Lloyd, Vincent W - Black Natural Law (2016)

Black Natural
Law
Black Natural Law
Vincent W. Lloyd
1
1
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Library of congress cataloging in publication data

Names: Lloyd, Vincent W., 1982– author.
Title: Black natural law / Vincent W. Lloyd.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015044627 (print) | LCCN 2016009346 (ebook) |
ISBN 978–0–19–936218–9 (hardback) | ISBN 978–0–19–936219–6 (E-book) |
ISBN 978–0–19–061058–6 (E-book) | ISBN 978–0–19–061059–3 ( Online Component)
Subjects: LCSH: African Americans—Politics and government—Philosophy.
| African Americans—Religion—History. | Political theology and race—United States.
| BISAC: POLITICAL SCIENCE / Political Freedom & Security / General.
| SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / African American Studies.
| SOCIAL SCIENCE / Black Studies (Global).
Classification: LCC E185.6 .L63 2016 (print) | LCC E185.6 (ebook)
| DDC 323.1196/073—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015044627
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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
world. In short, natural law means many things to many people—though

proponents of any particular brand of natural law often act as if they are
the only champions of it.
One way to approach natural law is to examine its conclusions. What
does (a particular tradition of) natural law say ought and ought not to be
done? Should abortion be legal? What about euthanasia or gay marriage?
Natural law promises to offer answers based on facts about the natural
world or about human nature. Different natural law traditions discern or
apply those facts in different ways. To give a quick example, we might con-
clude with Aquinas that procreation is essential to human nature. If a gov-
ernment passes laws that discourage or limit procreation, they run counter
to the natural law. From the perspective of some adherents of natural law,
such laws are not genuine laws at all, and everyone is capable of seeing
this by reflecting on our own human nature. This position is more subtle
than the belief that the laws of a nation ought to match the laws given
by God in a sacred text. Discernment and judgment are necessary. Such
added intellectual work is often forgotten in the political arena where God
is rhetorically positioned as an advocate or opponent of a particular law
under consideration. In the political arena, what matters most about natu-
ral law is what it prescribes: Do this, don’t do that. Natural law traditions
are richer than this. Their richness comes from the process rather than the
product: from the careful examination of human nature, from reflection
on the implications of a particular view of human nature, and from the
judgment used to apply those implications to the specifics of an ethical or
political debate. My claim in this book is that this process, when engaged
in collectively, catalyzes social movements and offers a critique of the wis-
dom of the world. While the black natural law tradition I describe cer-
tainly opposes slavery and segregation, those conclusions are much less
interesting than what natural law as a style of ethical and political engage-
ment does. Part of what is lost in recent invocations of natural law, such as
those of Clarence Thomas and more recently Ben Carson, is the richness
of that process. Natural law becomes mere rhetoric, the use of God’s name
to support this or that policy—the use of God’s name in vain.
In a sense, this book pluralizes our understanding of natural law. It adds
one more tradition to the many natural law traditions that have attracted
scholarly attention and motivated political action. While the black politi-
cal leaders discussed in this book certainly did draw on both religious and
secular European traditions of natural law, they also drew on black experi-
ences of enslavement and injustice, elements of black culture, and distinc-
tive black religious ideas and practices to formulate a largely autonomous
natural law tradition. In other words, this book demonstrates that African
Americans have their own tradition of ethical and political reflection;
Preface ( ix )
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
hot-button conservative causes of the day—to oppose abortion, to oppose

gay marriage, and to defend “traditional” standards of decency. As it has
been mobilized for political purposes, the philosophical and theologi-
cal richness of this tradition has been reduced, assuring its broad appeal
among conservatives of various stripes but limiting its coherence. In this
politicized natural law discourse, the natural law of Catholics is easily
confused with evangelicals’ commitment to the law of a personal God,
which is easily confused with libertarians’ commitment to a natural right
to freedom from government interference. As Biden’s skeptical question-
ing evinces, upon entering the realm of partisan politics, natural law came
to mean little more than a Republican slogan, inevitably meeting with
knee-jerk opposition from Democrats.
As I discuss in more detail in chapter 5, Clarence Thomas stood
between the black natural law tradition and the politicized, conservative
understanding of natural law. Thomas claimed the mantle of Frederick
Douglass and Martin Luther King Jr., but Thomas was also in dialogue
with conservative intellectuals seeking to reclaim natural law, as well as
with politicians seeking to deploy the rhetoric of natural law to advance
Republican interests. Rather than arguing that Thomas betrays the black
natural law tradition, I argue that the tradition collapsed into incoherence
after the civil rights movement. All that was left for Thomas to grasp were
incoherent fragments, and he bound these together with conservative,
politicized understandings of natural law in his ultimately incoherent
political philosophy. In contrast, Martin Luther King Jr.’s invocations of
natural law grew out of his immersion in the practices, values, and institu-
tions of the black community, though they were certainly not unaffected
by his awareness of other natural law traditions. King obviously did use
natural law in political contexts, as part of his political rhetoric, but his
invocations of natural law cannot be reduced to mere rhetoric employed
as a political cudgel.
Black natural law is not a political program that advances a set of
goals. Rather, black natural law is suspicious of the wisdom of the
world, ideology. It proclaims that we, through our own human nature,
can see that the world is not as it seems. The wisdom of the world is
a mystification used by the powerful and the wealthy to secure their
own interests. Black natural law calls us to recognize what is self-
evident: that the labels of slave, or Negro, or prisoner do not capture
the humanity of those so labeled. Furthermore, black natural law calls
us to honor the higher law that acknowledges our humanity by actively
challenging the wisdom of the world. It calls us to participate in social
movements that oppose, for example, slavery, segregation, and mass
incarceration.
Preface ( xi )
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 )
see it as characterized by a commitment to ideology critique and social

movement organizing. The particular targets of this critique and orga-
nizing vary depending on what problems are most pressing at a given
moment—the black natural law tradition is both principled and strate-
gic. While I characterize this as a distinctively black tradition, it does not
derive from any facts about race. Each of the four figures at the center
of this book takes blacks to be in a particularly privileged position with
regard to natural law. Because of the oppression faced by blacks, it is espe-
cially obvious to blacks that worldly descriptions of human nature never
suffice and that characteristically human capacities ought to be exercised,
not repressed. Moreover, the most pressing targets for critique and orga-
nizing in the United States have been issues around race, though each of
these four figures is also strongly concerned with other issues as well.
It might seem, then, that this book, with its focus on the normative
implications of human nature, does not tell a particularly black story. But
my contention, following the tradition I explicate, is that blacks have priv-
ileged access to natural law. In other words, all ethical and political theory
ought to start with the insights of blacks, rather than relegating them to a
final chapter or to an example of one of many types of difference. Indeed,
the discipline of black studies has been too modest in its claims, in part
because of the descriptive idiom it too often privileges over the norma-
tive. This is unfortunate because the university, with its relative insulation
from worldly pressures, is a particularly important site to address norma-
tive questions. Black studies need not confine itself to telling the stories of
black communities, describing black concerns, and surveying black opin-
ion. The field, born of struggle, was once centrally concerned with norma-
tive questions—What ought to be done? How ought we to live? What is
a just society?—but these concerns have faded, critical inquiry replaced
by dogmatic “progressive” assumptions. Recalling the black natural law
tradition points to a powerful resource to revitalize and orient normative
inquiry in black studies.
When I described this project to a well-known cultural studies scholar,
her first question was “What theorists are you using?” The proper response
to this question, I concluded, was to expunge as many “theorists” as possi-
ble from the text, including them when essential in footnotes. I have tried
to keep the focus of the text on the black figures about whom I am writing.
Having immersed myself in their worlds and their ideas, I attempt to com-
municate to the reader how these ideas fit together, and how they partici-
pate in the black natural law tradition—in other words, how black people
are capable of doing theory, but in an expansive, powerful sense, involving
the use of reason, emotion, and imagination, carefully staged for specific
audiences. This approach has two potentially problematic effects. The first
( xiv ) Preface
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 )
something about our current cultural moment that makes us uncomfort-

able with religion that does not stay in its place, rather like blackness that
does not stay in its place. Discomfort is productive, and I have tried to take
seriously the religious language employed in the black natural law tradi-
tion. In the afterword, I offer further reflections on questions left unan-
swered, locating black natural law amid conversations happening in the
academic study of religion.2
Black Natural Law
CHAP T ER 1
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
With vivid imagery, Douglass evokes an authority beyond the world. It is

a moral authority, one that names some things good and others evil, and it
is an authority to which worldly authorities must be held accountable. The
Supreme Court was wrong because of a moral absolute, not because of a
flawed interpretation. There is truth beyond the world, beyond the beliefs
of the day; in that we can have confidence, Douglass intones. It may be
a sad day for the nation, but it is not a sad day for the universe. In that
broader frame, slavery is wrong today, yesterday, and tomorrow.
Douglass has a natural law theory. He believes that unjust laws are
no laws at all, that reflection on human nature can help us identify just
laws, and that our perception of human nature is often badly distorted.
He offers suggestions on how human nature might best be perceived; he
(2) Black Natural Law
offers normative implications of this reflection; and he offers thoughts on

how natural law ought to be implemented. This is a robust theory, but it is
not all found in one place. It underlies many claims that Douglass makes
over the course of his long career as an advocate and organizer working
on behalf of black Americans, and it partially surfaces in his speeches
and writings. While some would dismiss Douglass as little more than an
advocate who synthesizes the ideas of others, attending to his natural law
theory shows a powerful intellect that would become a paradigm for the
black natural law tradition.2
One of the crucial, distinctive features of Douglass’s natural law the-
ory is the central role played by the emotions. 3 To discern natural law
rightly, both reason and emotion are needed; to implement natural law,
both reason and emotion must again be mobilized. While this is a point
that Douglass theorizes, it is also a point that he performs. Douglass was
a great persuader, in his orations and in his memoirs. He persuaded by
appealing to both the head and the heart, to reason and emotion. His
auditors frequently mentioned this, and transcripts of his speeches are
punctuated by his audiences’ laughter, applause, and exclamation. One
newspaper account noted, “Mr. Douglass made a speech of nearly two
hours in length, marked by a singular power in argument, satire, humor,
and pathos” (2:470), while another noted that Douglass “is a speaker of
great ability, well calculated to interest the feelings and convince the judg-
ment of his hearers” (1:36). This is already clear from the text of his speech
on Dred Scott, with the evocative language of the “firm old earth” and
“baling the ocean.” Indeed, the speech begins with a long sentence that
paints a picture quite different from the staid halls of the U.S. Supreme
Court: “While four millions of our fellow countrymen are in chains—
while men, women, and children are bought and sold on the auction-block
with horses, sheep, and swine—while the remorseless slave-whip draws
the warm blood of our common humanity—it is meet that we assemble as
we have done to-day, and lift up our hearts and voices in earnest denuncia-
tion of the vile and shocking abomination” (3:163). We may be angry at
the Supreme Court, Douglass is communicating to his listeners, but we
must keep front and center those who suffer, those who are enslaved. That
is what the Court forgot to do, with its ostensibly careful but strikingly
heartless reasoning.
Because Douglass’s language is at times so ornate, it is tempting to
read it primarily as rhetoric intended to evoke the emotions. It is tempt-
ing to stop paying attention to Douglass’s ideas, to stop looking for his
ideas. But they are here: In the first sentence, he begins building an argu-
ment that will continue throughout his speech; indeed, the argument is
encapsulated in the first sentence. The key to following the argument is
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS (3)
focusing on the phrase “our common humanity.” This is the cornerstone

of Douglass’s natural law theory: It is reflection on the human nature that
each of us shares that will allow us to appeal beyond the Supreme Court
to a higher court—to the Supreme Court of the Almighty. The violence of
slavery that Douglass describes is an abomination: It runs against God’s
law. This is self-evident, understood by all when we are attuned to the
facts—when we approach them with open hearts and minds. When we
do this, a normative response will naturally follow. We will denounce the
purported law of slavery as unjust, as no law at all. In other words, we will
critique the wisdom of the world. Also in this first sentence, just as impor-
tantly, Douglass calls attention to the appropriateness of the setting. It is
a gathering of those who share a concern about the injustice of slavery.
Along with critique come assembly, organization, and a social movement
demanding change. Once we recognize our common humanity and rec-
ognize how it is being offended by slavery, we must come together to build
a movement that will end slavery. In other words, natural law is not the
abstract exercise of academics in their studies, checking this law or that
against one that is higher. For Douglass and for the black natural law tradi-
tion, natural law is less a proposition than a movement of people toward a
more just world.
Douglass argues that reason and emotion together are necessary to dis-
cern the natural law, and he evokes both reason and emotion in his audi-
ences by finely crafting his rhetoric for these purposes. This is another
important point to note. In the black natural law tradition, once one has
discerned the natural law, it is to be shared. But to share it, one cannot just
point to it. Allowing others to see what is ultimately self-evident to them,
just obscured by the ways of the world calcified in their lives, requires
craftsmanship. Similarly, as we will see, to get from the world we have to
a world based on God’s law takes practical skill. It takes a careful knowl-
edge of the world as it is, strategic political maneuvering, provisional alli-
ances, and, most importantly, mass mobilization to hold the powers that
be accountable. In a sense, Douglass has no interest in persuading the
Supreme Court justices that his interpretation of the Constitution, or the
higher law, is correct. Douglass’s interest is in catalyzing a social move-
ment that will push for justice wherever the push will be most effective—
the Supreme Court, electoral politics, or even war.
All in all, to understand Douglass’s account of natural law is no easy
task. It requires careful attention to both form and content, to rhetoric
and argument, to principle and strategy—and to how all of these are
entwined. That very first sentence of Douglass’s speech on the Dred Scott
decision exemplifies how these many elements come together. Rather
than attempting to engage all of these questions at once, folded into each
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
As we have seen, Douglass is committed to the existence of an authority

