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Lloyd, Vincent W - Black Natural Law (2016)
Lloyd, Vincent W - Black Natural Law (2016)
Law
Black Natural Law
Vincent W. Lloyd
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CON T EN T S
Preface vii
1. On Frederick Douglass 1
2. On Anna Julia Cooper 32
3. On W. E. B. Du Bois 58
4. On Martin Luther King Jr. 88
5. Decline and Detritus 118
Conclusion: Against Pessimism 14 4
Afterword: Beyond Secularism and Multiculturalism 148
Notes 163
Bibliography 171
Index 177
PR EFACE
On September 10, 1991, the first day of Supreme Court nominee Clarence
Thomas’s confirmation hearings, then-Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Joseph Biden announced that “the single most important task
of this committee” was to uncover the meaning of Thomas’s “natural
law philosophy.” A quarter century earlier, in what has become a docu-
ment nearly as constitutive of the American political imagination as the
Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King Jr. invoked natural law
from a jail cell in Birmingham, Alabama. For King, natural law trumped
the laws of segregation and buttressed the struggle for social justice. In
contrast, Biden suspected that natural law led Thomas to his staunchly
conservative views, perceived by progressives as at odds with King’s
vision of social justice.
What happened in the quarter century between King and Thomas was
not simply a shift in the political valence of natural law. What happened
was the disintegration of the black natural law tradition. Through slavery,
the Civil War, Reconstruction, and decades of Jim Crow, in the words of
Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many oth-
ers, natural law, sometimes referred to as higher law or God’s law, pro-
vided a robust resource for black political engagement. This once-robust
natural law tradition abruptly collapsed. Only ruins remain: words and
phrases detached from a rich, coherent style of ethical inquiry and politi-
cal practice—fragments now often conscripted for strikingly diverse
political aims. This book recovers the lost black natural law tradition.
There is a long history of reflecting on natural law and of deploying
natural law in politics. This tradition stretches from Aristotle and Cicero
to Grotius and Hobbes to the U.S. Declaration of Independence and
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, placing it near the heart
of Western political thought. There are Christian, Jewish, and Islamic
natural law traditions, as well as dogmatically secular natural law tradi-
tions. Natural law traditions motivate but are distinct from discussions of
human rights and human dignity; natural law also is associated with those
who would implement “Judeo-Christian” values in the contemporary
( viii ) Preface
European concepts and practices need not be imported and applied to the
African American context. Indeed, it may be the case that European or
Catholic natural law traditions can learn much from the black natural law
tradition. For example, the black natural law tradition places particular
emphasis on the role of emotion in discerning natural law, a theme often
neglected in European and Catholic natural law traditions.
However, this book also makes a stronger claim. Not only does it
recover one more natural law tradition in order to expand the menu of
natural law options, it also suggests that the black natural law tradition
gets things right. To put the claim strongly, black natural law offers the
best way to approach politics, not just for blacks but for everyone. It is the
approach that ought to be taken. The black natural law tradition addresses
the same problems addressed by other natural law traditions, but it offers
more coherent and compelling responses. Where other natural law tra-
ditions start with accounts of human nature that only partially capture
our humanity—for example, understanding humans as directed toward
natural ends in the same way as animals or other elements of the physi-
cal world, or understanding human nature as essentially rational—black
natural law appreciates the mix of reason, emotion, and imagination that
makes up our humanity, and black natural law concludes that human
nature is ultimately unrepresentable. Where other natural law traditions
focus on the individual human being who discerns and implements nat-
ural law, the black natural law tradition appreciates the influence com-
munities have on individuals and the need for political change to happen
through social movement organizing. Where other natural law traditions
offer absolute principles to guide political engagement, the black natural
law tradition focuses on strategic political organizing against laws that
favor the interests of the few. Finally, where other natural law traditions
see each human being as equally capable of discerning the natural law,
the black natural law tradition recognizes the epistemic privilege of the
oppressed, the way that suffering attunes us to justice. While this book is
structured as an explication of a tradition, it could equally be structured
as a systematic presentation of the arguments for black natural law. This
latter organization, however, would betray a claim central to black natu-
ral law: that critique is a collective endeavor that must begin with careful
attention to specific circumstances.
Natural law may flourish in a variety of rich, sophisticated traditions,
but in the contemporary American political arena, this richness and
diversity are almost always ignored. One tradition in particular, bring-
ing together elements of Aquinas’s natural law theory and liberal politi-
cal philosophy, has become hegemonic. It has been embraced by both
Catholic and secular conservatives, and it has been mobilized to support
(x) Preface
The black natural law tradition largely remains silent on such issues
as abortion and gay rights, for better or worse. The version of natural law
theory that is politicized in the contemporary context often begins with
an account of human nature as essentially rational. In the subset of these
accounts that are explicitly derived from religious sources, reason is seen
as the way that humans participate in God. Natural law is our way of
knowing divine law. In the black natural law tradition, in contrast, what is
essentially human is rather more complex. It includes the capacity to rea-
son, but also the capacities to feel and imagine—these are all ways that we
participate in God. Crucially, the black natural law tradition is committed
to the view that no worldly description of the human suffices. Just as God
exceeds all worldly descriptions, the image of God in humanity exceeds
all worldly descriptions. We offer worldly descriptions as approximations
for what is ultimately unrepresentable, and those worldly descriptions
succeed when they remind us how their referent exceeds them. The black
natural law tradition claims that reasoning, feeling, and imagining are
characteristically human capacities, but these are descriptions that evoke,
rather than denote, human nature that is unrepresentable. When the
black feminist Sylvia Wynter calls for a rejection of the concept of man,
burdened with its particularly white, European, and masculine associa-
tions, and for the development of a new concept of the human, this is what
I take her to be seeking: a concept of the human essentially defined by
what it is not, marking what is in the world but never fully captured by it.1
Recovering this concept of the human is the basis of black natural law’s
normativity. Any worldly law or social norm that attempts to exhaustively
describe human nature, for example in slavery, runs against natural law.
Similarly, any worldly law or social norm that attempts to constrain our
characteristically human capacities to reason, feel, and imagine runs
against natural law. These human capacities are not the essence of human
nature, but they do allow us to discern human nature—as exceeding all
worldly description. Reason alone, or feeling alone, or imagination alone
would lead to a faulty account of human nature; all must be exercised
together. If they are restricted, we become blind to our own nature and
to the nature of others, and this is wrong. In a theological idiom, denying
or distorting human nature does violence to the image of God, ultimately
setting up humans in the place of God—idolatry. Much of the work of the
black natural law tradition is detecting idolatry, for the wealthy and pow-
erful are much invested in advancing their own interests at the expense
of reverence for the image of God in humanity. The world continuously
applies pressure on us, through ideas that circulate and through manipu-
lation of our emotions, to forget the transcendence of our humanity. Black
natural law requires resisting these pressures.
( xii ) Preface
Unlike politicized brands of natural law popular today, the black natu-
ral law tradition is less focused on implementing natural law than it is on
enabling our right perception of natural law. Following right perception,
the black natural law tradition sees implementation of natural law as a
question requiring practical wisdom, rather than abstract, philosophical
guidance. The distortions of the world are so great that righting percep-
tion is an enormous task, one that itself has normative consequences. The
black natural law tradition in this way focuses on ideology critique, but it
also focuses on social movement organizing. The practice of organizing
trains participants in the critique of ideology by putting ideology critique
into practice, collectively. But organizing also names the process of imple-
menting natural law. When accounts of natural law are not dominated
by reason, there is an uninterrupted flow from discerning natural law to
acting on natural law, to challenging unjust worldly laws and attempting
to replace them with more just laws. However, black natural law rejects
the notion that just laws, though self-evident to those whose perception is
undistorted, can simply be proclaimed and then implemented. The world
so mangles our perception that concerted, strategic effort is needed in
order to advance natural law. Social movement organizing, necessarily
attentive to the complexities of a political landscape and the distribution
of power, is essential for this effort.
To explore the black natural law tradition, I have chosen four figures
whom I take to be exemplary but not exhaustive: Frederick Douglass,
Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King Jr. Following
the precepts of the tradition itself, I investigate each as a human being: not
reducible to historical context, but also not reducible to any set of ideas
they put forward or to a style of reasoning they offered. I argue that each of
these figures performs natural law, offering words or text that exemplifies
the characteristically human capacities to reason, to feel, and to create.
Performance does a better job than static words on a page at evoking what
cannot be represented—at evoking the human. Moreover, black natural
law understood through performance is clearly contagious. Each of these
authors staged performances for his or her audience that sought to evoke
reason, feeling, and imagination. Each sought to give readers or listeners
the capacities to discern their own human nature, and so to give them
the motivation to participate in ideology critique and in social movement
organizing.
The four figures I have chosen are all centrally important in the canon
of black political thought. None is generally understood to be a radical;
each is thought to represent the mainstream in some sense. This book
urges us to rethink that mainstream. Rather than seeing it character-
ized by a push for integration and ultimately racial harmony, we ought to
Preface ( xiii )
is that it may seem as though these four figures are flawless. They certainly
are not. But my interest, like theirs, has been in discerning what is most
human in them as displayed in their writings and speeches. I have focused
on the exercise of their characteristically human capacities as they inquire
into the question of the human, as they attempt to ward off ideology, or
idolatry. There is plenty of secondary literature on these four figures that
explores their limitations and places them in historical context—and
so nearly forecloses their humanity. To this literature, I have occasion-
ally pointed in the notes. The second worry about my approach is that it
makes four very different figures appear the same. I concede that it does,
but that is precisely the point that each makes. When we shed the distor-
tions of our perception that have been thoroughly inculcated, we see that
all human beings share a common humanity—or rather a point of tran-
scendence that marks our common humanity.
In some ways, this book sounds very old fashioned, with its focus on
our shared human nature that leads to an account of justice. Yet I think
it will become clear that what this human nature involves is not so rusty.
Affect theory and the emotions have attracted wide interest in the world
of cultural studies, and I tap into some of those insights. But I also worry,
along with the black natural law tradition, that affect entrances just as
much as reason, blinding us to the complexities of our human condition.
I agree with many leftist scholars who take ideology critique to be a cen-
tral, if not the central, aim of scholarship. But too often ideology critique
is detached from the complexities of social movement organizing, to the
detriment of both. Focusing on performance yields useful insights, and it
is an approach that I embrace, but I do not find performance studies valu-
able as an end in themselves, or as “interventions.” Performance can be
a way of discerning human nature that resists reduction to either reason
or emotion, and it can be a way of encouraging others to discern as well.
Most important of all, affect, ideology critique, and performance must all
be part of a story about justice—about injustice in the world we have and
about how we can move toward a more just world. This is the story I try
to tell.
Finally, a word about religion is necessary. Natural law stands astride
the boundary between the religious and the secular. On the one hand, it
takes human nature as its starting point. Normative conclusions can be
reached in this world, by us, using our human capacities to investigate
ourselves. On the other hand, natural law is often advanced in a religious
context, its author named as God. Humans are said to contain the image
of God. The black natural law tradition certainly uses religious language,
but it is legible—and persuasive—without commitment to any specific
theological beliefs or participation in any religious practices. There is
Preface ( xv )
On Frederick Douglass
W hen the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1857 that Dred Scott was not
a United States citizen, Frederick Douglass had a ready response.
Although he believed that the Court’s ruling rested on a misunderstand-
ing of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—excluding
blacks from the proclaimed equality of “all men”—the main thrust of his
response did not have to do with interpretation. Douglass appealed to
God’s law:
The Supreme Court of the United States is not the only power in this world. It is very
great, but the Supreme Court of the Almighty is greater. Judge Taney can do many
things, but he cannot perform impossibilities. He cannot bale out the ocean, annihi-
late this firm old earth, or pluck the silvery star of liberty from our Northern sky. He
may decide, and decide again; but he cannot reverse the decision of the Most High.
He cannot change the essential nature of things—making evil good, and good, evil.
(3:167)1
other, for the sake of clarity, the analysis that follows will reconstruct
Douglass’s argument for natural law.4 The emphasis here is primarily on
content; at the end of the chapter, we return to questions of performance,
this time in Douglass’s writings.
HIGHER LAW
with the theory that law can be no more than an expression of the interests
of the powerful. Certainly the interests of the powerful do shape the laws
of the land, Douglass accedes, but this ought not to be the case; such influ-
ence ought to be opposed. For Douglass, law shaped by the interests of the
powerful is not law at all, even if it has a superficial resemblance to law. If
law shaped by the interests of the powerful was treated as genuine law, the
law of the land would be like “the murderous commands of the captain of
a pirate ship, on the deck of which might makes right” (2:462). We would
not say that a pirate ship is governed by law; even if the captain fancies his
word to be law, it is obviously deficient. There is no relationship between
law and morals on a pirate ship, and Douglass uses this intuition to urge
the adoption of natural law theory. He points to analogues of the pirate
captain: Tyrants and oppressors also take their arbitrary, human will to
set the law, precluding a role for morals. The laws of slavery are enacted by
tyrannous states and so are not laws at all, in Douglass’s view. Indeed, he
suggests that the pirate ship is more than a metaphor, given the circum-
stances in which blacks came to the New World.
As opposed to the arbitrariness of the pirate captain or the tyrant, on
Douglass’s view, God’s law is consistent, eternal, and stable. God’s law is
so because it follows the model of the laws of the physical universe. Just
as those laws are absolute, so are the moral laws. In contrast to the laws of
science, necessarily obeyed by all that exists, human beings have a choice
as to whether or not we will follow the moral law. If we choose to obey
it fully, we will, according to Douglass, find “happiness and well-being”
(5:139). Yet this sentiment is clearly aspirational since the moral laws of
the universe remain obscure. They can be gradually discerned, but the
promise of “happiness and well-being” remains in the distance—remains,
it might be said, an eschatological vision of participation in the divine. As
we saw above, Douglass has confidence in God as he has confidence in
humanity. The eschaton will, indeed, come: One day the higher law will
triumph, and hollow worldly law will fall away. This will be a day of bliss
for individuals but also for society as a whole since God’s law binds society
together when it is followed, whereas its simulacra, like the “laws” of the
pirate ship, tear society apart.
We do, however, have all the resources we need to discern moral law.
Quite unlike tyranny, based on one human’s will, God’s law is based on our
collective humanity. This is not so much a collective will than it is a shared
condition, our human nature with its distinctively human capacities, and
this condition results in normative conclusions. Hence the various names
that are often attached to God’s law: higher law, natural law, moral law,
the dictates of conscience, or simply justice. Even though Douglass does
not always use a theological idiom, the structure of his argument remains
(6) Black Natural Law
HUMAN NATURE
What does Douglass mean by human nature, this concept that plays
the central role in his natural law theory? In short, Douglass argues that
human nature is complex; indeed, that is its essence; that is how it images
God. Human nature is more complex than any description can capture.
The attempt to offer such descriptions will necessarily get human nature
wrong and lead to injustice. As a skilled rhetorician, Douglass does not
remain silent on matters that are beyond human description. He offers
plenty of descriptions of human nature. That he offers several such
descriptions that are inconsistent and in some ways incompatible should
not be dismissed as an example of the inconsistency of the rhetorician
as opposed to the consistency of the philosopher. The excess of descrip-
tions Douglass offers serves to underscore the inadequacy of each, but
the descriptions also serve as a reminder that there are many reasons we
human beings are not reducible to our animal nature.
What makes Douglass’s several descriptions of human nature espe-
cially striking is their focus on the expansive emotional, one might even
say spiritual, life of all human beings. Humans laugh and they weep, he
proclaims. Yes, we are able to reason, but much more too. We can speak,
we can learn, we can hope, we can fear, we can feel joy, and we can feel
sadness. All of these attributes are found in just one of Douglass’s many
speeches (2:502). Although this is a particularly long list of character-
istics, it is typical in that it mixes reason and emotion, acknowledging
that both are necessary and neither is sufficient to make a human being
human. Elsewhere, he suggests that the quality characteristic of human-
ity is “active and constant resistance to the forces of physical nature,” in
contrast to animals, which simply respond to the natural world (4:95).
This capacity for resistance also means the capacity to fight, as Douglass
famously illustrates in the physical confrontation with the slave-breaker
Covey that he thrice recalls in his autobiographies. It was a fight that led
Douglass for the first time to conclude that he was a man. Just as Douglass
could fight with Covey, blacks exercised and advertised their humanity
as they fought for the Union in the Civil War (4:69). In another itera-
tion, Douglass asserts that what is essential to our humanity is the capac-
ity to believe and to doubt (4:194). In yet another, Douglass claims that
(8) Black Natural Law
humans, unlike animals, are able to make progress (4:255). Each genera-
tion is capable of improving upon what came before, whereas the ways
of the animal world remain effectively constant. In another version of
this point, Douglass describes humans as uniquely aware not only of the
future but of temporality in general, of the relationship among past, pres-
ent, and future (5:45). Humans are creatures capable of remembering, of
reasoning, but also of prophecy. These are qualities shared by all, includ-
ing blacks, but they are not qualities found in animals. (Black progress, he
notes, has been constrained by slavery but will inevitably accelerate when
slavery and its remnants are fully abolished.) There is a qualitative rather
than a quantitative difference between humans and animals; a whole new
realm of capacities is found in humans. Humans are also animals, but they
are more: Douglass evocatively describes this excess as “the infinite side
of human nature” (4:194).
Although he has provided various lists and developed various claims
for what is characteristically human, Douglass concludes that an irreduc-
ible mystery remains, and this, at the end of the day, is what separates
humans from animals (2:255). It is because of this irreducibility, this mys-
tery, that humans are identified with God, for God is also ultimately mys-
terious, irreducible to the terms of the world. To so reduce God would be
to make God into an idol. Significantly, the many qualities of the human
that Douglass enumerates also mark the ways in which humans reflect the
image of God. Douglass’s God is not an abstract mind or a divine watch-
maker. God must also involve both reason and emotion, mind and heart.
This is not a point that Douglass fully develops—he is not a theologian—
but it likely informs his critiques of overly rationalistic religion (i.e., reli-
gion that forgets about the heart, not only the human heart but also the
divine).
Among all the qualities that he names as characteristically human,
Douglass mentions one that has particular import for his natural law the-
ory: “Men instinctively distinguish between men and brutes. Common
sense itself is scarcely needed to detect the absence of manhood in a
monkey, or to recognize its presence in a negro” (2:502). We do not need
Frederick Douglass to explain to us what counts as a human. He expli-
cates what all of us, with no special knowledge or training, already appre-
ciate. This means that we, as humans, are ultimately able to reject those
views that would exclude certain classes of people from the category of
the human. Coupled with the other capacities of the human that Douglass
enumerates, this further means that we are able to extract broader norma-
tive principles from human nature by which to judge our social norms and
laws—we are able to know natural law.
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS (9)
We who have been long debarred the privileges of culture may assemble and have
our souls thrilled, with heavenly music, lifted to the skies on the wings of poetry and
song. Here we can assemble and have our minds enlightened upon the whole circle
of social, moral, political and educational duties. . . . Here, from this broad hall, shall
go forth an influence which shall at last change the current of public contempt for the
oppressed, and lift the race into the popular consideration which justly belongs to
their manly character and achievements. (4:96)
While the Douglass Institute was to feature lectures and offer blacks new
information about the world, it would also attend to their broader human-
ity, including stimulating their emotions with music and poetry. Note how
quickly Douglass moves from exercising human capacities to normative
implications. Immediately following “poetry and song” are the “duties”
that the Douglass Institute will impress upon blacks. This juxtaposition
might read as jarring or incoherent if it were not for Douglass’s commit-
ment to natural law. Duties flow from his account of human nature, and
the more human capacities are exercised, the more self-evident those
duties become. Moreover, they are contagious. When others, in this case
( 10 ) Black Natural Law
uses an experience with which many of his listeners would be familiar, the
parting of mother and child, and ramps up its intensity to a level where it
is clearly impossible to communicate—and so provokes awareness in his
listeners of the incommunicability of the soul.
Before we can set about correcting the laws of the world, bringing them
into conformity with higher law, we must discern what the higher law
is. To do this is at once extraordinarily simple and extraordinarily com-
plex. The higher law is self-evident, Douglass affirms, following the
Declaration of Independence and the Christian tradition. But we are
estranged from ourselves. The ideas of the wealthy and the powerful—
in Douglass’s early days, slaveholders in particular—grab hold of us,
causing us to misperceive who we are and what human nature entails.
Prerequisite to implementing the natural law is ridding ourselves of such
distortions, and this is such a large task that it actually comes to entail
much of the work of natural law itself. While Douglass sometimes urges
that we must simply repeat eternal and self-evident truths, he harnesses
the motivating force of this formulation to fuel an inquiry into the distor-
tions of human nature—to fuel ideology critique. As Douglass pointedly
puts it, what is needed “is not simply the opening of our eyes and seeing
what was not seen before”; rather, what is needed is “the removal of what-
ever may obstruct, hinder or prevent the understanding from grasping
any object of which it may properly be cognizant.” To do this success-
fully requires “effort, work, either of body or mind, or both” (5:142–143).
Happily, Douglass offers prescriptions: practices that can help us remove
obstructions to our perception. Before offering prescriptions, however,
Douglass must diagnose the disease, must name the obstructions. The
distortion that so worries Douglass works on two levels. On one level,
human capacities themselves are muted or distended. On the other level,
our perception of those capacities also goes awry. These two distortions
feed back onto each other. The less well we perceive our nature, the less
we exercise that nature. The less we exercise that nature, the less well we
perceive it.
To untangle this knot of distortion, Douglass turns to religion. While
Douglass adores the words and ideas of the Bible, he has strikingly little
to say about love. It is not that he prefers the Hebrew Bible to the New
Testament; he freely cites both. The significance of Jesus for Douglass is
just as much in the world’s reaction to him than in Jesus’ message itself.
Douglass is particularly interested in the reasoning of the Jews as depicted
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS ( 13 )
to see the world and themselves in a way that preserves the status quo.
Rediscovering these truths, which were once so obvious, takes enormous
effort. It requires paddling upstream, cultivating a suspicion of the ways
of the world and openness to truths that transcend those ways. There are
several means by which this can be accomplished. First, there is organi-
zation. Groups like the Anti-Slavery Society, followers of the white abo-
litionist William Lloyd Garrison among whose number Douglass was
initially counted, offer a counter-pedagogy to that of the status quo. The
goal of such an organization was not so much to state the truth to its mem-
bers, although it certainly did this; its primary goal was to cultivate the
capacities to feel and reason that had been suppressed or misdirected by
the powers that be. In the relatively democratic, sometimes chaotic meet-
ings of abolitionist groups, individuals used to accepting what they had
been told learned how to make their voices heard. They learned how to be
suspicious of those wielding power. And they learned how to strategize—
both within the organization, as competing resolutions were debated and
votes taken, but also in the nation, as social movement organizations tried
out different tactics to gain traction with a national audience. Especially
important as well is the solidarity with the most oppressed involved in
social movement organizing, for Douglass suggests that close proxim-
ity to the oppressed can rectify distortions in those who are privileged
(2:462). A final point is worth remembering. More important than an
organization’s achievements is the effect that organizing has on the indi-
viduals doing the organizing.7 Their capacity to perceive themselves and
their world improves, resulting in even stronger motivation to persist in
the practice of organizing.
unable to access “the soul’s deepest meditations,” and ultimately such rea-
son “lays down the law to empty benches” (3:462). Reason alone would
get human nature wrong, and its normative conclusions would ring hol-
low. Head and heart keep each other in check. On the specific question of
justified killing under discussion, Douglass here deals in general princi-
ples; he does not offer criteria for determining when taking a life is accept-
able. Most likely he would resist any such criteria, instead charging each
human being with the use of his or her capacities, reason and emotion, in
order to decide based on the specific circumstances of the case.
Douglass offers several examples of ways in which we can improve our
perception of natural law. The first, quite clearly though often implicitly,
is by listening to a lecture, such as those delivered by Douglass. At their
best, lecturers engage their auditors’ reasons and emotions, exercising
these capacities and allowing for normative conclusions to naturally and
necessarily follow. Douglass would commemorate the great abolition-
ist orator Wendell Phillips by recalling that “He could make men think,
make them angry, make them wince under his scathing denunciations; he
could make them smile” (5:157). Phillips exemplifies the traits of the great
speaker, one who could not be dismissed with the pejorative “rhetorician.”
This term suggests manipulation of reason and emotions; it suggests dis-
tortion. The ideal of oratory that Douglass describes encourages listeners
to both respond with feeling and to interrogate those feelings; it encour-
ages them to track the speaker’s ideas but also to allow those ideas to affect
them viscerally.8
Another way that our ability to discern the natural law can be culti-
vated, according to Douglass, is through encounters with moral exem-
plars, individuals who devote all of their time and energy to implementing
natural law. Through such figures, we are able to catch “glimpses of God,”
for in them, there is almost nothing to distort the image of God (4:264).
Douglass tells his audience not to worship such secular saints, by which
he means that we should not simply imitate what they do or believe what
they say. They offer a model for how we are to discern natural law for our-
selves; we may not outsource this task to others. This is for at least two
reasons. While such secular saints may have reduced distortion in them-
selves, short of the eschaton, distortion cannot be entirely removed. The
process of combatting distortion—of ideology critique—is ongoing and
involves deep introspection. It is a very personal process, for the percep-
tion of each of us is distorted in a different way. The second reason is that
the normative implications that naturally follow from right perception
apply specifically to one individual, in the circumstances of that individ-
ual. As we will see shortly, the proximity to and implication in an unjust
law, as well as the opportunities that we have to change it, play a role in
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS ( 19 )
For Douglass, what the natural law is not is just as if not more important
than what it is. Natural law, first and foremost, condemns worldly laws that
flow from a faulty account of human nature. That human nature cannot
be reduced to the status of animal or machine means that human beings
cannot be treated as animals or machines. We should be able to exercise
our characteristically human capacities. Recalling Douglass’s expansive
account of these capacities, ranging from memory and prophecy to laugh-
ter and sorrow to intergenerational progress, there is much room for a
robust set of normative prescriptions to follow, even if Douglass does not
work them all out himself. For example, laws that restrict or tax inheri-
tance would be prima facie unjust because they diminish the characteristi-
cally human capacity for intergenerational progress. As we will see in the
next section, this does not mean that any specific law is indeed unjust, but
it exemplifies a starting point for Douglass’s natural law inquiry.
The natural law theory developed by Douglass is not wholly negative.
He writes, “There are such things in the world as human rights. They rest
upon no conventional foundation, but are eternal, universal, and inde-
structible” (4:252). These rights flow from reflection on human nature.
