Melvin L. Rogers - 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 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 1 2 3 4 5

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 AmericansPolitics and governmentPhilosophy. | African American philosophy. | Political scienceUnited StatesPhilosophy. | Black nationalism. | American literatureAfrican American authorsHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC E185 .A25363 2020 | DDC 320.089/96073dc23

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 (19642018):

Teacher, Scholar, Friend

Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner

Vincent Carretta

Melvin L. Rogers

Robert Gooding-Williams

Nick Bromell

Sharon R. Krause

Frank M. Kirkland

Desmond Jagmohan

Carol Wayne White

Naomi Murakawa

Paul C. Taylor

Michael Dawson

Michael McCann

Farah Jasmine Griffin

Jeffrey B. Ferguson

Anthony Bogues

Jason Frank

Daniel Moak

Tommie Shelby

George Shulman

Danielle Allen

John E. Drabinski

Nikhil Pal Singh

David L. Chappell

Lawrie Balfour

Jack Turner

Brandon M. Terry

Cedric G. Johnson

Neil Roberts

Corey Robin

Mark D. Wood

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 fields professional academic founders are scholars in black studies, womens 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 Afro-American 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.

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 thinker-centered, 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 centurysuch as the groundbreaking work of Robinson, Collins, Boxill, and Dawsondivides 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 historiesmany tied to social movementsof 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 thinker-centered 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 thoughts internal heterogeneity, as well as the diversity of its rhetorical approachesfrom Phillis Wheatleys use of poetry to reconfigure American revolutionary political imagination (chapter 1, by Vincent Carretta); to Martin Delanys use of the Roman concepts cives ingenui and jus suffagii to explain racial domination (chapter 3, by Robert Gooding-Williams); to Ida B. Wellss use of data aggregation to make patterns of lynching knowable as patterns (chapter 9, by Naomi Murakawa); to Toni Morrisons 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 Walkers