James Baldwin, History, Responsibility, and Atonement

Melvin Rogers, Professor of Political Science at Brown University, wrote The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African-American Political Thought (2023). 

The Darkened Light of Faith, he explains, takes up two questions: 1. “How should we understand the political-philosophical thinking of African-Americans [from David Walker to Frederick Douglass to W.E.B. DuBois to Anna Julia Cooper to Billie Holiday] who so often found themselves dominated by the American society they so diligently sought to transform?”; 2. “What must their vision of democracy presuppose about the people to whom they appealed and the society in which they stood?” And what is the character of their democratic faith, which never loses sight of the reasons similarly situated thinkers offer for despair? In his talk he will pursue these matters as they unfold in the work of the civil rights era essayist, novelist, and activist, James Baldwin.