They are not entirely disconnected from the negative conclusions entailed
by natural law. “The mission of the reformer,” Douglass says, “is to dis-
cover truth or the settled and eternal order of the universe” (5:142). While
zealous reformers would often jump immediately to the practicalities of
how to make the world a better place, how to fix the problems that appear
most pressing to us at the moment, Douglass urges that reform must
flow from the search for natural law. Notably, Douglass does not say that
reform should flow from the content of natural law. The process of discov-
ery involves removing distortions; it is an ongoing process, and it is this
process itself that Douglass privileges over any particular endpoint. Laws
that promote distortions in our capacity to know ourselves run against
natural law. As we have seen, Douglass has a very wide view of such dis-
tortions, and social institutions play an important role in circulating ideas
and feelings that distort. So, for example, schools that teach students of
the heroism of slaveholders, such as Thomas Jefferson, might prima facie
run against natural law in this way.
The most central theme of Douglass’s thought, from his earliest days to
his last, is freedom. Natural law guarantees human freedom—this can be
seen as a human right or it can be seen as a rejection of illicit constraint. To
his audience, Douglass intones that the right to freedom “is written upon
all the powers and faculties of [a human’s] soul. The title deed is in his own
breast; the record of it is in the heart of God” (3:7). Here Douglass vividly
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS ( 21 )
illustrates the power of the notion that humans are created in the image of
God. It implies that the capacities that are characteristically human make
the human being inviolable. To reject this is to run against God because
those characteristically human capacities are the image of God. Just as a
slaveholder has an absolute right over a slave, and the slaveholder would
be upset (and possibly sue) anyone who would damage his or her “prop-
erty” without permission, we have such an absolute right over ourselves,
whether we acknowledge it or not. No one may kill or maim us or oth-
erwise reduce our value. If we forget about this right, as many of us do,
God will still remember. Indeed, we will remember ourselves, even if we
or others attempt to suppress this knowledge. Even when the slave has
enough to eat—Douglass and many others sometimes went hungry—and
has other basic material needs satisfied, the slave still feels “the gnawing
hunger for Liberty” (3:11). Understood rightly, these pangs are a reminder
that slavery will not last forever. They are a reminder that the human
being is more than he or she is told—by slave-owners or by anyone else in
this world. They are a reminder that there is a higher law and that higher
law will ultimately triumph—“unless the devil is more potent than the
Almighty; unless sin is stronger than righteousness” (3:187). Douglass
believes that they are not, from both faith and evidence.
Slavery runs against natural law; this is the natural law claim Douglass
holds most dear. Douglass tells his audience that slavery is “a direct war
upon human nature, and the Laws of God” (3:127). The qualities that
make a slave human are suppressed by slavery. As we have seen, Douglass
offers plenty of such qualities to choose from, and slavery suppresses
them all. Humans are treated as inhuman; the image of God in human
nature is ignored. This is ultimately a greater violation than the violation
of any of the characteristically human qualities that Douglass enumer-
ates. The performative significance of his lists is to name the human as un-
nameable: That is how human nature images God. Slavery names human
nature with a number that follows a dollar sign.
Following freedom, the second normative principle that Douglass
derives from the natural law is equality. Because each human being images
God, and because this image cannot be valued in worldly terms—no dol-
lar value can be placed on it, nor is any set of descriptions adequate—the
only thing comparable in value with one human being is another, and
they are equal. Otherwise, if equality is rejected, we would presume to
accurately describe human beings: some of this type, deserving of this
treatment; others of that type, deserving that treatment. Equality is an
abstract principle. Defeasible claims of natural law derive from it—for
example, that employers ought to treat all job candidates in exactly the
same way. Douglass offers florid praise of this principle: In it, “humanity
( 22 ) Black Natural Law
human laws are a nuisance to be removed with whatever tools are quickest
and most effective.
John Brown offers an example of moral greatness, according to
Douglass. Importantly, Douglass asserts that this was widely recognized,
even by those who possessed no such greatness themselves. By living a
life “free from all conventional fetters, true to his own moral convictions,”
Brown exemplified a full commitment to natural law (5:12). He was aware
of the ways of the world, of social norms and laws, but he was also aware of a
higher authority, and it was by this higher authority that Brown decided to
live. Brown’s sheer existence committed in this way “compelled” those who
witnessed that commitment—and with the publicity surrounding Brown’s
life and legacy, there were many witnesses—to respond. Natural law was
thrust upon the nation for all those to see, though many chose to close their
eyes. Many others kept their eyes open, with the result that Brown trans-
formed the national conversation about slavery, accelerating its end.
Douglass knew Brown personally, and he tells his audiences that Brown
was startlingly ordinary: “In all visible respects he was a man like unto
other men” (5:24). Appreciating and responding to the natural law does
not take a superhero; any of us could be John Brown. Douglass describes
Brown’s occupation as a wood salesman, his taste for music and animals,
his moderation in temper and personality, and his seemingly mundane
virtues—he was “a good friend, a good citizen, a good husband and
father” (5:24). With such a personality, he could have achieved much in
the world had he just accepted its ways, had he just rejected the authority
of God’s law. In other words, Brown did not dislike the world; he just liked
God more. The lesson here is that an embrace of the world does not nec-
essarily distract from recognizing a higher authority. Brown could enjoy
music and animals and children and also put his life on the line to make
the world more just. Indeed, the two may be related. Douglass writes of
Brown that there was no one who found “life more sweet” than he (5:24).
It is ultimately this, the sweetness of life, the full exercise of human nature,
that reminds us of natural law—and that compels us to act.
It is true that John Brown resorted to violence, and violence would
seem to be at odds with God’s law. As we will see, Martin Luther King
Jr. distinguished natural law from Communism with his emphasis on
using nonviolent means to reach a just end. But from Brown’s perspec-
tive, one that Douglass would come to endorse, the distinction between
violence and nonviolence was not as clear as we are accustomed to believe.
Before the Civil War, it seemed as though the South was at peace, but in
fact, slavery was supremely violent. There was but the illusion of peace; in
reality, there was “an incessant state of war” (5:24). This is reminiscent of
Douglass’s understanding of the pirate ship or tyranny, rule by fiat, where
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS ( 25 )
IMPLEMENTING NATURAL LAW
NARRATING NATURAL LAW
and emotion together. Take, for example, the open letter that he penned as
a runaway slave to Thomas Auld, his former owner. It is a text that is emi-
nently humane, and it is committed to extolling humanity. Douglass is at
great pains not to write out of anger and not to dehumanize Auld. Even a
slave-owner, even one’s own former owner, has within him the image of
the divine. Douglass writes a text that is not overwhelmed by anger, but it
also does not suppress emotion. Wrongs were done to him. He feels them
and he understands them; he understands why they were wrong. The letter
opens by reminding Auld of their strained connection: “The long and inti-
mate, though by no means friendly, relation which unhappily subsisted
between you and myself,” he begins (421).10 Even if it has been unhappy,
this is a relationship between human beings, no matter how much Auld
wants to deny it. Indeed, Douglass’s ultimate goal is conversion: He hopes
that his letter will provoke Auld to use his reason and emotions to discern
for himself the natural law that Douglass has already found.11 He notes the
date of his letter: the anniversary of his escape from slavery. The principle
of freedom that Douglass realized for himself he now wants to spread to
others, not only blacks but also whites.
Douglass declares to Auld that he will explain the reasons he, Douglass,
has the right to be free. “I am almost ashamed to do so now, for by this time
you may have discovered them yourself ” (423). With this, Douglass again
acknowledges the humanity of his interlocutor. As a fellow human being,
Auld has the capacity to discern natural law himself; he does not neces-
sarily need Douglass to tutor him. The explanation that Douglass offers is
a mix of reason and emotion. As he tells it, when he was a six-year-old boy,
Douglass was puzzled by his own enslavement. He tried to reason it out,
but to no avail. He saw a slave badly beaten, and he puzzled more. Notably,
he describes himself employing emotion and reason together: He “wept
and pondered over the mystery” (423). Eventually, with the help of some
overheard information, he puts the pieces together and concludes that
he must escape. Once he understood his nature rightly, a process that
involved the exercise both of reason and emotion, a normative conclusion
seamlessly followed: Freedom was imperative. The reason that Douglass
offers to Auld for his self-emancipation is that both Auld and Douglass
were created by God, and they were created as separate. Douglass has his
own nature, his own capacity to reason and feel, and that nature ought not
to be diminished by bondage to another.
After conveying this central message, Douglass returns to a mode of
address that both describes and performs shared humanity. Douglass
offers an unsolicited update on his life, as if writing to a cousin. He notes
that his current home is the same size as Auld’s, that he is happily married,
and that he has four children, and mentions their ages. Indeed, it is these
( 30 ) Black Natural Law
children that remind Douglass most directly of natural law. When he looks
at them and imagines what it would be like for them to be enslaved, he
knows that a slaveholder must be “an agent of hell.” The conclusion comes
with “thoughts and feelings” that Douglass can barely control (426). In
his children, Douglass sees the image of God most clearly, and he sees
those who would harm them, who would deface that image, as demonic.
Access to the image of God in human nature both comes about through
and evokes “thoughts and feelings” that lead to normative conclusions.
Slavery is wrong. All ought to be treated humanely, including Douglass’s
former master. Douglass proceeds to collegially inquire about his own
sisters and his grandmother, now with a sense of natural law sharpened
in himself and imagined to be sharpened in his correspondent. These
relatives too are fellow human beings who ought to be free. Douglass con-
cludes his letter with a note of hospitality and an invitation. He invites
Auld to visit him, to stay in his home, so that Douglass may “set you an
example as to how mankind ought to treat each other” (428). If the reason
and emotion of the letter were not enough, Douglass is happy to continue
his persuasive work in person. His salutation condenses the content and
performance of the text into eight words: “I am your fellow-man, but not
your slave.”
Frederick Douglass is most often encountered today through his auto-
biographical writings. There is an account of natural law in these as well,
although it is not named as such. What is explicitly present are the com-
ponents of Douglass’s natural law theory, narrated. As Douglass depicts
it, even as an enslaved child, he “could not reconcile the relation of slavery
with my crude notions of goodness” (90). The wrongness of slavery is self-
evident, and children are insulated from the distortions of the world that
cause us to overlook what is self-evident. Not only did the young Douglass
perceive that slavery was wrong, he also was compelled to put this prin-
ciple into action. He resolved that he would struggle for his freedom,
motivated by “an inborn dream of my human nature” (91). For years, this
desire remained latent. Then Douglass began to develop his capacities and
attend more closely to his own human nature. He began to read. Before
he acquired this ability, slavery had distorted his emotional life so that,
as a slave, he could pass through life “light-hearted,” “gleesome,” and “full
of mirth and play”—existing in what Douglass felicitously describes as
a “moral dungeon” (159–160). But the abilities that he develops and the
knowledge that he acquires allow the young Douglass to perceive and
challenge the wisdom of the world. He had once thought his owner was
good and kind; now he was convinced of the opposite. The more Douglass
exercised his reason and emotion, the more they called to be exercised.
Within the constraints of his enslaved life, this led to great frustration.
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS ( 31 )
He only can understand the effect of this combat on my spirit, who has himself
incurred something, hazarded something, in repelling the unjust and cruel aggres-
sions of a tyrant. Covey was a tyrant, and a cowardly one, withal. After resisting him,
I felt as I had never felt before. It was a resurrection from the dark and pestiferous
tomb of slavery, to the heaven of comparative freedom. (247)
The word resurrection need not be read as a metaphor here. Douglass had
been estranged from his human nature, from his own life, and through
struggle, he gained it back. But he also gained something grander. In his
own nature was the image of God. By attending to this, he was able to
participate in the divine.
CHAP T ER 2
On Anna Julia Cooper
preserve male domination, now with moral force. Furthermore, the revival
of interest in natural law theory over the past few decades has been led by
conservative Catholic intellectuals who are invested in defending policies
that are often associated with patriarchy: prohibitions on abortion, con-
traception, and gay marriage. Proponents of this “new” natural law theory
see human nature not only directed toward the good but directed toward
specific basic goods. This list of basic goods, including knowledge, play,
aesthetic experience, and life, serves as the starting point in the process
of generating normative prescriptions. To act against these basic goods is
unreasonable and wrong: It goes against human nature and our deepest
desires. Yet the particular basic goods on these lists tend to be defined in
ways that conveniently fit with the most conservative strands of Catholic
social teaching.1
As we will see, Anna Julia Cooper does not believe that human nature
is essentially rational. She thinks that our emotional lives are just as cen-
tral to who we are and that our reason and emotion blend in a complex,
dynamic mixture. She agrees with the mainstream of natural law theory
that humans are innately directed toward the good, but for Cooper, it is our
reason and emotion together that are directed toward the good. With this
distinct account of human nature, no longer fetishizing reason, Cooper
avoids feminist worries; indeed, for her, natural law is especially acces-
sible to women. She does not address specific policy questions around
personal morality because, on her account, these are distractions from the
primary implications of natural law. Those implications are twofold: the
need to critique ideology, especially white supremacy and patriarchy, and
the need to support social movement for justice, especially those focusing
on education and community building.
Cooper was born a slave in Raleigh, North Carolina.2 She was not sure
of her father’s identity—her mother was too ashamed to speak of him—
but she presumed him to be the white man who had owned her mother.
Much later in life, Cooper would recall her mother as “the finest woman
I have known,” adding that “though untutored she could read the Bible
and write a little.” Her mother’s “self-sacrificing toil” offered Cooper a
model of industriousness that she would follow throughout her life. The
young Cooper attended St. Augustine’s Normal School, newly created
by the Episcopal Church’s Board of Missions to help educate blacks in
the aftermath of the Civil War—according to one source, on land that
had been owned by the Haywoods, the white family that a decade before
owned Cooper. St. Augustine’s was overseen by a minister who served as
principal, and the students’ days were structured by religion. There was
prayer in the morning and the evening, as well as daily church services
and weekly communion. The full Old and New Testaments were read
( 34 ) Black Natural Law
aloud to the children each year, and over the course of each month, all of
the psalms would be read. Cooper describes “the beauty and dignity of the
Prayer Book English” that she heard at St. Augustine’s, perhaps an early
inspiration for the appreciation of language she would show in her own
prose and poetry in the decades to come. The hymns she heard daily as
a child particularly affected her, offering her a “feeling of belonging” and
access to a “Communion of Souls.” She reports having the same feeling
when she would venture far from her childhood home: at college in Ohio,
visiting Westminster Abbey, and at her church home in Washington, D.C.
This was a theme that would recur in Cooper’s life. Religion offered her
a way of embracing the connections among all human beings. It was,
importantly, a feeling that religion offered, not a thought or a reason. It was
also about “souls,” about the part of humanity that reflects a divine image.
Through religious practice, through singing hymns, Cooper believed
that we each have the opportunity to realize the deep connection among
all souls.
The young Cooper was thoroughly immersed in a world of Christian
text and practice that would influence her for the rest of her life. For
example, years later, as a teacher and principal herself, she would keep
a list of Bible passages she found particularly significant. Cooper com-
pleted her studies at St. Augustine’s in 1877. Within a matter of weeks,
she had married her Greek teacher, George A. C. Cooper, 30 years old
and originally from the West Indies. He had been a tailor but had decided
to switch careers: He was training to become an Episcopal priest. In
1879, he succeeded in this goal, becoming one of the first black priests
in North Carolina. Alas, within months of ordination, he died; Cooper
would never remarry. She decided to continue her education at Oberlin
College, where she received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and later,
based on teaching experience, a master’s. Cooper’s interests were not lim-
ited to mathematics; she was particularly interested in languages and in
the humanities. At Oberlin, Cooper’s views of religion changed dramati-
cally. She describes herself, when she arrived, as “a bigoted ‘Churchman.’ ”
The liberal atmosphere at the college and her classes changed her mind-
set, “humanizing [my] ‘Churchianity,’ ” as she put it later. Cooper did not
abandon institutional religion, however. Throughout her time at Oberlin,
she continued to attend an Episcopal Church. However, Cooper no lon-
ger took Christianity to be a system of rules that must be strictly applied
to life. She came to believe that church institutions were secondary to
human souls. Christianity spoke to the soul, and it was from the soul, in
the view she would embrace, that normative prescriptions arise.
Cooper’s teaching career began at Wilberforce University in Ohio,
the nation’s first black-controlled college, where she taught mathematics,
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 35 )
French, and German. After a year, the declining health of her mother led
Cooper to return to St. Augustine’s, now as a teacher. Two years later, she
would move to Washington, D.C., where she would become a teacher
at and then principal of the M Street High School, and later president
of Frelinghuysen University, an institution focused on the education of
the working class. Along the way, Cooper would take graduate courses
at Columbia University, receive a doctorate from the Sorbonne, play an
important role in various local and national organizations, and remain
an active member of the Episcopal Church. While Cooper never had
children of her own, she adopted seven of her relatives’ children as her
own, including five that she took in when she was 57 years old. Late in
life, Cooper would continue to embrace the atmospherics of Christianity,
even if she had limited interest in the specifics. A 1951 article about her in
the Washington Star describes her home office as “a room filled with reli-
gious pictures and a bust of Frederick Douglass.”3 These religious pictures
may have elicited the same “feeling” as those hymns did at St. Augustine’s,
eight decades earlier. It was a feeling that, as we saw in the previous chap-
ter, was also closely connected with that great social critic and advocate of
a higher law, Frederick Douglass.
INNATE LONGING
movement into the future will look like. That would be to constrain it, to
disobey the law—and to make of God an idol. However, to align ourselves
with natural law, we are to acknowledge the desire we have, and we are to
struggle against those forces, including human laws, that would impede
this higher law.
Cooper finds the desire for future possibility in every soul. She thinks
“unquenchable longings” are particularly evident in the souls of women
(80). In Cooper’s view, such longings characterize black religion more
than any church could. Blacks are not ultimately concerned with the spe-
cific prescriptions of Christian institutions, even of black Christian insti-
tutions. Rather, blacks are concerned with realizing the desire they share
with all for improvement, “the one great yearning, aspiring, outreach-
ing, in all the heart-throbs of humanity in whatever race or clime” (103).
The deep secret of the human heart is simply the fact that it desires, and
it desires something that cannot be satisfied by an object in the present
world. It desires something that can be sought, struggled for, fought for,
but that cannot be described other than as likeness to God. All desires are
not desires for God, only those desires that continue to expand the realm
of possibility, only those that are never satisfied with this or that object at
hand, or even this or that object imagined.
Future possibilities may seem an abstract object of desire, but pursuing
this desire, according to Cooper, brings real rewards. She quotes a French
intellectual of a century earlier, Germaine de Staël: “Happiness consists
not in perfections attained, but in a sense of progress, the result of our
own endeavor under conspiring circumstances toward a goal which con-
tinually advances and broadens and deepens till it is swallowed up in the
Infinite” (54). Once again, participation in God is identified with future
possibility, an object of desire that can never be pinned down, as it is not
an object at all but the fact of expanding possibilities. Happiness thus does
not come from obtaining any object or achieving any state but from par-
ticipating in God, participating in, rather than inhibiting, the unfolding
of nature and self. Frustration and sadness come from resisting this pull
forward and outward; they are the result of protecting the way things are,
sheltering the self from the dynamism of the world.
Cooper’s praise of future possibility often sounds like a modernist
endorsement of progress. Salvation will come when there is more and bet-
ter, the modernist would say, and we are heading in that direction now. But
Cooper’s reflections on the future have a crucial critical edge. The mere
fact of novelty is insufficient to guarantee goodness, in her account. It is
future possibility that she commends: social practices that may come into
existence in the future but that do not yet exist and are not as yet imag-
inable. Having more objects or more technologies does not necessarily
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 37 )
result in such new social practices; often, they reinforce old ones. The ori-
entation toward the future is very important for Cooper, and it is impor-
tant for religious rather than utilitarian reasons. It is not that certain facts
about the future will make us happier, but that the process of struggling to
expand the repertoire of social practices results in happiness—because,
in Cooper’s view, this involves participation in the divine. God works
through history not to bring about progress in the anodyne sense, but
to bring about freedom. Individuals and groups are currently limited in
what they are able to do; in the future, as we become closer to God, those
limitations will recede. Cooper sees God working in the women’s move-
ment of her day. In her account, it is “a movement based on the inherent
right of every soul to its own highest development” (100). Here the move-
ment of history and the movement of the individual soul are linked: God
works through the former in order to enable the latter—which is to make
people free.
God’s role pulling forward the workings of history leads Cooper to
draw some conclusions that appear puzzling at first. She sees history as
necessarily filled with conflict, indeed driven by conflict. We should not
be overly concerned with this conflict, Cooper assures us, because God
will inevitably move the world forward, will inevitably resolve matters for
the better. This view has the result that, even in matters of race, Cooper
urges a certain detachment: “It is God’s problem and he will solve it in
time” (131). But she goes on to argue that people today cannot sit back
and wait for God, just as they should not imagine the responsibility of
righting the world’s ills to be entirely on their shoulders. Cooper argues
that there is a duty to honestly and fully represent one’s position and one’s
interests. If racism hurts you, that should not be hidden. If you desire a
law to be overturned, you should say so. You should not hide your views
or desires, and you should not stop speaking about them simply because
you are tired of describing them to no effect. There will be opportunities
for change, opportunities for life to widen and deepen, and you should
be ready to pursue them. The second-person address here refers not only
to individuals but also to groups: Cooper gives this same advice to races,
classes, and families.
Like many of her contemporaries, Cooper sees the United States as a
land of opportunity. For Cooper, this is more than a cliché, for opportunity,
or future possibility, is what defines participation in God. America is God-
blessed because of the land’s bounteous possibilities and the eagerness of
Americans to participate in actualizing those possibilities: “American
civilization will be broader and deeper and closer to the purposes of the
Eternal than any the world has yet seen” (129). Moreover, the Declaration
of Independence hints at just the relationship between God and future
( 38 ) Black Natural Law
possibility that Cooper sees in its famous self-evident truths: “that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with cer-
tain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pur-
suit of Happiness.” Cooper reads this last phrase as the pursuit of future
possibility, and she agrees that it is a right endowed by God. It is not just
that Americans happen to be particularly industrious, but that they, in
their founding document, affirm the most basic principle of natural law as
Cooper understands it.
Sometimes, Cooper takes her commitment to America’s promise
uncomfortably far. For example, late in her life, she argued that struggles
for racial justice ought to be paused during the Second World War, for
America was fighting a larger struggle. This view ought to be read in light
of Cooper’s understanding of how God works through history. There
are times when the task is to represent your interests and there are other
times—strategic, or providential, opportunities—when you ought to
fight for your interests. The Second World War was, for Cooper, a time
for blacks to represent their interests and for Americans to fight for their
interests. After the war, it would be time for blacks to fight.
LIFE AS IT IS
specifics of whom we see and what they do, not the categories in which
we automatically classify them.
Cooper is quite clear that the human soul, as she understands it, reflects
the image of God. It thus must be treated as sacred, but people often treat
as sacred categories that obscure the soul, such as race, gender, and class.
People often treat these categories along with all their associations as eter-
nal and unchangeable, or even as deserving of worship. For both blacks
and women, freedom will be won once the image of God untainted by
worldly interests is restored. Cooper envisions a time “when the image
of God in human form, whether in marble or in clay, whether in alabaster
or in ebony, is consecrated and inviolable, when men have been taught
to look beneath the rags and grime, the pomp and pageantry of mere cir-
cumstance and have regard unto the celestial kernel uncontaminated at
the core” (108). When this time comes, Cooper continues, we will be able
to treat each other with love. While Cooper describes this love in a way
that suggests a certain pretentiousness—“the science of politeness” and
“the art of courteous contact”—what she means is simply a humane way
of relating to each other, not only to wealthy whites but to each and every
human being.
Humans carry the image of God, according to Cooper, but the natural
world also plays an important role as God’s creation. Both humans and
nature are oriented toward future possibility, but humans are capable
of forgetting that orientation. Perceiving and responding sensitively to
nature (understood broadly as the world around us) is a way in which that
shared orientation can be restored. Cooper writes of the “sermons and
songs” nature offers us. In other words, connecting rightly with the world
around us is a way of beating back the distorting abstractions that tempt;
those distortions prevent us from connecting rightly with the world
around us. On Cooper’s account, interacting with the world involves not
only perceptions and mental processing, not only intuitions and concepts,
but a “crucible of our own feelings and imaginations” through which expe-
rience is “fused into consistency” (135). A mechanistic account of human
experience that would attempt to precisely describe how we interact with
the world necessarily involves yet more abstractions. The capacity to
endure the tumult of life is the same capacity that is brought to experi-
ence: It involves not only consistency but also feeling and imagination.
This kind of perception allows for greater participation in God: “this true-
ness to one’s habitat, this appreciative eye and ear for the tints and voices
of one’s own little wood serves but to usher us into the eternal galleries
and choruses of God” (135).
It often seems as though, in Cooper’s view, one is more likely to hear the
choruses of God in a nature reserve than in a church. Indeed, she argues
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 41 )
religion can motivate such sacrifice. On the other hand, Cooper’s under-
standing of religion is expansive, and she might deny that any mother can
be an atheist or agnostic if that mother feels the unlimited potential of her
child. Because God involves infinite possibility, humans, as finite beings,
are incapable of fully understanding or accurately describing God. No
particular banner of organized religion captures such infinite possibility,
though of course Cooper maintained her own Episcopal faith. This broad
conception of religion does not encompass everyone. Cooper does main-
tain that there are agnostics, but in her view, to be agnostic simply means
to reject the feeling of infinite possibility in favor of infinite suspicion. Put
another way, the agnostic rejects emotion in favor of reason, that “skep-
tical spirit.” The agnostic views human life as essentially defined by the
capacity to reason—like many natural law theorists of the present day.
THE JUDGMENT OF GOD
When the image of God is concealed, when the soul is distorted or mis-
understood, the work of repair is imperative. Cooper, for example, points
to alcohol and tobacco use as ways in which “the proper image of God
is transformed into a fit associate for demons” (111). While Cooper does
not connect the dots on why this is the case, alcohol and tobacco clearly
diminish the capacity to cope with the ups and downs of the world in pur-
suit of future possibility, and this is what Cooper means by the image of
God in humans. But she goes further in her analysis, arguing that the use
of alcohol and tobacco is itself often a product of the pressures that capi-
talism places on workers—thus suggesting that it is actually capitalism
that distorts the image of God. This demonstrates the critical power of
Cooper’s natural law approach. Starting from an understanding of human
nature, Cooper is able to criticize those social and political norms that
distort human nature, and to criticize the economic system that gives rise
to those norms. That economic system and the social norms accompany-
ing it may be sanctioned by the world, but they often conflict with a higher
law, with God’s law. As Cooper puts it, “men of inner light” (i.e., those who
recognize the image of God in them) are “the saviors of the nation and
Redeemers from sin.”5
Because future possibility is central to Cooper’s conception of God,
she has no patience for those who claim the mantle of religion yet ignore
the diminishment of future possibility in the real world. She decries “fun-
damentalists” who ignore the economic deprivation of blacks—“worse
than slavery” she calls the situation in 1928—and the horrors of lynching
(336). Christianity requires explicating a proper understanding of God
( 44 ) Black Natural Law
the government of the nation” (108). The interests of the wealthy and the
powerful will no longer dominate the government. They will be replaced
by God’s law, a law not only of love but of “reason and justice.” Cooper
adds these additional descriptors to emphasize that the eschatological
vision she presents is not simply about feeling, and it is not so abstract as
to involve souls relating to each other without the complications of the
world. The world to which Cooper aspires is a real world, made of humans
who not only feel but also think. It is made of humans who relate to each
other in all their fleshiness, but do so justly.