greater than the Supreme Court, greater than any authority in the world.
Douglass is confident that this higher law will prevail, a confidence that
follows from his faith in God. But Douglass also develops the notion of a
higher law in ways that do not require any specific religious commitments.
“We can appeal from this hell-black judgment of the Supreme Court to
the court of common sense and common humanity” (3:168). At first
glance, it seems as though Douglass has briskly reduced God to human-
ity, to “common sense and common humanity.” But Douglass does not
claim that this is an exhaustive definition of God. Further, his assertion is
very much at one with the European, Christian natural law tradition. Our
common humanity is our human nature, formed in the image of God.
The natural law is self-evident, accessible through the use of our common
sense (though Douglass will describe many ways in which this common
sense is distorted). In the European, Christian natural law tradition, there
is but a portion of divine law that humans are able to access by reflecting
on human nature using what Douglass would call common sense—but
the divine law that is found through this process trumps worldly law and
social norms. Against this background, Douglass’s appeal to the “Supreme
Court of the Almighty” sounds much less fanciful. Note that the dramatic
language that Douglass employs is not attributed to God, but rather is
used in the negative. Bailing the oceans and moving the stars marks what
no human is able to do, not a claim about what God actually does. What
Douglass is pointing to with such language are the limitations of the ways
of the world. Douglass’s account of natural law, like his account of God,
is primarily negative, emphasizing what the natural law is not and how
unjust laws can be identified rather than offering a specific set of concrete
proposals on how the law of God is to be implemented. Douglass never
writes of a possible future moment when the earth’s laws will be divine,
but he does write about the frightening consequences that may follow if
unjust laws in the world are not changed, including “lightning, whirlwind,
and earthquake” (3:169).
Douglass himself is aware of the European, Christian natural law tradi-
tion. He quotes Blackstone comparing natural law jurisprudence favorably
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
the same regardless of the name he uses. Indeed, Douglass’s vocabulary is

thoroughly soaked in the biblical, borrowing phrases and sentences that
sometimes go marked and at other times go unmarked. (By the end of his
life, his vocabulary was also thoroughly soaked in the Shakespearean.) The
connection among God, morals, and nature to which Douglass is commit-
ted is the view that is standard in European, Christian natural law theory.
Humans are created in the image of God. What is most essential about
our humanity is that which resembles the divine. God is good, absolutely,
and we are able to know about goodness, to participate in this goodness,
when we privilege the part of our humanity that resembles God. When we
do this, says Douglass, we will be saved, for “there is no salvation outside
of a life of truth and justice” (5:219). Indeed, when fully committed to
natural law, we are fully committed and fully faithful to God. Douglass
describes committed abolitionists, considered by him the paradigm of
committed followers of the natural law, as working “for the slave as if they
had been working for the Son of God” (3:196). This should not be read
merely rhetorically. Jesus represents the divine in the human most clearly
and so solicits a response to natural law the most clearly, offering a model
for all who follow.
If we refuse the natural law, as humans most often do, there will be
consequences, just as there are when we attempt to violate physical laws.
Pirate captains end up as dinner for sharks sooner or later. In a theologi-
cal idiom, Douglass classes the refusal of God’s law as idolatry. It involves
worshipping an idol in the place of God, causing us to follow something
made by humans when we should follow something made by God.
Douglass is quite explicit on this point. Slavery, he says, “is a direct war
upon the government of God” that “contravenes the first command of
the Decalogue,” namely, that humans are to have no other gods than God
(2:262). This conclusion, at first surprising, Douglass explains through his
account of slavery as tyranny writ small. Just as the pirate captain makes
supposed laws for his ship, the slave-owner makes supposed laws for his
or her slaves. The words of a human being are given absolute normative
force, a force that is properly reserved for God. The individual slave-owner
is a tyrant, but so too are governments that embrace slave-owning, such
as the Confederacy. Just as the goodness of God is contagious when rep-
resented in the eloquence of Douglass himself, the evil of idolatry is also
contagious. The tyrant attracts associates who share his contempt for the
law of God, who are also motivated by self-interest—in this case, as it may
be advanced by proximity to power rather than by the associates’ own
will. Further, the tyrant himself has no motivation to remain consistent.
As his interests or whims change, the law he propounds will change as
well. He will bend the law he has made before, or he will outright break
it. While Douglass is most concerned about tyranny as idolatry, he is also

concerned with another idol. He condemns those who act as if “there is no
God but wealth; no right and wrong but profit and loss” (3:197). A com-
mitment to the natural law holds amoral capitalism in check.
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
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.
Human nature in the complex, mysterious sense that Douglass

describes can be found even among the most oppressed, he contends.
Those humans who are enslaved retain their capacity to think and
emote—even if they sometimes wish they did not. The human spirit is
“elastic,” capable of weathering great storms. In an idiom that Douglass
occasionally though not often deploys, he suggests that we each have a
soul that transcends our body, and this soul maintains our humanity even
when our body is in bondage. We can witness this resilience in the songs
and dances of slaves (2:257). These seem, to the outsider, to express joy
or contentment. Perhaps slavery is not so bad after all, the observer may
ponder. Douglass agrees that slave song and dance express feelings, but
he denies that they express happiness. It is the fact of feeling, the fact that
even in the most wretched of circumstances, human beings still have a
rich inner life, that is salient here, Douglass tells his audience. Human
beings are marked by their expansive affective and rational capacities, and
these capacities remain present even if their exercise is severely limited.
After the great political struggle of Douglass’s life had been won,
after slavery had been abolished, Douglass committed himself to culti-
vating the capacities of freed blacks. In this he had much aid, as well as
many detractors. A group of freed blacks in Douglass’s former home of
Baltimore founded a Frederick Douglass Institute to pursue such work,
and Douglass himself spoke movingly at the Institute’s opening:
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
whites, witness human capacities being exercised, the witnesses them-

selves feel the pull of duty and are better able to discern natural law on
their own.
Human nature is complex and impossible to describe precisely, but,
according to Douglass, it can be said decisively that human beings are pre-
dominantly good. This is not a point on which Douglass offers evidence
or argument; it is a straightforward assertion. (It may implicitly rest on
theological commitments about the nature of God. Alternatively, it may
rest on the continuous improvement in humanity for which Douglass
believes there is historical evidence. 5) Both good and evil exist in the soul;
this is also part of human nature, that the moral laws are not followed
mechanically. But in the mix of opposing forces that make up not only
the soul but also the world, good has the upper hand. For Douglass, this
is not an idle observation. It actually serves as the foundation for one of
his accounts of natural law. If there was no certainty about the outcome of
the struggle between good and evil in ourselves, or if it was likely that evil
would emerge the victor, then it would be necessary to set up a govern-
ment insulated from the people. Democracy would need to be abandoned
in favor of some other form of government, perhaps the government of the
wisest, that would ensure the goodness of the laws—that would ensure
the laws of the nation align with the laws of God. In contrast, Douglass
tells his audience, “I believe that men are rather more disposed to truth, to
goodness and to excellence, than to vice and wickedness, and for that rea-
son I wish to see the elements of humanity infused throughout all human
government” (4:173). The image of God is democratically distributed, we
might say, and so political power ought to be democratically distributed.
There is no elite that is automatically better at perceiving or enacting the
natural law. Each human being is up to the task, though some excel at it
while others flounder.
Douglass follows the convention of his day, using the masculine to
refer to humanity as a whole. But he explicitly and repeatedly insists that
what makes us human is found as much if not more in women as it is in
men. His view on this issue developed over time, but he was consistent on
this essential point: “The instincts of the human heart in women are sub-
stantially the same as those in man” (4:173). Women ought to be allowed
to exercise their human capacities, Douglass tells women’s suffrage meet-
ings, and this is impaired by current laws. Those laws are unjust and must
be changed: Women should, inter alia, be given the right to vote. Indeed,
Douglass sometimes suggests a stronger claim, that women are by nature
more virtuous and truthful than men—in other words, they are better
able to discern the natural law—so it is especially important that they be
given the franchise. Why are women gifted with such normative insight?
ON FREDERICK DOUGL ASS ( 11 )
On Douglass’s view, the explanation is clear: The “judgment of women in

many things is incomparably superior to that of men” (4:183). Douglass
jocularly adds that he has yet to win an argument against a woman.
Women are especially capable of discerning and exercising their charac-
teristically human capacities; they do this generally better than men, so
they are generally better at knowing and implementing the natural law.
The votes of women, Douglass asserts, would undercut the current power
of the “mobocracy.”
While Douglass would develop into a skilled orator, lecturing across
the nation and abroad, in his first attempts at public address, it was his
bare humanity that was on display. Three years after running away from
bondage, Douglass reluctantly offered his first speech at a meeting of abo-
litionists. As the Pennsylvania Freeman reports, Douglass spoke “so spon-
taneously that it thrilled through every-one present, and compelled them
to feel for the Wrongs he had endured” (1:3). Without training or prepara-
tion, Douglass shared his story and the emotions that it evoked in him.
These emotions were contagious: The exercise of his human capacities of
emotion and speech brought out the human capacities of his listeners and
convinced them that slavery was unjust. In his first speeches, Douglass
would frequently allude to the scars left by the lash on his back during his
enslavement, though these scars would usually remain concealed by his
shirt. In contrast, Douglass would show for all to see his joy and sorrow.
This was not all Douglass did. Announcing his intentions on that first
public platform in Lynn, Massachusetts, Douglass offered a description
that would apply to his oratory for the next half century. “My friends,” he
began, “I have come to tell you something about slavery—what I know of
it, as I have felt it” (1:3). In future years, Douglass would not always rely
on the emotions provoked by his own story, but he did rely on a powerful
concoction of facts and feelings that catalyzed the discernment of natu-
ral law. Performing human nature helped his audience perceive natural
law. Yet essential to Douglass’s account of human nature is its mysterious
quality, its inability to be captured by any given description—just as God
cannot be so captured. Douglass was careful to remind his audiences that
complete sympathy is impossible. No matter how many moving speeches
they heard, they could not know the soul of the enslaved. Indeed, it is out
of this ignorance, rather than because of any knowledge or fellow feeling,
that normative commitments first arise. The hidden scars on Douglass’s
back dramatized this opacity, reminding his auditors of sorrows they
could not see, let alone understand. Douglass addressed the barriers to
empathy explicitly, telling those first listeners in Lynn, “You cannot feel
the slave’s misery, when he is separated from his kindred. The agony of the
mother when parting from her children cannot be told” (1:5). Douglass
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.
DISTORTED PERCEPTION OF HUMAN NATURE
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
in the New Testament, and the Pharisees in particular. They encounter

the truth, but they offer myriad reasons why their own practice is superior.
They encounter human nature at its most perfect in Jesus, but they refuse
to change their ways in response. Douglass explains that the Pharisees
“made void the law by their traditions” (3:284)—and this is exactly what
Americans have done as well. For the law to be law, it must grow out of
correct perception of human nature. The Pharisees refuse to open their
eyes, instead sticking dogmatically to what has come before, tradition—
which ultimately advances their self-interest. Further, Douglass speaks of
how the Pharisees would pass by those who were injured and suffering on
their way to worship, paying them no heed. In a fanatical commitment to
the law, which masks a fanatical commitment to self, even the most obvi-
ous of human suffering is ignored. So too with the wealthy, powerful, and
slave-holding in the United States.
Specifically, Douglass names prejudice, custom, and superstition as
principle obstructions to our perception (5:253). These distort both our
reason and our emotion, drawing our attention disproportionately here
and not there, allowing us to accept certain obvious falsehoods as true.
Such distortions have a long history, and Douglass points especially to
religious persecution in the Netherlands, British colonialism in Ireland
and North America, and, of course, slavery as prime examples. In each
of these cases, gross injustices occurred with relatively little opposition
because prejudice, custom, and superstition justified them. Indeed, jus-
tice was so obscured that it was made to seem like its opposite, injustice.
However, in each case, such distortions could not last. Self-evident truths
cannot be hidden forever, Douglass concludes, but they can be hidden for
a long time. (In the Netherlands, an example of which Douglass is nearly
as fond of as Ireland, it took 80 years for religious freedom to be granted.)
Because Douglass is committed to the view that good will eventually win
out over evil, he is confident that self-evident truths will emerge and win
the day. This is the reasoning he first applied to the abolition of slavery and
later applied to women’s suffrage; Douglass would see the former in his
lifetime but not the latter.
The most relevant force obscuring human nature, at least with respect
to Douglass’s primary concerns, was slavery. “Mankind lost sight of our
human nature,” Douglass says, “in the idea of our being property” (4:94–
95). This was not just an abstract idea. It had concrete consequences that
increased its plausibility. The more blacks were treated as property, the
more they seemed to lack human nature. Deprived of education and future
prospects, whipped like beasts, and otherwise degraded, the fundamen-
tal and eternal truth that all human beings share a common humanity, a
common human nature, was largely forgotten wherever slavery existed.
Treating some human beings as objects to be bought and sold or, as

