Tag: Black Republicanism
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The Contributions of Black American Classicists against Racism
Beyond the well-known figures like Phillis Wheatley and Frederick Douglass mentioned in the Introduction to Five Early Figures, a generation of Black American classicists emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, often born into slavery or its immediate aftermath. These scholars mastered Greek and Latin to refute racial inferiority claims and assert our…
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How Lenin and Bolshevism displaced Civic Republicanism with Socialism in Black Radicalism
After 1917, the global meaning of “REVOLUTION” was successfully seized by Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and their descendants. CIVIC REPUBLICANISM did not disappear because it was defeated in open ideological combat. It was crowded out by a louder, better-funded, more institutionally disciplined international movement that claimed the entire moral and linguistic territory of “revolution,” “liberation,” and…
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Introduction to Black Republicanism: Five Early Figures, Wheatley to Douglass
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a small but influential group of Black intellectuals engaged deeply with Greco-Roman classics and the ideals of classical republicanism. This engagement was multifaceted in that they drew on ancient texts to demonstrate Black intellectual capacity in the face of racist denials. This challenged e.g., claims by Thomas…
The American Minervan 