The account of natural law that Cooper advances is impossible to
codify.11 She rejects “theoretical symmetry and impregnable logic” (187).
She rejects justifications based on religious tradition or aesthetics. What
Cooper accepts and commends is a process for discerning what is right
and what is wrong. She presents this process as if it were a pragmatic,
empirical test. Instead of theory, one should examine “the fullness of a
man” that provides a “higher court” and a “final tribunal” (187, emphasis
in original). It might seem as if Cooper is saying simply: Do what works to
improve the human condition. But “the fullness of a man” is, crucially, the
image of God in humans. It is the seat of future possibility. The laws and
norms of the day ought to be judged by whether they blemish or enhance
this image of God. Here is the ultimate judgment: judgment according to
God’s law. It is a judgment that cannot be made a priori. The evidence—
historical and sociological—must be examined: If the “fullness of a man,”
future possibility, is enhanced, then God’s law is satisfied. Otherwise,
there must be struggle against this unjust law. Cooper is redirecting her
readers from abstract moralizing to the concrete world. It is there, in the
world, that the evidence must be accumulated to know whether a norm or
law is right or wrong.
Because of her commitment to careful observation instead of abstract
theorizing, Cooper is very suspicious of those who would claim to have a
plan to fix racial injustice. There can be no straightforward solution to the
oppression of blacks in America. “Amalgamation, deportation, coloniza-
tion and all the other ‘ations’ that were ever devised or dreamed of ” ought
to be rejected, Cooper asserts, “for the love of humanity” (132). This last
phrase is not just a figure of speech. It refers back to the core of Cooper’s
theoretical commitments. Humanity ought to be loved as it images
God; this generates the normative force of the “for” that rejects all of the
“ations.” Instead of looking for a single plan that will erase racial oppres-
sion or gender oppression, Cooper’s writings exhibit a more focused, and
more grounded, exploration of the specifics and complications of oppres-
sion in particular circumstances, at particular times. It is those specifics
that are presented as evidence to the “higher court,” and so it is to those
( 48 ) Black Natural Law
most of Cooper’s writing here uses a carefully descriptive tone, one quite
different from the tone she employs in A Voice from the South. Natural law
does appear in this work, though it is not at the center of the text. Cooper
writes that slavery was ultimately banished from France and its colonies
because the principles upon which the French Revolution was based—
liberty, equality, fraternity—are “immortal principles.”12 Later in the text,
Cooper elaborates: “All through God’s universe we see eternal harmony
and symmetry as the unvarying result of the equilibrium of opposing
forces. Fair play in an equal fight is the law written in Nature’s book.”13
Here Cooper is appealing not so much to human nature but to the natural
world as a sight through which God’s law can be discerned—though it
should also be noted that it is human nature that allows us to extract prin-
ciples from the natural world in a way that, for example, a turtle cannot.
While “eternal harmony” and even “fair play” may seem like hopelessly
abstract concepts, Cooper quickly uses them to argue that dictatorship
ought to be condemned. This form of government clearly lacks harmony
and fair play: A dictator is one individual with vastly more power than
those over whom he rules. While Cooper, writing primarily as a histo-
rian, does not press the implications, her position resonates strongly with
a formulation of natural law offered by Martin Luther King Jr. The civil
rights movement icon charged that laws enacted by a majority without
the participation or consent of a minority are illegitimate and out of
harmony with God’s law. Cooper would say the same because such laws
do not accord with the principles of harmony and fair play enshrined in
natural law.
A WOMAN’S VOICE
display her capacities and her possibilities. She does not repeat the words
and ideas of others; she thinks, she feels, and she creates herself. That all
blacks and all women are so capable is a point that Cooper makes both
in the content of her book and in its performance. The book is evidence
that if only blacks and women had the same opportunities as white men,
if only blacks and women did not endure myriad dehumanizing experi-
ences, they could be writers—and poets, and philosophers, and intellec-
tuals, and much else besides.
Cooper chooses the words of George Eliot as her book’s epigraph: “For
they the Royal-hearted Women are / Who nobly love the noblest, yet have
grace / For needy, suffering lives in lowliest place” (50, emphasis in origi-
nal). This is the figure Cooper wants to commend and perform, one who
is able to detect and appreciate excellence, and one who does not see the
desire for excellence as elitist. The religious term “grace” here is partic-
ularly significant. It is what distinguishes the women Cooper wants to
praise from others who have a taste for excellence. Because of this grace—
because, it is implied, of God—the desire for excellence must include rela-
tion with the “lowliest” of humans. Those who are so lowly, Eliot’s words
continue, are voiceless. They cannot express their suffering, though they
do feel their suffering with “inward pangs.” The lowliest humans are still
human; they have the capacity to feel even when suffering takes away their
speech. The royal-hearted woman responds to the suffering she senses
“With tender touch and with a low, soft moan.” This is how Cooper under-
stands her book. It is a “low, soft moan” by one who has been trained to
appreciate excellence. As a moan, it is a primitive expression of feeling, of
the most basic in humanity. But the book itself that follows these words is
highly articulate, highly cultured. Careful description and argument can
also be a moan, Cooper implies. Indeed, Cooper transfigures the lowliest
into the highest, inward pangs into outward expression. If her book were
purely argument unmoored in the most basic of human feeling, it would
be a failure, the epigraph implies. It is by combining reason and emotion
that Cooper is able to perform the role of “voice.” The very last line of the
Eliot poem, the line that explains the purpose of that “low, soft moan,” is
crucial: “For company.” This is the purpose of the “low, soft moan,” and
also the purpose of Cooper’s book. It is not so much representation of
those who suffer as it is an expression of solidarity with those who suf-
fer. They share a common humanity: They can all moan. Some moans are
little more than sound; other moans are well-ornamented sentences and
paragraphs, but all can share in this capacity to express our humanity.
In the first pages of her book, Cooper makes the connection between
the Eliot epigraph and her own project explicit. She describes the black
woman as “An infant crying in the night … with no language—but a cry”
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 51 )
(51). Even an infant is human, with human feelings and desires and a way
to express them—so too with blacks and with women. The cries of these
marginalized groups are often ignored, but Cooper will bring her love
for excellence to the task, a tactical move in order to project the cries of
black women farther, a megaphone as it were. Indeed, Cooper speaks to
her audience in a pragmatic register, noting that the United States faces
problems, and offers her voice as an aid. She explains that her own “bro-
ken utterances”—referring to the untraditional form of her book, itself a
reminder of the only partial intelligibility of an infant’s cry—will result
in “a clearer vision and a truer pulse-beat” (52). Here pragmatic motiva-
tions blend with higher aspirations. For some readers, hearing more per-
spectives will allow them to see an issue more accurately and so solve
problems more effectively. For others, and likely for herself, there is an
inherent truth in the sound of a voice when it grows out of the most essen-
tial aspects of our humanity. Cooper acknowledges that other groups
besides black women may also be inarticulate, and she positions the sort
of voice-giving project she undertakes as a model. Indeed, she positions
it in normative terms: “every wrong that needs a voice” (107) ought to
get one, and all muteness is linked. Read along with Cooper’s natural law
theory, these claims suggest that laws and norms that take away the voice
of any human are wrong and ought to be opposed. One tactic to oppose
them is performative contradiction: displaying the humanity of one who
is supposed not to have any humanity. Note that this reading implies that
natural law entails much more than just equal opportunity. Natural law
requires each individual to have the resources necessary to survive and
thrive—the requirements for having a voice.
Although Cooper saw the need for every group to express its voice, she
saw a particularly important role for women. As she writes, “You will not
find the law of love shut out from the affairs of men after the feminine half
of the world’s truth is completed” (77). With the evocative phrase “law of
love,” Cooper refers to a precept that women have particular access to, but
this need not be understood simply as invoking a gender cliché. We can
take this “law” seriously. Exclusively male lawmaking often goes wrong
and must be held accountable to a higher law, a law of love. The world
has been slow to recognize the authority of women, or, more precisely,
the authority of God particularly accessible to women. There have, how-
ever, been strands in the history of the West that show women’s connec-
tion with the divine, and Cooper brings these strands together.14 Cooper
points to the West’s Christian heritage and the medieval ideals of courtly
love as important resources to recover for appreciating the role of women
that she advances. Resonating with her Eliot epigraph, Cooper writes of
the “noble and ennobling ideal of woman” found in the West, an ideal that
( 52 ) Black Natural Law
encourages women to strive toward excellence and praises them for the
excellences they possess (53). A synthesis of Christianity and feudalism
is necessary for proper reflection on the role of women, harnessing the
insights and moderating the excesses of each. In the feudal ideals of courtly
love, it was but an elite few women who were venerated. Christianity’s
instinct for equality encourages us to see all women, regardless of wealth
or color, as equally deserving of veneration. The veneration of courtly love
may seem like worship from a distance, abstracting actual women into
ideals. Cooper understands it differently. At its best, what the medieval
practices of courtly love represent is an acknowledgment of the privilege
that women have in accessing the divine.
Cooper contrasts the woman-empowering resources in the Western
tradition with the current status of women in the United States. The con-
trast is unfavorable to Cooper’s contemporaries. Among elite and middle-
class whites, women are kept on “the pedestal of statue-like inactivity in
the domestic shrine” (107). Nineteenth-century ideals placed heavy con-
straints on female activity and placed heavy responsibilities on women.
This social order was often justified by appeal to God, Cooper notes.
Men were thought to do the work of glorifying God, while women were
thought to do the work of glorifying men (80). This is a social norm that
Cooper asserts is deeply misguided, and she attempts to flip it on its head.
Although all humans contain the image of God, women are best able to
glorify God because they can best appreciate the image of God in human-
ity and they, as the ones most involved in childrearing, are charged with
primary responsibility for implementing God’s law on earth by forming
moral youths. Cooper makes this argument powerfully and in various
ways. Sometimes she uses immanent critique, showing how the justifica-
tion for women’s relegation to the domestic sphere does not hold water.
For many, and particularly for those most invested in the gendered divi-
sion of labor, there is no longer a need for physical labor to be performed
to earn a living. There may actually be more physical labor performed at
home, in childrearing, than there is in the workplace. That men are physi-
cally stronger than women no longer works as a reason for men to have
jobs outside of the house and women to stay inside.
Cooper urges women to leave the pedestal on which they have been
placed by men and the regnant ideas of the age. They are to reject the way
that “woman” is defined by men, to reject the norms imposed on women
by men. Women are to “think and move and speak; to undertake to help
shape, mold, and direct the thought of her age” (107). In other words,
women ought to exercise their human capacities and express their voices.
The world will be better for it. This is not only because expressing human
capacities is commended by God’s law, but also because of “the instincts
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 53 )
we would have a whole world that participated in the divine. That is the
charge of the parent and the educator: to make the world more like heaven
by preserving and cultivating the image of God in children. The forces
of the world will attempt to distort this image, and they will inevitably
succeed—earth is not heaven, but it can be made more heavenly. Worldly
laws and social norms will be replaced by God’s law when the world is
filled with adults who were raised rightly, who have no patience for unjust
laws. Cooper privileges all women in her account of natural law, but she
thinks black women have a doubly important role. Given the oppression
faced by blacks, the need to combat unjust laws is all the stronger—so the
need for black children to be raised well is all the greater.
These reflections on childrearing are quite abstract, but Cooper has
concrete prescriptions as well. She argues that there is a God-given right to
both vocational training and a job (264). This follows from natural law—
she argues that it is enshrined in the Declaration of Independence—and
it ought to be implemented in the world. She praises the schools for freed
blacks established in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, like her
alma mater St. Augustine’s. These schools instill “ideals of home and of
womanhood” and they spread “a contagious longing for higher living and
purer thinking, inspiring woman herself with a new sense of her dignity
in the eternal purposes of nature” (203). Not only does natural law com-
mend holistic education, such education also promotes natural law by
allowing those so educated to discern it for themselves. While Cooper
argues that education should, indeed, prepare students for jobs, it should
not be limited to this task—a point on which she parts ways with Booker
T. Washington. “Christian Education,” as she calls the view of educa-
tion she endorses, also cultivates the character of the student. Cooper
describes this sort of education when she herself was a student: in her own
doctoral studies as a sexagenarian. “I am soundly convinced that every
scrap of information I may gain in the way of broadening horizons and
deepening human understanding and sympathies, means true culture
and will redound to the educational value of my work in the school room”
(326). Education contributes to the realization of human potential at all
ages, and this potential involves both reason and emotion, “understand-
ing” and “sympathies.” And education is contagious. The more the human
potential of the teacher is realized, the more she is able to contribute to the
realization of the human potential in her students.
Importantly, Cooper argues that such education should not be reserved
for the talented, or the wealthy, or men, or whites; it should be the standard
of education for all.15 Indeed, Cooper argues that even more resources
ought to be invested in the education of those who are disadvantaged.
Schools, she writes, offer children “the good tidings of social salvation”
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 55 )
varying amounts of detail. The final page of A Voice from the South urges
readers not to wait for justice in the next world but to start making this
world more just. Earlier in the book, Cooper writes that the settlement
house movement, one of the leading forms of community organizing of
her day, lived out the ideals of the Gospel. In another part of the text, after
describing the problems of crude, racist conduct faced daily by blacks and
the horrors of the convict lease system that put teenagers to work on chain
gangs, Cooper writes that the proper response would be for the women
who lived near these indignities to “organize a Society for the Prevention
of Cruelty to Human Beings, and disseminate civilizing tracts, and send
throughout the region apostles of anti-barbarism for the propagation of
humane and enlightened ideas” (95, italics removed). In other words,
organizing is the proper response to injustice. In this, Cooper is urging
her readers to think strategically. That a social norm or worldly law runs
against natural law does not mean that norm or law should be broken, or
even that it should be immediately contested. A population must be edu-
cated so that all can see the injustice and a consensus can form against the
unjust law. Building such a consensus cannot be done alone; it requires
organizing, a slow, often tedious and grueling labor.
Organizing also has its rewards. Confronting power builds strength,
Cooper suggests, in children and in adults. This strength builds the capac-
ity of organizers to further discern and enact natural law—organizing
has a snowball effect. Furthermore, organizing is not just a hobby. It is
Cooper’s life’s work, and she suggests that it should be the life’s work of
all. “The greatest happiness comes from altruistic service,” she writes,
and such service can be performed by even those with little financial or
social capital.17 The meaning of service, as Cooper understands it, is not so
much performing a deed that directly helps another, but rather building
the capacity of a community to address injustices and, ultimately, imple-
ment natural law. This is precisely the “law of love” that Cooper writes
about. We participate most fully in the divine when we are organizing our
communities: We are performing the law of love.
Some scholars have read Cooper as part of a problematic conversation
within the black community about racial uplift and respectability. This
understanding of Cooper emphasizes the nobility of the woman in the
epigraph to A Voice from the South, suggesting that Cooper wants to make
black women noble and does so by pursuing elitist projects and invok-
ing the canon of Western learning. These critics also charge that Cooper’s
outlook is ultimately nationalist: Her support for America is too uncriti-
cal, and her ideals of American-ness are sometimes read as xenophobic.18
While Cooper need not be hailed as a saint, attention to the religious
dimensions of her thought and particularly to her natural law theory
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 57 )
On W. E. B. Du Bois
Du Bois was 67 years old. In this empirical register, God does not appear.
There are churches as social institutions, but religious ideas are not part
of the analysis. The second genre Du Bois employs is literary: sometimes
fiction (short stories and novels), sometimes autobiography, and some-
times essays. In his literary writings, God is occasionally the protagonist
(e.g., “Jesus Christ in Georgia” or the messianic birth at the climax of Dark
Princess). Du Bois’s most powerful writings, The Souls of Black Folk and
Darkwater, combine these two genres, bringing together empirical studies
and literary sensibilities.
Du Bois himself attempts to reconcile these two genres by encompass-
ing both under the heading “propaganda.”2 He describes how he came to
realize that writing’s purpose, essentially, is to persuade. After Du Bois
left the academy and became a professional propagandist for the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People, an organization he
cofounded in 1909, his writings and speeches were increasingly focused
on persuading his audience to take particular political positions (e.g.,
to oppose lynching and to support nuclear disarmament). In these later
writings, it often seems as though Du Bois has no ethical or philosophical
framework as he weighs in on issues of the day. It is clear that he believes
the positions he is advocating are just, but he does not offer an account of
justice. In Du Bois’s earlier writings, there are few normative claims, and
there certainly is no account of justice.
How, then, can Du Bois be understood as a natural law theorist? Du
Bois does offer extended reflections on human nature. He also makes
normative judgments. To show that Du Bois is part of a natural law tra-
dition, it is necessary to show that the normative judgments flow from
the reflections on human nature. It is not necessary to show that Du Bois
himself argues in this way; it is simply necessary to show that his account
of human nature is capable of offering reasons for the normative judg-
ments he advances. 3 Many readers of Du Bois concern themselves with
discerning how he understands the concept of race, explicating his pro-
vocative remarks about double consciousness or analyzing his interest in
the “conservation of the races.”4 The discussion that follows will attempt
to demonstrate that such concerns are a distraction from Du Bois’s most
powerful insights. Du Bois is interested in human nature as such—in the
“soul.” Blacks have privileged access to the ways that God’s image is pres-
ent in human nature and so have privileged access to God. Blacks can
see themselves, their worlds, and God truthfully in a way that no others
can—though their insights are certainly not perfect and certainly still fal-
lible. Du Bois charges blacks with using their insights to change the world
for the better, and he implicitly argues that this can be done by attempting
to implement natural law.
( 60 ) Black Natural Law
LAWS OF SOCIET Y
Du Bois has much to say about natural law, but most of the time, he is using
the phrase in a sense quite distinct from the black natural law tradition.
In his empirical writings, Du Bois describes his task as that of discerning
the laws that govern the social world, laws that he takes to be analogous
to laws that govern the physical world. While this could, indeed, result in
certain normative claims (just as ducks ought to have two webbed feet,
perhaps societies ought to be organized around two-parent families), if
this were the entirety of Du Bois’s account of natural law, it would stand at
a significant distance from the black natural law tradition’s commitment
to what is beyond the observable social world, to religion. 5 Du Bois strug-
gles to understand what could be meant by a social law, and he ultimately
distances himself from the model of physical laws because of the account
of human nature he will develop. But he remains committed to careful,
truthful investigation of the social world, investigation that is scientific
insofar as it resists the distortions of perception caused by ideology.6
In his autobiographical sketch Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois recalls the
appeal of scientific law he felt in his youth when it presented an alterna-
tive to the claims of religion. He had always been skeptical of religious
claims and, as a university student, he came to reject religion altogether.
“In Germany I turned still further from religious dogma and began to
grasp the idea of a world of human beings whose actions, like those of the
physical world, were subject to law” (590).7 In a sense, the certainty of
religion was replaced by the certainty of science, social science. Du Bois
went in 1892 from Harvard to Berlin, where he would spend two years
studying with leaders in the emerging discipline of sociology. However,
Du Bois describes himself as dissatisfied with the abstract theorizing of
the German sociologists he encountered. He wanted to discern the laws
of society, but he wanted to do it by studying real people, up close. He
would study blacks, he decided, because they were a relatively discrete
community that could serve as a “laboratory experiment” allowing him
“to make the laws of social living clearer, surer, and more definite” (601).8
Notably, Du Bois describes his focus on blacks as pragmatic and instru-
mental to his goal of understanding the laws of all societies. In other
words, Du Bois considered all societies to be governed by the same social
laws. Studying blacks would uncover “natural law as locally manifest” and
could be followed by the additional labor of “careful, cautious generaliza-
tion and formulation.”9
Du Bois’s empirical research began with his famous study of blacks in
a Philadelphia neighborhood—a neighborhood that would be his “labo-
ratory.” It continued with the ambitious 100-year plan he envisioned for
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 61 )
scientifically examining all aspects of black life in the United States, a plan
he began to implement in Atlanta with numerous collaborators. This was
a purely empirical, descriptive research project, much like that of a chem-
ist or physicist: “I was in my imagination a scientist, and neither a leader
nor an agitator” (604). The conclusions that he would draw were for the
advancement of knowledge, not for the advancement of justice. They were,
however, concerned with social improvement, and The Philadelphia Negro
notoriously concludes with Du Bois’s recommendations for the black
community, starting with the need for blacks to limit their own criminal
dispositions. Du Bois does not present himself in this sociological treatise
as concerned with justice; he is concerned with practical improvements
in the lives of blacks and in the lives of Americans. Indeed, this possibility
for improvement is one of the ways that he sees the uniqueness of his own
project; other social scientists view the laws governing society as stiflingly
fixed, whereas Du Bois believes “that human beings could alter and re-
direct the course of events so as to better human conditions.”10 While Du
Bois acknowledges that there are limits to the effects that human efforts
can have, a commitment to some possible effect is crucial to his outlook.
Discerning the limits constraining human efforts is a task to which Du
Bois returns repeatedly. Indeed, it is the question that he took to be defini-
tive of the discipline of sociology rightly understood.11
That human actions could have an important effect on the social world
was confirmed for Du Bois by concrete historical evidence. Individuals
had worked for improvement, and they had made improvement. However,
all such efforts are constrained by natural law in the sense Du Bois uses it
in his early work: the scientifically discernable laws governing the physi-
cal world. Du Bois considers and sets aside the view that changes in the
social world, underdetermined by social laws, happen because of divine
intervention; he similarly considers and dismisses the view that natural
law was put in place by God. There simply is no evidence for such views, he
asserts. He must focus on the evidence supporting the existence of social
laws and the evidence demonstrating that humans can rise above those
social laws to improve the world. By taking human action as the center-
piece of his understanding of society, Du Bois sees himself to be making
a dramatic shift in emphasis from what he pejoratively refers to as “mysti-
cal” accounts of society.12 In other words, Du Bois has now, by the time of
his own investigations in Atlanta, moved two steps beyond his youthful
encounter with dogmatic religion. He was attracted by the possibility of
understanding social laws that govern the world, but he was subsequently
even more attracted by the potential of human action to shape a society
underdetermined by social laws. With this development in his think-
ing, Du Bois further demystifies social laws. Rather than privileging an
( 62 ) Black Natural Law
analogy with the laws of physics, Du Bois writes of the rhythms of life that
we all naturally notice—one need not be a German-trained scientist to
notice such rhythms. We accept such rhythms in the social world, but we
also understand that they can surprise us. We notice how social rhythms
can suddenly, dramatically transform—the results of human action,
sometimes individual, sometimes coordinated. This uniquely human ele-
ment that disrupts social patterns is taken as obvious in the real world
beyond the sociological classroom—in courts, in schools, in writing—
but it is too often ignored by sociologists, Du Bois charges.13
In a sense, Du Bois would seem to be arguing for sociology to be
abandoned in favor of anthropology, or at least for anthropology to take
primacy. To understand society, he seems to be saying, you have to first
understand human beings. But most of all, Du Bois is interested in the ten-
sion between human beings and the world in which they live. The human
marks what Du Bois calls the “Inexplicable” and the “Incalculable,” an
interruption of the orderly rhythms of the world that no amount of induc-
tive reasoning can predict.14 But Du Bois also rejects the view that chaos
characterizes human life. Humans are part of the natural and the social
world, and this imposes limitations on us; indeed, it constitutes us. But
we are also more, a surplus, a supplement. To tackle this great intellectual
problem—how to characterize the inexplicable and incalculable—Du
Bois the social scientist must advance on two fronts. He must, on the one
hand, discover all he can about the physical and social rhythms that do
exist and constrain humans. On the other hand, he must also study the
human soul. He must do so in a way that resists rational explanation or
calculation, and he must do so in a way that foregrounds human action. To
advance on both fronts simultaneously is the project of Du Bois’s greatest
writings, Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater, books that demonstrate the
complexity of the human condition and the human soul by juxtaposing
explication of the rhythms of the social world with sketches of emotional
conflict and emotional depth. Together, through this juxtaposition, Du
Bois presents his account of the soul as imaging God.
HUMAN NATURE
Du Bois offers numerous descriptions of human nature. They are not all
consistent. This does not mean that Du Bois is a sloppy thinker. It means
that he struggles to find words to describe something that cannot readily
be described. He must offer approximations; put another way, he must
paint a picture with words rather than aspire to offer an exhaustive defini-
tion. Most importantly, Du Bois’s various and shifting accounts of human
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 63 )
and War.”18 Du Bois thus not only employs a variety of genres in which
to express life, he has also set himself a diverse set of topics that are life’s
concerns. The variety of these topics dramatizes the variety of concerns
with which humans engage, from questions of individuality and home-
lands to questions of labor to questions of logic to questions of family to
abstract ideals such as beauty. To show what human life is, all of these
must be addressed; because they are of so many different types, it is clear
that they cannot be addressed in the same way. The rules of logic cannot
be addressed in the same way as childbirth, which cannot be addressed in
the same way as war. Yet part of what it means to be human is to address
all of these, to work out a stance toward them, not applying rules to beauty
or war or neighborliness—for rules and reason are yet another of the top-
ics toward which humans must have a stance. Rules and reason do not
stand above, adjudicating all other matters of life. In short, life is infinitely,
irreducibly complex.
As Du Bois describes it, this was not a conclusion that he always under-
stood. It took travails; it took growing up. As a child, Du Bois had ques-
tions, but he accepted the rules and reasons he was given, and he accepted
the notion that rules and reasons ought to be able to make sense of the
world. Coming of age for him meant that “I saw life through all its paradox
and contradiction of streaming eyes and mad merriment. I emerged into
full manhood, with the ruins of some ideals about me, but with others
planted above the stars.”19 This process of coming to know what life meant,
of coming to appreciate human nature for what it truly is, took emotional
work. It took laughter and tears. Beliefs that had seemed obvious and were
held without reflection now, in adulthood, were held reflectively—not just
interrogated by reason but interrogated by emotions too. What emerges,
in adulthood, is an appreciation for the unpredictability of life and the
limits to the control we have over ourselves and our circumstances. “I
meant still to be the captain of my soul, but I realized that even captains
are not omnipotent in uncharted and angry seas.”20 Yet we continue to
attempt to navigate the world, which we now see requires practical wis-
dom and often fruitless effort. The result of this process is a new kind of
faith, a critical commitment to what one values, now that those values
have been fully worked through. In a sense, Du Bois is arguing that there
is no content to human nature other than such faith. The grown-up Du
Bois, understanding and appreciating his soul, was “determined, even
unto stubbornness, to fight the good fight.”21 This is not the stubbornness
of a child and adolescent, rigidly following the consequences of uncritical
belief or relentlessly pursuing the objects of her passions. Rather, this is
the stubbornness of faith, resisting easy answers, resisting the appeal of
the superficially true and the superficially fulfilling.