Douglass sometimes put it, as machines, seemed to make sense.
Slavery distorts the self-perception of the enslaved, but it mangles the
perception of slave-owners even more badly. “They who study mankind
with a whip in their hands, will always go wrong” (3:368). Douglass pro-
poses a specific mechanism through which these distortions occur. Slavery
involves all sorts of cruelty and a false sense of superiority. This is internal-
ized by whites and then projected onto all human beings: It formed the
basis of a distorted account of human nature. Whites did not believe that
blacks could survive on their own upon emancipation because, according
to Douglass, whites imagined that blacks, unconstrained by the laws and
norms of slavery, would enter a state of nature, each fighting the others for
control of limited resources, each concerned only with self-preservation
at any cost. Such a view represents how whites—falsely—understand
themselves, Douglass charges; it has nothing whatsoever to do with the
humanity of blacks.
In addition to this psychological account of the distortion of human
nature, Douglass offers a more abstract, philosophical account. Those
social structures that are fundamentally unjust, such as slavery, are pre-
carious. People who benefit from them share Douglass’s conviction
that goodness will ultimately triumph. Because such structures are pre-
carious, they “must seek strength from without,” using “external props”
(3:444). Such social structures cannot rely on themselves because they
are not based in truth—meaning they would not be supported by human
beings perceiving rightly. Force is necessary for their continuity: circulat-
ing false ideas and supporting those false ideas with violence of all forms.
Such force can be witnessed, according to Douglass, in the suspicion with
which slaveholding interests view free speech, free movement, the free
press, and education. From the perspective of slaveholders, all of these
must be constrained to minimize the chances that individuals’ percep-
tion might be sharpened, and to lessen the chance of coming across any
indication of the fundamental injustice of slavery.
Joining the philosophical and psychological accounts of distor-
tion, Douglass adds an affective account.6 Slavery and all unjust social
structures shape the way that individuals feel. It would be natural to be
appalled at the murder or flogging of any human being. Tears and sor-
row would normally follow. This cannot be permitted by slaveholding
interests. To preserve the status quo, it is necessary that “the sacredness
of life which ordinary men feel, does not touch them anywhere” (5:590).
Affect is muted by slave-owning societies in two ways, the first individ-
ual and the second collective, according to Douglass. He describes the
“extreme and bitter selfishness” (3:127) that characterizes slave-owners.
So absorbed in his or her own profit, or perceived happiness, the slave-

owner is blinded to, and so does not respond to, the experiences of oth-
ers. In a slaveholding society, the sentiments must be trained in order to
suppress what is natural, although Douglass believes that what is natural
can never be fully stamped out. Southern customs, enforced not only by
social norms but also by institutions, do the work of training the senti-
ments. There is always hope that the human heart will be stirred, that its
muted or misdirected capacities may be awakened or righted; this is the
wager on which Douglass based his career as a public speaker. Douglass
presents evidence that Southerners are aware of their own human nature
despite the distortion of their perception: Southerners’ correction intu-
itions about their human nature limited their ability to fight in the Civil
War. Conscience tugs at the Confederate soldiers, for they know, deep
down, that their cause is unjust. The result, as Douglass memorably puts
it, is that the Confederates “were in chains—entangled with the chains of
their own slaves,” and so they would lose the war (4:154).
Among the institutions that perpetuate slavery, Douglass singles out
the church for his vitriol. Religion has a particularly powerful influence
on how individuals feel and think. Southern religion has acted like all
other Southern institutions, implanting and circulating the feelings and
ideas that conceal the truth about human nature. Abolitionists must focus
their efforts on undermining the church, or at least the American church,
Douglass urges. Success will come to abolitionists once they have suc-
ceeded in “getting the people to laugh at that religion” they hold (2:99).
But Douglass does not urge a total abandonment of Christianity. He
urges a shift in focus, from the focus his contemporaries have on an other-
worldly God, on which much can be projected, to a focus on fellow human
beings. This, Douglass suggests, has always been the core of Christianity;
after all, the Christian savior is a God who became human. Moreover, our
best access to God comes from a place we have ready access to: ourselves.
While the powers that be may still attempt to corrupt a human-centered
church, projecting problematic content onto the human, the chances of
success are much less than when problematic content is projected onto
an other-worldly God. As Douglass puts it, “The pulpit must not keep us
on the high wave of Apocalyptic vision, but on the rock of practical righ-
teousness” (4:502–503). Real religion is a religion of humanity, turned
inward first and then manifested in social action; false religion focuses on
externals, following rules or doctrines that blend all too easily with the
secular customs of the land—the religion of the Pharisees.
To obscure self-evident truths takes work, according to Douglass.
Children are born seeing things as they are. Socialization and education
distort that initially clear perception, teaching young men and women
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.
RIGHT PERCEPTION OF NATURAL LAW
The first step in discerning natural law, as we have seen, is attending to

the distortions of our human nature. The second step is to perceive our
human nature rightly. Douglass has done this and reported the results: He
offers approximations for human nature, as well as the ultimate conclu-
sion that human nature, as it images God, transcends any description.
While Douglass can tell his audiences of this conclusion, his goal as an
orator and organizer is to give his audiences the tools to reach this con-
clusion on their own. More precisely, since human nature is self-evident,
Douglass aims to remind his audience how to use tools they already have
in order to perceive themselves. Then he urges them to use these same
tools to discern the normative implications of their findings. Once distor-
tions are removed, the rest is easy; indeed, it involves no work at all. This
is because, without distortions, no decision or action is needed. In such

a condition, we are transparent to ourselves, and normative implications
are entailed by that self-knowledge. As Douglass puts it, in such a world
we know “by necessity, not by taste, but by evidence brought home to the
understanding and the heart” (5:142). This last phrase is crucial; it points
to the two tools that Douglass takes to be most important for right percep-
tion: reason and emotion. These capacities are part of our human nature,
and they are the elements of human nature that allow us to rightly per-
ceive ourselves and to draw normative conclusions. On Douglass’s view,
both are needed, together, to perceive rightly.
Sometimes, Douglass privileges reason; at other times, he privileges
emotion. There are examples throughout his speeches, as well as in his
writings, that demonstrate the ways in which reason or emotion holds
the other in check, and most often he mentions both in the same breath.
Human beings “must be reasoned with a little as well as scolded a good
deal,” he writes (5:253). Here the scolding represents an appeal to the
emotions: The one who is scolded is made to feel shame. If the scolding
also involves an explanation, that would be encompassed under the ear-
lier category, when one is “reasoned with.” In a much earlier formulation,
Douglass tells his audience, “Truth needs but little argument, and no long
drawn metaphysical detail to establish a position. There is something in
the heart which instantly responds to its voice” (1:108). Here it is the heart
that stands for appeals to the emotions, and here again it is emotion that
Douglass frames as the primary key to discernment. Note how reason, or
“argument,” is distinguished from “metaphysical detail.” What Douglass
means by reason is practical reason, interrogating the claims of the world,
searching for inconsistencies, and demolishing faulty arguments. Much
unlike the predominant strand of natural law theory today, for Douglass,
natural law is not an endeavor of human reason; human reason is one of
the tools used in discerning the natural law.
While in the two passages quoted above Douglass seems to diminish
the role of reason in discernment, favoring emotion, elsewhere he speaks
of the necessary role played by reason. Emotion that goes unchecked can
go wildly wrong, misidentifying human nature and resulting in normative
conclusions out of step with natural law. Douglass takes as an example
murder committed in order to end slavery. The emotions alone condemn
all murder, but when paired with reason, we can conclude that there
are times when murder is acceptable according to natural law. Douglass
speaks highly of the power of reason here: Compared with emotion, “her
judgments are broader, deeper, clearer and more enduring” (5:10). Even
so, the heart must not be abandoned; it is “holy.” If reason were given free
rein, unchecked by emotion, it would be profoundly limited. It would be
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
determining how we ought to respond to injustice. Instead of copying a

secular saint, the proper response, according to Douglass, is affection. In
other words, just like the talented orator, the secular saint’s reason and
emotion are contagious; encountering them prompts us to enhance our
own emotion (and, we can safely add, reason).
A rather less pleasant way in which our ability to discern the natural
law is improved is through suffering. Douglass particularly has in mind
Americans’ experiences in the Civil War. He describes the war as “a salu-
tary school—the school of affliction” (4:4). The lessons learned in this
school concern justice, the “statutes of eternal justice,” or in other words,
God’s law (4:8). Dramatic, violent conflict demonstrates that the sup-
posed stability of the world is illusory. It demonstrates that social norms
and laws must not have been rooted in the eternal; they must have con-
flicted with God’s law. Douglass has confidence that the forces of good
will ultimately prevail, if not in this battle, then in the next, so he is confi-
dent that the new laws established after the conflict subsides will be better,
more just. Even if injustice persists in the new order, humans will have
been reminded of the provisionality of worldly laws and social norms, and
so will be motivated to inquire into higher law. In the specific case with
which Douglass is most concerned, the Civil War, he concludes of the
Emancipation, “Reflection upon it opens to us a vast wilderness of thought
and feeling” (5:56). In other words, dramatic conflict and transformation
can function like the dramatic orator or the secular saint, spreading the
power of discernment.
Just as social institutions can promote distortions in our perception,
Douglass argues that social institutions can also promote the proper
discernment of natural law. Schools are particularly important in this
regard: “The more men know of the essential nature of things, and of the
true relation of mankind, the freer they are from prejudice of every kind”
(4:251). While schools cultivate human capacities, especially reasoning,
Douglass thinks that even learning facts is important. Slavery and other
systems of injustice are built on lies. The more one knows about how the
world really is, the less plausible those systems of injustice will seem.
Similarly, religion at its best, when it is centered on humans, can aid in
discerning the natural law. All too often, however, the focus of religion
is on rituals that are given divine sanction, rather than on human beings.
Douglass complains that the fugitive slave law abridges religious liberty
because it prevents the practice of mercy—a religious practice involv-
ing the proper orientation of the emotions. He notes that church leaders
would be up in arms if Congress had prohibited singing the psalms, an
external, superficial element of religion, while church leaders remained
relatively silent when mercy is disallowed (2:376).
WHAT NATURAL LAW ENTAILS
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
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
has nothing more touching, reason nothing more noble, imagination

nothing more sublime; and if we could reduce all the religions of the world
to one essence we could find in it nothing more divine” (5:23). With some
hyperbole, Douglass is drawing our attention not only to equality as a
natural law principle but to how it is derived. Reason, imagination, and
emotion (“touching,” “sublime”), all are evoked by Douglass, and all are
involved in reaching the normative conclusion. Further, in his statement’s
end, Douglass reminds his auditors that the principle of equality, like the
principle of liberty, is not derived from the secular world alone. Even if it
is through reflection on our human nature that we derive the principle, it
is a principle ordained by God, the author and archetype of that nature.
Douglass has an austere view of the positive content of natural law.
One of the few principles he commends beyond freedom and equality is
the inherent value of human life. Although this principle is clearly related
to freedom, as the freedom to live, it is broader than freedom. Freedom
alone might include the freedom to kill, for example, in suicide or, in a
problem more pressing in Douglass’s day than in ours, in a duel. Douglass
rejects “the nefarious custom of dueling,” and he worries that any expla-
nation for stamping out a human life would be inadequate—though the
worry for him is ultimately indecisive; the principle of life is defeasible
(3:266). What seems to trouble Douglass is the notion that, if the value
of human life is greater than anything in the world, if all worldly descrip-
tions are inadequate, then any worldly reasons offered for ending a human
life would be woefully inadequate. Imagine, for example, a justification of
this form: One million dollars will be saved if we do not keep Ms. Smith
on the respirator. From Douglass’s perspective, once human nature is
properly understood, this would be comparing apples and oranges, or bet-
ter, apples and baseballs. Any other description of worldly interests that
would call for the ending of human life would be just as inadequate as
the million-dollar explanation. The only explanation that could work, that
could defeat the principle that life must be preserved, would be another
principle derived from the natural law, such as freedom or equality.
Laws and social norms, according to Douglass, must value human life
directly, and they also must not “diminish and weaken man’s respect for
it” (3:247). This principle has broad implications, even if these are impli-
cations that Douglass himself does not develop. The principle could, for
example, be invoked when considering questions of homelessness, or abor-
tion, or nutrition. Indeed, Douglass embraces a broad view of the implica-
tions of natural law. He argues, “All great reforms go together. Whatever
tends to elevate, whatever tends to exalt humanity in one portion of the
world, tends to exalt it in another part” (1:58, italics removed). Douglass
himself lent support to causes secondary to his own central convictions,
including women’s suffrage, Irish freedom, and the temperance move-

ment. While Douglass does not precisely explain the way a reform move-
ment here could benefit those over there, all social movement organizing
allows for an exercise in the human capacities and motivates further com-
mitment. Moreover, because political engagement is motivated by natural
law, for Douglass, all political movements have a common provenance. It
is that provenance to which he is committed, the image of God in human
nature, while the specific movements with which he associates himself are
chosen for pragmatic reasons. He is black and was enslaved, so he orga-
nizes most vigorously for black freedom.
Despite this broadly ecumenical view of the implications of natu-
ral law, applying to all and lifting up all, Douglass also suggests that the
oppressed are particularly favored by natural law. What might it mean to
be so favored? The evaluation of conflicting natural law principles, a pro-
cess that involves both reason and emotion, should take place in light of
a further, background principle that calls for us to attend particularly to
the most vulnerable. “The moral government of the universe,” Douglass
writes, “is on our side, and co-operates, with all honest efforts, to lift up
the down-trodden and oppressed in all lands, whether the oppressed be
white or black” (5:61). God’s law is colorblind, but it is not oppression-
blind. Those suffering the most receive the most backing by God; it is this
imagery that should be interpreted to mean a hermeneutical principle that
privileges the oppressed. What this may lead to can be seen by tracking
Douglass’s attention to one particular example.
The white abolitionist John Brown claimed to be following God’s law
when he and his followers attacked an armory at Harper’s Ferry in the
hopes of starting a slave revolt. While Douglass was ambivalent about
Brown’s approach at the time, in retrospect, he suggests that Brown offers
a model for relentlessly pursuing higher law. “He saw the evil [of slavery]
through no mist or haze, but in a light of infinite brightness, which left
no line of its ten thousand horrors out of sight” (5:24). Not only is there
a higher law associated with God, but its opposite is associated with evil.
In the world, for most people most of the time, that higher law is inac-
cessible. The world is filled with “mist or haze” that obscures our view.
Brown, exceptionally, was able to see the world in truth, all that was right
and all that was wrong, and so was able to judge—and so was able to act
on that judgment. From his perspective, the laws that humans might try
to create are “mere cobwebs,” “the pompous emptiness of human pride”
(5:24). Instead of listening to the divine, instead of implementing God’s
law, humans have a tendency to try to make law for themselves—and
they fail. They enact laws that are no laws at all, that are simulacra of law.
From the perspective of one such as Brown who can see God’s law clearly,
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
there is no genuine law at all. In a context thoroughly filled with violence,

