This post is part of the Kluge Center’s 25 for 25, in honor of the Kluge Center’s 25th anniversary, celebrating 25 books that were written thanks to the Kluge Center’s support. Read the introductory post to the series here.
“What is it about democracy that justifies our faith, especially African Americans’ faith in it?” asks political theorist Melvin L. Rogers in his book The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023).
Partly in response to the rise of Afro-pessimism, a tradition that views the persistence of racial inequality as an inescapable consequence of slavery, Rogers acknowledges the powerful allure of this type of thinking. Yet he opposes it because, he argues, it takes away autonomy from the American people who have created their world. Instead, Rogers highlights the political tradition of a group of African American thinkers who viewed history as open-ended and believed that America’s meaning was something to “struggle over.” These thinkers, he recounts, envisioned creating a racially just society by improving democracy and its institutions.
David Walker, Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, Martin Delany, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin are among the group of nineteenth and twentieth-century Black intellectuals, activists, and artists portrayed by Rogers. Each of them, argues Rogers, was committed to creating a more racially just society, even while they were excluded from full political participation.
Rogers reads these thinkers closely. Among others, he examines David Walker’s 1829 pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America; Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 A Voice from the South; Ida B. Wells’ detailed journalistic narrations of lynchings; Billie Holiday’s protest song “Strange Fruit”; and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. These authors employed rhetoric to try to change how their fellow citizens viewed the nation and the people, and they appealed to human sensibilities like “fear, sympathy, love, shame, and horror” to change hearts and minds. Billie Holiday’s mournful song “Strange Fruit,” for example, encourages her audiences to reflect on the horrors of lynching and their place in American history.
Rogers hopes that the works of these thinkers can help current generations discover useful ways to progress as a society. In his famous 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Frederick Douglass wrote that “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”
Baldwin, according to Rogers, issued a similar plea: “that Americans assume a different attitude, critically embrace their past, and allow both to structure a collective vision of responsibility.”
The “perfectionist” thinkers, as Rogers refers to them, embodied faith in that they knew that their success was not assured. Yet they were willing to struggle to bring about their vision of democracy and of a racially just society.
Rogers worked on The Darkened Light of Faith during his tenure as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John. W Kluge Center in the summer of 2019. The book won the 2023 Best Book Award from the American Political Thought Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA); the David Easton Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of APSA; and the Ralph J. Bunch Award from APSA.
This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.