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 65 )
Toward the end of his novel Dark Princess, Du Bois depicts how this
sort of faith arises out of and surpasses worldly concerns:
The Spring sang in his ears; flowers and leaves, sunshine and shade, young cotton
and corn. He could not think. He could not reason. He just sat and saw and felt in a
tangled jumble of thoughts and words, feelings and desires, dreams and fears. And
above it all lay the high heart of determination. 22
This passage begins with the natural world and its rhythms: Spring is
not only a season but the season that represents the changing of the sea-
sons, the possibility that the natural world will continually restore itself.
Du Bois’s account of spring does not only represent the facts of chang-
ing seasons, but it does so sensuously, pointing to the sounds, the smells,
the images, and the tastes. It is significant that the passage begins with
the natural world and ends with the determination of faith, for the two
are inextricably linked in Du Bois’s view. In between, Du Bois depicts
humanity irreducible to the natural world. This humanity is not the
capacity to reason; Matthew, the novel’s protagonist, is unable to reason.
He is able to perceive the rhythms of the natural world. He has emotions,
thoughts, and desires, but they all remain incoherent, no single idea, feel-
ing, or desire dominating his being. In this, Du Bois is dramatizing his
account of human nature, and Matthew is learning what it means to be
truly human. When Matthew realizes what his humanity means—that he
reasons and feels in the natural world but ultimately exceeds it, that his
humanity is irreducible—the effect is faith: “the high heart of determina-
tion.” This faith is “above it all,” by which Du Bois means above the laws
of the physical world, but also above the laws and social norms governing
the social world. Matthew accesses something higher, and it is something
higher that motivates human action in the world to pursue justice.
Much in line with traditions of natural law, Du Bois argues that human
nature is directed toward a particular end, a “great End.” This end is
discernable, he argues, based on both knowledge of the world and the
experiences of others. From this we can learn that the realization of char-
acteristically human capacities is our end. Such realization involves the
“development and broadening of the feelings and emotions,” but it also
involves expanding our ability to articulate our feelings and emotions.
There is more still. The end of life also includes “the free enjoyment of
every normal appetite” and the growth of “creative impulse, in thought
and imagination” (1060).23 This is, to borrow a natural law idiom, an
account of the basic goods according to Du Bois. Unlike accounts of the
basic goods that are distinct from accounts of human nature (e.g., versions
of natural law theory that see humans as essentially rational and capable
( 66 ) Black Natural Law
of using that capacity to reason to discern and desire the basic goods), Du
Bois’s basic goods flow directly from his account of human nature.24 For
Du Bois, what characterizes humans is not only our capacity to reason,
but also our emotions, creativity, and complex thoughts. Human flourish-
ing means allowing these to develop unencumbered. Although Du Bois
does not directly draw normative conclusions from this account of the
human end, such normative conclusions are obvious: Those social norms
or laws that limit human movement toward our end are wrong and ought
to be opposed.25 As we will see, this is a fundamentally religious commit-
ment because these characteristics of human nature are the ways in which
humans image God, according to Du Bois.
Even when he writes in a secular idiom, Du Bois begins to draw out
these normative consequences. A few years after his discussion of the
“great End,” Du Bois describes “the end of being” as not only realizing
human capacities, but also “wide and poignant sympathy with men in
their struggle to live and love.”26 In other words, understanding the capac-
ities of others and what the flourishing of others would mean motivates
each of us to want others to flourish. Our selfishness is caused by the dis-
tortions of the world that would have us reduce humans to objects to be
manipulated. When these distortions are wiped away, we see the souls
of others as like our own soul, and we work toward the flourishing of all
souls. Du Bois offers a historical account of this process. Until the 19th
century, he claims, it was impossible to see the souls of many other human
beings because of rigid social hierarchies. Then “we began to descry in
others that transfigured spark of divinity which we call Myself,” finding
that spark in the poor, criminals, and in some cases racial minorities. Just
as one might be startled if a doll came to life, people “gasped with sur-
prise” as they discovered that those they previously thought of as objects
lacking humanity suddenly displayed “warm pulsing life” (514).
In his novel Dark Princess, Du Bois describes the eponymous char-
acter as having “an inner spirit, immutable, eternal, glorious” that was
apparent beyond the evidence of suffering on her visage and beyond her
accoutrements of aristocracy. When this inner spirit came into view, it
had the powerful effect “of some half-frightened appeal leaping forth to
know and prove and beg a self-forgetting love equal to that which she was
offering.”27 This bit of the princess—the bit which, as we will see, pres-
ents the image of God—had the effect of reminding those who saw it of
their own inner spirit and of calling others to respond to the inner spirit
that they witnessed. In a sense, Du Bois is suggesting that when the inner
spirit becomes visible, it is contagious. Those who come in contact with it
also have a tendency to uncover their own inner spirits, and in turn pass
along this awareness to others. Du Bois describes the response provoked
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 67 )
by the inner spirit as a “self-forgetting love” in the sense that it clears away
selfishness to unveil the soul, and the infinite of the soul is shared with all
humanity.
One of the particularly important elements of Du Bois’s account of
human nature is his view that the capacity to labor is integral to human
nature. To be deprived of a chance to work is to be deprived of some of our
humanity, in his view, because “Work … is the true destiny of human-
ity” (although Du Bois is careful to also add that work is compatible with
amusement and recreation, also essential parts of our humanity).28 By
work, Du Bois does not have in mind the manual labor notoriously taught
by Booker T. Washington and his Tuskegee Institute, supported by white
philanthropists. Even though Du Bois is particularly known for his pro-
posal to nurture a black elite, a “talented tenth,” when he writes of work,
he writes inclusively, concerned with work that fits the worker’s abilities
and training. Du Bois has in mind an expansive conception of labor that
includes intellectual labor and white-collar jobs. Indeed, the kind of activ-
ity that Du Bois idealizes—and he feels quite strongly about it, claiming
“Work is God”—brings together physical and intellectual effort. To be
forced into a job that does not include intellectual stimulation is to be
treated as less than human—and, with work identified as divine, it is a
kind of blasphemy. Exactly the same is true of intellectual or creative labor
that lacks a physical component, in his view.29
In his study of blacks in Philadelphia, Du Bois notes how educated
blacks have grave difficulty finding work that matches their school-
ing. In an unusually normative statement in an otherwise thoroughly
descriptive book, Du Bois characterizes the situation of educated blacks
in Philadelphia as “a disgrace to the city, a disgrace to its Christianity, to
its spirit of justice, to its common sense.” Indeed, he describes offering
suitable jobs as “the first duty of a civilized city.”30 Here we see again the
dots of a natural law argument that Du Bois himself does not directly
connect. Because suitable work is integral to human nature and to human
ends, social norms and laws must provide work; it is a “duty.” Du Bois’s
language need not be read as rhetorical excess. As a natural law thinker,
Du Bois is saying that the lack of work in Philadelphia is “a disgrace to its
Christianity” because it besmirches the image of God in unemployed or
underemployed human beings.
BLACK SOULS
that will not be accepted by many. To many, our humanity is just one part
of the natural world, subject to its rhythms. To others, a crisp account
can be offered for what defines our nature, such as its essential rational-
ity. Du Bois argues that the meaning of our humanity is often concealed.
While Du Bois describes his experience of discovering his own humanity
as he came of age, such a discovery is not a necessary part of maturation.
The view that laws or reasons can fully explain our worlds and ourselves
holds great appeal—particularly for those in positions of power, and par-
ticularly for those who rarely encounter tragedy. Encountering the tragic
(e.g., inexplicable suffering) offers an opportunity to reflect on whether
laws and reasons fully explain. 31 Those who regularly encounter the
tragic, such as those who are poor and, as Du Bois emphasizes, those who
are black, have increased opportunities to discern the “divine spark” in
the human soul. Moreover, those who are regularly treated as less than
human have increased opportunities to discern what that spark really is
that they intuitively know exists but others ignore—yet another privilege
granted particularly to blacks. In short, Du Bois argues that blacks have
an especially keen ability to understand what human nature consists of,
allowing for blacks to have an especially accurate view of natural law.
Indeed, Souls of Black Folk and Darkwater can both be read as offering
insights into the human soul, or human nature, gleaned from the experi-
ences of black life. Du Bois is not so much describing black souls as he
is describing the human soul as such through the privileged medium of
reflection on black experience. In the opening pages of Darkwater, Du Bois
lists the topics to be discussed, from reason to children to death. He then
adds, “I have been in the world, but not of it. I have seen the human drama
from a veiled corner, where all the outer tragedy and comedy have repro-
duced themselves in microcosm within.”32 Just as Du Bois found value in
a certain distance in his early social science investigations, he now finds
value in a certain distance in the study of human life. Just as his social sci-
ence works took black neighborhoods as a “laboratory experiment” from
which to test purported social laws, he is now able to use black experience
similarly, though for less mechanistic ends. Blacks have complicated lives,
like everyone, but carefully examining the specificity of the complica-
tions experienced by blacks is instructive for all. What Du Bois focuses
on in these works is not just black experience but what he calls at the start
of Souls “the spiritual world in which ten thousand thousand Americans
live and strive” (359). Du Bois is not describing black religion, though that
is one of the topics he covers. He means by “spiritual world” the trials of
the spirit faced by blacks. Du Bois examines hardships and how blacks
respond; in doing so, he learns something about souls, specifically, about
the divine image in human nature.
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 69 )
Bois is wary of deception and artifice, devices that conceal the soul, he
is also committed to a strong sense of charisma, a divine gift that shines
through in the comportment of the gifted. Du Bois is not explicit about
the provenance of Crummell’s gift, but he is clear on its ultimacy: It is the
“truth of life.” He is also clear on its effects: “Some seer he seemed, that
came not from the crimson Past or the gray To-come, but from the pulsing
Now, that mocking world which seemed to me at once so light and dark,
so splendid and sordid” (512). Crummell’s presence breaks into history,
interrupting the flow of time. 34 He cannot be explained by what has come
before, nor can he be explained as a projection of present desires into the
future. He is otherworldly but in this world, at this moment. He embod-
ies the incalculable and inexplicable. He appears at the moment Du Bois
is attempting to understand the world, at the moment he is passing into
adulthood—at his university commencement. He appears against the
background of the world’s complexities, “light and dark,” “splendid and
sordid.” Rather than carefully describing these complexities, Crummell
at once lives them and breaks through them, offering a model of humanity
for Du Bois and his readers.
Another sense in which blacks are privileged by harsh oppression is
the following: Continuing to persevere through overwhelmingly harsh
conditions and deprivation offers insight into what is necessary to count
as human and into human capabilities. This is how we ought to read Du
Bois’s assertion that “the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the tra-
vail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength”
(370). The children of slaves, literally and metaphorically, face extraor-
dinary oppression, oppression that would seem totally debilitating, and
yet they survive and even flourish in some ways. This is the spectacular
power of the human spirit, Du Bois suggests, and it is particularly evident
when we examine the experience of blacks. While Du Bois is inconsis-
tent about his usage of terms such as human nature, spirit, and soul, here
“spiritual striving” seems to point to that element of human nature that
images God. Or, to recall the formulation previously discussed, “spiritual
striving” seems to point to the determination or faith that characterizes
human nature when all of its secondary characteristics are stripped away.
What is significant about black experience is not simply that blacks
survive oppression but that they continue to realize their characteristi-
cally human capacities—thought and feeling and imagination—while
doing so. As Du Bois colorfully puts it, the black race “dances and sings;
it is humble; it longs to learn; it loves men; it loves women. It is frankly,
baldly, deliciously human in an artificial and hypocritical land” (662).
Even more important than their continuing capacity for thought, feeling,
and creativity, according to Du Bois, is the fact that blacks laugh. Laughter
( 72 ) Black Natural Law
GOD’S IMAGE
We have already seen Du Bois refer to the “divine spark” in our humanity
and to the way that humanity is irreducible to worldly terms. He develops
this notion of the image of God in humans even as he maintains a dis-
tance from organized religion and specific religious doctrines. Du Bois
does employ Christian imagery as a rhetorical and literary device, but this
does not mean that his use of religious ideas is limited to the superficial or
reducible to the natural.
When we embrace life fully, we embrace the other worldly, suggests Du
Bois. The objects and concerns that normally trouble us no longer have
a hold on us. Life, after all, marks what exceeds physical and social laws,
so when we fully embrace life, we stand above those laws. Du Bois does
not suggest that such a full embrace is possible, but he does represent it in
his fiction. What is aspirational in life can be imagined in literary prose.
As the climax of Dark Princess approaches, Matthew travels to his lover
who, unbeknown to him, is about to give birth to a messianic child. Du
( 74 ) Black Natural Law
Bois describes Matthew’s journey thusly: “He was riding Life above the
world. He was triumphant over Pain and Death. … Some one touched
his shoulder. He knew that touch. It was arrest; arrest and jail. But what
did he care? He was flying above the world.”37 In the story, Matthew is
literally in an airplane en route to his beloved, but Du Bois’s language
clearly points to more. Arrest and jail represent the enforcement of the
world’s law, while pain and death represent constraint by physical laws of
the universe. Matthew accessed something in himself that put him above
the world’s social and physical laws even as he recognized that he was still
in the world. He still feels the hand of the police on his shoulder, but it no
longer represents an ultimate authority.
As Du Bois continues to describe this scene, it becomes increasingly
clear that the part of himself that Matthew is able to access is the image of
God in him:
Matthew’s spirit lifted itself to heaven. He rode triumphant over the universe. He was
the God-man, the Everlasting Power, the eternal and undying Soul. He was above
everything—Life, Death, Hate, Love. He spurned the pettiness of earth beneath his
feet. He tried to sing again the Song of Emancipation—the Call of God—“Go down,
Moses!”—but the roar of the pistons made his strong voice a pulsing silence. 38
is motivated to sing “Go Down, Moses,” the slave spiritual that tells the
Exodus story. Human nature at its purest, for Du Bois, does not just sit
there wallowing in its glory. Even though it is above the pettiness of the
world, it attempts to change the world, to participate in struggles for lib-
eration. Participation in God is participation in the struggle for freedom.
As Du Bois puts it, this is the “Call of God.” In the novel, Matthew and his
beloved Indian princess are plotting with other nonwhite peoples of the
world to overturn white supremacy. The union of poor black and aristo-
cratic Indian holds unique potential, Du Bois’s novel suggests, to trans-
form the world as the darker races unite. This is precisely what Matthew is
imagining, fueling his journey, as he is divinized on the plane.
Just as human nature can be seen most clearly in blacks, Du Bois sug-
gests that the image of God can also be seen most clearly in them. Indeed,
he suggests that God is black. Like Cooper, Du Bois portrays Jesus Christ
in short stories as a black man in the South. More precisely, he portrays
Jesus as racially ambiguous, perceived by some as black. He also depicts
Jesus as an escaped convict seeking refuge. He writes that Jesus was a poor
worker who was persecuted and lynched. 39 In short, Du Bois embraces
the notion that God is most present among those who suffer the most,
and he also asserts that the world is least likely to recognize God when
God dwells among those who suffer. Indeed, Du Bois designates those
who suffer as “the world’s Christs.” This identification is not limited to
men: Among these Christs is the “Black Mammy,” forced to deprive her
own children to care for the children of whites. Du Bois describes her as
“embodied Sorrow” and likens her suffering to a crucifixion.40
While Du Bois identifies Jesus with those who suffer, elaborating on
this identification in his literary writings, his intention is simile. Humans
remain humans: imperfect, confused, and disoriented. There is a divine
image imprinted in humans, but it is often obscured. After describing the
complications of human life, empirically and lyrically, in Darkwater, Du
Bois concludes with a prayer for purification: “Save us, World-Spirit, from
our lesser selves! Grant us that war and hatred cease, Reveal our souls in
every race and hue! Help us, O Human God, in this Thy Truce, To make
Humanity divine!”41 This passage points to two problems: that the exis-
tence of black souls is rejected by whites, who treat blacks as objects, and
that blacks do not appreciate their own souls (race stands here for any type
of systematic dehumanization). God is called on to solve both problems,
and their solution means a reunion of humanity and God—means the par-
ticipation of humanity in God. Importantly, Du Bois inserts in this other-
wise abstract, quite theological passage very concrete earthly wrongs: “war
and hatred.” The identification and embrace of God’s image in humanity
necessarily means taking normative stances: opposing, for example, war
( 76 ) Black Natural Law
and hatred. It means not simply believing in certain normative claims, but
taking collective action to advance them. Du Bois writes in the first-person
plural and requests help in a project of political organizing.
Another way of expressing this first-person plural relationship to God
employed by Du Bois focuses on God’s role as creator of all. God created
all humans “of one blood”—against theories circulating in Du Bois’s day
that different races were created separately.42 There are, indeed, differ-
ences between the races, Du Bois acknowledges, but what they share is
essential. Shared parentage implies brotherhood, a powerfully resonant
notion. The particular element that is shared, that images God, is the soul.
In Du Bois’s “Credo,” a statement of faith that begins Darkwater and was
posted in places where blacks would congregate across the nation, Du Bois
began by asserting such a belief in divine parenthood, and he continued
by stating all humans are “alike in soul and the possibility of infinite devel-
opment.”43 The soul consists of capacities for reason, emotion, and creativ-
ity, and when these capacities are exercised fully, they know no limit as
they participate in the divine. While Du Bois begins his “Credo” in an
explicitly theistic idiom (“I believe in God …”), he quickly switches to a
humanist idiom, yet both idioms do precisely the same intellectual work.
Du Bois commends the belief “in pride of self so deep as to scorn injus-
tice to other selves,” but Du Bois could equally be referring to veneration
of the image of God in humans. Such veneration affirms that blemishing
this image is an injustice. Indeed, Du Bois returns to a dramatic religious
idiom as his prose turns normative. It is the devil who is “hating the image
which their Maker stamped on a brother’s soul,” and it is the devil who
is behind the differential treatment of the races.44 This crucial point that
represents the beginnings of Du Bois’s normative ethical and political the-
ory has foundations that are sometimes described in theistic terms and
sometimes described in humanistic terms, but it has a structure that does
not depend on whether the word “God” is used in its formulation.
To make his argument, Du Bois does deploy a concept of the image of
God in humans that is not only theistic, but specifically Christian. One
of the crucial elements of the soul, Du Bois asserts, is its capacity for self-
sacrifice. This goes above and beyond the capacity for hard work. Sacrifice,
for Du Bois, does not so much mean giving up an object in order that God
may have it. Rather, it means giving up self-interest in order to advance
justice—in a sense, in order to advance God’s interests. Time, money,
and energy that would otherwise be spent attending to one’s own cares
and desires are to be spent advancing the interests of social justice (e.g.,
in opposition to racism). This sacrifice must be freely given. Pleasures
of the self ought not to be proscribed, but blacks must come to under-
stand that the cause of justice is greater than any other pursuit. It brings
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 77 )
sacrificed his life for the cause of justice, for the higher law. In order to
properly respond to natural law, this suggests, one must first attune one-
self to natural law by positioning oneself in such a way as to perceive it
rightly; then one is able to pursue the action it authorizes.
GOD’S LAW
the deep religious feeling of the real Negro heart, the stirring, unguided might of
the powerful human souls who have lost the guiding star of the past and are seeking
in the great night a new religious idea. Some day the Awakening will come, when
the pent-up vigor of ten million souls shall sweep irresistibly toward the Goal, out of
the Valley of the Shadow of Death, where all that makes life worth living—Liberty,
Justice, and Right—is marked “For White People Only.” (505)
and that blacks must protest against whatever hinders their ability to
develop their humanity.49 These are not anodyne throwaways: As we have
seen, Du Bois has a robust account of what the human means. It is these
capacities of the human, and ultimately the ineffability of the human, that
he believes politics must advance. In other words, any political project that
names humanity as this or that must be rejected, for such a project would
bend humanity away from the human when the human is understand as
what marks a limit to representation. Here Du Bois is urging that natural
law must be the foundation for political engagement, but his account of
natural law is quite subtle and, in many places, abstract. However, he uses
examples from the Christian tradition to make it more concrete.
In a short story, Du Bois depicts Jesus as black in the segregated South,
and he depicts Pontius Pilate as the “Federal Governor of Mississippi”
who “sat in the Judgment seat at Jackson.”50 This offers a vivid image of
the injustice of worldly law and the criteria by which it ought to be judged.
What the laws of Mississippi say is to be judged from the perspective of
their effects on a poor black man in Mississippi; if they wrong that man,
they are to be condemned as conflicting with God’s law. Du Bois pushes
this biblical analogy further in his narrative, imagining that Pilate has
doubts and finds no law on the books with which to punish Jesus. But the
crowd tells Pilate of their social norms, “we know our unwritten law,” and
urges that Jesus be condemned. “Lynch him!” they shout. 51 The death of
Jesus is portrayed as a result of social norms having the final word, the
result of regional customs becoming universally applicable law. Implicit
in this portrayal is the notion that Jesus’s resurrection demonstrates the
limits of social norms and confirms the existence of a higher law.
Du Bois generalizes this point, suggesting that “it is in the slums of
modern society” that an orientation toward a more just world will be
found. 52 Particularly, it is in the aesthetics of the slums that the key to jus-
tice lies. As many scholars have pointed out, music is of particular impor-
tance to Du Bois, and he begins each chapter of Souls with a few notes
of a spiritual. He also theorizes the significance of these spirituals: He
writes that they express “a faith in the ultimate justice of things” as mea-
sured “in some fair world beyond” (544). Just as black life offers privileged
access to natural law, black music in a sense performs the natural law. It is
a contagious performance: expressed by the singer and passed on to the
audience, or expressed collectively as a song sung in unison. Such songs
remind us that there is a law beyond the world and that is the law by which
we will ultimately be judged. Spirituals, according to Du Bois, are a call to
bring oneself and one’s world into conformity with this higher law.
The songs of the slaves are beautiful, Du Bois suggests, and it is because of
the power of beauty that the songs have powerful effects. “Beauty sits above
( 80 ) Black Natural Law
Art and creativity make for one path to justice that Du Bois explicates.
He also explicates another, asserting that to approach justice there must
be “a union of intelligence and sympathy” (492). Reading Du Bois as a
pragmatist, it is tempting to interpret this claim as saying that reason and
emotion each alone are not enough to solve the world’s problems; they
must join forces. But given Du Bois’s account of human nature and the
image of God in humanity (i.e., given Du Bois’s natural law theory), he
is clearly making a more sophisticated claim. He thinks there is a higher
law than the world’s law, and he thinks that reflection on how reason and
emotion mix in human nature provides us with access to that higher law.
Neither reason nor emotion suffices, but their sum does not suffice either.
Rather, intelligence and sympathy interact in a way that holds back the
excesses of each and brings out the best in each so that, together, we can
approach knowledge of natural law.
Along with ways that the natural law may be accessed, Du Bois
explores ways that it may be obscured. He points to the way that slavery
started with “the doctrine of the divine right of white people to steal.”54
Claims to God’s law obscured human interests and perversely labelled as
just a massive injustice. At other times, Du Bois suggests that capitalism
establishes profit as a “moral law” that leads to deeply problematic politi-
cal and ethical consequences. 55 The most dangerous way in which natural
law goes wrong is when it is confused with popular opinion. This was the
central message of one of Du Bois’s very first intellectual and rhetorical
efforts: the speech he delivered at his Harvard graduation. Du Bois chose
the surprising topic of Jefferson Davis, leader of the Confederacy. Davis
becomes the occasion for Du Bois to carve out space for natural law and to
argue that commitment to natural law is essential. “Judged by the whole
standard of Teutonic civilization,” Du Bois asserts, Davis was a great man.
However, Davis is deeply flawed when “judged by every canon of human
justice” (811). In this brief address, Du Bois does not explicate those can-
ons of human justice, but it is clear that they trump worldly law. The latter
is local, for instance, specific to one civilization, the “Teutonic.” “Human
justice” ought to be read as justice that is accessible through reflection on
our human nature: natural law. Du Bois takes Davis’s flaw, in light of his-
tory, as self-evident and as demonstrating that all social norms and laws
ought to be considered provisional and ought to be interrogated from the
perspective of justice, of natural law. Yet Du Bois goes on to suggest that
Davis ought not to be entirely dismissed. Engagement with and even excel-
lence according to a specific sets of norms and laws (“civilization”) are the
prerequisites for approaching natural law. We ought to be fully invested in
mastering those norms and laws if we are interested in bringing justice to
earth—if we want “to guide the world nearer and nearer that perfection
( 82 ) Black Natural Law
of human life for which we all long, that ‘one far off Divine event’ ” (819).
As he often does, Du Bois mixes what seems to be an entirely humanistic
outlook with explicitly theistic ideas. Taking the latter as ideas, not rhe-
torical flourish, allows us to see how Du Bois sits squarely in a natural law
tradition. Human perfection is identified with full participation in God,
possible at the eschaton. Human perfection means embracing the image
of God in humanity and rejecting all that runs counter to it. Through
reflection on this, we are able to discern the precepts of “human justice”
that trump any particular set of social norms and laws.
If natural law is ignored or if it is identified with the specific norms
and laws of one particular world, the soul can never be at peace. There
are enormous pressures to accept the status quo as all that there is, but
our souls continue to itch, reminding us that there is something more.
Du Bois describes the suppression of the natural law as the loss of a soul.
When the soul’s ineffability is no longer recognized, it is as if it does not
exist, as if all there is to humans is physical bodies. When faced with this
possibility, a “great fear surges in your soul,” a fear unlike all others. 56 This
fear itself displays the soul’s capacities, displays what makes us distinc-
tively human: Reasoning about the world prompts an emotion that can-
not be reduced to the terms of biology. There is no escaping natural law.
In the realm of formal politics, Du Bois worries that natural law is eas-
ily forgotten and ponders what structures might allow for it to be remem-
bered. While Du Bois often extols the ideals of democracy, he is also
explicit about the need for principles of justice to override the results of
any majority vote. Too often, he suggests, democracy deifies majorities,
collapsing the distinction between present views and absolute justice—a
clear implication of his reflections on Davis. 57 As a concrete, although still
imperfect, solution to this problem, Du Bois extols the virtues of coali-
tion governments. He argues that a plurality of political factions that align
temporarily would be less prone to the vices of majorities, such as setting
themselves up in place of God. In a pluralistic political landscape, Du Bois
writes that we would find “the human soul free.”58 By this, it seems best to
understand Du Bois as meaning that the soul is free from the misconcep-
tion that social norms and laws are the same as God’s law. The soul is free
to continue seeking justice through critical reflection.