so thoroughly devoid of law, it would be impossible to keep one’s hands
clean of violence and still advance toward justice.
IMPLEMENTING NATURAL LAW
Douglass certainly favors proclaiming natural law, shouting it from the

mountaintops. That is what he does; it is his vocation. But Douglass’s
speeches are not so effective because he shouts particularly loudly, or
because the mention of divine law instantly converts his listeners. He is
so effective because of his eloquence, combining reasoned argument with
the production of emotions in his listeners. Natural law is implemented
not through brute force, although force may at times be necessary, but
through persuasion. This requires a set of skills: knowledge of the con-
tours of the social and political landscape and the wisdom to know when
and how to intervene. One mode of intervention is speechmaking, a prac-
tice that combines ideology critique with organizing. When Douglass
addresses an audience, he does not just recite truths. He often urges his
audience on toward collective action, whether it is to join a certain orga-
nization or to tell officials to act in a certain way.
In short, Douglass urges a pragmatic stance toward the implementa-
tion of natural law. Natural law itself necessitates action: Once it is rightly
perceived, it propels us into the work of enacting its precepts on earth. But
this is work. It requires patience and skill—indeed, it requires that we tap
into some of the same human capacities that allowed us to discern natural
law in the first place. Implementing natural law requires an understanding
of the ways of the world and how the powers that be distort perception. It
may also require building institutions that counteract such distortions.
It may require dramatizing natural law for others, through the oratory
of the formerly enslaved, but this is only one technique among many
for implementing natural law. When we shift focus from discernment to
implementation, a host of practical questions present themselves, calling
for practical wisdom to act as a guide—where practical wisdom is another
characteristically human quality. Too often, those who rightly perceive
natural law remain stuck in a moralizing register, rather than shifting
to the register of the political.9 As Douglass tells his listeners late in his
life, after many successes and failures, “Among the common errors of the
world, none is more conspicuous than the error of seeking desirable ends
by inappropriate and illogical means” (5:142). By this, Douglass is not
claiming that the means must correspond with the end, as Martin Luther
King Jr. at times seems to be saying. Rather, Douglass is urging that our
full human capacities be mobilized in pursuit of the political problem of

implementation, that our capacities not be held back by confusing imple-
mentation of natural law with perception of natural law.
As an example of the calculus behind such implementation, Douglass
points to the role of blacks in the Civil War. Some Northern whites had
charged that blacks would never fight, that they were too docile. Douglass,
in contrast, argues that blacks did not fight against slavery before the
Civil War because they were too reasonable, because they made use of
their capacity for practical wisdom. “The only reason he has not fought
before is because he had no reasonable probability of whipping anybody.
As soon as he was convinced that there was the slightest shadow of hope,
he was ready to bare his bosom to the storm of war and to face the enemy”
(4:129). Blacks were able to discern natural law. They knew that slavery
was illicit, that equality was ordained by God. This knowledge led auto-
matically to a desire to bring freedom and equality into the world, but
it was held in check by practical wisdom. It was held in check, but just
barely. Blacks did not wait until victory was certain or even likely to enter
the fight. They waited only until “the slightest shadow of hope” was per-
ceived before plunging in.
Douglass offers several other examples of the political calculus that must
accompany the implementation of natural law. He endorses a black politi-
cal convention post-Emancipation because, in this case, practical wisdom
reins in the principle of equality that would authorize only a colorblind
convention. As Douglass starkly puts it, now that slavery has ended “human
law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human
practice may” (5:91). It is that landscape of human practice in which poli-
tics intervenes, applying the abstract principles of natural law. Building up
institutions and organizations that are race-specific—or, rather, specific to
the race of the oppressed—is a legitimate political technique, in Douglass’s
view, for advancing natural law. Indeed, one of his life’s works for which he
was most renowned was doing just this: moving away from the abolition-
ist hubs in Massachusetts to found a black-run newspaper in Rochester,
New York. As a guest speaker at women’s suffrage organizations, Douglass
urged a similar political sensitivity, requiring both patience and calcula-
tion. Even though Douglass was a strong supporter of women’s equality in
principle, he commends the incremental demands and achievements made
by this movement: first for women to be allowed to speak for themselves,
then for education, and only then for the vote (5:251).
In unusually philosophical reflections on the practice of public speaking
that Douglass offered late in life, he maintains his fundamental commit-
ment to natural law separate from its politically determined implementa-
tion. Describing oratory, he asserts, “The expression is but the body; the
thing expressed is the soul” (5:140). Several different expressions can

be given to the same truth depending on circumstances. Indeed, this is
necessitated by the very nature of truth, and natural law. God and human
nature are irreducible to worldly terms. The best that can be offered are
approximations, but if we lean too heavily on any one approximation, we
begin to imagine that we have correctly named God, or human nature.
As Douglass tells his audience, “No definite idea of absolute truth can be
perfectly conveyed to the human understanding by any form of speech.”
He continues, “There are, nevertheless, individual truths, sparks from the
great All-Truth, quite within the range of [human] mental vision” (5:141).
In the social world and in the realm of politics, we deal in sparks. Our
task is to identify them and to blow on them with the hope that they will
grow—with the hope (and, for Douglass, confidence) that eventually the
whole world may be aflame. This takes practical wisdom and other virtues.
Douglass commends an array of further techniques for bringing the
law of the world into conformity with natural law—for blowing on the
sparks, as it were. We have encountered some of these above: the practices
that enhance our ability to rightly perceive our human nature and so nat-
ural law. Douglass further urges individuals to act as examples, following
natural law in their own lives. As we have seen, he commends the practice
of organizing, which he understands in a broad sense. In a world not as
yet supersaturated with media, organizing involves not only building per-
sonal relationships but, even more than today, creating and disseminating
media. The organizer must write, edit, publish, and speak. These practices
of organizing, Douglass proclaims, are weapons “superior to swords, guns,
and dynamite”; they make those in power “fear and tremble” (5:250).
While Douglass began his career in the camp of the Garrisonian aboli-
tionists, he later parted ways with them, eventually finding a home in the
Republican Party. However, Douglass was always clear that his political
party affiliation was pragmatic, that his primary interest was advancing
the cause of justice, rather than advancing his party or himself. “Though
I am a party man,” he told an audience, “to me parties are valuable only
as they subserve the ends of good government. When they persistently
violate the fundamental rights of the humblest and weakest in the land,
I scout them, despise them, and leave them” (5:184–185). He was acutely
aware of the temptation to become overly invested in the political pro-
cess, forgetting the ends that this process was to serve: forgetting natural
law. In the early days of Abraham Lincoln’s presidency, Douglass com-
plained that Lincoln’s political maneuvering trumped the president’s
commitment to principles. Douglass’s complaint was not that Lincoln
refused to immediately free the slaves. His complaint was that, given the
political cover that the Civil War provided to Lincoln, the president was
slow to act on the principles of liberty and equality. In Douglass’s analy-

sis, “Policy, policy, everlasting policy, has robbed our statesmanship of
all soul-moving utterances” (4:13). The soul is not to directly determine
political action—the intermediary of practical wisdom is necessary—but
the soul must remain the underlying, motivating force behind political
action. Policy alone addresses what seem to be problems, but an excessive
focus on policy (thrice repeated!) diverts energy from addressing genu-
ine problems, as determined by natural law. Douglass also describes this
issue in terms of the necessary collaboration between reason and emo-
tion. Excessive focus on policy gives reason unwarranted privilege. In
his remarks on Lincoln, Douglass laments the apparent lack of a “warm
heart” in the notoriously somber statesman.
In contrast to Lincoln’s initial policy focus, Douglass commends the
example of the already victorious British abolitionists whose agitation
“was not impelled or guided by the fine-spun reasonings of political expe-
diency, but by the unmistakable and imperative demands of principle.
It was not commerce, but conscience; not considerations of climate and
productions of earth, but the heavenly teachings of Christianity, which
everywhere teaches that God is our Father, and man, however degraded,
is our brother” (3:195). Here Douglass does not unveil all of the appara-
tus of natural law; he abbreviates it with “principle,” “conscience,” and
“teachings of Christianity,” of which the most important is the image of
God in humans. This is why the metaphor of God’s fatherhood is appro-
priate, Douglass suggests, and it carries with it the metaphor of human
brotherhood. If only Christianity would embrace this point as its central
message, Douglass often laments, the end of injustice would be near. In
the same way that truth transcends each of its manifestations in speech,
Douglass holds that “religion is greater than the form created to express
it” (3:38). Churches tend to bind people to the status quo, rather than urg-
ing them to investigate their humanity (and so the divine) and then trans-
form the status quo. At its best, religion ought to seek out “the lowest link
in humanity’s chain—humanity’s most degraded form in the most abject
condition” (2:101). To the lowliest, the true Christian offers both material
assistance and a sense of self that allows for the characteristically human
capacities to be exercised. Douglass fully identifies abolitionist organizing
with religion: “This is Anti-Slavery—this is Christianity” (2:101).
NARRATING NATURAL LAW
So far we have considered Douglass’s spoken words. He was a powerful

orator, but he was also a powerful writer; in both media, he evokes reason
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
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.
“Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge,” he writes, “my spirit

was roused to eternal wakefulness. Liberty! the inestimable birth-right
of every man” (160). But liberty could not be obtained immediately.
Douglass would need to wait. Once, he lost patience, attempted to run
away prematurely, and was captured. This experience reminded him that
natural law requires practical wisdom to be implemented in the world.
The most acclaimed scene in Douglass’s writings is his fight with a
slave-breaker named Edward Covey. Douglass depicts this scene in each
of his autobiographies, and it forms the climax of each—and so the climax
of his life as he writes it.12 Covey was notoriously brutal, and Douglass
had already developed the intuition that slavery was unjust. Beaten regu-
larly by Covey, Douglass resolves finally to appeal to higher authority. He
appeals to two: his owner and a traditional African spiritual healer. Both
are unsuccessful at protecting him from the wrath of Covey. Douglass
decides that he will appeal not without but within, to his own capacity to
resist. According to the narrative, as soon as Douglass resolved to fight in
his mind, he realized that he was already fighting Covey in the flesh, grap-
pling with him and exchanging blows. In other words, Douglass’s action
followed without mediation from the awareness of his own nature. The
more Douglass fought, the more aware he was of his own nature until he
was finally “a freeman in fact” even if he “remained a slave in form” (247).
Douglass did not escape slavery on that day as he resisted Covey’s blows
and tricks, but Douglass’s perception of human nature and the natural law
sharpened. In time, when practical wisdom told him the time was right,
he would attempt escape—and he would succeed. In the figure of Covey,
Douglass depicts the paradigm of injustice: the tyrant. Recall how the
tyrant sets himself in the place of God, replacing God’s law with arbitrary
decisions of his own will. Douglass appeals to his reader to identify with
him in this confrontation with injustice and to draw from it conclusions
about a higher law:
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
F or Anna Julia Cooper, natural law liberates society’s weakest. It brings

freedom to blacks, as well as to women, the two groups that were
Cooper’s greatest concerns. She appreciated the importance of discuss-
ing the oppression faced by both groups compounded, and she appreci-
ated how that oppression scarred the lives of her fellow black women.
For Cooper, natural law was not an intellectual project, though for her
the intellect does play an important role in criticizing unjust laws and
practices. Rather, for Cooper, natural law motivates action: community
organizing and education for the least advantaged. Women have a par-
ticularly important role to play in such action, and the same factors that
disadvantage black women also put them in a privileged position with
respect to natural law: They can be its strongest champions, and they can
form the vanguard of the critical project it commends. From birth in slav-
ery in 1858 to the publication of her intellectual masterpiece A Voice from
the South in 1892 to her decades as a high school teacher and university
administrator to her earned doctorate received from the Sorbonne when
she was 67 years old to her death at 105, Anna Julia Cooper’s extraordi-
nary life and thought richly contributed to the black natural law tradition.
Her intellectual project is at one with the tradition, but she significantly
deepens the tradition in a number of ways, most notably by emphasizing
the way natural law speaks particularly to women.
In the wake of powerful feminist critiques of human nature as a con-
cept built on masculine underpinnings, natural law theory that would
draw normative conclusions from human nature would seem exposed to
feminist critique. Feminists have persuasively argued that viewing the
human as essentially rational is misguided; even worse, it preserves male
domination under an ostensibly neutral claim. Normative claims based
on an account of human nature as essentially rational would, by extension,
O N A N N A J U L I A CO O P E R ( 33 )
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
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,
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
Natural law theories begin with an account of human nature, of what

it means to be human. Often, these accounts describe human beings as
longing for God, or the good. On many accounts, humans are also seen as
having the capacity to advance toward that object of desire, for example,
by using reason to achieve particular goods like friendship and knowl-
edge. Cooper agrees that humans all have a longing that can be described
in religious terms. For her, all of creation moves toward greater actualiza-
tion. A small seed growing into a tall, strong tree represents the direction
in which all nature moves, a conclusion she describes as “the universal
law of development” (67).4 While all nature follows this law, humans are
in the unique position of being able to understand it themselves and so
choose whether or not to cooperate with it. If humans choose to cooper-
ate, we direct our actions toward a future of “inexhaustible possibilities,”
toward “full knowledge and likeness of [the] Creator” (80; 67). If humans
choose not to cooperate, by implication, such possibilities are shut off. We
are stuck repeating the same—a kind of hell, forever separated from God.
Rather than seeing God’s law as having any specific content, Cooper sees
a law, “God-given and inviolable,” that demands we embrace the existence
of and desire for future possibilities. There is no way to predict what this
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
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
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
Accounts of human nature offered by natural law theorists often focus

