African American Political Thought: A Collected History 9780226726076

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African American Political Thought

A Collected History Edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2021 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637. Published 2021 Printed in the United States of America 30

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ISBN-13: 978- 0- 226-72591- 8 (paper) ISBN-13: 978- 0- 226-72607- 6 (e- book) DOI: https:// doi.org /10 .7208 /chicago/9780226726076.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Rogers, Melvin L., editor. | Turner, Jack, 1975– editor. Title: African American political thought : a collected history / edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner. Description: Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020019278 | ISBN 9780226725918 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226726076 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: African American political activists. | African American philosophers. | African Americans—Politics and government—Philosophy. | African American philosophy. | Political science—United States— Philosophy. | Black nationalism. | American literature—African American authors—History and criticism. Classification: LCC E185 .A25363 2020 | DDC 320.089/96073—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019278 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

In Memory of Jeffrey B. Ferguson (1964– 2018): Teacher, Scholar, Friend

Contents

Political Theorizing in Black: An Introduction / 1

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Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner 1

Phillis Wheatley and the Rhetoric of Politics and Race / 31

Paul C. Taylor 11

Vincent Carretta 2

David Walker: Citizenship, Judgment, Freedom, and Solidarity / 52 Martin Delany’s Two Principles, the Argument for Emigration, and Revolutionary Black Nationalism / 77

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Frederick Douglass: Nonsovereign Freedom and the Plurality of Political Resistance / 116

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Alexander Crummell’s Three Visions of Black Nationalism / 142

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Booker T. Washington and the Politics of Deception / 167

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Anna Julia Cooper: Radical Relationality and the Ethics of Interdependence / 192

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Ida B. Wells on Racial Criminalization / 212 Naomi Murakawa

Thurgood Marshall: The Legacy and Limits of Equality under the Law / 386 Daniel Moak

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Carol Wayne White 9

Langston Hughes’s Ambivalent Political Expressivism / 367 Jason Frank

Desmond Jagmohan 8

C. L. R. James: Race, Revolution, and Black Liberation / 352 Anthony Bogues

Frank M. Kirkland 7

George S. Schuyler: Post-Souls Satirist / 330 Jeffrey B. Ferguson

Sharon R. Krause 6

Zora Neale Hurston’s Radical Individualism / 314 Farah Jasmine Griffin

Harriet Jacobs: Prisoner of Hope / 95 Nick Bromell

A. Philip Randolph: Radicalizing Rights at the Intersection of Class and Race / 290 Michael McCann

Robert Gooding-Williams 4

Marcus Garvey: The Black Prince? / 260 Michael Dawson

Melvin L. Rogers 3

W. E. B. Du Bois: Afro-modernism, Expressivism, and the Curse of Centrality / 235

Richard Wright: Realizing the Promise of the West / 413 Tommie Shelby

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Bayard Rustin: Between Democratic Theory and Black Political Thought / 439 George Shulman

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Ralph Ellison: Democratic Theorist / 460 Danielle Allen

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James Baldwin: Democracy between Nihilism and Hope / 481 John E. Drabinski

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Malcolm X: Dispatches on Racial Cruelty / 497 Nikhil Pal Singh

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Martin Luther King: Strategist of Force / 516 David L. Chappell

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Toni Morrison and the Fugitives’ Democracy / 541 Lawrie Balfour

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Audre Lorde’s Politics of Difference / 563 Jack Turner

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Stokely Carmichael and the Longing for Black Liberation: Black Power and Beyond / 593 Brandon M. Terry

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Huey P. Newton and the Last Days of the Black Colony / 631 Cedric G. Johnson

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Angela Y. Davis: Abolitionism, Democracy, Freedom / 660 Neil Roberts

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Clarence Thomas: Race Pessimism and Black Capitalism / 685 Corey Robin

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Cornel West and the Black Prophetic Tradition / 705 Mark D. Wood

Acknowledgments 731 Index 733 Contributors 759

Political Theorizing in Black An Introduction Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner

African American Political Thought: A Collected History heralds the emergence of an interdisciplinary field of study that has been in the academic making for more than a quarter century. Though the tradition of African American political thought goes back to the origins of the republic, the field’s professional academic founders are scholars in black studies, women’s studies, philosophy, history, law, literature, and political science who have insisted that both their academic peers and the broader public take African American writers seriously as sources of political knowledge and philosophical reflection. A partial list of these scholars includes Leonard Harris, whose 1983 volume Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of AfroAmerican Philosophy from 1917 articulated the coherence of African American philosophy as a genre of inquiry; Cedric Robinson, whose 1983 Black Marxism made “the black radical tradition” a touchstone of black discourse; Patricia Hill Collins, whose 1990 Black Feminist Thought synthesized that tradition from Maria Stewart to Alice Walker and elaborated its philosophical and political implications; Bernard Boxill, whose 1992 article “Two Traditions in African American Political Philosophy” traced the conflict between separatist and assimilationist traditions and remains a landmark in the academic literature; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, whose 1995 Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought offered a provisional canon of major writings from US black feminism and made those writings broadly accessible; Michael Dawson, whose 2001 Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies created a taxonomy of six different African American political ideologies and explained their relationship to both classic black thinkers and black public opinion; and Robert Gooding-Williams, whose 2009 In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America set a new standard for the careful philosophical explication of individual black thinkers such as Douglass and Du Bois.1 1 Leonard Harris, ed., Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy from 1917, 2nd ed. (Dubuque, IA: Kendall Hunt, [1983] 2000); Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, [1983] 2000); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, new ed. (New York: Routledge, [1990] 2009); Bernard Boxill, “Two Traditions in African American Political Philosophy,” Philosophical Forum 24, nos. 1– 3 (1992– 93): 119– 35; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, ed., Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist

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This book extends their work by offering a “collected history” of African American political thought: thirty chapters on thirty African American thinkers from Phillis Wheatley to Cornel West, written by thirty scholars spanning political science, philosophy, history, English, religious studies, legal studies, and black studies. Why this “collected history” approach? How did we select which thirty thinkers to include? How do we view the status of the “provisional canon” this book creates? We chose this “collected history” approach, first, because we believe that the study of African American political thought needs to become more thinkercentered, and we will argue this point at greater length later in this introduction. Much of the prominent scholarship on African American political thought of the last quarter century— such as the groundbreaking work of Robinson, Collins, Boxill, and Dawson— divides the field into a taxonomy of broad traditions or ideologies: black Marxism, black feminism, black liberalism, black nationalism, and so on. Individual thinkers are then categorized and situated within these ideologies. There is immense value in this approach because it helps us understand thinkers in terms of the larger histories— many tied to social movements— of which they are a part. The price, however, is obscuring the individuality of black minds, the ways the thinking of individual speakers and writers draws on various traditions simultaneously and exceeds any given conceptual mapping of African American political ideologies. Our aim is not to displace the ideological approach; after all, by placing all these thinkers together under one title we cannot help but suggest that a coherent tradition of African American political thought exists. Our aim is, rather, to supplement and counterbalance strong conceptual mappings with a thinkercentered approach that can give us a more granular view of particular minds. Second, the collected history format enables us to achieve a breadth and depth of study of individual thinkers that would be virtually impossible to achieve in a single-authored volume. This in turn enables us to more fully display African American political thought’s internal heterogeneity, as well as the diversity of its rhetorical approaches— from Phillis Wheatley’s use of poetry to reconfigure American revolutionary political imagination (chapter 1, by Vincent Carretta); to Martin Delany’s use of the Roman concepts cives ingenui and jus suffagii to explain racial Thought (New York: New Press, 1995); Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Robert Gooding-Williams, In The Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). See also Lucius T. Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996); Tommy L. Lott and John P. Pittman, eds., A Companion to AfricanAmerican Philosophy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway, eds., Black Women’s Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Lebanon, NH: University of Vermont Press / University Press of New England, 2007); George Yancy, “African-American Philosophy: Through the Lens of Socio- existential Struggle,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 37, no. 5 (2011): 551– 74; and Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage, eds., Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

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domination (chapter 3, by Robert Gooding-Williams); to Ida B. Wells’s use of “data aggregation” to make patterns of lynching “knowable as patterns” (chapter 9, by Naomi Murakawa); to Toni Morrison’s novelistic imagination of new norms of democratic responsibility (chapter 24, by Lawrie Balfour). The collected history format also allows us to display a variety of interpretive approaches to African American political thinkers: close philosophical analysis of a single political pamphlet such as David Walker’s Appeal (chapter 2, by Melvin Rogers); tracing an animating political concept— nonsovereign freedom, for example, in Frederick Douglass— across an entire career and corpus (chapter 5, by Sharon Krause); identifying an all-encompassing political logic, such as political deception in Booker T. Washington (chapter 7, by Desmond Jagmohan); deciphering how an individual thinker such as Zora Neal Hurston synthesizes ideologies as seemingly opposed as proto-feminism and political conservatism (chapter 13, by Farah Jasmine Griffin). This reflects our belief that proper interpretation of African American political thinkers requires scholars to draw on a variety of interpretive strategies and to make context-sensitive determinations of which are most apt. Third, we hope that the collected history will provoke new scholarship and debate. To select thirty thinkers for a volume such as this is to construct a “provisional canon” and thus to generate controversy. We made our choices based on (a) our assessment of the intrinsic theoretical interest of the thinker in light of the judgments of the field, (b) the need to achieve representative chronological range from the late eighteenth century to the early twenty-first, (c) our desire for a “big-tent” approach to political stances and expressive genres, from conservatism to revolutionary nationalism, from sermons to slave narratives to satire to Supreme Court opinions. Readers will undoubtedly argue with our choices on the basis of both our own criteria and their own separate criteria. There are other thinkers we would have loved to include that for reasons of time and space we did not get to include, such as Maria Stewart, T. Thomas Fortune, Alain Locke, and Hortense Spillers. The volume includes far more twentieth-century political thinkers— especially late-twentieth-century— than eighteenth- and nineteenth-, and far more men than women. In retrospect, we wish we had thought to incorporate politically significant musicians such as Billie Holiday and Public Enemy. Finally, we deliberately chose— over the objections of several colleagues— not to include Barack Obama: notwithstanding the quality of his writing and his historical importance, we believe it is impossible to get real perspective on Obama’s political thought until he publishes more work that is further removed from the demands of electoral politics and the American presidency. There is more work to be done, even as we believe in the importance of the volume’s intervention. This book does not seek to end the argument of who belongs in the canon of African American political thought. It seeks simply to take that argument to a new level. In so doing, we recognize that we will reignite debates about the benefits and dangers of canon formation. We are not doctrinally committed to the promotion

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of literary, philosophical, or political canons. Yet as scholars and teachers of the history of political thought, we cannot help but notice that some authors and texts command more attention than others; some authors and texts we teach more than others; some authors and texts repay rereading more than others. This attention to the comparative political and intellectual interest of works goes hand in hand with our enthusiasm for tracing intellectual particularity. This book cannot help but be seen as a recommendation list of who most deserves attention in African American political thought. The recommendation list carries the implicit claim that working through these thinkers offers opportunities for moral and political improvement that we are less likely to achieve in the absence of reading and thinking critically about their ideas. Yet we openly acknowledge the artificiality— the constructed nature— of the list. It reflects subjective judgments that are considered yet contestable. It also reflects chance events that attend the construction of any volume this large: we had planned chapters on Sojourner Truth and James Weldon Johnson, for example, but the authors dropped out. The rest of this introduction will unfold in five sections. First, we will geographically map African American political thought in relation to Western political thought, Africana political thought, and American political thought. Second, we will outline two main approaches to the interpretation of African American political thought and explain why we pursue one approach over the other. Third, we will address how the study of African American political thought automatically reconfigures the study of American political thought at large. Fourth, we will argue that the study of African American political thought forces us to regenerate our understanding of democratic theory. Fifth, we will explain how African American political thought relates to the Western tradition of political thought going back to Socrates.