IMPLEMENTING GOD’S LAW
mind the two lessons the youthful Du Bois takes from Davis: first, that
social norms and laws necessarily fall short of a higher law; second, that
mastery of social norms and laws is a prerequisite for accessing this higher
law. Together, these lessons lead Du Bois to embrace a broad and deep
knowledge of the contemporary world, particularly the black world, so
that this knowledge can be mobilized in pursuit of justice. This helps to
explain the various registers in which Du Bois writes. At times, he writes
for the black community using familiar techniques, but with the pur-
pose of moving his audience toward the higher law. Blacks have “Truth”
on their side, Du Bois notes, but they must bring it into the world “with
organization in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy” (557). This state-
ment affirms that reason and emotion are both means through which
natural law is accessed, but they are also means through which natural
law is spread. It also affirms the need to leverage a deep familiarity with
the norms of the black community in order to advance natural law—that
is how “propaganda” is able to persuade and how a “mob” is able to reach
“frenzy.” But first and foremost, this statement touches on a theme that is
central to all of Du Bois’s life and work: the need for organization. Even
though it is the soul that is at the center of Du Bois’s natural law theory,
the work of implementing the conclusions of natural law is work that hap-
pens collectively. Du Bois is most known as a political activist, but he was
also an organizer. 59 Among other activities, he was one of the founders
of the venerable National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, and he edited the NAACP’s flagship periodical for many years.
These were not simply platforms for Du Bois to proclaim segregation
as very, very bad. The organizations of which he was a part did crucial
work connecting blacks with each other, providing platforms for new
black leaders, encouraging difficult questions to be explored in the black
community, and much more. In short, Du Bois worked toward creating
a vibrant, complex black social and political space, and he saw this work
as flowing from his natural law commitments. It flowed from those com-
mitments in two senses: His organizing work was a way of advancing the
struggle against injustice, and it also, in the process of organizing itself,
provided an opportunity for the realization of human capacities.
Furthermore, organization has the effect of restraining the desire for
justice to flow immediately. Such intemperance often results in the pro-
longation of injustice. Du Bois advises careful planning and strategic
action to attack unjust laws. As early as The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois
wrote, “A man may be wrong, and know he is wrong, and yet some finesse
must be used in telling him of it.”60 While this statement focuses on per-
suasion at the individual level, the same is true writ large. Particularly
given the status of blacks as a minority—quite different from colonial
( 84 ) Black Natural Law
contexts—much finesse is needed. Both the hearts and the minds of the
majority, whites, must be changed in order to eliminate unjust laws, and
the very best techniques for doing this must be developed. Lack of orga-
nization is a grave problem plaguing the black community, in Du Bois’s
view, and the result is intemperance and imprudence. Blacks cannot wait
for justice, but they also often lack the virtues necessary to strive toward it
in the world or to venerate the divine image in themselves.61
Because of the decimation of social structure in the Middle Passage,
the black church occupies a privileged place in reflection on black organiz-
ing. Even though Du Bois was personally wary of the church and focused
his organizing efforts elsewhere, he was aware of its history and power.
The black church brings together “the work of [white] churches, theaters,
newspapers, homes, schools, and lodges” (837). Indeed, Du Bois’s essay
on the church in Souls can be read as a primer in community organizing,
with the minister cast in the role of professional organizer, catalyzing
community transformation.62 The essay begins by juxtaposing two ways
of understanding black religion: as purely emotive and as purely rational.
The former focuses on the frenzy and forms of worship that appear irra-
tional to white eyes. The latter takes a social scientific approach, viewing
the church as functioning to connect individuals where no other forms of
connection are possible. Du Bois views human nature as both rational and
emotional, and the dialectic of Du Bois’s essay brings together the emo-
tive and the rational as it unfolds.63 He is suspicious of churches that are
overly emotive and those that try to entertain, worrying that this distracts
from the “true, divine mission” of the church, namely, “human inspira-
tion.”64 Black religion can veer toward the mystical and away from “the
righteousness of Christianity,” by which Du Bois means a concern with
justice (838). Du Bois is equally suspicious of churches that are overly
rational, focused on instilling specific beliefs in their congregants instead
of encouraging behavior that is genuinely just. Too often, he suggests,
God’s law is reduced to the duty to “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and
be saved,” a proposition that has little content in itself (1058). He writes
that churches, at their best, ought to be concerned with black life through-
out the week, not just on Sundays. Du Bois urges that they, for example,
encourage blacks to save money in banks and examine when low wages
constitute theft. The church of his dreams would include “a cooperative
store in the Sunday school room; with physician, dentist, nurse and lawyer
to help, serve and defend the congregation; with library, nursery school,
and a regular succession of paid and trained lecturers and discussion
… a credit union, group insurance and a building and loan association”
(1059). There would be preaching, but it would not be limited to the Bible.
It would also include the words of Shakespeare, Confucius, Buddha, and
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 85 )
John Brown. Put another way, the point of organized religion, according
to Du Bois, is to cultivate the image of God in humanity. It must use the
various tools at its disposal (rational, emotional, and creative) to do this.
It is a task that cannot take place alone, with personal belief, but must take
place in community where the image of God is cultivated through the
practice of organizing. But organization—in this case, the church—must
never substitute for the image of God. No particular form of organiza-
tion is sanctioned by God; it is the practice of organizing that cultivates
the image of God in humanity. Churches are a privileged form of black
organization for historically contingent reasons, Du Bois implies, and he
is confident that “healthy, wholesome folk-song” is just as good for the
soul as hymns.65
One side of the implementation of natural law is organization; the
other side is critique. Knowledge of a community’s mores and tradi-
tions is essential for both. While organization enriches the lives of blacks
both as a process and as it moves toward its ends, critique calls attention
to the distance between higher law and worldly law. For this, as usual,
Du Bois describes blacks as occupying a privileged position. Blacks will
“speak to the nations of earth a Divine truth that shall make them free,”
he proclaims (823). Blacks are not so easily tempted to attribute divinely
sanctioned normativity to their own customs because the contingency of
these customs and their responsiveness to worldly circumstances—the
displacement of slavery, the horrors of white supremacy—are so obvious.
Sharing this knowledge with the world is redemptive, but holding this
special place in human history should not make blacks big-headed. Just
as important, according to Du Bois, is self-criticism (822). Divine truth
exposes the limits of worldly law, but it also exposes the limits of our own
self-conceptions. Moreover, as self-criticism proceeds, as more and more
false conceptions of our humanity are discarded, we perceive natural law
better and better—and so are motivated both to more self-criticism and to
further proclaim the limits of worldly norms and laws.
The very best critic of ideology, Du Bois proposes, is the child.66 The
child has not yet absorbed the world’s many false ideas, the ideas that cir-
culate in order to sustain the positions of the wealthy and the powerful.
Children are able to see what is self-evident without first having to cut
away layers of socialization that prevent us from seeing it—for example,
that humans are fundamentally equal regardless of race. Children offer
insight into natural law, in Du Bois’s account, but children are also valu-
able for what they represent, namely, future generations. He makes a
powerful connection between children and eternal life. While we our-
selves will die, we live on forever through our children and our children’s
children. Du Bois writes of the immortal child, an idealized youngster
( 86 ) Black Natural Law
insight is cultivated when the capacities of the soul are developed, and Du
Bois promotes education that not only develops intelligence and knowl-
edge but also “broad sympathy” (842). Recall that Du Bois is particularly
committed to hard work, going so far as to count it as a way of participat-
ing in the divine. Hard work is also a virtue to be cultivated in schools
and homes, a virtue that Du Bois finds particularly lacking in the world
around him.69 Education begins in homes and at schools, but it should
continue throughout life. This is one of the reasons black organizations
are so important, according to Du Bois. Black colleges, newspapers, and
intellectual associations can continue cultivating the capacities of the soul
that children are born with but that are so often obscured by the world.
Du Bois’s life was dedicated to the hard work of building and sustaining
such institutions.
CHAP T ER 4
I n the most famous piece of writing by Martin Luther King Jr., the most
famous black American political leader invokes natural law. Said to
have been smuggled out of a Birmingham jail, King’s letter offers a robust
and multipronged justification of civil disobedience aimed at skeptical
white clergy. Priests and ministers who understood themselves as mod-
erate were calling on both sides, the vehement segregationists led by the
infamous Bull Connor and the civil rights demonstrators led by King, to
de-escalate the conflict in Birmingham and to work toward a compro-
mise. King rejected this framing. He sought to persuade the moderates
that moderation is not the right approach when the choice is between
justice and injustice. To make this point, King describes the degradation
faced by blacks in Birmingham and all over the South, but he also points
to natural law. The white ministers objected to breaking the law; King
responded that unjust laws are not laws at all. In this, he pointed to a long
and varied history of natural law reflection. He agreed that just laws are
those that match God’s law, but he also gestures to the formulations of
Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich. He wrote of the injus-
tice of “any law that degrades human personality”; he wrote that “segrega-
tion distorts the soul”; and he wrote that “an unjust law is a code that a
numerical or power majority group compels a minority group to obey but
does not make binding on itself.”1
King here clearly leans toward a natural law tradition—a European
natural law tradition. But does he embrace the substance of that tradition?
King devotes but one or two sentences to each of the natural law theories
he mentions before moving on to the next. He does not align himself with
any one theory in particular, nor does he distance himself from any of the
theories. Here King is a rhetorician, a vocation at which he excelled both
orally and in writing. He was trying to persuade a particular audience, in
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 89 )
this case white clergy, to take his side. Many scholars of King and natu-
ral law have pointed to King’s Birmingham letter as evidence of the civil
rights icon’s underlying philosophical or theological commitments.2
Because he embraced the (white, European) natural law tradition, such
scholars claim, King was able to forcefully oppose segregation. Such argu-
ments are simplistic at best. They suppose that King was not a thinker in
his own right, or at least that he did little more than apply white, European
thought to the context of the American South. They suppose that black
Americans did not have a robust intellectual tradition in which King was
reared and in which he participated. And they suppose that King was not
particularly religious, that his religiosity was a means for advancing his
political ends.
In fact, King used natural law language and ideas from his earliest ser-
mons, preached at black churches while he was still a student, to his last
speeches and writings. His views of natural law changed, and he incor-
porated new ideas he encountered into his accounts of natural law. The
religious idea most associated with King is love, but he was equally if not
more invested in law, particularly in the first few years of his short career
as an activist, organizer, and public intellectual. In King’s last years, love
came to overshadow law—pleasing his white, secularist audiences. Cause
and effect here are mixed. King was a master rhetorician: He knew how
to please an audience. The more than 700 pages of King’s writings and
speeches collected in Testament of Hope, the most widely read anthology
of his work, barely mention natural law. This book, like many of King’s
later speeches and writings, aimed to reach a wide, white, secular audi-
ence, and it succeeded. King sought to build a national consensus against
segregation, but in doing so, his image and legend came to be carefully
managed by the powers that be, even as those powers came to accept
integration. The King who grappled with and advanced natural law ideas
is largely obscured by his own later self and his image; recovering the
King who embraced natural law has critical potential. Where it has now
become fashionable to describe King’s later work as increasingly radical,
this chapter argues precisely the opposite. It is by appreciating King’s dis-
tinctively theological and distinctively black voice that the most powerful
political insights can be harvested, and this distinctive voice is most evi-
dent before King starts speaking with increasing frequency to a secular,
white audience.
King’s letter points to the challenge in engaging with King as a thinker.
He can seem hard to pin down because he communicates in different ways
with different audiences at different times. This does not mean that King
is incoherent; it means that the interpreter has a more difficult job. Indeed,
King’s use of multiple rhetorical registers may actually be prescribed by
( 90 ) Black Natural Law
the natural law view that he holds. It may be the case that God’s law is not
simply to be proclaimed; it may even be the case that God’s law is not a
set of propositions that could be proclaimed. As we have seen, the black
natural law tradition commends a movement toward justice that is stra-
tegic and carefully attentive to circumstance. King participates in such a
tradition and develops such a view. Yet King poses a further challenge to
the interpreter. In addition to the multiple rhetorical registers he employs,
King frequently employs the words of others, not always marking them as
distinct from his own. He did this in academic settings, including in his
largely plagiarized dissertation, and he did this in speeches and sermons
that borrow liberally from the words and phrases of others. While this
certainly runs against academic norms, it could be understood outside of
an academic context as a firm embrace of tradition. King mobilizes the
ideas and practices that have come before him, reconfiguring them to be
responsive to the particular circumstances he encounters. Scholarship
on King often misses this point, attempting to track and disaggregate his
intellectual influences rather than treating his intellect. Put another way,
it is important to treat King’s work and words as performative rather than
purely referential—and, in doing so, we can see how natural law can and
indeed must be performative.
King is certainly recalled as a performer. He is most remembered for
his “I Have a Dream” speech, with its dazzling sounds and compelling
words. It is a speech and memory that have been commodified, no doubt,
but its initial effect on a black audience is important to remember. Alice
Walker describes listening to the speech as a black Southerner, experienc-
ing it quite differently than King’s other audiences:
Martin King was a man who truly had his tongue wrapped around the roots of
Southern black religious consciousness, and when his resounding voice swelled and
broke over the heads of the thousands of people assembled at the Lincoln Memorial
I felt what a Southern person brought up in the church always feels when those
cadences—not the words themselves, necessarily, but the rhythmic spirals of pas-
sionate emotion, followed by even more passionate pauses—roll off the tongue of a
really first-rate preacher. I felt my soul rising from the sheer force of Martin King’s
eloquent goodness. 3
King’s speech spoke to the soul. This need not be taken metaphorically,
and Walker discourages us from taking it metaphorically by emphasiz-
ing a religious context, a context where people encounter God with their
souls. For Walker, it is not so much the words as the rhythm and reso-
nance of King’s address that touch her soul because it is accustomed to
such rhythm and resonance. It is part of the black Southern religious
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 91 )
King is a great speaker. The secret of his greatness does not lie in his voice or his
presence or his manner, though it has something to do with all these; nor does it lie
in his verbal range or felicity, which are not striking; nor does he have any capacity
for those stunning, demagogic flights of the imagination which bring an audience
cheering to its feet. The secret lies, I think, in his intimate knowledge of the people he
is addressing, be they black or white, and in the forthrightness with which he speaks
of those things which hurt and baffle them. He does not offer any easy comfort and
this keeps his hearers absolutely tense. He allows them their self-respect—indeed,
he insists on it. 5
Unlike Walker, Baldwin concludes that King’s oratorical genius lies else-
where than in evoking the tradition of black Southern religiosity, but like
Walker, Baldwin concludes that King touches on something particularly
powerful in his listeners. For Baldwin, the effect of King’s oratory is to
compel his listeners to acknowledge truths about the world and about
themselves—most essentially, that his listeners are worthy of respect. At
the end of the day, this is another version of the soul’s goodness described
by Walker: For Baldwin, the lesson here is that each and every individual
has something in him or her that has inherent worth and dignity, what
( 92 ) Black Natural Law
Walker would call a soul. The way that King gets his listeners to this con-
clusion is not reducible to reason, affect, or imagination. King uses words
and evokes feelings, but he does so subtly. He does not use them, accord-
ing to Baldwin, in order to achieve quick spiritual pleasure—pleasure that
may ultimately not be so spiritual at all. King uses words and evokes feel-
ings precisely attuned to the situations of his listeners in order to break
through their illusions and confusions. Instead of soothing the anxieties
of his listeners, King helps them move from misguided fears to critical
inquiry. In short, he performs ideology critique, and his performance is
contagious. Because it is contagious, it translates into collective action
aimed at making the world more just. All of this happens in a religious
idiom, in a religious space. While Baldwin, distanced from the church of
his childhood, hesitates to call the process religious, hesitates to name
God, King himself has no such hesitation, and King ought to be taken at
his word.
Martin Luther King Jr. was the son of a Baptist preacher, Martin Luther
King Sr. “Daddy” King pastored a prominent Baptist church in Atlanta
and was a respected leader of the local black community on issues both
spiritual and political. The young King was instilled with a sense of self-
worth and immersed in black religious tradition. He attended Morehouse
College, started to preach himself, and then went east to continue his
education in theology and philosophy, eventually receiving his doctorate
in theology from Boston University. There the theology of “personalism”
that put a particular emphasis on the analogy between divine and human
personality prevailed, and King embraced it. He was suspicious of the
two other theological movements prevalent at the time, theological lib-
eralism with its excessive optimism and neo-orthodoxy with its excessive
pessimism.6 King did not think God was totally incomprehensible from
the perspective of the world, but he also did not think God was dwelling
among all humanity, pushing history forward toward infinite progress.
He struggled in his studies to find a middle ground, and a focus on the
opaque image of God in humanity was one of the solutions he favored.7
After King finished his coursework, as he was about to embark on writ-
ing his dissertation, he was called to the pastorate of Dexter Avenue Baptist
Church in Montgomery, Alabama, the capital of the old Confederacy. In
his first year, he finished his dissertation and built his congregation. In his
second year, he changed American history. King recorded his experiences
with the Montgomery bus boycott in the book Stride Toward Freedom, on
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 93 )
which he worked ardently and with relatively little staff support.8 (King’s
later writings were often team efforts.) He tells the dramatic story of what
he perceives to be God working through history in Montgomery to end
segregation, and King implicitly offers Montgomery as a model for other
black communities seeking to organize against segregation. The black
people of Montgomery, as King portrays them, were largely uneducated
and impoverished, but they could still understand justice. What King and
the protest did was provide the occasion for ordinary individuals to reflect
on justice and act toward its achievement. This process involved getting in
touch with the soul, removing sedimented feelings of fear and impotence
that concealed a deep knowledge of the higher law. King was fond of quot-
ing a participant in the boycott reflecting on the experience: “My feets
is tired, but my soul is at rest” (ix).9 There was physical work to be done,
including, most basically, walking instead of riding segregated buses, but
this work would put the soul at peace.
When King arrived at Dexter, he found a church that was perceived to
be the spiritual home of the community’s black elites. This was a reputa-
tion King wanted to break. “Worship at its best,” he reflects, “is a social
experience with people of all levels of life coming together to realize their
oneness and unity under God” (10). King was opposed to the segrega-
tion of blacks, but he was also opposed to class segregation—a theme that
would run through his speeches and writings his entire adult life. Human
beings black and white, rich and poor are united because of their shared
relationship with God. As each individual is a child of God, all individuals
are brothers and sisters. The role of religion, “worship” in King’s phrase, is
to remind people of this fundamental unity, to remind people that they all
possess in themselves the image of God. In other words, King’s sense of
human brotherhood was not only a political principle; it was first and fore-
most a religious principle that he sought to implement in his first ministry.
Black people in Montgomery, as in many Southern communities, had
protested segregation at various times and in various ways. What made
King’s Montgomery story unique was the scale and duration of the pro-
test: Blacks refused to ride the buses for more than a year, and thousands
of Montgomery residents participated in mass meetings and in the orga-
nizing efforts around the boycott. Montgomery attracted national atten-
tion and, eventually, a U.S. Supreme Court ruling declaring segregation
on public transportation unconstitutional. As the story goes, the boycott
began with the very respectable Mrs. Rosa Parks refusing to give up her
seat after a hard day of work.10 Parks was arrested. The black community
in Montgomery rallied to her defense, committing itself first to a one-day
boycott, forming an organizing committee of which the relative new-
comer King was elected as a neutral leader, and calling a mass meeting.
( 94 ) Black Natural Law
either reason or emotion. The result was an “inner voice”—note how King
describes this as “the presence of the Divine,” but as an inner voice rather
than the voice of God—urging King to recommit himself to the pursuit
of justice in the world. In other words, King’s soul returned to a proper
orientation: Reason and emotion were to flow from the commitment to
justice, to organizing in pursuit of justice. Neither reason nor emotion is
an end in itself, and they should not obscure the essential commitment to
justice. A few days later, King’s house was bombed. There could have been
a riot, but King was able to remain calm and focused on the struggle for
justice. He was able to calm the angry crowd of fellow protesters that had
gathered at his house. After speaking to them, “The spirit of God was in
our hearts” (118).
The end of the bus boycott came because of a decision of the U.S.
Supreme Court. King was in a local court, fighting one of the many law-
suits filed against him by the powers that be in Montgomery as a form
of harassment. As King recalls the moment, a man came up to him and
said, “God Almighty has spoken from Washington, D.C.” Once again,
the multiple senses of “higher” law are on display. Washington is higher
than Montgomery and God is higher than both; Washington is an author-
ity that sides with justice, and God is the ultimate such authority.13 King
describes his own reaction: “At this moment my heart began to throb with
an inexpressible joy” (140). These words should be read in the context of
King’s views of humans and God. The way of accessing God’s authority is
through the heart, through that element of human nature irreducible to
reason or emotion. What King felt was not an excess of emotion; it was
something that transcended words and emotion: “inexpressible joy.” The
justice of God had come to earth, and the protesters, with King at their
head, participated fully in the divine—at least as fully as is possible on
earth. While this effect was momentary, other effects continued. King
describes “a contagious spirit of friendliness and warmth” (164–165) in
the black community of Montgomery following the boycott. The protest-
ers had been trained, through struggle, to access the best within them-
selves, and they continued to do so even when the hardest parts of the
struggle were done.
While all humans have difficulty recognizing God’s image, whites
are particularly challenged in this regard, according to King. Blacks
find it self-evident that there is a divine quality in all, that the claims of
inequality holding up segregation are false; whites are more likely to be
deeply committed to their inherent superiority. The result is that, for
most whites, the “soul is greatly scarred” (87). Deep, deep down, whites
know that they are not superior. They know that God’s image is in blacks
too. But whites must repress this knowledge. They do not believe there is
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 99 )
any authority higher than the law of the land: “Timeworn traditions had
become too crystallized in his soul. The ‘isness’ of segregation had for him
become one with the ‘oughtness’ of the moral law” (100). This repression
of God causes anxiety, fear, and hatred, King diagnoses. It is tempting for
blacks to respond to whites’ feelings with reciprocation, but in doing so,
blacks begin to scar their own souls. Whites are not going to save them-
selves, King concludes, and the only hope that they will be saved is that
they might be loved by blacks (a point James Baldwin will famously echo
in The Fire Next Time). This is not a certain solution—it quite likely will
fail—but it is the only hope for orienting all souls, including whites’ souls,
toward God, achieving what King is fond of calling beloved community.
To respond rightly to the feelings of whites, blacks must be disciplined
and critical. They must not ignore the words and feelings of whites;
instead, they must carefully observe and examine, searching for “the ele-
ments of truth” (199). Only then, with this critical, careful, ultimately
truthful stance toward the world, can blacks love and live properly. Blacks
are privileged, in King’s view, because their oppression makes it easier for
them to appreciate God’s image and God’s law. Indeed, blacks are gifted
with the role of potentially saving the world (201). This is the lesson that
King takes from the Montgomery bus boycott.
While King’s most famous statement about natural law is in his 1964 let-
ter, he wrote and spoke explicitly about natural law many, many times. He
often repeated nearly the same phrases. In the early 1960s, he would pres-
ent his view of natural law in two ways. First he would offer an account of
natural law that he described as philosophical, and then he would offer an
account of natural law that he would describe as practical. After distin-
guishing between just and unjust laws and describing the latter as those
that align with God’s law or the moral laws of the universe, King would
echo a formulation developed in his own graduate studies by describing
unjust laws as those degrading to the human personality, and just laws as
those that show “respect for the dignity of the human personality” (7:159).
King would then switch to a less abstract idiom, calling unjust laws those
“where the majority enforces a code on the minority which is not bind-
ing on itself,” sometimes adding that a law is also unjust when some were
excluded from the process of formulating the law (7:158). Sometimes
King abbreviates this second formulation with the slogan “difference
made legal,” pointing to the way that unjust laws codify differential treat-
ment for minority groups. King goes on to assert not only that unjust
( 100 ) Black Natural Law
laws do not have binding force, but also that we have a responsibility to
oppose unjust laws. The natural law maxim that unjust laws are no laws
at all implies on its face that unjust laws can be ignored. The only laws we
should pay attention to are the just ones, the ones that match with higher
law. King disagrees. Unjust laws should not be ignored; they should be
protested. The form this protest takes should demonstrate a respect for
the law in general. Protest must be precisely targeted at particular unjust
laws and must have the effect of dramatizing their injustice in order to pre-
cipitate their change. Accepting the penalty dictated by the unjust law for
violating an unjust law is a crucial part of this drama. Those who witness
the penalty will, whether they admit it or not, be witnessing unwarranted
suffering. This is potentially redemptive. Witnessing unwarranted suffer-
ing can call the soul out of its slumber, can unleash the natural instinct
toward justice that is so often repressed. With enough witnesses, a con-
sensus may form to rescind the law—importantly, through democratic
process.
King was often confronted with the question of whether he would
support Southerners who believe that segregation is just disobeying
federal integration laws they consider unjust—particularly, disobeying
the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board school integration decision. Many
Southern integration opponents made claims about natural law that,
on the surface, sounded quite similar to King’s. The response that King
repeatedly offered was that he would, indeed, support white Southern
civil disobedience if it was motivated by a correctly discerned account of
justice. He doubted, however, that most defenders of segregation actually
believed that it was just. More likely, segregationists believed they were
preserving their self-interest, or they believed they were preserving tradi-
tion; appeals to God were most often rhetorical in the pejorative sense.
If segregationists really listened to their souls, they would hear God say-
ing that segregation is unjust. This question of whether segregationist and
integrationist civil disobedience were parallel occasionally put King into
uncomfortable arguments about how one might correctly listen to one’s
soul. Indeed, King’s televised 1960 debate with the segregationist edi-
tor James J. Kilpatrick went so badly on this point that some of his allies
walked away from their televisions (5:556). Kilpatrick made it seem as
though King was encouraging each person to decide for himself or herself
which laws were just through introspection. This was a thoroughly secu-
larizing move, cutting King off from the natural law tradition that artic-
ulates practices for discerning God’s law through reflection on human
nature.
By the 1960s, King was attempting to build a national consensus for
integration. Instead of turning more deeply to the natural law tradition
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 101 )
God; for King, some of what is characteristically human images God and
some of what is characteristically human leads away from God. On our
own, we do not make ourselves or our worlds a better place. We need to
be devoted to God, which is to say devoted to the best in ourselves and
others, in order for good to come about. For King, the unholy elements
of human nature—King is not explicit on what they are, but his writings
imply that self-interest is among them—distort the image of God, pulling
us away from the good. In other words, it is not only the external problems
of the modern world that dehumanize, but also elements of human nature
itself that dehumanize both self and others. It is particularly in moments of
“challenge and controversy,” King suggests, that the image of God is con-
cealed or, as King graphically puts it, is “terribly scarred.”21 There is work
to be done for religion, according to King, in directing people toward the
best in themselves, in helping them find the image of God in others and
in themselves. The reward is greater than any reward offered by worldly
gods: “When the soul returns to its true home, there is always joy.”22
Like the European Christian tradition of natural law theory, King
is committed not only to the view that the image of God is in humans,
but also to the view that there are particular ends proper to human life.