on not only desire for the good, but also the characteristics of humans
that are relevant for pursuing that desire. These characteristics are shared
between humans and God and so allow humans access to God’s law
when they are used properly (i.e., when they are used in the pursuit of
the good). As mentioned above, a popular version of natural law theory
focuses exclusively on the human capacity to reason. Cooper offers a
quite different account of what it means to be human or, put another way,
what characterizes the human soul. For her, this involves reason and also
emotion, and it is essentially dynamic, irreducible to any simple depic-
tion. In describing the novel she wishes were written about black life, she
recommends a book that would portray “life in the raw, struggling, fail-
ing, falling, battling the hardships, buffeting the onslaughts, accepting
the handicaps, but toiling on and up, irrepressibly up and always human”
(343). Life is complicated, but it ultimately bends upward—this is the
“universal law” to which Cooper is committed. Those complications, or
rather our capacity to grapple with them, are essential. What makes us
human, in Cooper’s view, is that we are oriented toward future possibili-
ties, and that we have the capacity to battle hardships and repel onslaughts
in order to move toward those future possibilities. Battling and buffeting,
struggling and accepting involve both rational and emotional work. We

have to make sense of what happened to us or what might happen to us,
figuring out how to right ourselves when the world tips us over. But we
must also have passion and resolve, be able to mourn, and be able to prop-
erly separate unwarranted anger from righteous indignation.
Cooper does not make a list of emotions or modes of reasoning that
are essentially human because such a list supervenes on the capacity that
Cooper believes characterizes the human soul: the ability to continue
through the ups and downs of life in the world oriented toward an ultimate
goal, toward God. She is quite explicit in her condemnation of those who
would make lists of the features of the human: “Men are not ‘drawn’ by
abstractions” (68). Elsewhere, she adds, “God’s kingdoms are all sealed to
the seedy, moss-grown mind of self-satisfied maturity. … Preconceived
notions, blinding prejudices, and shriveling antipathies must be wiped
out, and the cultivable soul made a tabula rasa for whatever lesson great
Nature has to teach” (104). Here, abstractions are figured as a type of
prejudice, cemented with time and age. They do not properly characterize
the soul because the soul, at its best, is taught by “Nature.” For Cooper,
nature means the desire for future possibilities, but the lessons of nature
are also the trials and tribulations of life. In place of abstractions, the soul
should be shaped entirely by its struggles with the difficulties of life as it
pursues infinite possibility. Accepting abstractions closes off future pos-
sibility and so puts us at odds with God. Bluntly stated, commitment to
the abstractions of race, gender, or class sends you to hell.
The best perspective on the world, according to Cooper, is that of the
child. (As we will see later, this makes the process of education particu-
larly delicate and significant.) Quoting the words of Jesus in Matthew
18:3, Cooper writes, “ ‘Except ye become as little children’ is not a pious
precept, but an inexorable law of the universe” (104). It can count as a
law of the universe because it follows directly from the “universal law”
Cooper earlier identified, that the universe tends toward increased pos-
sibility. As children encounter aspects of the world for the first time,
they are continually experiencing such increased possibility. Children
are not burdened by the “moss-grown mind” of grown-ups. The mind
of a child is not filled with abstractions that still the world’s dynamism.
Children do not as yet have categories for every object they encounter,
nor do they have expectations for every person based on race, gender,
or class. If only we could return to the perspective of the child, Cooper
wishes, we could become closer to God. Later in life, we do experience
echoes of this privileged perspective of the child. Cooper points to
love and sympathy as ways of approaching our fellows without reduc-
ing them to abstractions. With these attitudes, we are attentive to the
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
that institutional religion must be held accountable to actual experiences

of God, in the soul and in nature. As a commitment to God, faith takes
those experiences as its starting point, not the creeds or rituals of any
institutional church. Cooper writes, “To me, faith means treating the truth
as true. Jesus believed in the infinite possibilities of an individual soul. His
faith was a triumphant realization of the eternal development of the best in
man—an optimistic vision of the human aptitude for endless expansion
and perfectibility” (193–194, italics in original). Here it is not even Jesus’s
life that is to serve as a model for Christians, but the essence of his faith
that is the model. Jesus fully appreciated the image of God in humans in a
way that no human fully appreciates that image. Jesus not only embraced
infinite possibility (quite literally, being God) but also experienced the
ultimate turmoil of life, persecution unto death. He demonstrated the
capacity to persevere, an essentially human capacity. We human beings
can model ourselves on Jesus by embracing these truths, in both ourselves
and our relations with the world around us. As Cooper puts it, “Religion
must be life made true; and life is action, growth, development—begun
now and ending never. And life made true cannot confine itself—it must
reach out and twine around every pulsing interest within reach of its
uplifting tendrils” (194). Religion is not about church or creed but about
following God, where God is essentially identified with “action, growth,
development.” When our life is so oriented, we are aligned with the rest
of the world, for the rest of the world, the rest of creation, is also animated
by the spirit of “action, growth, development.” If the individual does not
properly understand her identity as imaging God, the individual is mis-
aligned with the world, inhibiting rather than enhancing that “action,
growth, development.” When we properly understand ourselves, Cooper
is saying, we not only experience flourishing ourselves but we enhance the
flourishing of others.
According to Cooper, our commitment to God, and to the image of
God in ourselves, compels us to share this faith: We should “give it out
by precept and by example” (194). By living a life that is devout in this
way, we set an example for others, but we should also articulate our under-
standing of the divine, spreading our faith by sharing the precepts we for-
mulate with others. As Cooper carefully explicates her view of life, it is
tempting to take her as troublingly focused on the individual. She is not.
For her, the individual always lives in a home, with a family, with a mother.
Life involves growth and development, but life is lived together with oth-
ers. It is not simply an individual who examines herself, becomes aligned
with nature, and shares the wisdom she has gained, but rather an indi-
vidual who is nurtured by parents and relatives to become properly ori-
ented to the world and who also teaches those parents and relatives how
to become so oriented. As we will see, for Cooper, mothers have a crucial

responsibility—and so, in a sense, a divine mandate—in this regard.
Cooper offers hints about how she would move from general accounts
of human life and of God to specific claims about what ought and ought
not to be done. It is our task, she is saying, to do the work of making nor-
mative claims based on our understanding of human nature as imaging
God. One path that Cooper takes to normativity: She cautions against
those who would be content with aestheticized nature, against those who
would write poems describing the sensuous without reference to truth. In
discussing the poet Maurice Thompson’s “A Voodoo Prophecy,” in which
the white Southerner presents himself as “prophet of the dusky race” and
“poet of wild Africa,” Cooper commends the aesthetics but condemns
the poem because of its dramatic misrepresentation of realities of black
life (152). Life lived rightly does not just mean wallowing in the beauty
around us, Cooper seems to be arguing. Our perception could be scandal-
ously wrong; what seems to us beauty could in fact be deceitful. Life does
not only involve growing bigger and stronger and doing new activities. It
also means a responsiveness to the world, a willingness to part with beau-
tiful illusions when we realize them to be illusions, and a rejection of the
allure of the merely pretty.
It might seem as if the account of human nature that Cooper is offer-
ing, oriented toward future possibility, is secular, or secularized. It might
seem as if God can be bracketed and nothing will change; she could make
the same claims about human nature without mention of God in order to
come to the same normative judgments. The name of God would seem to
be simply adding rhetorical oomph. Cooper strongly opposes this view.
She singles out agnostics in particular as lacking the ability to mold their
character in the right ways because of their “primarily skeptical spirit”
(193). For Cooper, agnosticism is not the opposite of belief in certain reli-
gious propositions, and it is not the opposite of knowing a personal God.
Rather, agnosticism is an affective orientation that refuses to acknowl-
edge “men need to be anchored to what they feel to be eternal verities”
(193). Religion is felt. It is not an intellectual operation, and it is not a
personal relationship. In Cooper’s view, religion involves a very power-
ful feeling: It motivates action in a way that nothing else can. In particu-
lar, it motivates sacrifice that would not be justified by practical reason.
Knowing that the world is moving toward new possibilities, that growth
and expansion will soon come if only we are properly oriented toward
them, makes us willing to give things up that we hold dear—our time,
our wealth, our affections, and perhaps even our bodies. It is hard not to
think of motherhood as a paradigmatic example of such sacrifice, though
perhaps it is an example that calls into question Cooper’s claim that only
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
and God’s image in humans through specific normative claims. Lynching

is wrong. An economic system that deprives blacks of opportunity is
wrong. This is a strong sense of “wrong”: It is wrong as judged by God.
Christians must campaign against those worldly forces that would conceal
God’s image; that is the essence of Christianity for Cooper. Christianity
is not about following a certain set of rules found in the Bible. The Bible
provides insight into who God is and how we can come to know God,
but coming to know God is a process that we must begin from where we
are, as individuals. However, we must never forget that we are individuals
embedded in families and communities.
Cooper offers vivid imagery to conjure the wrongs done by oppres-
sion, encouraging her readers to see these as wrongs done directly to God,
through Christ. Like W. E. B. Du Bois, she imagines a black Jesus and a
Jesus who stands with the lowliest. When we take the perspective of this
God, we are able to see just how wrong racism and sexism are. Blacks and
women have their future possibilities dramatically curtailed by the world,
yet God is closely identified with future possibility, in Cooper’s account.
Imagining God as a woman or a black person puts into stark relief the
“petty prejudice and narrow priggishness” that characterize our social
and political norms, staging a dramatic conflict between worldly law and
higher law when that higher law is embodied in a marginalized individual
(89). In addition to writing a parable of Christ as a black Southerner who
goes unrecognized, Cooper was also particularly fascinated by images of
the black Madonna, about whom she composed a carefully crafted poem.6
In this figure, Cooper found blackness and femininity combined—and
combined, crucially, in the mother of God. It is not only the individual
human being whose life is shared with those around him, but also God
in Jesus Christ whose divine life is shared with his mother, Cooper seems
to be suggesting. Here again, in the figure of the black woman, the image
of God is often forgotten, but when it is remembered, it has a powerful,
critical potential. As she puts it, “The God of history often chooses the
weak things of earth to confound the mighty” and so we can conclude
that “the Negro race in America has a veritable destiny in His eternal
purposes” (194).
While Cooper does not take love as the centerpiece of her thought,
love does play an important role, and her reflections on love represent a
part of her particularly Christian religious identity. In a poem that she had
privately published about the death and resurrection of Christ, Cooper
describes love as “Triumphant over law” in Christ’s resurrection. Law is
explicated, in the next lines, as “race, or class proscription” and “barri-
ers high and low.” 7 Law here refers not only to social norms and statutes.
Cooper emphasizes that Christ champions a disposition responsive to the
world. She condemns those who display “narrowness of vision” or “drowsy

ears” and those “slow-of-heart.” These maladies prevent us from perceiv-
ing the needs of those around us and from recognizing the humanity of
others, and so from loving. In other words, Cooper is not only charging
us with seeing the divine in ourselves but also in others, and that means,
specifically, cultivating the ability to see others rightly. Sensitivity of per-
ception is the prerequisite to judgment. God condemns unjust laws, but
in order to understand which laws are unjust, we must perceive ourselves
and others rightly, which means appreciating the “kinship in ‘one blood’ ”
of humanity—with that blood given by “One Father.”8
Social and political norms are deeply rooted, in Cooper’s view, and the
violence done by those norms is overlooked by a population made passive
because of business interests. The nation may appear peaceful, but this
is just an illusion that allows for the smooth functioning of commerce.
The nation suffers from “widespread apathy due to the fact that business
interests require good men [and] reconciliation of national differences.”
These interests “cry peace, peace, when there is no peace.”9 Business
interests also imagine themselves to represent progress, development,
and future possibility, but, like the racist poems of Maurice Thompson,
they do so without reference to truth. The United States suffers from an
underlying conflict, from violence done to blacks and women, but this can
only become visible when the world’s illusions, supporting the interests
of the wealthy and the powerful, are discarded. The belief in peace in a
deeply violent world is one of the various forms of dishonesty that Cooper
condemns. Indeed, she sees American Christianity as fundamentally
duplicitous, with a “great gulf between its professions and its practices”
(206). White churches carefully avoid issues of race while still being white
churches, refusing to embrace the universal brotherhood proclaimed by
Christ.
Anna Julia Cooper is often trumpeted as a precursor to intersectional
feminist analysis (i.e., to analysis that looks at the interaction between
racial and gender oppression).10 Cooper, after all, is a black woman, and
she writes of the oppression of women, of blacks, and of black women.
Yet her analysis of all oppression is based on her commitment to natu-
ral law. The reason blacks, women, and black women are wronged is that
the image of God in the human being is disrespected. It is disrespected
in different ways, and Cooper offers a powerful analysis of those variet-
ies of disrespect, but her analysis is not motivated by solidarity with any
particular group; it is motivated by a sense of human kinship and the
“Fatherhood of God.” This is what motivates her to urge women’s rights
advocates to think of black rights and to urge antiracism activists to think
about gender. She asserts that women’s equality is guaranteed by Christ,
just as racial equality is guaranteed by Christ. Racial injustice cannot be