The Geography of African American Political Thought

African American political thought lies at the intersection of the mutually constitutive fields of Western political thought, Africana political thought, and American political thought. Though these fields partially overlap, each has a different center of gravity: Western political thought in the traditional European canon from Plato to Locke to Marx to Arendt; Africana political thought in modern African and Afro-diasporic thinkers from Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano in the eighteenth century to Anténor Firmin and George Wilmot Blyden in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter in the twentieth and twenty-first;2 American political thought in the writings of thinkers ranging from Benjamin Franklin to James Madison to W. E. B. Du Bois to John Dewey to Gloria Anzaldúa. 2 Lewis R. Gordon, An Introduction to Africana Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Some— but not all— scholars of Western political thought include AfroCaribbean and African American political thinkers within their conceptualizations of Western political thought. These theorists, for example, consider Du Bois and Fanon to be among Hegel’s intellectual progeny. But within this conceptualization Du Bois and Fanon are offshoots of Hegel’s branch. European political theory is central, Afro-Caribbean and African American appropriations of it marginal. Du Bois and Fanon are viewed, in other words, as subordinate in philosophical interest. Most scholars of Africana political thought, on the other hand, acknowledge that their field is intertwined with Western political thought and American political thought. As Lewis R. Gordon observes, Africana political thought is “ironically inclusive”: “To articulate the set of problems and concerns of Africana thought one must engage the [European] tradition that accompanied [Africana thought’s] emergence in the modern world. Africana thought always presupposes other kinds of thought, whereas European thought often denies the existence of those beyond its own.”3 Scholars of Africana political thought claim US black thinkers as their own, even as they acknowledge differences in emphasis and idiom between African American and other areas of Africana political thought (African, Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian, Afro-British, etc.). At the same time, scholars of Africana political thought stress that all its different subareas share transnational, diasporic consciousness. All participate in what Paul Gilroy famously called “the black Atlantic.”4 The experience of modern Atlantic black subjects— whether located in Accra, London, Kingston, São Paulo, or New York— was shaped and informed by news and events occurring elsewhere in a world of commerce in which the slave trade and slave agriculture were central. This too shaped the long arc of African American political thinking as US blacks contemplated and theorized the connection between their domination and the domination of darker peoples around the world.5 Thus the experience of modern Atlantic black subjects was fundamentally Gordon, Introduction to Africana Philosophy, 31. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double- Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). 5 A sample of this scholarship on black internationalism in the context of African American thinking and practices incudes Carol Anderson, Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the African American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944– 1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Ifeoma Kiddoe Nwankwo, Black Cosmopolitanism: Racial Consciousness and Transnational Identity in the Nineteenth-Century Americas (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005); Brent Hayes Edwards, The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Michael Hanchard, Party/Politics: Horizons in Black Political Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones, eds., Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Maurice Jackson and Jacqueline Bacon, African Americans and the Haitian Revolution (New York: Routledge, 2010); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917– 1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Alvin B. Tillery Jr., Between Homeland and Motherland: Africa, U.S. Foreign Policy, and Black Leadership in America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Adam Dahl, 3 4

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informed by transnational networks of resistance: reports of revolution spreading from Port-au-Prince to Charleston in the late 1700s, for example, or African anticolonial texts such as Wretched of the Earth (1961) becoming mainstays of black power politics in late-1960s Oakland. This is why Gilroy asks us to think of the black Atlantic through the “organizing symbol” of “ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean.”6 This symbol of “ships in motion” is similarly fitting for Africana political thought. Scholars of American political thought increasingly include black thinkers within their conceptualization of the field. Six of the fifty chapters in Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga’s (largely Straussian)7 History of American Political Thought (second edition, 2019) are dedicated to African American thinkers.8 So are 14 of the 150 articles published in the journal American Political Thought from its inception in 2012 to the close of 2019.9 Though these numbers are not insignif“The Black American Jacobins: Revolution, Radical Abolition, and the Transnational Turn,” Perspectives on Politics 15, no. 3 (2017): 633– 46; Juliet Hooker, Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 6 Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 4. 7 Two points to note about the invocation of Straussianism. First, the term denotes a set of “research methods, common conceptions, theoretical presuppositions, central questions, and pedagogic style characteristic of the large number of conservatives who have been influenced by the thought and teaching of Leo Strauss (1899– 1973)” (see Mark C. Henrie, “Straussianism,” First Principles: ISI Web Journal, May 5, 2011, at http://www.firstprinciplesjournal.com/articles .aspx?article=871). Second, we do not deploy this term in a pejorative sense; rather, our purpose is to indicate what appears to be a set of shared norms of those writing in the History of American Political Thought volume. 8 Richard S. Ruderman, “‘Proclaim Liberty throughout the Land’: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Abolition of Slavery”; Peter W. Schramm, “Booker T. Washington and the ‘Severe American Crucible’”; Jonathan Marks, “Co-workers in the Kingdom of Culture: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Vision of Race Synthesis”; Peter C. Meyers, “The Two Revolutions of Martin Luther King, Jr.”; Lucas E. Morel, “Malcolm X: From Apolitical Acolyte to Political Preacher”; Bradley C. S. Wilson, “The Jurisprudence of William Joseph Brennan, Jr., and Thurgood Marshall”; Jeffrey Sikkenga, “‘Yes, We Can’: The Progressive Political Thought of Barack Obama,” in History of American Political Thought, 2nd ed., ed. Bryan-Paul Frost and Jeffrey Sikkenga (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2019), chaps. 21, 27, 28, 40, 41, 47, 50. 9 Peter C. Myers, “Frederick Douglass on Revolution and Integration: A Problem in Moral Psychology,” American Political Thought [hereafter APT], 2, no. 1 (2013): 118– 46; Nicholas Buccola, “‘The Essential Dignity of Man as Man’: Frederick Douglass on Human Dignity,” APT 4, no. 2 (2015): 228– 58; Paul E. Kirkland, “Sorrow Songs and Self-Knowledge: The Politics of Recognition and Tragedy in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk,” APT 4, no. 3 (2015): 412– 37; Paul Schumaker, “John Rawls, Barack Obama, and the Pluralist Political Consensus,” APT 5, no. 4 (2016): 628– 57; Adam M. Carrington, “Constructed for Liberty: Justice Clarence Thomas’s Understanding of Separation of Powers,” APT 5, no. 4 (2016): 658– 85; Simon Stow, “American Skin: Bruce Springsteen, Danielle Allen, and the Politics of Interracial Friendship,” APT 6, no. 2 (2017): 294– 316; Gregory M. Collins, “Beyond Politics and Natural Law: The Anticipation of New Originalist Tenets in the Constitutional Thought of Frederick Douglass,” APT 6, no. 4 (2017): 574– 609; Patrick Allit, “Buckley, Baldwin, and the Decline of Conservative Racism,” APT 6, no. 4 (2017): 616– 23; Susan McWilliams, “On the Faiths of (and in) Our Fathers: American Men and American Dreams in the Baldwin-Buckley Debate,” APT 6, no. 4 (2017): 624– 31; Nicholas Buccola, “‘We Are Human, Too’: On James Baldwin’s Politics of Dignity,” APT 6, no. 4 (2017): 641– 47;

