What kept Black thinkers faithful to American democracy through slavery, Jim Crow, and worse? On this episode of the Liberalism.org Show, political theorist Jason Canon talks with Melvin Rogers — the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brown University and author of The Darkened Light of Faith — about the tradition running from David Walker and Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois and James Baldwin. They explore why these figures insisted on freedom and equal regard even without evidence it could be won, the difference between democratic "faith" and ordinary hope or optimism, and why Baldwin asks us to measure progress not by redemption but by how honestly we confront a history that never fully leaves us.

Further Reading

• The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought — Melvin L. Rogers, Princeton University Press

• African American Political Thought: A Collected History — Melvin L. Rogers & Jack Turner, eds., University of Chicago Press

More from Liberalism.org

• Liberalism's Uneasy Relationship with Democracy — Ilya Somin

• Civic Education for Liberal Freedom — Paul Carrese