The work of the faithful individual and religious communities is to dis-
cern the infinite worth in themselves and in others and also to discern
and embrace their natural inclination toward the good. King is much
more explicit about what the end of life is not than he is about what it is.
It is not “to achieve pleasure and avoid pain,” and it is not “to be happy.”23
The end of life is not to accumulate material wealth or objects. Life has,
rather, “spiritual ends.” Sometimes, King describes these in secular terms,
as developing personal character; at other times, he describes them in
strongly theological terms, as doing “the will of God” or “standing up for
the truth of God.”24 By these diverse phrases, King means the same thing.
Advancing the truth is doing the will of God; it is combatting worldly illu-
sions. But it is also developing human personality insofar as human per-
sonality, when it develops properly, when human capacities are exercised
freely, advances the truth of God. When human beings perceive and act in
the world with their capacities to reason, emote, and create unhampered,
they advance the truth. In other words, it is not accidental that King avoids
naming specific ends of human life; the ultimate end is the full exercise of
human nature, wherever that may take us. To name any object would be
idolatrous. A metaphor must be invoked; what King names as the end of
life is participation in the divine.
When humans come to appreciate the image of God contained within
ourselves, we also come to appreciate the meaning of justice beyond
worldly law and social norms. As King puts it, we aspire to a time when
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 105 )
“men are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts
the conviction that all men are brothers.”25 Such inner law or moral law is,
in King’s account, analogous with the laws of physics. It provides a foun-
dation for the universe. King ominously warns that anyone who disobeys
the moral law will “suffer the consequences” (2:251). Universal human
brotherhood is the first and most basic normative implication of King’s
natural law theory, and sometimes King abbreviates the moral law as the
“law of love.” It is prescribed by God’s law, and all human laws that run
counter to it must be opposed. Any norm or law that injures the image
of God in humans, that injures that part of humans deserving of love, is
proscribed. The taking of any human life is clearly against God’s law in
this view, but so is any law or norm that restricts the capacity for any indi-
vidual to reason or emote or create. The latter conclusion in particular,
which King sometimes simply describes as freedom, clearly takes a good
deal of interpretation to apply to any real-world scenario.
King repeatedly emphasizes that worldly laws are enforceable but that
“law written in your heart” is not enforceable (5:174). The government
ought not to impose punishments for violating this inner law even though
each individual ought to follow it. King usually makes this point when
discussing the role that the government has in ending segregation. While
the government can and should create a legal framework that promotes
equality, the government cannot require individuals to like each other.
This means that the civil rights movement must not only be focused on
changing laws; it must also change “hearts.” What does this say about
King’s commitment to natural law? It is yet another instance where King
acknowledges that the implementation of higher law on earth must be
strategic. The sense of law in higher law is broad, referring generally to
“oughtness,” as King likes to put it. Just because there are things we ought
or ought not to do in order to participate fully in God does not mean that
we should use the state’s power to coerce in order to implement them in
this world. In the same way King urges that civil disobedience be carefully
targeted at one law at a time, dramatizing its injustice, changing social
norms may require other techniques, not legislation or dramatization
(e.g., such change may require love that is not immediately reciprocated
or preaching that is not immediately heard).
In the midst of our dehumanizing and idol-filled modern world, we are
still reminded that a moral law exists: “A nagging inner voice” speaks to
us, telling us that we are “born for eternity.”26 When we act against the
moral law, we have a sense that something is amiss, even if we work hard to
ignore or repress this sense. To move from intuition to prescription, King
tells us that it is necessary to combine “a tough mind and a tender heart,”
reason and emotion. That is how we are able to access our “true nature” and
( 106 ) Black Natural Law
thus that is how we are able to access God’s law.27 King is careful to point
out that these are not technical skills that must be delegated to experts.
Each human has the capacity to discern the moral law. Reason need not be
trained with classes in logic; using reason means “incisive thinking, realis-
tic appraisal, and decisive judgment” that allows for “breaking through the
crust of legends and myths and sifting the true from the false.” 28 Although
seemingly obvious, King suggests these qualities are often lacking. The
dehumanizing, idol-filled world of the present distorts our judgment,
closes our minds, and dampens our love for truth. We are too often content
to regurgitate what we have heard, too often committed to beliefs without
inquiring into their veracity. Yet all people, in some aspects of their lives,
use reason in the way King describes (e.g., when bargaining with a sales-
man or when evaluating the excuses of a child). The problem is that certain
aspects of our lives are insulated from this capacity to reason, just as they
are insulated from our capacity for feeling. Among other things, King has
in mind the inertia of tradition that sustains practices like segregation, pre-
venting both whites and blacks from exercising their natural capacity to
ask whether such a system makes sense. King worries about how we too
often accept what we hear through the media, what politicians proclaim,
and even what ministers preach without exercising our capacity to reason
in order to critically interrogate their claims.
Just as our capacity to reason is needed to access the moral law, so is our
capacity to feel; the two must work in tandem, in King’s view. If we refuse
to feel, if we are “hardhearted,” we are incapable of empathizing with
others, of appreciating their humanity. We perceive other human beings
as “mere objects or as impersonal cogs in an ever-turning wheel.”29 The
modern world in particular has a tendency to promote a focus on reason
over emotion, and King preaches that this must be vigorously opposed.
God is not a calculator punching in numbers that represent people. God
is “tenderhearted,” and so is God’s image in humans. 30 The modern world
has a tendency to distort our emotions, offering us hollow pleasures and
manufactured fears. Work is necessary to discern the genuine from the
false, work that involves not only emotion but also reason. In tandem,
they provide access to God’s law.
While human nature contains the capacities needed to access moral
law, in King’s view, these capacities must be cultivated and nurtured. In
babies, they are only nascent: Babies feel and complain but they require
care to develop these nascent feelings and thoughts. Some individuals,
according to King, never get much beyond this stage, continuing to focus
on themselves and their immediate desires and unable to see the human-
ity in others—or, really, in themselves. 31 While history and tradition can
stifle our ability to access moral law, they can also be an aid. King suggests
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 107 )
that the criteria we use to discern moral law include “the insights of the
ages through saints and prophets,” “the religious insights of the ages,”
and “the best evidence of the intellectual disciplines of the day, psychol-
ogy, sociology, anthropology” (5:564). In other words, the picture of an
individual sitting alone in the woods examining his or her heart to learn
the precepts of God’s law is dead wrong. To discern this higher law, we
must examine our human nature, but this examination must take place
in light of knowledge of the world around us, and it must take place in
light of religious traditions. We discern the moral law in community, and
appreciating the insights of our contemporaries and predecessors is the
prerequisite for our own inquiry. This does not mean that God’s law can
change, but it does remind us that at any moment, our knowledge of God’s
law is only partial, limited by our own and society’s shortcomings both
in terms of ability and in terms of knowledge. Similarly, although King is
particularly fond of Gandhi and even fonder of Jesus, no single religious
figure can tell us what the moral law is, in King’s view. The insights of holy
men and women must form the background for our own inquiry rather
than determining the outcome of our inquiry.
King occasionally says things that suggest a rather different view of
natural law. For example, in one of his regular advice columns in the
black-oriented Ebony magazine, King urges a man whose anger was out
of control to “submit your will to the power and scrutiny of God,” adding
that “ultimately one is changed by totally surrendering his will to God’s
will” (4:269). Here it would seem as though human discernment in light
of science and tradition plays little role. The individual is simply to mute
his own reason and emotion and pray for divine guidance. But recall that
the image of God in humans is crucially important for King. The way to
submit to God is not to bow down to heaven but rather to lift up the divine
part of ourselves. The scrutiny of God means proper self-scrutiny, shed-
ding worldly illusions and using reason and emotion in light of science
and tradition to probe truths of the self and the world. To surrender one’s
will to God is to pursue whatever conclusions one reaches after this pro-
cess of discernment, abandoning self-interest as a primary motivation.
Indeed, in many of his other Ebony columns, this is precisely what King
urges, to the point of discomfort. He suggests, for example, that a woman
whose husband continues an affair even after she has confronted him and
he has promised to change his ways ought to begin by examining what she
could do differently to be a better wife. King describes subjecting himself
to such scrutiny as he leads the civil rights movement: “I subject myself to
self-purification and to endless self-analysis; I question and soul-search
constantly.”32 When the stakes are high, getting God’s law right is serious
and crucially important work.
( 108 ) Black Natural Law
The work of discerning God’s law takes us away from the crowd and
may make us seem amiss, like “nonconformists” or even the “malad-
justed.” These are labels we must embrace, King urges, if we are to give our
ultimate loyalty to God. But we also must beware of the traps into which
nonconformists tend to fall. Instead of a dedication to justice beyond the
law, nonconformists can be “annoyingly rigid and unreasonably impa-
tient.”33 When one steps away from conventional wisdom and turns to a
higher authority, it is tempting to grow deeply frustrated with the world. It
is tempting to desire immediate change, to desire that God’s law be imple-
mented in full right now. And it is tempting to cling to one’s own views
stubbornly because of the belief that they align with God’s. King’s empha-
sis on the importance of strategy means that all of these temptations must
be rejected. We never have direct access to God’s law, and God’s law can
never be directly enforced in the world. God always remains opaque to
us, even as we do our best to use science and tradition, emotion and rea-
son to discern divine judgment. This must humble us, give us patience,
and make us deliberate. The one thing such a belief must not do is make
us pragmatists, endorsing what works best and reducing morality to the
opinions of the day. Given the uncertainty inherent in natural law, King
commends those moral actions that are most certain. Finding the image
of God in a neighbor and revering it, for example, is clearly prescribed by
God’s law. Moreover, such clear-cut actions reinforce our knowledge of
our own souls and commitment to God’s law; as we witness the image of
God in a neighbor, we are reminded of our own souls and the normativity
that flows from this encounter with God’s image. 34
APPLYING NATURAL LAW
Not only did Martin Luther King Jr. describe how to access natural law, he
also reflected at length about its content. As we have seen, he does not view
such content as a set of propositions that are absolutely true for all people
at all times (though his opposition to causing the death of a human being
comes close to being an absolute). Natural law must be responsive to “the
changing problem of life” (4:349). For example, in his Ebony column, he
advises that remarriage after divorce is acceptable as long as lessons have
been learned from the failed marriage. On the other hand, King does not
take divorce lightly, urging couples to go to great lengths to preserve their
marriages. In offering advice to the Ebony readers, King is attentive to
the specific circumstances faced by each reader; he never applies blanket
prescriptions to all problems of a certain type. Most commonly, he urges
advice-seekers to examine their own blameworthiness first and then turn
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 109 )
is implied, saved him from his overly theological and regional concerns
by showing him the global scope of injustice and pointing out the con-
nections between white supremacy in the United States and imperialism
abroad. But this was already a connection King was making in the 1950s
and early 1960s, a conclusion that he reached based on his specifically
theological and racial mode of moral inquiry. From his early days in the
pulpit of black churches, he describes the way that colonialism degrades
the image of God in humans and how it must be judged wrong by a higher
law than the law of any nation or any international body. It is condemned
by the law of God. But, as we have seen, the tenets of natural law are to be
advocated strategically, and it may well be the case that the problem of
segregation was more pressing for black American communities than the
problem of colonialism, though the connections between the problems
still must be named. King names those connections.
It is also often supposed that King radicalized in his late years because
he began to speak increasingly about economic justice. 38 Once again, this
is a theme that King had already emphasized consistently in the 1950s,
and he had done so under the mantle of natural law. King preaches that,
for the image of God to be properly treated as sacred in human beings,
humans must have “the basic necessities of life” (3:416; cf. 7:598). It is
those necessities that allow for the characteristically human capacities
of reason and emotion to be realized. The “basic necessities” phrase is
so powerful because it is open-ended. It requires examination of what is
necessary for whom in which circumstances, not assuming that there is a
magic number of bread loaves that would nourish everyone, everywhere.
This encourages King’s listeners themselves to probe their lives and the
lives of those around them for a broad range of social injustices. Is hous-
ing adequate? Are there toxins in the atmosphere? Is there clean water? Is
education sufficient? These all would qualify as necessities, and in many
black communities, the answers to such questions reveal the enormous
scale of social injustice—in King’s day and today.
King goes further, repeatedly using a provocative formulation that calls
attention to the concrete reason necessities are lacking. All too frequently
in our world, we “take necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the
[upper] classes” (4:88). 39 In the next words that come from King’s mouth,
he reminds his listeners why this is a problem: It obscures the image of God
in humanity. We will fully participate in the divine—God’s kingdom will
arrive—when all have life’s necessities, he states. Natural law, for King,
is not just a set of abstract precepts or a tool to counter relatively obvious
injustices. It has consequences for how our economic system is organized.
He moves from symptoms of deprivation to cause; even in 1960, he could
declare capitalism dangerous because “we will become so involved in the
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 111 )
it as corrupt from its root. King argues that worldly law in general must be
respected, but that strategically chosen extralegal means are necessary to
improve the law. He attempts to find this middle ground by appealing to
God. When God is acknowledged as the highest authority, our lingering
attachment to worldly law must be discarded. Yet acknowledging God as
a supreme authority also acknowledges the need for authorities and laws
that are determined by someone other than ourselves.
IMPLEMENTING GOD’S LAW
and laws of the world include some that match God’s law and some that
do not. Eventually, the kingdom of God will come to earth, and the laws of
the earth will match God’s laws. God supports the efforts of humans who
are helping to make this happen.
King identifies particular moments in history when God’s law, or cer-
tain elements of it, notably advance. He points to the potential held by the
rise in the democratic form of government that codifies the equal value of
human life (7:113). The struggle between segregationists and their oppo-
nents in the South is a historic moment of tension, but King’s theological
vision gives divine significance to this tension. It is misleading to see this
as a struggle between blacks and whites, King argues, because it is really
a struggle “between justice and injustice, between the forces of light and
the forces of darkness” (7:121). It is recognizing this broader significance,
accessible through religious tradition along with natural law, that allows
for political actors to be the most effective. They are not to be distracted
by superficial concerns that a problem, framed in racial terms, might
solicit. King often dismisses interracial marriage as such a superficial con-
cern. Seeing political struggle against the background of divine history
by means of natural law allows for a precise focus on what needs to be
changed and allows for the certainty that, eventually, it will be changed.
King argues that the historical drama of good and evil can be a blessing. It
prompts self-examination.48 It makes us ask hard questions about the world
and ourselves. If there were not such tension, it would be easy to confuse
worldly law and God’s law—and thus allow our human capacities for rea-
son, emotion, and creativity to desiccate. King is consistently critical of those
who aspire to an empty peace, a position he associates with white liberals.
Such an empty peace names the absence of conflict rather than the presence
of justice. The peace King commends names a world that abides by God’s
law. King imagines Jesus saying, “Whenever I come, a conflict is precipitated
between the old and the new, between justice and injustice, between the
forces of light and the forces of darkness. I come to declare war over injustice”
(3:208). In other words, once natural law is perceived, once we are able to
access the perspective of Jesus, social tensions that were otherwise concealed
become evident. Problems to which we were previously oblivious now strike
us as grotesque injustices in need of immediate attention.
King describes the end of history in several different ways. End here
should be understood as both descriptive and normative: It is the direc-
tion in which history is moving, pushed by God, but it is also the direc-
tion in which history ought to move. The most famous formulations of this
end are “beloved community” and “reconciliation.” King explicates these
phrases as referring to, for example, “a society where all men live together
as brothers, and every man will respect the dignity and the worth of human
ON MARTIN LUTHER KING JR . ( 117 )
personality” (7:121). Those invoking King’s legacy often repeat his slogans;
less often do they draw attention to his explications, and very rarely do they
consider the implications of those explications. The essential end King has
in mind is a world where humans are treated in a way that accords with
their infinite value. The best model for such treatment that we have in our
current world is family, specifically brotherhood, a metaphor also evoking
shared divine parentage. Those who once oppressed will live together with
those who were once oppressed, treating each other as if they are siblings.
It is tempting to view this eschatological world that King envisions to be
composed of atomic individuals, but King is quite clear on its commu-
nal nature. Individuals are formed through our relations with each other
even if we exceed these relations, and a rich network of such relations must
be part of any account of the world we are to desire. It involves not only
“absence of contradiction” but also “presence of coherence” (5:280).
When “beloved” abbreviates the content of such community, it is easy
to understand beloved community as overly abstract and sentimental—
and thus avoid the normative implications of King’s work. King does
speak and write of love, but he is careful to frame love in unsentimental
terms. For King, love is the proper response to perceiving the image of
God in a human being. Borrowing from and developing the thought of
Anders Nygren, King argues that love in the sense of “agape” means nei-
ther friendship, our relations with those we like, nor romantic or senti-
mental attachment. Then what does love mean concretely? King describes
“a very stern love that would organize itself into collective action to right
a wrong” (5:234). In other words, the content of love, as King uses the
term, is identical with natural law. It discerns the image of God and it
responds by organizing to advance the law of God. Love, like natural law,
refuses the distortions of excessive rationalism and emotionalism. King is
clear that love and justice are two names for the same thing—he famously
pronounces, “Justice is really love in calculation. Justice is love correct-
ing that which revolts against love” (3:73). This statement is often taken
to sentimentalize justice rather than to offer a normative account of the
implications of love. King might even be said to offer a negative theology
of love. He is comfortable saying specifically what love is not; we can point
to examples of these in the world. But the love he commends is ultimately
missing, indescribable in worldly terms except in its effects. These effects
involve organizing for justice: strategically and collectively challenging
worldly laws that run counter to God’s law. Perhaps King does not want us
to envision what a beloved community would look like at all. Perhaps that
phrase is simply rhetoric that encourages us to interrogate worldly laws
that deface the infinite worth of the human being and struggle together
to change them.
CHAP T ER 5
I n 2011, a 30-foot tall statue of Martin Luther King was added to the
many monuments commemorating great figures in American history
on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. Words spoken or written by
King were engraved around his granite likeness. The word love appears
four times. The word peace appears five times.1 The words law, God, and
soul do not appear at all. Amazingly, the word black does not appear
either, and the only mention of race is in the quotation “Our loyalties must
transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we
must develop a world perspective.” The King who is remembered today by
countless tourists, schoolchildren, politicians, and at many Martin Luther
King Day events annually is a thoroughly secularized, post-racial figure.
Offensive to none, all this King wants is to fill the world with love. While
it seems as though King might be gesturing toward some higher author-
ity as he recommends transcending race and class, the words selected for
his monument replace divine authority with a vague internationalism. In
other words, the world is all there is. The powerful critical force of King’s
writings and speeches has been entirely forgotten or repressed.
Why was the black natural law tradition abandoned? This is a story for
historians to tell, but some speculation is warranted. The present chapter
demonstrates that the tradition did, indeed, collapse, and it examines the
incoherent fragments of the tradition that remain. It is tempting to read
this collapse together with a lament for what was lost through integration,
what Adolph Reed insightfully terms the Lake Wobegon style of black
cultural memory.2 In this nostalgic view, black natural law flourished
when there was a coherent black community with class integration, robust
and distinctive institutions, and a sense of shared history. Yet none of the
four figures examined in this book comfortably fit in such communities.
Douglass escaped from slavery and lived in upstate New York; Cooper
DECLINE AND DE TRITUS ( 119 )
left her home in North Carolina for Oberlin and then for Washington,
D.C.; Du Bois was from a small town in western Massachusetts and never
was comfortable in close-knit black communities; and King was trained
in Boston and eventually aimed his rhetorical skill at a largely white audi-
ence. Each of these figures had awareness of and experience with black
traditions and institutions, but none of these figures was fully immersed
in the life of a black Lake Wobegon.
The decisive shift—and this is speculation that would need to be
proven or disproven by historians—is that black elites are now most often
educated in predominantly white institutions. This, combined with the
rapid rise of black electoral politics, has resulted in a class of black intel-
lectual elites whose political and cultural views are closely aligned with
the liberalism or radicalism of white intellectual elites. The latter are
thoroughly secularist, associating any substantive theological language
with the ominous Religious Right. These changes foreclosed the space
for robust development of black religious ideas, even if the form of black
religion continues to hold strong appeal for white liberals and leftists. The
feelings conjured by the intonations of King and his latter-day imitators
seem like they must be progressive, critical, and capable of moving the
masses—regardless of what content is expressed. That content is all too
often precisely the same positions expressed by white liberals or leftists,
who use less colorful packaging. The function of the black intellectual or
politician becomes that of the performer, adding pizazz to the prepack-
aged views of white intellectual elites. The latter want a language of morals
to counter the Religious Right; blacks provide performances that com-
municate morality without substantively addressing it.
Forgotten is the critique of ideology that was so central to the black nat-
ural law tradition. As bell hooks compellingly argues, the absence of blacks
from media and elite culture was so obvious during segregation that blacks
became particularly good at cultural criticism. The dissonance produced
by all-white culture that presented itself as universal called for comment.
Such criticism took place “in black living rooms, kitchens, barber shops, and
beauty parlors.”3 Black natural law was one of these forms of cultural criti-
cism, rooted in black religious tradition. When culture integrated—in the
superficial sense that black characters began to appear on television shows
and black politicians began to appear in city halls and state capitals—the
easiest opening for ideology critique disappeared. Something similar hap-
pened with the transformation of de jure segregation into de facto segrega-
tion. Enormous injustices remained, but the starting point for critique was
less obvious. The need that black natural law once so easily filled still exists
but in more subtle forms, and this has resulted in the dismantling of the
most powerful tools for attacking racial injustice.
( 120 ) Black Natural Law
but without developing any account of them. These words added rhetori-
cal force to his speeches and little more. The rapid evolution of Jackson
into a presidential candidate shows just how untethered his politics had
become from the moral foundations he once proclaimed. To achieve
the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination, Jackson would have to
appeal to white liberal voters, but he had long voiced strong opposition to
abortion. So he changed his position. In 1977, for example, Jackson had
described his moral stance against abortion, albeit in rather incoherent
fashion. Attempting to echo Du Bois, Jackson wrote, “The question of
‘life’ is The Question of the 20th century. Race and poverty are dimen-
sions of the life question, but discussions about abortion have brought
the issue into focus in a much sharper way.”9 Here Jackson would seem
to be endorsing something resembling the natural law position of King
and others, particularly as he continues, “Human life itself is the highest
human good and God is the supreme good because He is the giver of life.
That is my philosophy. Everything I do proceeds from that religious and
philosophical premise.”10 Jackson is trying to evoke the black natural law
tradition, but he does not get it quite right. Instead of human life having
infinite worth because humans are created in the image of God, Jackson
writes that God has infinite worth because of the apparently self-evident
worth of human life. Intentionally or not, Jackson betrays his thoroughly
humanizing, secularizing instinct: God is subordinate to humanity, deriv-
ing worth from humanity. These political foundations are, curiously, “reli-
gious and philosophical,” as Jackson puts it, in an equivocation that itself
hints at the reduction of theology to the secular—or, more crudely put,
the instrumentalization of theology for political purposes. Jackson goes
on to compare slavery and abortion as related evils—a view that, given
its weak foundations, must not have been difficult for Jackson to alter less
than a decade later for his presidential runs.11
prescriptions, what brings us to a law higher than the laws of the world.
Disconnected from reason, such accounts of sentimental natural law lend
themselves to individualization. They fall prey to the worry that James
Kilpatrick voiced in his 1960 debate with Martin Luther King Jr.: Each
individual chooses which laws he or she wants to follow based on which
ones feel right.
A version of black natural law centered on humans’ emotional nature
was influentially advanced by James Baldwin in his short 1963 book The
Fire Next Time. Baldwin positions himself as an intellectual complement
to the more religious, more activist Martin Luther King Jr. From a cyni-
cal perspective, Baldwin positions himself as a translator of King’s ideas
for a white, secular audience. Baldwin had been through a religious phase
himself—he had been a child preaching prodigy—and his childhood fit
the stereotype of black American experience. He was born to a single
mother and grew up with several siblings in Harlem. The fundamental
message that Baldwin takes from King is that of love.14 In the writer’s
account of his own development, he was confused as a child because he
could not love. This led him to dogmatic religion, which only furthered
his confusion. Once he could love, he could flourish.
Baldwin describes his initial stance toward religion as uncritical.
Christianity meant a set of beliefs about the supernatural, and these were
beliefs that the young Baldwin held at first. On reflection, however, he
realizes that what he really had wanted was safety, and God provided that.
There was an all-powerful creature in the universe who provided order,
who reassured. As he grew from child to adolescent, Baldwin reached
a crisis. The Christian worldview he accepted condemned the world’s
evils, and Baldwin was tempted by evil. He worried particularly about
his own evil inclinations that he could not control. Baldwin reflects on
his inner self, on whom he is or was in his youth, beyond the biological.
What he describes is emotion. He was “guilty,” “frightened,” and filled
with “anguish” and “hysteria.” The tumult eventually resulted in the
14-year-old Baldwin’s conversion. He describes this conversion largely in
terms of the feelings it involved: “It was the strangest sensation I have ever
had in my life,” involving “roaring, screaming, crying out” (28).15 Before,
Baldwin had understood religion to involve a set of propositions about
God; now, he understood it to involve a set of feelings.
When the young Baldwin preached—and he was very good at it—he
was not guided by thoughts but by feelings. Following his conversion,
“the resulting hysteria lent great passion to my sermons” (32). The ser-
mons might have consisted of thoughts expressed and reasons given,
but beneath them was feeling. Through preaching, Baldwin was able to
reach a union with fellow humans that he was unable to achieve in his
( 124 ) Black Natural Law
own life. In religious terms, this would be considered unity in God, but
Baldwin describes it, in retrospect, as unity among humans. Specifically,
he describes it as emotional unity: “They surrendered their pain and joy
to me, I surrendered mine to them” (33). Church was a space for human-
ity to be stripped to its essentials and put in communion; those essentials
are feelings.
This view of the underlying power of religious feeling persisted
throughout Baldwin’s life. As he writes, “It took a long time for me to dis-
engage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral
level, I never really have, and never will” (32). However, Baldwin came
to realize that religious feeling was often deeply distorted, distended by
doctrine. He would seek an even purer kind of sensation, a purer kind of
love. Baldwin first noticed the troubling complications of religious feeling
in himself. Preaching gave him independence. His family was religious,
and his father himself was a preacher; it was a vocation worthy of respect.
The young Baldwin could trump his father’s authority with God’s, but in
so doing, he continued to treat God as a bigger, stronger, more power-
ful father. When Baldwin finally lost his religion, he replaced the affec-
tive relationship to father-God figure with objectless affect, specifically,
with love. This is precisely what he found lacking in the church where he
attended and then preached: “There was no love in the church. It was a
mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair” (39). The church was rich
in emotion, but it was emotion distorted, superficial love masking deep
hatred. This was a problem of religion, but it was also, especially, a prob-
lem of race. The anger of blacks at dehumanization was transformed into
the appearance of love. Evidence of the superficiality of Christian love
would occasionally surface in Baldwin’s youth. Even though love was
commended, it was only those in the church community who were to be
loved. Others were to be looked at warily; they would burn. Furthermore,
the church commended love but frequently rejected its physical expres-
sion. These inconsistencies pointed Baldwin beyond Christianity to what
he understood as a deeper, more holistic focus on love. It was a love that
would replace his father and his God as supreme authority.