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icant, they fail to sufficiently pluralize the field’s center of gravity. Moreover, they do not reflect the enormity of the problems that the United States continues to face regarding the status of black citizens. The chapters and articles in this sample also focus disproportionately on such thinkers as Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., who are easily but misleadingly encompassed within traditional conceptions of natural-rights liberalism and the American Creed. Too often scholars of American political thought fold black thinkers into their preexisting conceptualizations of American political thought without asking whether those conceptualizations are adequate to the thinkers in question or in need of change in order to capture both what those thinkers are saying and what they are revealing about the United States. Often the focus on these thinkers obscures the complicated rhetorical frameworks in which their philosophies are located— frameworks that often reconfigure traditional themes. As we will later argue, including black thinkers within the study of American political thought requires us to recast the very terms of study, to reconstitute our understanding of American political thought itself. Broadening and deepening our conception of the African American tradition of American political thought revolutionizes the study of American political thought as a whole: it pluralizes our sense of what kinds of political stances and argumentative outlooks count as American, and it moves the primary concerns of African American political thought— racial slavery, white supremacy, gendered violence— to the center of a field of inquiry traditionally focused on federalism, natural rights, constitutional law, and popular sovereignty.

Interpreting African American Political Thought: The Dawson–Gooding-Williams Debate

Now that we’ve mapped African American political thought as a distinct field of study lying at the geographic intersection of Western, Africana, and American political thought, the question becomes how best intellectually to approach it. Within our home discipline of political science, there have been two predominant schools of thought over the past two decades. The first is the Dawson school— epitomized in Michael C. Dawson’s magisterial Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies (2001). Dawson frames his study as an inquiry into the ideological currents of US black public opinion. He divides African American political thought into six Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “William F. Buckley Jr. and James Baldwin Today,” APT 6, no. 4 (2017): 665– 70; Alvin B. Tillery Jr., “Reading Tocqueville behind the Veil: African American Receptions of Democracy in America, 1835– 1900,” APT 7, no. 1 (2018): 1– 25; James M. Patterson, “A Covenant of the Heart: Martin Luther King Jr., Civil Disobedience, and the Beloved Community,” APT 7, no. 1 (2018): 124– 51; Giorgi Areshidze, “A Faith-Friendly Form of Rawls’ ‘Public Reason’? Barack Obama’s Civic Faith and the Challenge of Religion in Deliberative Politics,” APT 7, no. 2 (2018): 304– 36; Brian Danoff, “Invisible Man and Democratic Leadership,” APT 8, no. 1 (2019): 54– 81; David Jenkins, “James Baldwin and Recognition,” APT 8, no. 1 (2019): 82– 107.

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main ideologies— black nationalism, black feminism, black Marxism, and three varieties of black liberalism: radical egalitarianism, disillusioned liberalism, and black conservatism. He acknowledges that this taxonomy of six ideologies is not all inclusive (Pan-Africanism, for instance, is an extant African American ideology not analyzed in his study). He also acknowledges that the ideologies are roughand-ready analytical categories, far from hermetically sealed (Du Bois, for example, is a radical egalitarian, disillusioned liberal, and black Marxist at different points in his career). Nevertheless, Dawson insists that “these ideologies, and the discourses around them, form the core of black political thought.” The study of individual thinkers and broader trends in black public opinion, he argues, should go hand in hand. The aim is to trace changes in black ideologies not by focusing “on only a few canonical texts or authors” but by understanding “how various concepts were used within various black activist and grassroots communities.” One of Dawson’s most important insights is the tight connection between “ideological debate and political mobilization”— between word and deed— in African American political debate: Within black political thought, the distinction between the “contemplative” and “active” life has been neither a luxury most black intellectuals could historically afford nor one that made pragmatic or philosophical sense to the activists and intellectuals who were developing, debating, codifying, and implementing the ideologies which are at the core of black political thought. Black public spaces, the black polis, has been historically constituted by those engaged in both the creation of speech and action. Indeed, the worthiness of black political speech has often been judged by the claims of the speaker to have engaged in political action.10

Dawson has many adherents in his ideological approach to African American political thought— Melissa Harris-Perry, Christopher S. Parker, and Alvin B. Tillery Jr. among the most prominent.11 Admittedly, Dawson’s approach is not unprecedented. Philosophers and historians of African American thought have long used ideological frameworks— assimilationist/integrationist versus separatist / black nationalist, for example— to think through the meaning and complexities of the tradition. Cornel West, for example, deploys these categories in his Prophesy Deliverance! (1982) to understand the African American intellectual landscape. Reflecting on the debates and con10 Dawson, Black Visions, 2, 8, 10, 53. Cf. Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 34– 36, where Collins emphasizes the “dialogical relationship” between thought and action in black women’s struggle. 11 Melissa Victoria Harris-Lacewell, Barbershops, Bibles, and BET: Everyday Talk and Black Political Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004); Melissa V. Harris-Perry, Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in America: For Colored Girls Who’ve Considered Politics When Being Strong Isn’t Enough (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011); Christopher S. Parker, Fighting for Democracy: Black Veterans and the Struggle against White Supremacy in the Postwar South (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Tillery, “Reading Tocqueville behind the Veil.”