relegated to a back burner by white women’s rights advocates because
God is present in all those who suffer. Cooper takes it as axiomatic that
the suffering of one group will end only when the suffering of all groups
ends. She writes, “For woman’s cause is the cause of the weak; and when
all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will
have her ‘rights,’ and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will
have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly,
to love mercy, and to walk humbly” (105). What Cooper could mean
here is hard to understand in exclusively secular terms. In the practical
rationality of politics, it makes sense that certain groups could advance
and achieve power, while other groups remain stuck in powerlessness. If
politics is motivated by self-interest, at least by a crude, rationalist sense
of self-interest, there would be no reason to advance the interests of any
groups other than one’s own. But Cooper is arguing that the struggle for
women’s rights is “the cause of the weak,” one species of a religious genus,
one of the many ways in which humans ought to work to restore God’s
image in humanity. In this view, political calculation still has a role, but
its role is in determining which unjust laws or norms to struggle against
most immediately and with the most energy. Struggle happens on many
fronts, and it must continue on many fronts even if resources for struggle
are scarce and must be allocated strategically. In any particular struggle,
this broader picture of multiple struggles must be remembered, and the
process of struggling on one front ought not to undermine the struggle
on another front.
Cooper presents her view of the connections between multiple forms
of oppression and struggle against those forms of oppression as moti-
vated by eschatology. One day, justice, mercy, and humility will pervade
the land. This is more than a hope for the end of oppression. It is a vision
of the virtues that Cooper crisply encapsulates in the familiar phrase
“regarding one’s neighbor as one’s self ” (105). Such regard—which is, on
Cooper’s account, proper perception—is possible when sexism and rac-
ism are eliminated. Once that happens, as we regard our neighbors as our-
selves, we will treat them justly and mercifully, and we will carry ourselves
humbly. Cooper offers a provocative label for this state: “universal cour-
tesy” (105). Cooper harnesses the ideals of femininity of her day, but she
attempts to void them of their disingenuous, classist content. Courtesy
is a proper aspiration; it has just been deeply misunderstood. Its true
meaning is respect for the image of God in others, and this is only pos-
sible when norms and laws that blemish this image have been removed.
As Cooper puts it, this will involve “the final triumph of all right over
might, the supremacy of the moral forces of reason and justice and love in
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
specifics that we must respond. Certainly reason is necessary, but reason

should not be made into an idol. Both racism and antiracist activism have
a tendency to rely on reason divorced from experience, divorced from the
careful training of perception and emotions. This, Cooper is arguing, is a
mistake.
Just because a social norm or law is condemned by the “higher court”
Cooper envisions, this does not mean that it ought to be disobeyed. While
for Cooper, an unjust law may be no law at all, there still may be reasons
to follow it. Writing of laws enforcing segregation, Cooper is careful not
to blame those whose job it is to implement what she considers unjust
laws: “When a law has passed and received the sanction of the land, there is
nothing for our officials to do but enforce it till repealed; and I for one, as a
loyal American citizen, will give those officials cheerful support and ready
sympathy in the discharge of their duty” (94). It should be noted that such
a view—perhaps rather too “cheerful” for the tastes of many today—does
not preclude vigorous protest or civil disobedience. It would seem that,
in her view, the consequences of civil disobedience, for example, jail time
or fines, must be endured, perhaps even cheerfully. Cooper does directly
urge her readers to attempt to change unjust laws, but the greater part of
her interest in implementing the higher law lies elsewhere. “Public senti-
ment precedes and begets all laws, good or bad; and on the ground I have
taken, our women are to be credited largely as teachers and moulders of
public sentiment” (94). Rather than focusing on dramatic protests or acts
of civil disobedience, Cooper assigns a uniquely important role to fami-
lies in molding character. In order to be rid of unjust laws, the population
must be equipped to evaluate whether the laws of the land would stand
in a “higher court.” There must be a population that does not fall for the
allure of rationalistic moral codes or prepackaged programs aimed at cor-
recting injustice. There must be a population equipped to carefully and
patiently examine historical and social conditions in a way that does not
reduce them to bullet points. There must be a population that appreciates
the presence of the image of God in each individual and so appreciates the
fundamental kinship of all individuals as children of God. Such a popula-
tion can only be created with much effort. This effort is not abstract, and
it is not possible to formulate general rules for this creation. It involves
forming the right kind of character, and formal law is not the primary or
best mechanism for this task.
Cooper’s dissertation, completed and defended in Paris when she was
in her seventh decade, tracks antislavery efforts in France, with particu-
lar attention to how the dynamic political landscape around the French
Revolution dealt with the equally dynamic political landscape and
equally revolutionary developments in Haiti. This is a history book, and
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
While Cooper’s dissertation, written late in life, largely conforms to aca-

demic norms, her early writings, published as A Voice from the South, are
not fully disciplined by academic or literary norms. Cooper’s book fea-
tures a mix of essays, speeches, autobiographical reflections, and histori-
cal studies—a hybrid genre that Du Bois would employ to much acclaim
in Souls of Black Folk just over a decade later. The method of Cooper’s
book is clearly self-conscious, and its aim is indicated in the title. Instead
of conveying information about the South—or about blacks or women—
Cooper provides a firsthand account. The significance here is not so much
the authority she attributes to herself. Rather, Cooper is leveraging the
broader connotations of “voice”—voice as a window into our humanity.
Instead of representing individuals or events, Cooper aims to perform
through writing the humanity of a black Southern woman. Her words
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”
(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
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
of [women’s] nature” (112). These are moral instincts, or at least instincts

with moral consequences. Women are particularly attuned to creating
happy and healthy children and families, and if women are allowed to
take this instinct to the public square, the nation would have more laws
that nurture children and families—an example of the implementation
of natural law. Cooper is particularly concerned with the damaging moral
effects of national prosperity. With wealth flowing freely, it might seem
that the only concerns that should influence lawmakers are those of profit
and utility. This is ultimately the perspective of selfishness, and of selfish
men. Such men are concerned with increases in their bank accounts, not
with morals. Women, in contrast, are naturally concerned with human-
ity, starting with children and extending outward through home and
family. This is an orientation advantageous for discerning God’s law. It
allows women to appreciate and advocate for “the solidarity of humanity,
the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness of and injustice of all special
favoritisms, whether of sex, race, country, or condition” (204). Because
women can instinctively see the humanity in a baby or a sibling or a hus-
band, they are more easily able to see the humanity in everyone. They
are more likely to see that misogynistic, racist, and nationalist laws run
against natural law, and they are more likely to see that special privileges
granted to the wealthy and the powerful are equally illegitimate. Women
ought to advocate against sexism, Cooper writes, but as they gain increas-
ing political power, they will also join the struggles against other forms of
oppression—as long as they continue to attend to natural law.
EDUCATING AND ORGANIZING
Much of Cooper’s long life was spent not as a spokesperson or an activist

but as an educator and a community organizer. Professionally, she was
a teacher; she was also the adoptive mother of seven children. These are
vocations that allow special access to natural law, and they are vocations
that have a special role in the implementation of natural law in the world.
Cooper dramatically intones, “Woman, Mother, your responsibility is one
that might make angels tremble and fear to take hold! To trifle with it, to
ignore or misuse it, is to treat lightly the most sacred and solemn trust ever
confided by God in human kind” (59). What is most essentially human,
according to Cooper, is infinite possibility. Where would such possibil-
ity be better represented than in the figure of the child? Because they are
representatives of what is most essentially human and of the image of
God in humanity, caring for children becomes a kind of worship. If only
the purity and holiness of the child could be preserved into adulthood,
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”
(258). It is important to pause on Cooper’s reasoning here. She is commit-

ted to equality, but not to equality as an abstract concept. Equality means
that each human being ought to be able to exercise her characteristically
human capacities, moving toward her infinite potential. If privileges of
birth allow some to realize their humanity in this way with relatively lit-
tle help from schools or society, resources that would have gone to the
privileged ought to be redirected toward those whose disadvantaged cir-
cumstances require extra educational or social resources to realize their
humanity. Cooper rejects the notion that equality means equality of
opportunity, but she also rejects the notion that equality means equal-
ity of outcomes, to use the slogans in which the debate about affirmative
action is often framed today. What Cooper thinks equality means is that
human potential ought to be realized in all. This cannot be measured in
quantifiable “outcomes” (this would be reducing humanity to the calcula-
ble); it cannot be left to “hard work”; and it cannot be left to unpredictable
factors. It must be ensured by the law if the law of the world is to conform
with natural law.
Although Cooper was a teacher, she was also hugely involved in orga-
nizing. She was a member or leader of many local and national organi-
zations, including the National Education Association, the Southern
Sociological Association, the Classical Association of the Atlantic States,
the local branch of the Young Women’s Christian Association (of which
she was a life member and board member), the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People, the National Negro Association for
the Suppression of Atheism and Communism, and the Oberlin Alumni
Association, to name just a few. She cofounded the Washington Negro
Folklore Society and she chaired the National Association of Colored
Women’s committee investigating the convict lease system.16 Her inter-
est in education and community organizing combined in her leadership
of Freylinghausen University. In that role, she stabilized the institution’s
finances and regularized its procedures while maintaining its mission of
educating the black working class. Part of her method for securing the uni-
versity’s finances was to move it from a costly rented building into her own
home. While this required abandoning, at least temporarily, dreams of a
freestanding home for the institution developed by her impecunious pre-
decessor, it ensured the institution’s continuing viability. This was one of
the difficult choices faced by Cooper as a community organizer. That the
university was enshrined in her home also represented the way that Cooper
saw family, education, and organizing as activities in continuity with each
other. Now they all occurred in the same physical location as well.
In addition to the practice of organizing, Cooper offers a theory of orga-
nizing that connects it with natural law. She does this in several ways, with
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
presents a different story. The desire for nobility in Cooper’s epigraph is

complemented by a desire for grace that manifests as identification with,
and organizing with, the downtrodden. To achieve this, which is to move
the world toward the divine, Cooper realizes that careful planning and
strategic action are necessary. This starts with community building at
the local as well as national level. There are times to be critical and times
to remain silent; recall how Cooper urged blacks to mute their protests
during the Second World War. Throughout, the characteristically human
capacities for reason and emotion ought to be exercised. This is the excel-
lence, the nobility that Cooper embraces. It is not haughty but a practical
awareness of the ways of the world and a belief that blacks and whites,
women and men, and especially black women can excel. By excelling, they
participate in the divine, participation that is contagious and may precipi-
tate the eschaton.
CHAP T ER 3
On W. E. B. Du Bois
W . E. B. Du Bois is often considered a decidedly secular black

leader. He was trained in sociology at Harvard and the University
of Berlin, and he resisted organized religion—refusing to lead prayers
at Wilberforce University when he taught there, for example. Yet Du
Bois also writes passionately in a religious, and specifically Christian,
idiom. He appeals to God often, he wrote a widely circulated statement
of faith, “Credo,” and his most famous work addresses “souls.” This has
recently led to scholars studying Du Bois as a religious humanist or a
religious naturalist, committed to a worldly faith that recognizes the
complex and unknowable depths of the human condition while reject-
ing any belief in the supernatural.1 This way of understanding Du Bois
encourages a separation of his political commitments from his religious
commitments. On such a reading, religion is treated as a personal belief
or a worldview, but there is no clear pathway from religion to Du Bois’s
acclaimed work organizing for social justice. At most, Du Bois is said
to hold certain quasi- Christian beliefs about making the world a better
place, beliefs that point to his view that Jesus identifies with those who
are oppressed.
On my reading, Du Bois fits squarely within the black natural law
tradition. To see this, we must first appreciate that Du Bois was capa-
ble of writing in different registers. His early writings were primarily
descriptive—listing facts gleaned from his empirical investigations—and
Du Bois continued to employ this empirical register throughout his career
in writings that include his dissertation, published as The Suppression of
the African Slave-Trade to the United States of America (1896), his ground-
breaking The Philadelphia Negro (1899), and the several volumes of studies
he oversaw at Atlanta University in the first years of the 20th century, and
that extend to Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, when
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 59 )
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.
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
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 )
nature point to what he thinks is most important about human nature: the

very fact that it cannot be reduced to any one definition. Unlike the physi-
cal world that can be fully understood with enough effort, the human
marks what does not fit comfortably into the terms of the world. In addi-
tion to his theoretical reflections on human nature, Du Bois describes this
ineffability in quite explicit and practical terms. “Infinite is human nature,”
he writes. “We make it finite by choking back the mass of men, by attempt-
ing to speak for others, to interpret and act for them, and we end by acting
for ourselves and using the world as our private property.”15 Here already
we see hints at the way Du Bois’s account of human nature can lead to nor-
mative conclusions and how it is connected with God—the “Infinite.” We
attempt to name that human nature, making it “finite,” in everyday life.
We label people, assuming that because they are of a type, they will act in
certain ways. By ignoring what human nature really entails, the infinite,
we treat people instrumentally, as if we were the only human on earth
surrounded by objects to be used for our wishes. The human soul, in Du
Bois’s account, is a “marvelous universe” accessible only to ourselves. It
is a “reservoir of experience, knowledge, beauty, love, and deed.”16 This
is what makes us human: our capacity not only to perceive the world and
act in it, but to appreciate the beauty of the world, to have emotions in the
world, to acquire knowledge of the world beyond instinct. The infinite,
expansive universe that makes us who we are is irreducible; the attempt
to reduce it does violence, turning a human into a nonhuman, and must,
according to Du Bois, be condemned.
When Du Bois is discussing human nature, sometimes, he refers to it
as “all that is human”; at other times, he refers to it as “life.” Human life is
another way of describing the uniqueness of humanity. The physical world
lacks life, and animal life lacks what makes a human, human. The varie-
gated collection of essays, poems, and reflections that Du Bois published
as Darkwater is, according to its author, a reflection on “the Riddle of Life.”
Du Bois explains that this necessitated a publication that mixes genres,
including both emotion-evoking poetry and “sterner flights of logic.”17
Life includes the rhythmic workings of the physical and social world that
can be understood through the human capacity to reason, but life also
includes more than that. This is life’s riddle—that logic is necessary but
not sufficient, and that poetry too is necessary but insufficient. Somehow
they must work together, in productive tension. The topics of Darkwater
must be the topics of life, the issues with which humans and no other crea-
tures concern themselves—concern that is constitutive of human nature.
“These are the things of which men think, who live: of their own selves
and the dwelling place of their fathers; of their neighbors; of work and
service; of rule and reason and women and children; of Beauty and Death
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
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
Our humanity is essentially indiscernible; it is what marks the limits of

