133 S. 36th Street, Room 418
Perelman Center for the Study of Political Science and Economics
Read the Introduction to Rogers' book here.

In his new book, MELVIN ROGERS (Brown University) explores how African Americans understood American democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, amid their own social and political exclusion. How did they think about democracy so as to make sense of and render intelligible their appeals to the polity? Rogers argues that focusing on this question gives us new insight into the tradition of African American political thought and enriches our understanding of democracy as a way of life. Some of the key figures in the book include David Walker, Hosea Easton, Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin.

This event is held in partnership with the Penn Political Theory Workshop.