POL3282: Black Political Thought: Conceptions of Freedom

On January 21, 1964, Ella Baker, one of the most important Black leaders of the Civil Rights Movement stood in front of a large crowd in Hattiesburg, Mississippi and said: "Even if segregation is gone, we will still need to be free; we will still have to see that everyone has a job. Even if we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we will not be free. Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind." With these words, Baker held before the crowd a political vision that went beyond the immediate goals of social struggle and defined one of the central impulses of Black political thought: to articulate a large and expansive conception of freedom. In this course, our main objective is to enter an intellectual terrain of rich and vibrant debates between African American political thinkers over the meaning of Black freedom. We will explore questions about 1) the geographical reach of their visions of freedom 2) their strategies for agitating for and achieving freedom 3) their different understandings of the nature of domination and how this informs their conception of freedom and 4) their emphasis on political affect in the struggle for freedom. Our orientation will be historical and theoretical. To this end, we reconstruct theoretical debates from four important periods of African American history. 1) pre-Civil War debates about the abolition of slavery (1830-1860) 2) Turn of the century debates about racial progress (1880-1910) 3) Civil rights era debates about integration and separatism (1950-1970) and 4) contemporary debates about law enforcement, police killings, mass incarceration, and political disenfranchisement (1990-present).

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