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flicts internal to the 1865 National Equal Rights League Convention that endorsed full and immediate citizenship for African Americans, August Meier captures the waxing and waning of these two ideological positions during Reconstruction: Yet the appeal for racial solidarity [made at the Convention] smacked of selfsegregation, of a sort of nationalism, of furthering the system of “color caste.” This paradox is one of the central themes in American Negro thought on the race problem. The outlook of the Reconstruction period was primarily integrationist, for it was a period when there was much sympathy and support among whites for the Negro cause and the passage of concrete legislation assuring Negros of their citizenship rights. Later, as conditions took a turn for the worse, the theme of selfhelp and solidarity again assumed a major role.12

Although Meier centered black thinkers in his analysis and served as an important intellectual voice for African American history and thinking, the result, not unlike West’s intervention, inevitably flattened out the internal philosophical diversity among thinkers. The significant difference, of course, between Dawson’s newer approach and the earlier reflections by philosophers and historians is in pluralizing the ideological postures internal to this tradition. The second major school of thought is the Gooding-Williams school— epitomized in Robert Gooding-Williams’s meticulous In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (2009). In the Shadow of Du Bois argues that Afro-modern political thought constitutes a distinct genre of political philosophy comparable to the social contract genre from Hobbes to Rawls and the nineteenth-century French liberal genre from Barante to Tocqueville. Encompassing figures ranging from Cugoano to Douglass to Fanon, “the Afro-modern tradition is bound together by certain genre-defining preoccupations— for example, the political and social organization of white supremacy, the nature and effects of racial ideology, and the possibilities of black emancipation.”13 Afro-modern political thought is a variant of Africana political thought but is less focused on pre-fifteenth-century African thought systems and more specifically focused on Afro-diasporic responses to the cataclysms of colonial conquest and New World slavery since the fifteenth century.14 12 Cornel West, Prophesy Deliverance! (Louisville, KY: Westminister John Knox, 1982), especially chap. 3; August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880– 1915: Racial Ideologies in the Age of Booker T. Washington (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1963), 8. 13 Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois, 3. In conceptualizing the Afro-modern tradition, Gooding-Williams builds on Robinson, Black Marxism; Frank Kirkland, “Modernity and Intellectual Life in Black,” Philosophical Forum 24 (1992– 93): 136– 65; Michael Hanchard, “AfroModernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11 (Winter 1999): 245– 68; and Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets (New York: Routledge, 2003). GoodingWilliams, In the Shadow of Du Bois, 258n6. 14 For discussion of pre-fifteenth- century Africana thought, see Gordon, Introduction to Africana Philosophy, 23– 28, 186– 90.

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In the Shadow of Du Bois offers a respectful critique of Dawson’s ideological approach to African American political thought. Though Gooding-Williams compliments Dawson for taking the conceptual mapping beyond the assimilationistseparatist dualism, Gooding-Williams ultimately calls on scholars to move beyond the practice of ideological categorization itself. Scholarship in African American political thought should not focus on identifying the “correct” category for “subsuming” the political thought of any given individual thinker. Neither should the aim be “to elaborate a new and even more discriminating scheme of classification than . . . Dawson provides.” Rather, we should embrace “a healthy skepticism with respect to the adequacy of any such scheme.” Gooding-Williams analyzes the two main subjects of his study— Douglass and Du Bois— by highlighting “the schemeexceeding complexity and specificity” of their thought. Gooding-Williams embeds this explanation of his methodological approach within a broader call for scholars of Afro-modern political thought to treat the tradition’s writings “as complicated, nuanced, and argued statements of political thought demanding just the sort of attentive reading and probing analysis that we have been accustomed to give works like Aristotle’s Politics, Locke’s Second Treatise, and Tocqueville’s Democracy in America.”15 The Gooding-Williams school has an increasing number of subscribers— Lawrie Balfour, Stephen H. Marshall, Nick Bromell, Shatema Threatcraft, Tommie Shelby, and Brandon Terry among them.16 Two qualifications of our portrait of the Dawson– Gooding-Williams debate are in order. First, Gooding-Williams’s approach does not preclude the possibility of identifying and studying distinct intellectual traditions to which black thinkers belong. Wilson Jeremiah Moses’s and William L. Van Deburg’s pioneering studies on black nationalism reveal that despite a variety of differences among the thinkers they study, that thinking nonetheless expresses something called black nationalism.17 There is a thread that runs through David Walker, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, Marcus Garvey, and Malcolm X that binds them together into a distinct ideological formation. This too is often the case with European thinkers, with a variety of figures being grouped under the umbrella of something Gordon, Introduction to Africana Philosophy, 6– 7. Lawrie Balfour, The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001); Lawrie Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction: Thinking Politically with W. E. B. Du Bois (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011); Stephen H. Marshall, The City on the Hill from Below: The Crisis of Prophetic Black Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011); Nick Bromell, The Time Is Always Now: Black Thought and the Transformation of US Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Tommie Shelby and Brandon M. Terry, eds., To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018). 17 Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850– 1925 (Oxford: Oxford University Press [1978] 1988); Wilson Jeremiah Moses, ed., Classical Black Nationalism: From the American Revolution to Marcus Garvey (New York: New York University Press, 1996); William L. Van Deburg, ed., Modern Black Nationalism: From Marcus Garvey to Louis Farrakhan (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 15

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called Enlightenment while others fit under the heading of something called Romanticism.18 Nevertheless, Gooding-Williams rightly encourages us to take heed and be mindful of the ways ideological framings often flatten the complex and rich terrain of individual intellectual visions. Second, significant though the differences between Dawson and GoodingWilliams are, their interpretive approaches are not mutually exclusive. They are two different levels of analysis— the first a bird’s- eye view of major clusters of political ideology and an account of how different thinkers relate to those clusters, the second a more microscopic view that still keeps historical contexts and ideological mappings in mind. Those seeking to tell the story of African American political thought would do well to remember the lessons of both. But while Dawson’s attention to ideological context and his call to analyze the tight connection between speech and action inform the present volume, we generally take Gooding-Williams’s interpretive approach. Thus our organization of the thirty chapters around thirty different individual thinkers. We build on GoodingWilliams’s intervention by emulating it in reference to twenty-eight thinkers beyond Douglass and Du Bois (though we, of course, have chapters on them too). All of the chapters make questions of ideological categorization secondary— including Dawson’s own chapter 11 on Marcus Garvey. We concur with Gooding-Williams that scholars of African American political thought need to counterbalance the ideological approach that Dawson, Robinson, Collins, and Boxill popularized with more intensive attention to the intellectual particularities of individual thinkers. The present volume provides thirty profiles of intellectual particularity, all the while stimulating in the reader, we hope, a deep desire to see connections and lines of inquiry across these thinkers.

