What the Black Intellectual Tradition Can Teach Us About American Democracy

We the People

National Constitution Center

History, News Commentary, News

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 30 January 2025

⏱️ 65 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie and political scientist Melvin Rogers, author of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, explore the ways key African American intellectuals and artists—from David Walker, Frederick Douglass, and W.E.B. Du Bois to Billie Holiday and James Baldwin—reimagined U.S. democracy. Thomas Donnelly, chief scholar at the National Constitution Center, moderates. This conversation was originally streamed live as part of the NCC’s America’s Town Hall program series on Nov. 14, 2023. Resources Melvin Rogers, The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (2023) Melvin Rogers, The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (2008) Kate Masur, Until Justice Be Done: America's First Civil Rights Movement, from the Revolution to Reconstruction (2021) Jamelle Bouie, “How Black Political Thought Shapes My Work”, The New York Times (Feb. 11, 2023) David Walker David Walker, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) Jamelle Bouie, “Why I Keep Coming Back to Reconstruction”, The New York Times (Oct. 25, 2022) Martin Delany Jamelle Bouie, “What Frederick Douglass Knew that Trump and DeSantis Don’t”, The New York Times (June 30, 2023) Jamelle Bouie, “The Deadly History of ‘They’re Raping Our Women’”, Slate (June 18, 2015) W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) Stay Connected and Learn More Questions or comments about the show? Email us at [email protected] Continue the conversation by following us on social media @ConstitutionCtr. Sign up to receive Constitution Weekly, our email roundup of constitutional news and debate. Subscribe, rate, and review wherever you listen. Join us for an upcoming live program or watch recordings on YouTube. Support our important work. Donate

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0:00.0	Hello friends, I'm Jeffrey Rosen, President and CEO of the National Constitution Center,
0:07.0	and welcome to We the People, a weekly show of constitutional debate.
0:11.0	The National Constitution centers a nonpartisan nonprofit, chartered by Congress to increase awareness and understanding of the Constitution among the American people.
0:20.0	February's Black History Month, and to celebrate, we're sharing a great program from the
0:24.6	NCC's America's Town Hall series.
0:27.6	It's a conversation with New York Times columnist Jamel Bowie and political scientist Melvin Rogers
0:33.6	about how African American intellectuals and artists from David Walker to James Baldwin, transformed American democracy.
0:41.3	My colleague Tom Donnelly, Chief Scholar at the National Constitution Center,
0:45.3	moderates. The conversation was recorded on November 14,
0:49.3	2023. Enjoy the conversation, and happy Black History Month.
0:53.3	Thank you again for joining us, Jamel Bowie, Enjoy the conversation and happy Black History Month.
0:59.2	Thank you again for joining us, Jamel Bowie and Melvin Rogers.
1:01.8	Thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you for having us.
1:06.8	So beginning with you, Professor Rogers, your new book, again, is the darkened light of faith.
1:11.5	It offers a powerful account of the black intellectual tradition from Antebell America all the way up to the 20th century. Just want to begin by ask you, what inspired you
1:17.1	to write this book now? Right. So I was working on the book, I would say, for about a decade.
1:25.7	And what motivated the book was really my first book project, which was on the American philosopher
1:33.2	John Dewey.
1:34.8	And central to that project was the idea of uncertainty that John Dewey sort of emphasized as being
1:43.2	centred to democratic politics.
1:45.6	And once I concluded that book, my thought was that Dewey had laid out philosophically the importance of uncertainty,
1:52.9	but who has sort of lived it in an immediate way.
	...

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