The new religion that Baldwin advanced in his writing was based on
the following commitment: “To be sensual, I think, is to respect and
rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does,
from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread” (42). With this state-
ment, Baldwin leaves the tradition of black natural law for a new era, what
seems to be a New Age spirituality. The deepest part of our humanity is
our feelings, including both emotions and senses. That is where we find
Baldwin’s substitute for God, “the force of life.” No longer is it an image
of God. Now this “force” is actually “life itself.” He proceeds to state the
DECLINE AND DE TRITUS ( 125 )
implications of his new faith at their most basic. (Elsewhere, Baldwin will
describe more substantial though often still allusive normative conclu-
sions.) The analog to the divine is accessible through the senses. To move
closer to the divine, and to learn of its plans for this world, we must be par-
ticularly attuned to our senses: We must be “present.” In contrast, Baldwin
views the Christian God as privileging spirit over flesh, with the implica-
tion that Christians conclude they should not be attuned to their senses;
indeed, they should ignore them. Baldwin claims that this Christian view
has resulted in countless deaths as bodies are instrumentalized, used or
slain in battles to advance Christendom.
While Baldwin does not use the language of natural law, he makes it
clear that the account of sensation and emotion he describes has norma-
tive implications. “If the concept of God has any validity or any use,” he
writes, “it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.” Once
we realize this, an individual should “divorce himself from all the prohi-
bitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church” (46). Baldwin
believes that there is an end to human life: It is to enlarge our capacity
for sensation and emotion, the capacity that makes us human in the first
place. Laws and norms that inhibit this end are morally wrong. But the
focus on sensation and emotion to the exclusion of rationality has the
consequence that any explicit flow of norms from this account of human
nature is troublesome. The only distinctively human resources Baldwin
has to extract such norms are sensation and emotion, but it is unclear how
these would aid in the necessary process of discernment.16 With Baldwin’s
quick dismissal of all Christian “prohibitions,” he suggests a resistance
to prohibition as such, even non-Christian prohibition. When he vis-
its Elijah Muhammad, he expresses an aversion to the Nation of Islam’s
rules. They remind him of Christian rules and his father’s rules. When
asked by Muhammad what religion he professes, Baldwin thinks the most
truthful answer would be: “I love a few people and they love me and some
of them are white, and isn’t love more important than color?” (70). Love
transcends race; it is what makes us all human. But with no mechanism to
move from love to a world without racial injustice, Baldwin leaves us with
a sense that love itself suffices. If a problem is encountered, love more.
Baldwin begins The Fire Next Time with an open letter to his nephew.
Deploying finely crafted words and sentences, Baldwin shares his knowl-
edge of love with his nephew and with his readership. “Here you were,
Big James, named for me … here you were: to be loved. To be loved,
baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless
world” (6). A baby solicits love: That is the effect of the baby’s innocence
on those around it. The world is lacking in love, but children squeeze
out the love that there is. Baldwin also hints at an element of self-love in
( 126 ) Black Natural Law
this love toward the baby—a term Baldwin uses equivocally here, a term
for both the newborn and for one desired with erotic love; it was also a
term Baldwin used liberally to refer to his friends. Baldwin sees himself
in the baby with whom he shares a name; this too must solicit his love.
As Baldwin describes it, love is necessary for human life, now and in the
future. Baldwin presents himself as authoritative: writing of himself and
his siblings, he intones, “Had we not loved each other none of us would
have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the
sake of your children and your children’s children” (6). Love here remains
rather mysterious, and Baldwin offers us nothing with which to resist a
sentimental interpretation. It is clear that he thinks love is essential, pow-
erful, and contagious, but it is not clear what that power might look like or
how it is exercised. Baldwin’s idea seems to be that the racist world dehu-
manizes, and love humanizes. But without any concrete sense of what this
love entails, Baldwin’s claim runs the risk of encouraging readers to feel
their way out of racism, as it were.
Baldwin urges his nephew not only to be loved but to love, and to love
whites. Cryptically, Baldwin writes of whites, “You must accept them and
accept them with love” (8). Where does the normativity in this statement
come from? Baldwin, in line with the black natural law tradition, takes
blacks to be in a privileged position because they are able to perceive the
world clearly—much more clearly than whites. Whites are invested in
their own false sense of racial superiority. It seems that the imperative to
love whites is related to this epistemic privilege, but it remains unclear
where the imperative would come from unless it were basic, unless it
were love all the way down. This, it seems, is an element of the epistemic
privilege of blacks, in Baldwin’s view: They realize who they really are,
namely, creatures who love. Baldwin goes on to affirm the brotherhood
of all humans, black and white. Whites just happen to renounce this
brotherhood—they are “lost, younger brothers” (9). What makes them,
what makes all humans, brothers is our shared capacity to love.
In his autobiographical reflections, Baldwin recalls his youthful sense
of a higher law, but it was not God’s law. It was the system of norms and
laws instituted by whites that trumped the laws of his own father. White
authority is cast as demonic, a simulacrum of God’s law. Compared to his
father, white authority was “nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to
please, and bottomlessly cruel” (25). Local customs and rules are not the
ultimate authority; the ultimate authority for blacks in the United States
is the heartless rule of whites. That ultimate authority must be replaced
by another, higher still: God, or something that stands in for God. For
Baldwin, God functions as exactly the opposite of white authority. God is
all loving instead of bottomlessly cruel. As faithful servants of their God,
DECLINE AND DE TRITUS ( 127 )
whites appeal only to this God’s authority. This means perpetuating a lie,
and the result is “anguish,” Baldwin suggests. There is a sense in which
whites must be pitied. They are so committed to their idolatry that they
cannot acknowledge that it is the cause of, not the cure for, their existen-
tial angst. What whites need, like blacks, is love: “Love takes off the masks
that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within” (94).
There is no authority higher than love; it is where truth is to be found for
all, if only we accept its troublingly amorphous embrace.
This is not the place to track Baldwin’s intellectual legacy or to offer a
comprehensive account of defective black natural law theories. Baldwin
is simply one exemplary figure; Audre Lorde is another. Like Baldwin’s
The Fire Next Time and his novel Another Country, Lorde’s Zami, pub-
lished two decades later in 1982, fully embraces sensuality and love as
an organizing principle. She describes her work as a “biomythography,”
foregrounding her effort to replace Christian theology with an alterna-
tive religious worldview. However, it is in Lorde’s essay “The Uses of the
Erotic,” included in her 1984 collection Sister Outsider, where she most
explicitly describes her version of black natural law. Lorde is even more
explicit than Baldwin about her belief that emotion or something like it,
the erotic, leads to normative conclusions with political implications.
The erotic is defined by Lorde as “those physical, emotional, and psy-
chic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each
of us, being shared: the passions of love, in its deepest meaning” (56).17
Like Baldwin, Lorde focuses on sensation, with a particular interest in
emotion. Sensation provides access to our very core, the essence of our
human nature. As was the case with Baldwin, that essence is ultimately
described with the label of love. Lorde points to the way such sensation is
shared, always felt in relation to another person. This suggests an impor-
tant possibility for circulation and an important bulwark against solip-
sism. Emotion experienced alone does not qualify as among the “deepest
and strongest and richest” and does not qualify as definitive of our human
nature.
Lorde further suggests that we think of the erotic as “a resource within
each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane, firmly rooted
in the power of our unexpressed or unrecognized feeling” (53). Lorde is
no philosopher, nor is she a theologian. She is a writer, and she expresses
herself allusively. The implications, however, are clear. Essential to human
nature, and expressed most fully in women, is the erotic. It connects human
nature with the “spiritual”—again, as with Baldwin, this is the spiritual, it
is not merely an image or copy of the spiritual. The erotic involves feeling,
but it involves the feelings we don’t know we feel in addition to the feelings
we know we feel. In other words, and in contrast to Baldwin, a process of
( 128 ) Black Natural Law
With more concreteness than Baldwin, Lorde suggests that the erotic
teaches us how we ought to relate to each other. It teaches us to see each
human being as capable of deep feeling, because we ourselves are capable
of such feeling and—here is where Lorde steps beyond Baldwin—when
we experience such feeling, it is together with another. If both people do
not experience joy, our joy does not qualify as erotic in the sense Lorde
commends. The differences that distinguish another person from me no
longer seem threatening, in Lorde’s view, when we see in that other person
primarily the capacity for erotic joy. By implication, those laws or social
norms that would treat any human in a way that diminishes his or her
capacity for enjoyment would be judged wrong from the perspective of
the erotic.
This emphasis on shared feeling, together with her account of the ways
the erotic is obscured by the powers that be, offers Lorde more opportuni-
ties to consider the erotic as critical—in contrast to Baldwin’s vision of post-
racial love. Yet Lorde still does not see reason or rationality as an essential
part of human nature, as an essential partner to emotion. The result is that
both Baldwin and Lorde are unable to offer an account of how natural law
might have an effect in the world; both offer inadequate accounts of politics.
As the previous chapters demonstrated, the black natural law tradition is
particularly attentive to the need to carefully strategize and employ multiple
rhetorical registers in order to implement natural law. Moreover, the black
natural law tradition takes ideology critique and social movement organiz-
ing as essential to natural law. Baldwin and Lorde, as writers, are content
with the realm of words and feelings even as they gesture toward political
problems. According to the black natural law tradition, judgment is crucial.
There are times to say yes and times to say no. In contrast, Lorde writes, “We
have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings” (57).
As we have seen, Lorde does not urge an unequivocal embrace of all that
we feel, but she does not offer a very precise account of how to discern the
authenticity of feelings. Would this be based on how they feel? Would it be
based on how intense they are? Would it be based on whether they are sup-
pressed by the powers that be? If the answer to this last question is affirma-
tive, this would force the erotic to cede its authority to those powers. Quite
mysteriously, Lorde writes, “Once recognized, those [desires] which do not
enhance our future lose their power and can be altered” (57). But how are
we to decide whether a desire enhances our future? How long are we to wait
to see enhancement? Are we to make a projection based on how the desire
feels? Lorde leaves many questions open. This is symptomatic of the partial
embrace of the black natural law tradition.
In contrast to Baldwin and Lorde, bell hooks came to the erotic quite
late. Her early work was strictly political and secular: powerfully argued
( 130 ) Black Natural Law
While the last half century has seen some black intellectuals gravitate
toward emotion as the foundation for natural law, others have embraced
reason. This is in keeping with trends in white natural law theory. The past
few decades have seen a revival in natural law views built on the founda-
tions laid by Thomas Aquinas that take him to be arguing that natural
law begins with reflection on human reason as the essential component
of human nature.28 Along with this interest in Aquinas has been the
growth of a community of scholars inspired by Leo Strauss who make a
similar argument on secular foundations. Straussians have had a particu-
lar influence on conservative black intellectuals, including Alan Keyes
and Clarence Thomas, who find the Straussian focus on expressions of
natural law (labelled by Straussians “natural right”) in the Declaration of
Independence and the thought of Abraham Lincoln particularly appeal-
ing. These black conservatives represent another way in which the black
natural law tradition fragments and degenerates. With humans under-
stood as essentially reasoning beings, natural law becomes formalistic,
and the two key elements that are at the core of the black natural law tra-
dition, ideology critique and social movement organizing, are lost.
( 132 ) Black Natural Law
natural law. While Thomas himself would probably say that it was through
their capacity to reason, an essentially human capacity that requires no
formal education to acquire, it seems doubtful whether Thomas’s grand-
parents would recognize in the abstract concept of “reason” the pathway
they took to conclude that they were equal to whites. More likely, they
would describe a mix of intuitions, feelings, and thoughts that brought
them to this conclusion.
Thomas refers to his grandfather’s labor disputes with white employers
to emphasize another aspect of natural law foreign to the black natural
law tradition. 37 Thomas takes natural law to imply a right to freely nego-
tiate contracts, particularly labor contracts. As reasoning creatures, we
humans can decide whether to accept or reject a contract on our own,
without government or other outside interference. The government’s
role is to ensure that no coercion takes place, as might be the case with a
sharecropper or a member of a labor union. In contrast, as we have seen,
the black natural law tradition does often concern itself with economic
rights, but these economic rights flow from an account of the distinctively
human capacities to reason, feel, and imagine. Economic deprivation pre-
vents these capacities from being exercised, so natural law mandates that
the basic necessities of life be available to all.
As Lorde points out, and as the performances of Douglass and King in
particular demonstrate, emotion is not constrained to the boundaries of
the self. When it is reason rather than emotion that is taken as the essential
component of human nature, there is a tendency to focus on the individ-
ual reasoning inside his or her own head. This is a tendency that Thomas
embraces, and the result is that he confidently claims that only individuals
can have rights. Groups cannot. 38 That these are the two choices, indi-
viduals or groups, already betrays a limited political imagination. There is
no place for social movements and no place for collective forces to shape
humans, for the better or for the worse. Moreover, reason, like love in
hooks’s view, seems self-evident. Discernment is not needed to figure out
what it is. The most discernment that is needed is list-making: enumerat-
ing certain basic goods that human life is naturally directed toward and
that reason can help us attain. Thomas pejoratively labels collectives as
“interest groups,” and he poses a choice between civil rights policy moti-
vated by these interest groups and civil rights policy motivated by “prin-
ciple,” by which he means natural law. 39 As one would expect, he argues
that the latter is to be preferred, and that the latter is what a natural law tra-
dition that includes the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution,
Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Luther King Jr. would endorse.
These reflections lead to Thomas’s controversial rejection of affirma-
tive action. Thomas likens racial preference policies in the United States
( 134 ) Black Natural Law
to apartheid policies in South Africa.40 In both cases, the state does not
treat individuals as individuals. The state treats individuals as members
of a group, and this violates natural law. It disregards the inherent value
of each individual—the image of God in each individual. Certainly racial
discrimination should be combatted, Thomas agrees, but it must be com-
batted in ways that conform with natural law. Appealing to individual
worth is how slavery was ended, in Thomas’s view—curiously disregard-
ing the work of ideology critique and social movement organizing that
precipitated slavery’s end. This is what happens when Douglass and oth-
ers are read as only offering reasons, not as offering performances that
persuade with both reason and emotion. When the fuller dimensions of
natural law, dimensions underscored by the black natural law tradition
are embraced, ideology critique and social movement organizing flow
naturally and necessarily from natural law. Practical wisdom and strate-
gic thinking are necessary, in the black natural law tradition, to persuade
those in power to advance natural law. Thomas approaches natural law
from the perspective of someone holding the reins of power—a perspec-
tive that greatly skews one’s perception of natural law. The powerless
have epistemic privilege, according to the black natural law tradition, and
should be listened to even more carefully than one listens to the Thomists
or the Straussians with their seemingly sophisticated arguments and
seemingly subtle reasoning.
Thomas himself laments the decline of the natural law tradition. “Until
recently,” he writes, “it has been an integral part of the American political
tradition. Martin Luther King was the last prominent American political
figure to appeal to it.”41 Central to this tradition, according to Thomas, is
not only reason but also freedom—the freedom of the individual. This
freedom flows from reason: Each human being ought to be able to come
to his or her own decisions without unnecessary government impairment.
Freedom in this way entails the exercise of our human capacities, or rather
our one essential human capacity, our capacity to reason. Closely related
is equality, a “God-given right” in Thomas’s view. Natural law offers to
Thomas a justification for the enforcement of civil rights laws at the EEOC,
just as it offered Douglass and Lincoln a justification for the end of slavery
and King a justification for the end of segregation. Ronald Dworkin help-
fully distinguishes between natural law as a framework for interpreting
legal texts and natural law as a framework for invalidating worldly laws.
Dworkin identifies Thomas with the former approach and King with the
latter.42 While this distinction does capture how Thomas sees himself, as
a government official employing natural law theory, it obscures the reason
Thomas is able to take this interpretive approach, namely, because of his
cripplingly partial account of human nature.
DECLINE AND DE TRITUS ( 135 )
Like bell hooks, Keyes worries about a decline in the moral fiber of the
black community after the civil rights movement. Blacks feel as if they
have no value and, furthermore, that nothing has value. Once, slavery
dehumanized blacks. Now, blacks dehumanize themselves. Keyes fur-
ther argues that all that remains in this moral wasteland is immediate
sensation, placing him squarely in opposition to the degenerate accounts
of black natural law that cling to sensation as an authority. What went
wrong, according to Keyes, was a failure of responsibility. The divine
spark manifests in human freedom: choosing to perform a simple act of
kindness or choosing to treat others in a dehumanizing way. One practice
even during slavery that acknowledged humans’ divine spark was blacks
holding each other accountable; objects cannot be held accountable. With
the decline in black community morals, blacks too often ignore the divine
spark found in all humanity, do not treat others as accountable (a partic-
ular problem of the black intelligentsia), and do not treat themselves as
responsible (a particular problem of the black masses). Keyes places this
discussion of accountability directly in natural law terms. God judges
individuals, and one of the ways that individuals image God is through
their capacity to judge.
Indeed, Keyes aligns himself with King on this point. King’s focus
on nonviolence “called upon black Americans to display the rich moral
character quietly nurtured through the years beneath the surface of mate-
rial deprivation.”50 Nonviolence was a public display of moral responsi-
bility, unflinchingly accepting whatever legal or social penalty might be
given to the campaigner for racial justice. In contrast, Keyes charges that
campaigners for racial justice after the civil rights era demand economic
support from the government, rather than emphasizing personal respon-
sibility. The implicit ethical commitment motivating such politics is to a
concept of the human measured in dollars and cents—exactly the same
commitment that motivated slavery. Lost in liberal political advocacy,
according to Keyes, is the inherent worth of each individual, the divine
spark present in all humanity. Moreover, black political elites too often
take their task to be asking for goods from whites. This is another way in
which the inherent worth of blacks is forgotten. In Keyes’s view, there is
nothing that whites can give that is necessary for blacks once blacks real-
ize that they already have the spark of the divine in themselves. Keyes
takes this principle of black responsibility quite far, including advocacy
for strong neighborhood associations that would take charge of policing
and local governance.
Where Thomas focuses on the human capacity to reason as decisive
for natural law, Keyes focuses on a special case of reasoning, holding each
other responsible. Essential to our human nature is our capacity to hold
( 138 ) Black Natural Law
As the black natural law tradition began to decline, certain elements of the
tradition were privileged and others forgotten. Some black thinkers privi-
leged reason, and others emotion. A third response to the declining tradi-
tion, that of the pragmatist, has now come to dominate. The pragmatist
calls for justice but has no theory of justice. The pragmatist names certain
practices or laws as wrong but names no authority by which they should
be judged wrong. In a sense, this does not move as far from natural law as
it might at first seem, for, traditionally, natural law is seen as self-evident.
This self-evidence is usually taken to mean that every human being, not
just a privileged or trained elite, has the capacity to access natural law
( 140 ) Black Natural Law
programs, support for public education, and much else. Indeed, the views
held by protesters mapped very closely onto the progressive wing of the
Democratic Party. This already raises the question of whether the reli-
gious (or “moral”) sanction offered by Barber and others to these protests
was more than a sugar-coating to make a political agenda developed by
secular whites more persuasive.
Barber uses the words “moral,” “justice,” and “God” often. He does not,
however, talk about God’s law. He urges that “moral values” should guide
public policy. He says, “Our deepest moral traditions declare that the true
challenge to society is not private charity but public policy that impacts
how people exist every day of their lives.”68 He argues that both the Bible
and the Constitution take justice as their first principles. But he offers no
insight into how we might understand what the concept of justice means.
He offers no tools for discernment. He offers public policy prescriptions
that address what he takes to be self-evident wrongs, but he offers no point
of entry into a conversation about how we determine what counts as a
wrong. Barber performs a compelling impression of King, both in per-
formance and in the words he uses—until we listen to how those words
fit together. At that point, we realize that we are confronted with a moral
tradition in ruins.
Conclusion
Against Pessimism
I n the initial aftermath of the Civil War, Frederick Douglass had urged
blacks to work hard. With legal obstacles removed, there was no reason
blacks could not advance in the world like whites. There was no reason
they could not accumulate wealth, excel in education, and become lead-
ers in all fields. Twenty years later, in 1883, Douglass no longer believed
that hard work was enough. Even though slavery was abolished, many
obstacles to black advancement, both those imposed by law and those
imposed by social norms, remained. Today, half a century after the civil
rights movement ostensibly ended legal segregation, Douglass’s words are
remarkably resonant:
It is a real calamity, in this country, for any man, guilty or not guilty, to be accused
of crime, but it is an incomparably greater calamity for any colored man to be so
accused. Justice is often painted with bandaged eyes. She is described in forensic elo-
quence, as utterly blind to wealth or poverty, high or low, white or black, but a mask of
iron, however thick, could never blind American justice, when a black man happens
to be on trial. Here, even more than elsewhere, he will find all presumptions of law
and evidence against him.1
is about neither of the topics with which it is most often associated in the
popular imagination: religion or nature.
While this is a specific debate in the philosophy of law, it offers a micro-
cosm of the broader issues at stake in conversations about natural law.
Natural law rejects the notion that we must always defer to the law of the
land, and it rejects the notion that we must always defer to the wisdom
of the world. There is a higher law that trumps, and natural law theories
provide an account of how to access that higher law. In short, it is accessed
through nature; specifically, through human nature. We each know, by
our own nature, that the law of the land errs. Through reflection on our
human nature, we can determine which laws are unjust, in conflict with
natural law. Such laws do not bind us. Blacks in America have been par-
ticularly aware of the injustice of certain laws; indeed, the black natural
law tradition holds that blacks have an epistemic privilege, allowing for
especially clear knowledge of the higher law because of the dehumaniza-
tion they have faced. Aware that they are human and that the law of the
land refuses to respect their humanity, generations of black Americans
have discerned natural law and used it to challenge the law of the land.
Higher law opposed to the wisdom of the world is sometimes called
natural law, sometimes called God’s law. This last label prompts worries,
some of which surfaced at Thomas’s confirmation hearings. If the goal of
natural law is to implement the higher law on earth, will a nation that listens
to natural law become a theocracy? In the contemporary American politi-
cal landscape, this is the domain of the Religious Right, intent on apply-
ing normative prescriptions from a sacred text to lawmaking, for example,
in Congress (it is also the proponents of Sharia imagined by the West).
Attempts to build a “religious left” have often begun with general prin-
ciples palatable to an “interfaith” audience, such as love-your-neighbor.
Rather than translating biblical law into U.S. law, the contemporary reli-
gious left encourages lawmaking to be approached with abstract religious
principles in mind.
Black natural law neither supports theocracy nor distills religion into
vague, abstract principles. Once the allergy to religion that infects con-
temporary political discourse has been treated, such dichotomies dis-
solve. The boundaries between religion, culture, and politics blur. Indeed,
scholars of religion have argued that the notion of religion as a discrete
phenomenon primarily located in the individual is a peculiarly modern
phenomenon.7 Also peculiarly modern is secularism, the aversion to reli-
gion that depends on and reinforces the notion that religion is a discrete
object. Secularism is distinct from secularization: While the latter names
the decline in religious belief or practice, the former names the ideology
that excludes religious belief or practice from a given domain, often the
AF TERWORD ( 151 )
public square.8 It was once popular to see the Western world as secular-
izing, but with the growth and increased visibility of a variety of religious
communities in recent years, ranging from nondenominational mega-
churches to Mormons to Muslims, secularization narratives appear to
be more a product of secularism than a description of the contemporary
religious landscape.
Naming the ideology of secularism illuminates the complicated role of
religion in the current American political landscape, and it hints at why
black natural law has been forgotten—for secularism casts religion as an
object both feared and desired. On the one hand, American politicians
have an obligation to say that their “personal religious convictions” will be
insulated from their policymaking: They won’t make laws based on what
they think God wants. On the other hand, personal religiosity is a pre-
requisite for elected office, and atheists remain among the least electable
candidates, even less electable than racial minorities and homosexuals.
This apparent ambivalence is produced by secularism: Religion is pushed
away and surreptitiously embraced at the same time, and to do so, religion
is packaged as first and foremost a set of personal commitments, beliefs
that may or may not give rise to practices or institutions. In this way, sec-
ularism affects not only secular culture but also religious communities.
A once amorphous blend of culture, religious practice, and social concern
becomes packaged as an object, a religion with a set of beliefs, even in
the self-understanding of religious communities. Consequently, the sort
of religious language permissible in public is largely vacuous, either hope-
lessly vague or deployed as little more than rhetorical oomph to advance
one side of a debate already configured in secular political terms. Just as
an object of fantasy blinds us to complex mundane realities, the construc-
tion of religion as a polarizing object by secularism blinds us to complex
realities, and so enervates our political discourse.
While secularism has long reigned among the privileged—whites,
men, and economic elites—other communities have maintained a com-
plex mixture of religion and culture. In part, this is a perception dictated
by secularism: The object of fantasy, religion, is possessed by the other
(female, black, or working class), and this object, like its possessors, is
feared and desired by the privileged. But only in part, for it does seem
plausible that secularism and social privilege, or at least upper-middle-
class status in the contemporary West, are deeply connected. Social
privilege is accompanied by a certain style of living, one that is confi-
dent in the status quo and explains away moments of paradox, tragedy, or
insecurity—in short, a lifestyle that is primed to dogmatically embrace
the secular. From outside positions of privilege, where ordinary lives con-
tinuously encounter the inexplicable and the unjustifiable, the aspiration
( 152 ) Black Natural Law
to exclude or control religion is less common. From the margins, the fact
that there is mixing of religion, culture, ethics, and politics is self-evident.
This is the terrain where black natural law begins. However, it is terrain
that is quickly disappearing as secularism spreads into marginal commu-
nities themselves.
The black natural law tradition has been obscured by secularism, and it
has also been obscured by multiculturalism. As a principle, multicultur-
alism grants accommodations, such as funding or rights, to groups that
share a culture (e.g., minority ethnic groups). As an ideology, multicultur-
alism in the United States affirms the value of cultural diversity and some
degree of cultural autonomy. I contend that, where secularism excludes or
manages religion, multiculturalism excludes or manages race. For both,
the object becomes reified, becomes an autonomous, problematic entity—
one that is highly charged, feared, and desired. Multiculturalism purports
to embrace race, but only if it can be managed, can take on a comfort-
able, controllable form. Race is reduced to culture, frightening skin tones
converted to a festival of colors, ordered properly in a joyful rainbow.