Reconstituting American Political Thought

As the previous sections make clear, this book’s first major intervention is elaborating a thinker-centered account of African American political thought. But this first major intervention involves a second major intervention: the reconstitution of American political thought itself. The trailblazing black historian Nathan I. Huggins always insisted that African American history is American history, that researching and narrating the story of black Americans automatically entails revising our historical understanding of the United States at large.19 Studying slavery in colonial Virginia, for example, forces us to revise our understanding of the sources of American ideas of free18 For example, see Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966/1969); M. H. Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971). 19 Nathan I. Huggins, “Integrating Afro-American History into American History,” in The State of Afro-American History: Past, Present, and Future, ed. Darlene Clark Hine (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 157– 68.

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dom. Those sources were not only the minds of Harrington, Sydney, Locke, and Montesquieu but also the lived experience of slavery. As Edmund Morgan observed, the “presence of men and women” who were “almost totally subject to the will of other men” gave slaveowners like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison “an immediate experience of what it could mean to be at the mercy of a tyrant. Virginians may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life without it could be like.”20 On the basis of revisionist histories such as Morgan’s, Huggins concluded, “Afro-American history and American history are not only essential to one another. They share a common historical fate.”21 African American political thought and American political thought are also essential to one another and share a common historical fate. This is not to say that African American political thought is not also a part of Africana and Western political thought. It is simply to say that African American political thought is bound up with the distinctive idioms and touchstones of US national experience. Think of David Walker’s reinterpretation of the Declaration of Independence as a warrant for black emancipation and coequal citizenship, for example, or Ida B. Wells’s creative appropriation of the US rhetoric of self-help to justify collective black armed self- defense against lynching.22 When black thinkers speak from their distinctive standpoints on US national experiences and ideals, they decenter hegemonic white interpretations, lay claim to their own interpretive authority, and put new interpretations of nationhood into circulation.23 Thus they open up the possibility of reconstituting US citizens’ self-understanding. One powerful example of the reconstituting potential of African American political thought is W. E. B. Du Bois’s revisionist narrative of emancipation in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860– 1880 (1935). Against the background of the American myth that black Americans were passive (and unprepared) recipients of a freedom dispensed by Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, Du Bois’s chapter on 20 Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W. W. Norton,1975), 376. 21 Huggins, “Integrating Afro-American History,” 160– 61. See also David W. Blight, “In Retrospect: Nathan Irvin Huggins, the Art of History, and the Irony of the American Dream” (1994), in Beyond the Battlefield: Race, Memory, and the American Civil War (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), 258– 77, and Jeffrey B. Ferguson, “Freedom, Equality, Race,” Daedalus 140, no. 1 (2011): 44– 52. 22 David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Penn State University Press, [1829] 2000), 75– 76; Melvin L. Rogers, “David Walker and the Political Power of the Appeal,” Political Theory 43, no. 2 (2015): 208– 33; Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (1892), in The Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, ed. Trudier Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 40– 45; Lawrie Balfour, “Ida B. Wells and ‘Color Line Justice’: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms,” Perspectives on Politics 13, no. 3 (2015): 680– 96. 23 On the political significance of claiming one’s own interpretive authority, see Nolan Bennett, The Claims of Experience: Autobiography and American Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).

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the general strike spotlights the mass political action of black southerners more than a year before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Masses of enslaved people stopped work on Confederate plantations, ran to Union lines, labored for the Union cause, and lobbied to take up arms against the Confederacy. Du Bois’s retelling of the story not only gives credit where credit is due to the African Americans who seized their own freedom, but helps to explain why Lincoln recognized the pivotal importance of black labor to winning the war, and so accelerated his plans for emancipation. It also reconstitutes our understanding of emancipation itself as a social process partly— if not largely— driven by the initiative of the enslaved. Lincoln emerges not as a heroic herald of freedom but as a political actor caught between the demands of preserving the Union, the need to appease antiabolitionist northerners, and the opportunities created by enslaved southerners who put their labor and fighting power into play. Because Lincoln decided to take advantage of the critically important labor and military service offered by African Americans, he could frame emancipation as a military necessity and deflect criticism from antiabolitionist northerners supportive of a Union war but opposed to an abolition one. Du Bois’s retelling highlights the crucial role of black agency in the second American founding. It recasts US history as a cocreation (though an asymmetric one) of black and white actors. Finally, it is crucial to note that although Du Bois’s revisionist history was found implausible by the white historical establishment when it appeared, it anticipated by more than half a century today’s scholarly consensus that emancipation was a complex social process, partly— if not largely— driven by the political actions of enslaved people themselves.24 African American political thought reconstitutes not only key narratives of US national history but also the key concepts shaping US citizens’ political selfunderstanding. It does not simply appropriate preexisting concepts in US political thought— e.g., freedom, equality, and “the people”— and then apply them mechanically to the lives of black people. Rather, African American political thought adapts these concepts to the contexts and conditions of black life, and in so doing reconfigures and refines them.25 As Neil Roberts shows in chapter 28, Angela 24 W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860– 1880 (New York: Touchstone [1935] 1995), 55– 83; Ira Berlin, Barbara J. Fields, Steven F. Miller, Joseph P. Reidy, and Leslie S. Rowland, Slaves No More: Three Essays on Emancipation and the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); David W. Blight, “W. E. B. Du Bois and American Historical Memory” (1994), in Beyond the Battlefield, 223– 57; Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Unfinished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), chap. 2; Balfour, Democracy’s Reconstruction, chap. 2. 25 On conceptual reconfiguration, see Michael Hanchard, “Contours of Black Political Thought: An Introduction and Perspective,” Political Theory 38, no. 4 (2010): 512– 516. For examples of black conceptual reconfiguration in relation to concepts of individualism, democracy, universalism, self-determination, and republicanism, see— respectively— Jack Turner, Awakening