reason and emotion. This is Du Bois’s claim, but he adds that it is a claim
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 )
Du Bois’s description of black double consciousness is one of the most

famous lines ever penned by a black writer: “One ever feels his two-ness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled striv-
ings; two warring ideals in one dark body” (364–365). Du Bois is indeed
describing a tragedy here, but it is a tragedy that brings about epistemic
privilege. 33 A few lines later, Du Bois asserts that “Negro blood has a mes-
sage for the world” (365). Because of the split identification experienced
by blacks, blacks are better able to resist the temptation to universalize
particular, worldly commitments. It is harder for blacks to imagine every-
one as American and to imagine everyone as black because they feel
the tension between these two identities, between these two “souls,” in
themselves. Du Bois is not attempting to describe one of these souls, the
Negro soul; he is attempting to describe the tension felt acutely by blacks
that offers insight into all souls. (Du Bois’s book is importantly not titled
Souls of Negroes; “black” is labeling a condition rather than a commu-
nity.) Blacks do not want to become white, according to Du Bois. What
blacks want is the ability at once to hold two identities and participate
in two communities without diminishing either. In other words, blacks
embrace their epistemic privilege, but what they reject is that the liminal
position they occupy ought to bring with it violence and humiliation. Du
Bois acknowledges “the inevitable suffering that always comes with life”
(994); he seeks to mitigate rather than repress that suffering. Embracing
whiteness, or blackness apart from America, is a form of repression, a form
of imagining life without suffering. It is a form of imagining a world and
a self that fit together perfectly, a world and a self advancing toward goals
rationally, harmoniously, and effortlessly. To embrace such a view is to
embrace false consciousness—too often embraced by Americans, in Du
Bois’s view, who ought to learn a lesson from the black embrace of the
tragic.
For the tragedy of black experience to be productive, both blacks and
Americans must understand that their humanity is shared and that their
human yearnings are shared. Such a view faces heavy resistance from the
pressures of the world to smuggle particular, worldly characteristics into
the definition of human nature. Du Bois illustrates this in his account
of the black artist, torn between fulfilling the desires of blacks and the
desires of whites. The racism of whites prevents black artists from appre-
ciating anything black if they desire a broad audience, and the black artist
whose creativity is an expression of black humanity receives no appre-
ciation from the white world—which, of course, controls prestige and
funding. Black artists are uniquely talented at turning the human inclina-
tion toward beauty into manifestations that can be shared with others,
but black artists are discouraged from doing so because it would seem
as though this is not true beauty at all, just a particular representation

appealing only to blacks. Yet black artists expressing black experiences do
produce true beauty, Du Bois argues. The problem is just that whites are
prejudiced. The case of black artists is a special case of a degradation expe-
rienced by blacks as a whole whose expression of their experience is dis-
counted. The result for black artists (as for all blacks) is “wooing false gods
and invoking false means of salvation” (366). Here Du Bois is quite clearly
making the link between human nature, of which he believes creativity is
an essential component, and God. Human creativity, expressed rightly,
participates in the divine. When the world prevents creativity from being
expressed rightly through racism, the artist participates in the worship of
false gods. While Du Bois focuses his remarks on black artists, his argu-
ment is also applicable to white artists whose work participates in white
aesthetics, rather than the true beauty of divine aesthetics—white artists
whose art consists of molding idols.
It should be remembered that it is more brutality than tragedy that has
characterized black experience. Suffering harsh oppression offers a dif-
ferent sort of insight into human nature than dual allegiance does. First,
experiencing oneself as a different sort of creature than how one is treated,
experiencing oneself as a human rather than as a thing, offers insight into
what it means to be human. It means that one does not feel at home in the
world, for the world is always treating blacks like things, and this exilic
feeling is attributed by Du Bois to himself. The “soul in search of itself ”
created by this status naturally rejects accounts of human nature that
would reduce it to this or that set of qualities (518). Indeed, the very pro-
cess of discerning what humanity means is, in Du Bois’s view, part of what
humanity means. The search requires reason and passion and creativity,
and these are also the key qualities of the human.
Du Bois describes not only himself but also Alexander Crummell, the
great figure of black intellectual life from a generation earlier, as exem-
plary black souls. The chapter on Crummell in Souls begins: “This is the
history of a human heart, the tale of a black boy who many long years ago
began to struggle with life that he might know the world and know him-
self ” (512). While the “black boy” Du Bois is referring to is Crummell, it
is also in a sense Du Bois himself, as well as all blacks. This is made clear
when Du Bois describes his first encounter with Crummell, an encoun-
ter that occurred when Du Bois has suddenly become a boy peering at
Crummell’s great soul. The inner nature of Crummell shines through in
his outer characteristics and disposition: “I began to feel the fineness of
his character, his calm courtesy, the sweetness of his strength, and his
fair blending of the hope and truth of life. Instinctively I bowed before
this man, as one bows before the prophets of the world” (512). While Du
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 71 )
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
is also uniquely human—and, Du Bois adds, it is “the greatest of the gifts

of God.” Once again, this need not be read as rhetorical flourish. Laughter
points to the inexplicable and the incalculable, God’s image in humanity,
because laughter marks the absurdity of worldly conventions. If there is
nothing beyond arbitrary social norms and laws that cause suffering, our
reaction would be anger and frustration. Knowing that there is more, that
we are more, offers the distance necessary for amusement—and also nec-
essary to motivate action to change those unjust social norms and laws.
The result is not only laughter but also progress. Realizing that the ways
of the world are inadequate motivates the search for new ways of organiz-
ing society and organizing life. When it seems as though everything fits
together nicely and humans have only to apply reason to understand it
all, we end up with “men who sit in cloistered ease, hesitate from action
and seek sweetness and light” (1158). The status quo is reaffirmed. In con-
trast, those who have suffered oppression and who survive, gifted with
the knowledge that they are more than the world makes them out to be,
are motivated to alleviate the suffering of others. They are motivated to
save souls, as it were, both physically and spiritually. (Of course, many
do not survive, in body or in spirit.) Du Bois writes in praise of “the soul-
torn strength of those who can never sit still and silent while the disinher-
ited and the damned clog our gutters and gasp their lives out” (1158). The
higher law to which human nature points is not to be pondered; it is to be
implemented.
In addition to his descriptions of the black soul as he saw it around
him in the present, Du Bois also draws on the scholarship of his day to
assert that the black soul has been on display throughout history in the
supposedly natural religiosity of black Americans. 35 While such claims
were used by some of Du Bois’s contemporaries to assert the inferiority
of blacks, Du Bois uses them to assert blacks’ superiority. Because of their
persistent religiosity, blacks have a closer connection with God, and so
they are more readily aware of God’s law. In a sense, Du Bois is asserting
that history shows how the image of God is clearer in the souls of blacks.
But Du Bois suggests that this sense of divinity was, historically, not only
in the soul but also in the world. “The transplanted African lived in a world
animate with gods and devils, elves and witches; full of strange influences,
of Good to be implored, of Evil to be propitiated. Slavery, then, was to him
the dark triumph of Evil over him” (499). Rather than taking this passage
from Souls to merely offer a description of how slaves viewed the world,
we can see that Du Bois is positioning his own views in a tradition—a
black natural law tradition. He is not the first to appeal to God to con-
demn worldly injustices; it has been done by blacks since time immemo-
rial, he posits. In earlier days in Africa, God (or the gods) was accessed
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 73 )
externally in the natural world. Now, God is accessed internally, through

God’s image imprinted on human nature. In both cases—and this is the
crucial point Du Bois is making—God sits in judgment on worldly laws
and social norms.
The epistemic privilege of blacks is particularly evident when it comes
to knowing whites, claims Du Bois. The souls of whites are concealed
from themselves for the usual reasons of immaturity and social pressure,
but also because of whites’ commitment to racism. Racism rests on a fun-
damental misconception of the soul. To believe that whites have souls and
blacks do not requires misunderstanding what the soul is. Blacks realize
that whites are deceived. Whites are aware that blacks have this knowl-
edge, and whites find it threatening. It is not simply that blacks work in
white houses and thus see various unseemly acts that whites would rather
conceal. According to Du Bois, blacks “see these [white] souls undressed”
because they realize the hollowness of the beliefs that grant whites an aura
of superiority—specifically, the false claim that whites are human and
blacks are not. 36 Knowing at some level that blacks know this, and that
white supremacy is a charade, motivates whites to hold on to their fan-
tasy of superiority and black dehumanization all the more tightly. Whites
reduce the complexity of black feeling to anger, and they dismiss the pos-
sibility of black intellect. So continues the cycle by which white souls are
increasingly distorted, while blacks continually sharpen their perceptions
of those around them.
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
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
Du Bois continues to exploit the double meaning of Matthew’s airplane

ride into the heavens. Matthew’s beloved allows him to realize his human
capacities, expanding and deepening the emotions he feels, the ideas he
ponders, and the future he imagines. This is not only self-realization but
participation in the divine, Du Bois suggests. Matthew is able to embrace
his “eternal and undying Soul,” which, at the same time, Du Bois describes
in explicitly theological terms: “He was the God-man.” Even Matthew’s
enlarged emotional capacities become secondary to his soul itself, to that
inexplicable part of humanity that is given by God. However, Matthew is
still on earth. His participation in the divine cannot overcome the roar
of the airplane in which he is riding. This could be read as a limit on the
extent to which humans can embrace the divine in this world, given the
constraints of physical laws of which Du Bois has reminded us. It could
also be read as illustrating the way that the soul and the world are always
entangled. As Du Bois argues, our humanity is made possible by the con-
straints of physical laws. In a sense, we need to be in an airplane in order to
discover human nature at its purest. Human experience of the sky is both
dependent on physical forces and more than that: It is experience of the
heavens irreducible to those physical forces.
Note also how Matthew responds to his identification with the God-
man. Not only does he spurn worldly laws and their “pettiness,” he also
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 75 )
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
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 )
rewards that are an order of magnitude greater than worldly pleasures.45

Du Bois is quite explicit about how sacrifice is directed toward the other
worldly: Citing Tennyson, he calls the motivation of sacrifice “That one,
far off, divine event, / Toward which the whole creation moves” (832).
The justice to be achieved through such sacrifice is not the justice of the
reformist, fixing a law here and there. Rather, this is justice of a differ-
ent order, a divine order, standing in judgment on worldly laws and social
norms. In this sense, the pleasure of self-sacrifice that Du Bois commends
is the pleasure of participation in the divine.
In John Brown, Du Bois found a paradigm of self-sacrifice. Du Bois
devoted a book to the white abolitionist whose attempt to precipitate a
slave revolt accelerated the nation’s move toward civil war. Brown justi-
fied his actions by explicitly appealing to God’s law, a higher authority
than the law of the land.46 His life and legend brought about broad dis-
cussion of God’s law and its relevance to politics. Much of this discus-
sion focused on God’s law or higher law prescribed directly by the Bible.
In contrast, Du Bois read Brown as an advocate of natural law, discerned
through reflection on human nature. Du Bois acknowledges that Brown
broke the law of the land, but he also asserts that Brown’s “lawlessness was
in obedience to the highest call of self-sacrifice for the welfare of his fel-
low men.”47 In other words, Brown obeyed a higher authority than the law
of the land. That higher authority demands justice for all, and it demands
self-sacrifice in order to achieve it. Advancing the natural law is not simply
a matter of advocating for abstract precepts, nor a matter of applying the
Bible to the present day; it is a matter of putting oneself on the line so that
the world can be transformed.
What of Brown’s white race? Du Bois describes what separates his take
on Brown from the approaches of Brown’s many other biographers as a
focus on Brown’s relationships with blacks. Brown “worked with them;
and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues,
and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot.”48
If whites generally have a difficult time appreciating natural law, Brown
was an exception because he shed his white privilege. Although he could
not literally become black, by living with blacks, he was able to acquire
some of their disposition and outlook, cutting through the mystifications
to which whites are often committed because of their immersion in white
culture. By emphasizing how Brown lived among blacks, Du Bois is not
only explaining how Brown was able to perceive a higher law. He is also
proposing a course of action for whites. To better understand justice and
to strengthen their commitment to justice beyond the law, whites ought
to identify with the experience of blacks. In a sense, Brown’s self-sacrifice
was double. First, he sacrificed the privileges of whiteness and then he
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
Discerning the mechanics of Du Bois’s religious-ethical project means

connecting the dots from his view of God’s image in humanity to his nor-
mative prescriptions. Often, because Du Bois’s political writings take the
meaning of justice and oppression as obvious, this job of connecting the
dots requires some effort. At other times, Du Bois is quite clear. In the
final paragraph of the chapter of Souls on religion, he writes of
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)
Here we have an inclination toward a “Goal” that is rooted in human nature,

when that nature is rightly understood. The inclination will find its object,
its “Goal,” when an “Awakening” comes. That “Awakening” is portrayed
as salvation from death. It will take place not individually but collectively,
with “ten million souls” moving together. This is a social movement, but it
is also the implementation of God’s law: “Liberty, Justice, and Right” will
come to prevail on earth, restoring human flourishing. Moreover, this nat-
ural inclination toward a “Goal” is inhibited by a very specific set of social
norms and laws, those of racial segregation. Such laws are illegitimate from
the perspective of “Justice,” a perspective accessible when humans collec-
tively embrace their inner orientation toward “the Goal.” Du Bois writes
“Goal” and not “God,” but it is ideas that matter, not the words, and these
ideas could just as well be expressed in a Christian idiom.
While Du Bois often speaks in a purely political register, there are
moments when he reminds his readers that there is a philosophical (or
theological) position underlying his politics. Remembering this keeps pol-
itics and protest focused on the right targets, preventing them from being
distracted by intense political maneuvering. Even in the early Philadelphia
Negro, this pre-political discernment is present. There Du Bois writes that
the goal of politics must be “the bending of Humanity to all that is human”
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 79 )
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
Truth and Right,” he provocatively claims (995). This must be understood in