I contend that multiculturalism hampers black politics just as secularism
hampers higher law, limiting its role in politics. Multiculturalism makes
us imagine black politics as relying on an obsolete biological notion of race
or, at best, it makes us feel guilty about privileging one type of oppression
over others (what about a Latino or an immigrant politics? or a feminist
or queer politics?). Even those on the radical left who promote “people of
color” as the privileged name for the oppressed do so within the frame-
work of multiculturalism, bringing together the many “of color” cultures
in a rainbow lacking only the color white.
Those who have sought to undergird black politics with political theory
have often taken a correct understanding of racial identity as a prerequi-
site for political engagement. They have asked: In what ways can a concept
of blackness or race be understood so that it does not entail commit-
ments to antiquated biology and so it does not overlook internal diversity
within the black community?9 Framed in this way, the question solicits
an answer that searches for a middle ground, for a pragmatic account of
race, drawing on precedents in the work of such authors as W. E. B. Du
Bois and Martin Delaney to legitimate racial language when it is useful
in addressing pressing social problems. Since many pressing social prob-
lems today particularly affect those whom we ordinarily refer to as black,
and because the language of blackness can especially motivate this com-
munity to collectively address social problems, it is deemed a legitimate
language for politics. In this view, blackness is not the only language for
politics (there may be other languages to address other problems, such
AF TERWORD ( 153 )
navigate them as one would wish. I worry that the pragmatism so preva-
lent today in black political thought and practice ignores the normativ-
ity of tradition, and so suffers from such reduced efficacy—from reduced
freedom. The same worry applies to cultural studies. Describing practices
and values without considering the ongoing, binding force of tradition
makes politics a spectator sport, one particularly well suited for comfort-
able academics.
The banner of tradition is now flown most readily by politically conser-
vative Catholics. A specific style of moral reasoning is said to be embodied
in the Catholic tradition: natural law. Particularly in recent years, natu-
ral law is presented independent from the Catholic tradition, as a style
of moral reasoning accessible to all and, moreover, preferable to each
alternative. This recent development is a result of secularism: Natural law
discourse is purified of the taint of religion, particularly Catholicism. Yet
even the explicitly Catholic account of natural law rests on a narrow sense
of tradition and, consequently, a narrow sense of natural law. The oppo-
sition of Catholic tradition to secular modernity so central to the self-
image of conservative Catholicism is itself a product of secularism, a force
that causes religion to be imagined in a way that makes a divide between
secular and religious domains possible. When we set aside the image of
tradition as hermetic (another version of the secularist fantasy), we see
a contemporary landscape full of multiple traditions in various states
of cohesion and disarray, with various characteristic styles of political
engagement. Among the traditions we see is the African American politi-
cal tradition, once robust, now moribund. Like the Catholic tradition, the
style of political engagement characteristic of the African American polit-
ical tradition is natural law, but it is a quite distinct type of natural law.
How do secularism and multiculturalism deal with natural law tradi-
tions? There are three primary approaches: deflationary, pluralizing, and
robust. The deflationary view is motivated by secularism; the pluralizing
view is motivated by multiculturalism. Black natural law, like Catholic
natural law, takes the robust view; however, black natural law takes the
robust view in a quite different direction, for the contemporary, conser-
vative Catholic approach has been contaminated by secularism, even as
secularism is what it claims to most vehemently reject.
An easy—too easy—response to the puzzle of how the same natural
law language could be used in such different ways by political conserva-
tives and by social justice advocates is to dismiss the language of natu-
ral law as mere rhetoric. Understood in this way, natural law (including
“God’s law” and “higher law”) is nothing more than a language used to
persuade, making a given position seem more appealing. Natural law
was language that appealed to Douglass’s abolitionist supporters in the
AF TERWORD ( 157 )
Can we understand black natural law in the way that Traina sug-
gests? Doing so would mean that there are certain “black” (rather than,
in Traina’s case, “female”) capacities and circumstances that need to be
taken into account for African Americans to make sense of their innate
inclination toward the good. Phrased in this way, Traina’s account seems
much less plausible in the case of race than in the case of gender. The radi-
cal potential that the natural law invoked by Douglass or King holds—the
potential to overturn deeply entrenched racism—is lost when natural law
is understood as a style of reasoning that takes as its starting point the
circumstances and capacities of a certain community (the starting point
of multiculturalism). Traina wants to avoid saying that there are certain
circumstances and capacities that all humans share—but black natural
law, I contend, makes an even more radical move. It suggests that the one
thing all humans share, at the core of our humanity, is an essential inef-
fability. The process of discerning natural law is a process of working that
ineffable point indefinitely, always failing but trying to fail better. Traina,
in contrast, supposes that circumstances and capacities can be named
accurately and so can provide a firm starting point for reasoning about the
(undefined) good. Like Stout’s deflationary approach, Traina’s alternative
account of natural law lacks the capacity for criticizing the wisdom of the
world found in black natural law.
The third approach to natural law language is robust. It takes natu-
ral law language to be part of a style of ethical-political engagement. In
general terms, this involves an ascent from social conventions to a higher
authority that is made possible by an aspect of human nature—for the-
ists, the aspect that is in the image of God. The most widely discussed
contemporary view of this stripe identifies this aspect of human nature as
the capacity to reason coupled with an orientation to the good and, more
concretely, to certain basic goods such as life, procreation, and knowl-
edge.16 These goods provide reasons for acting; humans, as rational crea-
tures, have the capacity to act in response to these reasons in pursuit of
goods. In short, natural law is a “law of practical reasonableness.”17 A story
is told about the tradition of natural law as a tradition of proper reason-
ing, from Cicero through Aquinas through Locke through King. In each
case, natural law, be it generically “higher” or “God’s,” is accessed through
this proper reasoning that all humans have the capacity to use. Indeed, a
common feature of the natural law tradition is the claim that natural law
is self-evident, apparent to all without external assistance.
This robust account of natural law sounds quite different from what we
find in black natural law. As we saw in the preceding chapters, figures such
as King and Douglass do treat the higher law to which they refer as self-
evident and accessible to all human beings. However, black natural law
AF TERWORD ( 159 )
societies as well as for individuals. Thus, having tried to give pattern to the
chaos which lives within the pattern of your certainties, I must come out,
I must emerge.”19 While Ellison’s narrator remains invisible, not capable
of being represented by the wisdom of the world, unlike Bigger Thomas,
he resolves to “emerge,” now cognizant of the “chaos” that the wisdom of
the world seeks to conceal, ready to push back against it.
The end of the 1960s saw the rise of black theology, a movement that
sought to harness black power and black Christianity. The most signifi-
cant figure in this movement was James Cone, and in his early work, par-
adox was front and center.20 Cone describes blackness as being at once
“ontological symbol” and “visible reality.” He writes, “Freedom is the
opposite of oppression, but only the oppressed are truly free.”21 Freedom
in Christ, Cone suggests, means becoming a servant to Christ. Moreover,
“Black Power … is by nature ‘irrational.’ ”22 Cone thus acknowledges that
his descriptions of human nature seem paradoxical, that they are non-
sense from the perspective of the wisdom of the world. “The logic of lib-
eration is always incomprehensible to the slave masters.”23 Further, Cone
asserts that embedded in the wisdom of the world, which he identifies
with white people and sin, is a desire “to play God in the realm of human
affairs.”24 The only way to break through is to risk death, which displays
pure humanity in a way that nothing else can—pure humanity that is vis-
ible only when it rejects everything supposedly human. By the end of the
1970s, Cone and others associated with black theology had moved away
from paradox, instead embracing “contextual” theology, which pluralizes
rather than voids human nature—a theology of multiculturalism that
ultimately also embraces secularism.
While black natural law characterizes the mainstream of black intellec-
tual life, it has also surfaced in various radical political projects. Marcus
Garvey, for example, invokes God’s law in calling for black unity around
his Universal Negro Improvement Association. Law is a favored topic in
the Nation of Islam, from Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X to the pres-
ent. A higher law, also practiced as a law of life, sets black Muslims apart
from other African Americans. Louis Farrakhan, on his more sophisti-
cated days, associates the natural order of creation with God’s law, linking
it with God’s law as a guarantor of the sanctity of human life in a way not
unfamiliar to mainstream black natural law.
In examples such as these, aspects of black natural law are present, but
not the full style of political engagement. Wright and Ellison dramatize
the limits of the wisdom of the world but only gesture toward a critical
political practice. Cone uses Christian theological language to suggest
that blackness and liberation may offer such a critical political practice, but
Cone’s discussion remains at a distance from the practicalities of politics.
AF TERWORD ( 161 )
Garvey, the Nation of Islam, and other radical political projects invoke a
higher law to distinguish themselves, but do so at the expense of adding
content to that higher law and thus separate themselves from the main-
stream African American political tradition, where the focus is on dis-
cernment of natural law rather than on specific normative prescriptions.
Some will object that the examples discussed in this book illustrate
how black natural law valorizes the charismatic black leader, a problematic
figure because of the undemocratic authority invested in him and because
this model of leadership privileges certain performances of masculinity.25
Such critics would say that talk of higher law conjures up the strong, exces-
sively virile black race man preaching to his flock, telling them how to be
saved both politically and spiritually. These race men seemingly imagine
themselves as Moses going to the mountain and bringing back God-given
tablets describing the higher law. A better model for black politics, from
this perspective, is that of the grassroots organizer, the Ella Baker figure
deeply committed to allowing others to realize their own political agency,
to turning on the extraordinary potential of ordinary people when they
work together to solve shared problems.26
Yet Moses himself may be read as first and foremost an organizer,
facilitating the collaboration of ordinary people doing extraordinary
things—and God’s law helped him organize.27 Indeed, black natural law
is accessible to everyone; the task of leadership is simply to show peo-
ple what they already have (again, this is also the task of the organizer).
What they already have is a critical capacity to suspend the wisdom of
the world. But black natural law is not only about critique or suspicion;
this is what Bigger Thomas and the Invisible Man miss. Black natural law
is also embodied and performed in social movements, in the upsurge of
individuals activated to challenge power, because the mystifications of
power are exposed as shams. There is both a critical side and a movement
side to black natural law; both are essential. Valorizing the Ella Bakers, the
grassroots organizers, is insufficient, for it overlooks the critical moment
necessary to question why certain problems appear and what other prob-
lems are concealed.
The voices of black natural law in the preceding pages often sound
unfamiliar, foreign. Because of the hold that secularism and multicul-
turalism have on black politics and black political thought today, black
natural law has been largely forgotten. Clarence Thomas clings to one
incoherent fragment; James Baldwin to another; and Barack Obama to
yet another. This third approach has become hegemonic; it occupies the
White House but it is also claimed by critics of the White House, such
as Cornel West. Unfortunately, pragmatism lacks the resources to be
genuinely critical, to interrogate how our perception of social problems
( 162 ) Black Natural Law
is skewed and masked. This latent weakness becomes explicit in the anxi-
ety and attraction evident when pragmatic black political theorists are
confronted with a pragmatic black president. Black political thinkers may
be frustrated with Obama’s pragmatic approach, his apparent lack of any
critical edge, his contentment with adjudicating the options that present
themselves instead of interrogating why those options are visible and what
other options are concealed, but this is exactly what pragmatic political
theory looks like when it is implemented in the real world. And so we have
reached an impasse. Black natural law, understood as part of the African
American political tradition, offers a new approach. As a tradition, it does
not purport to make an argument on neutral ground. Traditions assert
the rightness of their positions, respond to internal contradictions—and,
ultimately, call for conversion.28 Conversion is taboo in an era of secular-
ism and multiculturalism, but it is at the heart of political commitment.
This is not conversion to Christianity or monotheism, but rather conver-
sion to the side of the excluded and oppressed—most concretely in the
contemporary United States, to the side of the two million imprisoned
Americans whose human nature is systematically denied.
NOT E S
PREFACE
1. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom.”
2. I am obliged to acknowledge a Georgia State University Research Initiation Grant,
an Individual Research Grant from the American Academy of Religion, the Woodrow
Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, and residential fellowships at Emory’s James
Weldon Johnson Institute and the Notre Dame Institute for Advanced Study for sup-
port in the writing of this book. I am grateful to Sofia Henderson for correcting many
mistaken views I held about politics. I am also grateful for the thoughtful comments
of Josh Dubler, Shana Redmond, Angela Dillard, Devin Fergus, Melvin Rogers, Dana
Lloyd, and especially Katie Weaver.
CHAPTER 1
1. Parenthetical references are to Douglass, Speeches, volume: page.
2. See Martin, The Mind of Frederick Douglass; a similarly dismissive attitude is often
taken even by those who explicitly focus on Douglass’s natural law theory, such as
Myers, Frederick Douglass.
3. Boxill, “Fear and Shame as Forms of Moral Suasion”; Bromell, “The Liberal Imagination
of Frederick Douglass.”
4. I explore the entanglement of these questions more fully in “The Affect of God’s Law.”
5. On the latter point, Douglass writes, “Men talk much of a new birth. The fact is funda-
mental. But the mistake is in treating it as an incident which can only happen to a man
once in a life time; whereas, the whole journey of life is a succession of them. A new
life springs up in the soul, with the discovery of every new agency by which the soul is
raised to a higher level of wisdom, goodness and joy” (3:460).
6. Douglass suggests two further sources of distortion. Economic prosperity can induce
comfort and complacency that inhibit the critical capacities and, secondly, alcohol can
distort. Douglass was a supporter of the temperance movement and occasionally spoke
on behalf of this cause.
7. A point particularly well developed by Snarr, All You That Labor, and Stout, Blessed are
the Organized.
8. For a similar account in contemporary political theory, see Garsten, Saving Persuasion.
9. See Brown, Politics Out of History, and Geuss, Philosophy and Real Politics.
10. Parenthetical references that follow refer to Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom.
11. Douglass was surprisingly successful. In 1877, he met and reconciled with Auld’s
family.
12. Douglass’s last book continues with many rather sundry details of his later life; nothing
matches the dramatic power of the fight. Particularly compelling scholarly treatments
( 164 ) Notes
of the fight include Gordon’s existential reading, in Existentia Africana, and Carter’s
theological reading, in Race.
CHAPTER 2
1. Bamforth and Richards, Patriarchal Religion, Sexuality, and Gender; Traina, Feminist
Ethics and Natural Law. The target of such critique is often Finnis, Natural Law and
Natural Rights.
2. Biographical information from Anna J. Cooper Papers, Manuscript Division,
Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University; Hutchinson, Anna J. Cooper.
Quotations in this section are from Cooper Papers, Box 1, Folder 1, except where
noted.
3. Cooper Papers, Box 1, Folder 2.
4. Parenthetical references are to Cooper, Voice.
5. Cooper Papers, Box 1, Folder 8.
6. Ibid., Box 4, Folder 31; Box 4, Folder 47.
7. Ibid., Box 4, Folder 53.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., Box 1, Folder 8.
10. See, e.g., May, Anna Julia Cooper.
11. See Cooper, Voice, 57: “Christ gave ideals not formulae. The Gospel is a germ requiring
millennia for its growth and ripening.”
12. Cooper, Slavery and the French Revolutionists, 115.
13. Ibid., 121.
14. Cooper argues that the West is unique in this regard; she writes that the East in general
and Islam in particular are deeply oppressive to women (53).
15. In response to a written question about her views of education, Cooper responded, “I
have always stood for that Education that aims at the making of Men rather than the
constructing of machines. If the Negro is a man then what is good for Man, in all its
age-old and infinite varieties, is good for him. Why should he be cabined and cribbed
with just this or just that for his mental pabulum?” Cooper Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.
16. May includes a list of such organizations on pp. 10–11 of Anna Julia Cooper; I have also
included memberships found in the Cooper Papers.
17. Cooper Papers, Box 1, Folder 1.
18. Gaines, Uplifting the Race.
CHAPTER 3
1. See especially Kahn, Divine Discontent, and Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois.
2. “My career as a scientist was to be swallowed up in my role as master of propaganda”
(Writings, 622). Du Bois’s late novels certainly fall into the category of propaganda
as well.
3. In other words, I am not arguing that Du Bois secretly holds a natural law view, one that
he might for some reason be afraid to express, à la Leo Strauss. Rather, Du Bois simply
did not have the occasion to express his views in this way. My reconstruction remains
accountable to Du Bois; he should be able to recognize himself in it.
4. The locus classicus of this literature is Appiah, “Uncompleted Argument.”
5. See Foot, Natural Goodness.
6. This sense of “scientific” is persuasively developed by Louis Althusser in For Marx.
7. Parenthetical references in this chapter are to Du Bois, Writings.
8. See also Du Bois, “The Atlanta Conferences,” 86.
9. Ibid., 85.
Notes ( 165 )
CHAPTER 4
1. King, Testament of Hope, 49.
2. For an example of such an analysis of King’s use of natural law, see Timothy P. Jackson,
“Martin Luther King, Jr.”
3. Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 159.
4. Compare how King also suggests injustice is contagious: “A withered sense of justice in
an expanding society leads to corruption of the lives of all Americans” (Where Do We
Go From Here? 85).
5. Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket, 250.
6. See, e.g., King, Papers, 5:421.
7. For further discussion, see Wills, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Image of God.
8. Nevertheless, significant portions of the theological reflections contained in this text
are borrowed nearly verbatim from others without attribution.
9. Parenthetical references here refer to King, Stride Toward Freedom.
10. Of course, the story is more complicated than this: Others had been arrested with-
out attracting widespread protest, and Parks was already invested in the struggle
against segregation. For broader context here and elsewhere, see, e.g., Garrow, Bearing
the Cross.
11. Parenthetical citations in this format refer to King, Papers, volume: page.
12. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 67– 68, 164. Melissa Snarr develops such an account of
organizing in All You That Labor.
13. In contrast, Barbara Allen reads King as committed to an American tradition that uni-
fies federal and divine law in her “Martin Luther King’s Civil Disobedience.”
Notes ( 167 )
CHAPTER 5
1. It originally appeared six times, but one quotation, a paraphrase that caused a good
deal of controversy, was removed.
2. Reed makes this comment in reference to Henry Louis Gates’s memoir, in his W. E. B.
Du Bois and American Political Thought, 160.
3. hooks, Yearning, 4.
4. Powell, “Seek Audacious Power,” 7.
( 168 ) Notes
43. E.g., Biden, “Law and Natural Law”; Tribe, “Clarence Thomas and ‘Natural Law.’ ”
44. Lowery, “The SCLS Position,” 152.
45. National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, “The NAACP
Announces Opposition to Judge Thomas’s Nomination,” 144.
46. Jet, “God’s Law,” 8.
47. One of Thomas’s former law clerks has a rather different take on the Justice, suggesting
that he ought to be read in the tradition of black nationalism. On this view, Thomas
holds that, after the civil rights movement, “Blacks need not look to race-based rem-
edies or preferential treatment from society in order to succeed. They need only look
within, to the genius, creativity, and capacity for hard work that resides in the heart
and mind of every black person.” While this view brings Thomas closer to the black
natural law tradition, with its focus on multidimensional accounts of human capaci-
ties, Thomas seems to hold his views of racial uplift independent of his views of natural
law (Smith, “Clarence X,” 586).
48. Keyes, Masters of the Dream, 8.
49. Ibid., 9.
50. Ibid., 19.
51. For another example of this technique, see Cain, This Is Herman Cain!
52. Carson and Carson, One Nation, 151.
53. Carson, America the Beautiful, 194.
54. Ibid., 110.
55. Carson and Carson, One Nation, 43.
56. Ibid., 41.
57. Ibid., 192.
58. Million Man March, xiv.
59. Ibid., 14.
60. Ibid., 15.
61. Ibid., 17.
62. Farrakhan further argues that the obstacle to union with God for blacks is
whites: “White supremacy has to die in order for humanity to live,” he says. “The false
idea of White supremacy prevents anyone from becoming one with God” (Million Man
March, 21–22).
63. Ibid., 29.
64. Obama, “The Audacity of Hope.”
65. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad.
66. Obama, “A More Perfect Union.”
67. Ibid.
68. Barber, “Speech at Netroots Nation.”
CONCLUSION
1. Douglass, Speeches, 5:63.
2. It might be objected that the exponential growth in the U.S. prison population is rela-
tively confined to the last half century. Although there is, indeed, a unique—and truly
grotesque—explosion of the prison population, particularly for poor blacks, this phe-
nomenon is in continuity with the long history of racism in the criminal justice system
that Douglass identifies (Davis, Abolition Democracy). See also Harcourt’s argument that,
when other forms of institutionalization such as mental health facilities are taken into
account, the incarcerated population is relatively stable since its initial explosion with the
advent of financial liberalism in the 18th century (Harcourt, Illusion of Free Markets).
3. Frank Wilderson synthesizes the tradition in the first chapter of his Red, White, and
Black. In theology, Carter’s Race and Jennings’s Christian Imagination can be read in
this tradition.
4. For a thoughtful reflection on hope in Afro-pessimism, see Warren, “Black Nihilism
and the Politics of Hope”; see also Lloyd, “Afro-Pessimism and Christian Hope.”
( 170 ) Notes
5. Lloyd, “Of Fathers and Sons.” I am grateful to Amaryah Jones-Armstrong for thinking
through these points with me.
AFTERWORD
1. The classic account, focusing particularly on European natural law traditions, is
d’Entrèves, Natural Law.
2. Faust (ed.), Ideology of Slavery, but see also Dyer, Natural Law and the Antislavery
Constitutional Tradition.
3. See, e.g., Ramsey, Basic Christian Ethics, Chap. 2.
4. Strauss, Natural Right and History.
5. Brague, The Law of God.
6. See, e.g., Tierney, The Idea of Natural Rights.
7. E.g., Asad, Genealogies of Religion; Taylor, A Secular Age.
8. This distinction is made particularly clearly by Jeffrey Stout in Democracy and Tradition.
9. E.g., Shelby, We Who Are Dark; Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro!; Gooding-Williams,
In the Shadow of Du Bois; Glaude, In a Shade of Blue.
10. MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? See also Stout, Democracy and Tradition.
11. This point is particularly well put in Brandom, “Freedom and Constraint by Norms.”
12. Stout, “Truth, Natural Law, and Ethical Theory.”
13. Traina, Feminist Ethics and Natural Law. A related point is made in Hall, Narrative and
the Natural Law.
14. Traina, Feminist Ethics and Natural Law, 8.
15. Ibid.
16. The seminal work here is Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights.
17. George, The Clash of Orthodoxies, Chap. 9.
18. This approach to political theorizing is hinted at by Judith Butler’s suggestion that the
human is “that which limits the success of any representational practice.” Drawing on
Emmanuel Levinas, she writes, “For representation to convey the human, then, repre-
sentation must not only fail, but it must show its failure. There is something unrepre-
sentable that we nevertheless seek to represent, and that paradox must be retained in
the representation we give” (Precarious Life, 144). In other words, Butler is affirming
that the wisdom of the world (“any representational practice”) necessarily fails when
it tries to incorporate human nature (“the human”). The desire to be accurately rep-
resented, to be counted in the world, necessarily causes us to challenge the wisdom
of the world. Catholic natural law takes human nature as oriented toward the good;
this resonates with black natural law, animated by a desire that cannot be sated in the
world. What black natural law rejects is the attempt to compile a definitive list of basic
goods found in the world, to which our desires are properly oriented.
19. Ellison, Invisible Man, 579.
20. I develop this point more fully in “Paradox and Tradition in Black Theology.”
21. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 87.
22. Cone, Risks of Faith, 5.
23. Cone, Black Theology of Liberation, 10.
24. Ibid., 108.
25. This issue is explored particularly well in Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black
Leadership.
26. Glaude, “Pragmatic Reconstructions”; Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom
Movement.
27. See Walzer, Exodus and Revolution.
28. This point is developed in MacIntyre, Three Rival Versions.
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INDE X
Civil War, 7, 15, 19, 26, 27, 54, 144 Gandhi, Mahatma, 97, 107
colonialism, 13, 109–110 Garrison, William Lloyd, 16
Communism, 111 Garrisonian abolitionists, 27
Cone, James, 160 Garvey, Marcus, 160, 161
Confederacy, 15, 81, 92 Gates, Henry Louis, 167n2
Connor, Bull, 88 God
Constitution, 1, 3, 94, 133, 143, 148 desire for, 35, 36, 38, 102, 115
conversion, 162 fatherhood of, 28, 45, 48, 76, 117, 124
Cooper, George A. C., 34 identified with those who suffer, 75
Covey, Edward, 7, 31, 147 participation in, 5, 31, 36, 37, 54, 57, 70,
crime, 111, 144, 165n30, 166n61 74–75, 77, 82, 91, 98, 104
Crummell, Alexander, 70–71 Supreme Court of the Almighty, 3
culture, 154 Thomas’s view of, 132, 135–36
working through history, 37, 38, 97,
Davis, Jefferson, 81– 83 115–16
Decalogue, 6 See also Jesus
Declaration of Independence, 1, 37–38, Good Samaritan, 109
103, 133, 139
Delaney, Martin, 152 Haiti, 48
democracy, 10, 82, 100, 116 happiness, 5, 15, 29, 36, 56, 104
devil, 21, 76 Harcourt, Bernard, 169n2
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 92, 114 Harper’s Ferry. See Brown, John
dictatorship, 49. See also tyranny Harriford, James, 101
dignity, 34, 54, 91, 94, 96, 99, 103, 115, 116 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 155
double consciousness, 59, 69 Hill, Anita, 135
Douglass Institute, Frederick, 9 homosexuality, xi, 33, 112
dueling, 22 hooks, bell, 119, 129–31
Dworkin, Ronald, 134 human nature, ix
Douglass’s view of, 3, 7
Ebenezer Baptist Church, 114
education, 13, 15, 19, 32, 33, 53–55, 67, idolatry, xi, 6, 7, 8, 70, 82, 102, 127
86– 87, 112–13, 115, 143 imagination, xii, 40
Eliot, George, 50, 51 Indians, American, 46
Ellison, Ralph, 159– 60 integration, xii
Emancipation, 19 Ireland, British colonization of, 13
epistemic privilege, ix, 23, 68, 69, 73, 80, Islam, Cooper’s view of, 164n14
98–99, 126, 134, 150
Equal Employment Opportunity Jackson, Jesse, 121–22, 140
Commission (EEOC), 132, 134 jeremiad, 142
equality, 21–22, 26, 28, 105, 142 Jesus
erotic, Lorde’s account of the, 127–29 as black, 44, 75, 79, 160
ethics, distinguished from politics, 155 Carson on, 138
exemplars, moral, 18–19, 24 Cone on, 160
Cooper on, 39, 41, 44, 45
family, 41, 48, 53, 55, 64, 117. See also Douglass on, 6, 13, 15
motherhood, children Du Bois on, 58, 59, 75, 79, 84
Farrakhan, Louis, 140– 41, 160 King on, 94, 97, 107, 116
Federalist Papers, 132 resurrection of, 79
freedom, 20–21, 22, 26, 28, 29, 30–31, 40, Jews
85, 134, 142, 155, 160, 165n29 Douglass’s view of, 12
Freylinghausen University, 55 likened to Catholics, 149
Index ( 179 )