James Baldwin's Gift
"James Baldwin's Gift" is the concluding chapter of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought, published in 2023. The book reexamines how figures as diverse as David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin thought about the politics, people, character, and culture of a society that so often dominated them. Sharing a light of faith darkened but not extinguished by the tragic legacy of slavery, they resisted the conclusion that America would always be committed to white supremacy. They believed that democracy is always in the process of becoming and that they could use it to reimagine society. But they also saw that achieving racial justice wouldn’t absolve us of the darkest features of our shared past, and that democracy must be measured by how skillfully we confront a history that will forever remain with us.
Melvin Rogers is Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He has wide-ranging interests in contemporary democratic theory and the history of American and African-American political thought. He is the author of The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2008) and The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023). He is the editor of John Dewey, The Public and its Problems (Ohio University Press, 2016) and co-editor (with Jack Turner) of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021), a collection of 30 essays on figures in the tradition of African American political thought. His articles have appeared in major academic journals and popular venues such as Dissent, the Atlantic, Public Seminar, and Boston Review. In addition to his published writings, Professor Rogers serves as the co-editor of the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy book series. The series focuses on the unattended voices in the history of philosophy. He received an M.Phil in Political Thought and Intellectual History from Cambridge in 2000 and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale University in 2006.