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Davis’s idea of freedom is an example of this sort of conceptual reconfiguration. Whereas Euro-American political thinkers in the natural rights tradition from Paine and Jefferson to Lincoln and Stanton understood freedom as humanity’s baseline condition from which unfreedom deviates, Davis convinces us to imagine unfreedom as our baseline condition and freedom as the activity of resisting that condition. Not only does Davis’s reconceptualization better reflect Afromodern experience, but it also recasts the nominal freedom of oppressors as a passive state of privilege. In effect, it implies that the freedom of the oppressor is undesirable (1) because it is parasitic on the unfreedom of the oppressed and is therefore contingent on an inegalitarian form of social identity and (2) because it is decadent, for it is removed from the motion, risk, and exhilaration of resistance and revolution. Davis, on Roberts’s interpretation, makes struggle and activity freedom’s defining qualities, while proposing that passive enjoyment of the pleasures of privilege is free only within the corrupt framework of white supremacy. Davis resignifies freedom and challenges both black and nonblack audiences to abandon Euro-American concepts of freedom for the notion of “freedom as marronage.”26 The merits of this conceptualization— and its relationship to EuroAmerican conceptualizations— are, of course, subject to debate.27 The point is that Davis’s conceptualization of freedom is not Stanton’s or Lincoln’s or even Arendt’s applied to a new context. It is a different way of theorizing freedom. The stakes of the claim that careful study of African American political thought cannot help but revise prevailing understandings of American political thought are more than academic. In her landmark essay “Redeeming American Political Theory,” based on her 1990 presidential address at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Judith Shklar argued that a defining feature of American political experience was “the prevalence of chattel slavery long after it had disappeared from the rest of the world”: Not racism— which is universal— but slavery in a modern constitutional state is truly unique. Until the Civil War amendments America was neither a liberal nor a democratic country, whatever its citizens might have believed. Yet it did have in place a set of institutions that were capable of becoming so and to an unequaled degree. to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), chaps. 3– 6; Bromell, Time Is Always Now; Adom Getachew, “Universalism after the Postcolonial Turn,” Political Theory 44, no. 6 (2016): 821– 45; Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Melvin Rogers, “Race, Domination, and Republicanism,” in Difference without Domination: On Justice and Democracy in Conditions of Diversity, ed. Danielle Allen and Rohini Somanathan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020). 26 Roberts, Freedom as Marronage. See also Barnor Hesse, “Escaping Liberty: Western Hegemony, Black Fugitivity,” Political Theory 42, no. 3 (2014): 288– 313. 27 For a critique of Roberts on this score, see Jack Turner, “Democracy, Freedom, and AfroModern Political Thought,” Contemporary Political Theory 16, no. 4 (2017): 532– 40.

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This country had embarked upon two experiments simultaneously: one in democracy, the other in tyranny.28

Because of its sharp focus on the life and afterlife of slavery, African American political thought brings the American experience of tyranny into sharp relief. Nowhere is this better illustrated in this volume than in Robert Gooding-Williams’s interpretation of Martin Delany in chapter 3. According to Gooding-Williams, Delany believed that slaves and antebellum free blacks alike were subject to “a shared political servitude where free blacks and chattel slaves alike take no part in government, benefit from no true representation, and have whatever rights and privileges they have due to the ‘sufferance’ and discretion of their rulers. Delany conceptualizes racial oppression as a form of what republican and neorepublican political theory dubs ‘domination’— that is, as subjection to arbitrary rule.”29 On the basis of his diagnosis of the US regime as one of racial domination tout court, Delany advocated that black people in the US emigrate to Central America, South America, the West Indies, or Africa, and that they establish an independent black nation. The United States was unlikely to become a land of universal liberty, in his eyes, because its general political culture was not democratically egalitarian but racially tyrannical. In Gooding-Williams’s words, Delany held that “the prejudices that custom and law entrench and stabilize are so stubborn in their persistence, so fundamentally ingrained in the ethos of America’s white citizens, that the fulfillment of blacks’ shared political desire is extremely unlikely while they remain in the United States.” Delany voices a racial pessimism that later black nationalist thinkers from Marcus Garvey to Malcolm X would adopt. Thus he and his black nationalist heirs offer a window onto America that directly challenges the view of the US as the site of a liberal consensus— a view that Louis Hartz made famous with his 1955 The Liberal Tradition in America.30 Delany’s America is a case study in tyranny as much as it is in liberty. Taking Delany seriously means taking seriously the possibility that America is racially tyrannical at heart. 28 Judith Shklar, “Redeeming American Political Theory” (1991), in Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffman and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 92. Cf. Dawson, Black Visions, 14: “A central theme within black political thought has been . . . to insist that the question of racial injustice is a central problematic in American political thought and practice, not a minor problem that can be dismissed in parentheses and footnotes.” 29 For an innovative discussion of black republicanism as a popular political ideology, see Parker, Fighting for Democracy, chap. 2. 30 Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, [1955] 1991). For a review essay that nicely summarizes Hartz’s position and the challenges and alternatives addressed to it, see Marc Stears, “The Liberal Tradition and the Politics of Exclusion,” Annual Review of Political Science 10 (2007): 85– 101. See also Rogers Smith, “The ‘Liberal Tradition’ and American Racism,” in The Oxford Handbook of Racial and Ethnic Politics in the United States, ed. David L. Leal, Taeku Lee, and Markn Sawyer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, online publication date October 2016), DOI: 10.1093 /oxfordhb/9780199566631.013.13.

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Reconstituting American political thought through African American political thought, however, need not always lead to racial pessimist conclusions. As Carol Wayne White shows in chapter 8 on Anna Julia Cooper, America sometimes emerges from black political thinking as a site of chastened hope and potential democracy. Against the background of her “politics of radical relationality— in which the fate of each individual (or the one) is inextricably connected to all (or the many),” Cooper envisioned America as “an unfolding cultural sphere where ‘regenerating’ and ‘vitalizing’ forces were at work— a ‘relational whole’ advancing in growth and perfection for all its constituents.” This democratic perfectionist vision of America, according to White, formed the basis of Cooper’s prophetic critique: “Cooper insisted that unless, and until, black women and men (and other marginalized groups) could prosper and participate fully in the rich unfolding of America, it would not actualize itself.” White’s Cooper offers a vital democratic perfectionist perspective on racial injustice largely missing from the work of major Euro-American democratic perfectionist counterparts such as Emerson, Dewey, and Cavell.31 Cooper’s elevation in the canon of American political thought holds out the possibility of reconstituting our understanding of American democratic perfectionism for the better not only by making the democratic perfectionist canon more racially inclusive but also by equipping that tradition of thought to respond more adequately to racial injustice. Living in a house not built for you is difficult to do. Uneasiness becomes a constant companion. African Americans know this all too well: “Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?” 32 One is always asking, as Toni Morrison did: “[Can] I redecorate, redesign, even reconceive the racial house without forfeiting a home of my own?”33 In placing the accent on reconstituting American political thought, then, we are under no illusions about the uneasy relationship between African American political thought and the tradition we see all of these figures reimagining. We proceed on the assumption, because it is entailed by their writings, that African American political thinkers more often than not treat the conceptual field of American political and cultural life as a site of symbolic action, in Ralph Ellison’s sense of that term.34 The signifiers are not hermetically sealed, nor are the concepts resistant to refashioning and reconsti31 On the relationship between democratic perfectionism and black life, see Robert GoodingWilliams, “Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire,” in Look, a Negro! Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), 43– 67, and Eddie S. Glaude Jr., “James Baldwin and Black Lives Matter,” in A Political Companion to James Baldwin, ed. Susan J. McWilliams (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016), 361– 72. 32 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, ed. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams (orig. 1903; Boston: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1997), 38. 33 Toni Morrison, “Home,” in The House That Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West, and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today (New York: Vintage, 1998), 4. 34 Ralph Ellison, “The Little Man at Chehaw Station: The American Artist and His Audience” (1977– 78), in Going to the Territory (1986), in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 502.

