A Symposium on Melvin Rogers’s The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought

The Darkened Light of Faith is a work in the history of black political thought that speaks to contemporary challenges. It provides intricate reconstructions of David Walker’s rhetorical methods in his 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World ; the democratic perfectionism of Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, and Anna Julia Cooper; Frederick Douglass and Martin Delany’s debate about the meaning and implications of civic republicanism for oppressed peoples; Ida B. Wells’s and Billie Holiday’s use of journalism and music to reeducate American moral sense on lynching; and W. E. B. Du Bois’s use of art as propaganda to call readers to higher character. Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, Alain Locke, and James Baldwin make cameo appearances. Rogers provides not only riveting intellectual history but also rigorous argument about the faith-based character of democratic transformation.