As part of the Library of Congress’s commemoration of African American History Month, the Kluge Center will be hosting two events that honor the African American scholars and activists who have contributed so much to American democracy.
On February 22 at 1pm, join us for A History of African American Political Thought with Melvin Rogers and Jack Turner. Free registration is available here and the event will be available on the Library of Congress YouTube Channel.
Rogers and Turner will discuss the new book they co-edited, African American Political Thought: A Collected History. The book brings together contemporary scholars to reflect on the contributions of important figures in the tradition of African American political thought, providing an unprecedented philosophical history.
And on February 23 at 1pm, join us for African American Women and the Suffrage Movement, with Martha S. Jones. Free registration is available here and the event will be available on the Library of Congress YouTube Channel. Jones will discuss her recent book: Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All.
Vanguard tells the history of African American women activists that is too-frequently left out of accounts of the struggles for racial and gender equality in the US. Jones writes about trailblazing activists like Maria Stewart, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Fannie Lou Hamer, and the political battles they fought against unjust systems.
Melvin Rogers is Associate Professor of Political Science at Brown University, with specialties in democratic theory and the history of American and African American political and ethical philosophy. Rogers’s work includes The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008). He currently serves as the co-editor of the Oxford University Press New Histories of Philosophy series. He is a former Kluge Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kluge Center.
Jack Turner is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Washington, with specialties in race, American political thought, and democratic theory. Turner’s works include Awakening to Race: Individualism and Social Consciousness in America (2012) and A Political Companion to Henry David Thoreau (2009). He formerly served as Director of the Washington Institute for the Study of Inequality and Race (WISIR).
Martha S. Jones is the Society of Black Alumni Presidential Professor, Professor of History, and a Professor at the SNF Agora Institute at The Johns Hopkins University. She is a legal and cultural historian whose work examines how black Americans have shaped the story of American democracy.
In addition to Vanguard, Jones is the author of Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018), which won the Organization of American Historians Liberty Legacy Award, the American Historical Association Littleton-Griswold Prize, the American Society for Legal History John Phillip Reid book award, and the Baltimore City Historical Society Scholars honor for 2020. Jones is also author of All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture 1830-1900 (2007) and a coeditor of Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women (2015).