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tuting their political and ethical power. The house can be more than the reasons for which it was built; spaces can be repurposed, what was once strange may come to seem familiar, and new relationships may emerge in light of the redesign. In thinking of the conceptual field in just this way, the problems of white supremacy, racism, patriarchy, inequality, and domination that are often taken up in this book function as significant, but not by any means exclusive, features of American political thought. In treating African American political thought as both standing in and exceeding American political thought, we transform the parameters and possibilities of the latter. This volume will be successful in its effort to help reconstitute American political thought if it leads teachers and students to see Delany, Cooper, and Davis as equally emblematic of US political thought as Jefferson, Stanton, and Reagan. Interweaving African American political thought into the history of American political thought will make the latter more historically accurate as well as more philosophically interesting.

Democratizing Democratic Theory

As previously suggested, we believe that there are transformative insights to be had when we think about American political thought through the animating concerns of African American political thought. We also suspect similar results when we place democratic theory in conversation with this tradition. Two years after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Ralph Waldo Ellison penned the following lines for Time: “The fantasy of an America free of blacks is at least as old as the dream of creating a truly democratic society. While we are aware that there is something inescapably tragic about the cost of achieving our democratic ideals, we keep such tragic awareness segregated in the rear of our minds. We allow it to come to the fore only during moments of great national crisis.”35 Even as Ellison observed the persistence of this fantasy— this desire for a blackless America— he continued to yoke together “America” and “democracy” in the service of a racially just society. This was an odd occurrence; Martin was gone, Malcolm five years earlier from the time of Ellison’s article, and the soil of America was drenched in the blood of black people and their allies. And yet Ellison, not unlike many in the tradition facing the violence of white supremacy, believed African Americans by virtue of their struggle had something to teach American democracy. Were one to examine mainstream democratic theory for lessons learned from black political thought, one would find little to report. Despite the flourishing of normative reflections on democracy, few locate African American political thinking and activism at the center of analysis. Specifically, we mean those who turn to 35 Ralph Ellison, “What America Would Be Like without Blacks” (1970), in Going to the Territory, in Collected Essays, 577.

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the tradition of “Western” political philosophy to theorize democracy in America but ignore that many of those who have something to offer are nonwhites facing the persistent denial of the goods democracy promises. As Brandon Terry observes in chapter 26, the lacuna is surprising given that much of the discussion of “participatory democracy” of the late 1970s and 1980s and its descendant deliberative democracy of the 1990s grows out of the grassroots struggles and thinking of black people in the 1960s and 1970s. For this reason, it is worth asking how African American political thought could intervene in our thinking about democracy. To begin an answer, we need to first say a word about democratic theorizing. There are, we think, at least three dominant approaches (there may be more) in democratic theory that are transformed by engaging African American political thought.36 The first envisions democracy as exclusively a power play of interests, aggregation of preferences, and electoral competition.37 The second approach turns away from the individualistic basis of democracy and market driven ideas about politics toward discussion or deliberation as a means for understanding opinion and will-formation. Deliberative democracy probes the very formation of interests and preferences in the first place and insists that collective decisionmaking be achieved through discussion, with the understanding that those individuals and groups whose interests are most likely affected should be included.38 This approach thus legitimizes democratic practices in ways that extend beyond mere electoral competition and voting. The third, though having longer historical roots, is nonetheless of recent normative variety: neorepublicanism. This tradition theorizes the meaning of freedom through the lens of nondomination. To be free is, on this view, to not be at the arbitrary mercy of institutional processes and public officials. Thus freedom depends on a democracy (a) imposing constitutional constraints that guard against arbitrary power and (b) providing institutional spaces that allow citizens contestatory power to ensure the proper functioning of a constitutional order.39 36 The reader should treat this line as an invitation to think and explore other approaches to democratic theorizing that may be enriched by interacting with African American political thought. 37 Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 3rd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, [1942] 1950); Robert Dahl, A Preface to Democratic Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), and Democracy and Its Critics (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 38 Jürgen Habermas, Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon, 1985), and Between Facts and Norms, trans. William Rehg (Oxford: Polity, 1998); Joshua Cohen, “Procedure and Substance in Deliberative Democracy,” in Democracy and Difference, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 95– 119, and “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy, ed. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 67– 93. 39 Quentin Skinner, “Machiavelli on the Maintenance of Liberty,” Politics 18 (1983): 3– 15; “The Idea of Negative Liberty,” in Philosophy of History: Essays on the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. R. Rorty, J. B. Schneewind, and Q. Skinner (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 193– 221; “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. G. Bock, Q. Skinner, and M. Viroli (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 239– 309; and Liberty

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African American political struggles have often been defined by the quest for the franchise. The right and free ability to vote was a tool of power and a material manifestation of one’s equal standing in society and one’s equal capacity to shape the direction of the political community. In the nineteenth century especially, the vote was central to democracy’s proper functioning and one’s place within a democratic society. Writing in 1865, five years before the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, Frederick Douglass powerfully captured the point: By depriving us of suffrage, you affirm our incapacity to form an intelligent judgment respecting public men and public measures; you declare before the world that we are unfit to exercise the elective franchise, and by this means lead