light of the phrase that comes next: The ideal, according to Du Bois, is for all
three to become “unseparated and inseparable.” We can make sense of Du
Bois’s claim by reading the first instance of “Truth and Right” as referring
to this world, where truth and right, facts and norms, are based on imper-
fect, partial knowledge. They are the laws of the day and the bases for those
laws. They must ultimately be set aside as we move from the provisional to
the absolute. The pathway from the provisional world of the present to the
absolute world, the kingdom of God, may be aesthetic. In this world, we can
appreciate and sometimes create beauty. The self-evident transcendence
of this beauty calls into question the ways of the world. Du Bois aspires,
as an artist, to access truth and right that are absolute, that are inseparable
from beauty. He sees the artist as a privileged theorist of natural law. In
the process of creativity, in exercising the imagination, that cornerstone of
our humanity, we become “one upon whom Truth eternally thrusts itself”
(1000). Whatever resistance we might have to the norms of a higher law is
set aside by the “compulsion” through which beauty acts on us, implant-
ing awareness of what ought to be, whether we seek such awareness or not.
This allows us to understand Du Bois’s seemingly cynical description of his
own work as thoroughly propagandistic, as well as his strong claim that “all
Art is propaganda” (1000). Art that fully participates in beauty necessarily
persuades. It functions as propaganda. Art that is premised on falsities also
persuades, even if it presents itself as apolitical. Such art persuades us that
the status quo is just, that there is no law higher than the laws and norms of
the world. This is art that must be condemned.
Du Bois admits that he has offered an idealized portrayal of art, but
it is a portrayal that the black artist is uniquely situated to appreciate.
White artists must respond to the racial prejudices of a white audience
(and some black artists decide to as well). This prevents their art from
participating in the beautiful, the good, and the true. Beauty can be mere
appearance; appearances, like beauty itself, can seduce. To avoid seduc-
tion that leads to injustice and falsity, Du Bois counsels that the faculty
of judgment, particularly aesthetic judgment, must be developed. We are
fully capable of building our capacity for judgment, blacks even more so
than whites. The more whites attempt to build their capacity for judg-
ment, Du Bois suggests, the more they realize that the foundations of
their world would be shaken if they develop it further. He writes bitingly
of whites’ “fear of the Truth,” their “childish belief in the efficacy of lies as
a method of human uplift” (664). Just the opposite is true for blacks. The
more blacks develop their judgment, the more they are able to see what
justice beyond the world looks like—and it is a vision that resonates with
fettered souls. 53
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 81 )
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
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
Du Bois’s reflections on Davis and on democracy offer hints at how politi-

cal ideas might flow from the natural law theory that the towering black
intellectual develops. In pursuing this question, it is important to keep in
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 83 )
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
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
representing all future potential. This is crucial to Du Bois’s natural law

theory because it shifts how we think about the realization of human
capacities. It is not only in our lifetimes that our capacities can be real-
ized, but in the lifetimes of future generations and thus in the future more
generally. The focus on the soul swiftly becomes a focus on the future of
humanity in general. In the figure of the immortal child, we also see more
of what it means to be human. We see the unlimited possibilities of an
unlimited future. By interacting with children, we are made “larger and
purer” as the unadulterated image of divinity exerts a centripetal force
on those nearby, pulling them in and ultimately up to the heavens (509).
Du Bois first develops this theme in his reflection on the death of
his own son in Souls. The immortal child of Darkwater is a very specific
child, Du Bois’s lost child. In a carefully crafted essay in the book that
first brought him renown, Du Bois evokes biblical imagery to describe
the birth and, within two years, death of his child. Where Souls utilizes a
variety of genres to get at the complexities of the human soul, the essay on
the death of Du Bois’s child—who remains unnamed with the effect that
a human name does not distract from his near divinity—depicts a soul
as near to perfection as possible. When the child was born, Du Bois and
his wife “were not far from worshipping this revelation of the divine”; he
was able to “hear in his baby voice the voice of the Prophet that was to rise
within the Veil”; “A perfect life was his, all joy and love, with tears to make
it brighter” (507–509). This last description is particularly notable as it
shows that Du Bois is depicting near divinity, or divinity in humanity. The
baby still cries, is still essentially human, and yet also contains the divine.
This is what all humans contain, in Du Bois’s view; it is just obscured by
the effects of years living in the world, adapting to the ways of the world.
One of those worldly ways on which Du Bois particularly focuses is race.
The baby knows nothing of white or black, and he dies before he could
learn. Yet in death, the world had its way: As the funeral procession went
by, whites exclaimed, “Niggers!” In the child, then, the higher law is dra-
matized, just as it is dramatized in Du Bois’s stories about the unrecog-
nized Christ. As a child confronts the world, we are reminded of the ways
that social norms and laws besmirch the image of God.
Because children have privileged access to natural law, Du Bois, like
Cooper, is particularly concerned with their proper upbringing—it is,
writes Du Bois, “the problem of problems.”67 The point of education ought
not to be training in preparation for a lucrative vocation. The purpose
should not be to transmit the ways of the world to the young so that the
status quo can be preserved. Rather, the point of education ought to be the
further cultivation of insight into the good, the true, and the beautiful—
and, crucially, how these three are, at their best, interchangeable.68 Such
O N W. E . B . D U B O I S ( 87 )
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
On Martin Luther King Jr.
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
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
tradition. The effect cannot be reduced to elevated reasoning. The effect

begins with emotion but moves beyond emotion, making the soul rise.
By this, Walker means a particular awareness of the soul and what it calls
for. Implicit are the further claims that the soul is rising toward God, that
the soul is where God’s image resides, and as the soul rises, it comes closer
and closer to participation in the divine. Out of that experience comes the
possibility of “goodness,” a word Walker importantly uses with equivoca-
tion. The goodness she refers to is at once King’s and that to which the
soul rises. King’s voice rises and swells, and at the same time, the souls
of his listeners rise. Both together move toward the divine; both together
learn lessons in goodness that can be brought back to everyday life in the
world. In a sense, King’s oratory does natural law, allowing his listeners to
find the image of God in themselves and learn about justice higher than
worldly concerns—and to do this all not through rational reflection, but
rather through a passion that transcends both reason and affect, a passion
that is contagious.4
When a young James Baldwin was assigned to write a magazine profile
about the even younger King shortly after the preacher came to national
attention, Baldwin flew to Montgomery and attended a service at the
Dexter Avenue Baptist Church where King pastored. Baldwin, who was
himself a preaching prodigy before turning to the pen, offers another take
on how King performs natural law:
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
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.
NATURAL LAW IN MONTGOMERY
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
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.
King dramatically portrays the lead-up to this meeting, where he was to

preach. According to his account, normally he would spend 15 hours pre-
paring his sermons, but events were moving so quickly that he had almost
no time to prepare. He knew his task was to tap into the people’s desire
for justice, a desire that had remained latent but, with the right words
and cadences, could be mobilized. King reports being “almost overcome,
obsessed by a feeling of inadequacy” as he struggled to prepare a text. He
could not fall back on reason. He could not carefully calculate how to tap
into that sense of justice. His soul felt bare, stripped of its protective lay-
ers. Denuded, King was brought toward God: “With nothing left but faith
in a power whose matchless strength stands over against the frailties and
inadequacies of human nature, I turned to God in prayer. My words were
brief and simple, asking God to restore my balance and to be with me in a
time when I needed His guidance more than ever” (45). King’s own soul
was exposed and rose toward God, toward justice—this would be conta-
gious, infecting the souls of those in his audience.
Three years later, in Stride Toward Freedom, King remembers telling his
audience about their own dignity. He remembers telling those assembled
that they deserved respect. And he remembers telling his audience that
“the eternal edicts of God Himself ” ran counter to the worldly laws of seg-
regation (46). King remembers appealing explicitly to natural law. In the
audio recording of this auspicious meeting, King is not quite so explicit
in his appeal to natural law, although it is probably the effect that King
remembers and wants to emphasize, the effect of appealing to God’s law,
to eternal edicts. In the recording, King’s words are: “If we are wrong, the
Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution
of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong, God Almighty is wrong. If
we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never
came down to earth. If we are wrong, justice is a lie” (3:73).11 King is cer-
tainly aligning the cause of the boycotters with the cause of justice, and
with God. He is also suggesting, as he will do frequently in later writings
and speeches, that there is a hierarchy of law, beginning with the local,
ascending to the national (the Supreme Court), and finally rising to the
highest form of law, the law of God as embodied in a perfect individual,
Jesus. That highest law is where true justice is found, and it is the author-
ity to which people can appeal when they are disturbed by local laws—
like the laws of bus segregation in Montgomery, Alabama. It is important
to remember that this claim, an intellectual claim, is embedded within
King’s oratorical performance, a performance for which he bared his soul
to reveal the image of God. The performance of the speech and the con-
tent of the speech match: God is confirmed as the highest authority, and
God calls on individuals to act according to God’s authority.
What sorts of actions are necessary in response to divine authority?

King here, as he famously does elsewhere, invokes the “calculation” neces-
sary to implement justice. People are not to simply demand that God’s law
be implemented on earth; that would be a misunderstanding of God’s law.
It would be hubristic, imagining that humans have a capacity to perfectly
know God. (This is the hubris King rejects in theological liberalism.) As
King portrays it, and as the effects of his performance suggest, God offers
a court of appeal, like the Supreme Court, that is not so much concerned
with making law as it is correcting injustice. God motivates the struggle
for justice rather than naming the extension of the concept of justice.
Struggle must be practical and strategic. Although it is almost never men-
tioned when the Montgomery boycott is recalled today, the initial demand
of the boycotters was not integrated seating on buses. Rather, the boycot-
ters asked for courteous treatment, more black employees to be hired by
the bus company (the issue of labor was also central to King throughout
his career), and “Seating of Negro passengers from rear to front of bus, and
white passengers from front to rear on first-come-first-serve basis with no
seats reserved for any race” (3:81). The way the issue was initially framed,
blacks in Montgomery accepted the premise of segregation; they were just
asking that segregation be implemented more fairly. Instead of reserving
certain seats at the front of buses for whites, even when there were few
whites and many blacks, each individual should have an equal chance to
sit down. They would sit among their own race, but blacks should never
have to stand if there were any open seats. This was the practical first step
urged in the struggle toward justice that King and those organizing with
him promoted, with the endorsement of the black masses of Montgomery.
Those who think themselves to be implementing God’s law are tempted
to supreme self-confidence, to arrogance. King discouraged such feelings
in two ways. On the one hand, he framed the struggle as moving toward
justice rather than implementing justice; as such, it required careful cal-
culation and disciplined action. On the other hand, the direction toward
which the protest moved was set by God, and God is love. King repeatedly
argued that a movement directed toward a loving God must be animated
by love. There could not be hateful means employed to advance toward a
loving end. Put in more theological terms, the movement toward a loving
end is a movement that participates in the loving God, and so must be lov-
ing. The false, worldly beliefs and feelings of the protesters were stripped
away and what was left was a soul directed by God, which is to say a soul
(or heart) filled with love. Prayer was necessary in order to keep the move-
ment properly directed. Prayer, according to King, functions to strip away
human motivations and interests—“our knowledge and our supposed
wisdom”—and replace them with an orientation toward God irreducible
to human reason (3:231). This is what distinguished the anti-segregation

protesters’ movement toward justice from the protests of pro-segregation
forces (e.g., in response to the Supreme Court-ordered integration of
schools). The latter protests were oriented by self-interest, and the pro-
testers’ hearts were not filled with love. Instead, pro-segregation forces
employed “violence and lawlessness,” and they did so in pursuit of
injustice.
While strategic thinking and practical reason are necessary to advance
toward justice, on King’s account, what is most important is not a par-
ticular victory achieved but rather the movement itself. It is in the move-
ment that humans participate in the divine; it is through social movement
that natural law manifests. As King writes of that very first gathering in
Montgomery, “The victory is already won, no matter how long we struggle
to attain the three points of the resolution. It is a victory infinitely larger
than the bus situation. The real victory was in the mass meeting, where
thousands of black people stood revealed with a new sense of dignity and
destiny” (50). A secularist reading of this passage tempts us to see the pro-
test as simply raising the self-esteem of the protesters. But recall this is not
even a protest as yet: It is the first mass meeting. Recall how King describes
his performance as divinely inspired. And recall how, in this very state-
ment, King notes the “new sense of dignity and destiny” as “revealed.” In
the movement toward justice, individuals come to know themselves bet-
ter, to know the image of God in themselves, and to act accordingly—to
commit themselves all the more strongly to advancing the cause of divine
justice, protesting more, knowing themselves more, and so on. This,
King’s audience sees, is human destiny: to be properly oriented toward
divine justice, purifying the soul even as the feet become tired.
Physical effort is not the only practical side of protest, on King’s account.
He describes the hard work of organizing. “After ascending the mountain
on Monday night, I woke up Tuesday morning urgently aware that I had
to leave the heights and come back to earth. I was faced with a number
of organizational decisions. The movement could no longer continue
without careful planning” (53). Here King evokes the biblical imagery of
receiving God’s revelation, or God’s law, on “the mountain,” paired with
its implementation in the world. Inspired oratory is not enough; commit-
tees need to be formed. By “careful planning” King does not mean his
own strategic thinking or the strategizing of a clique of movement leaders.
King literally means forming committees: He describes forming a trans-
portation committee, a finance committee, a strategy committee, and an
executive committee. Natural law requires meetings, group discussion,
difficult decision-making, and delegation. When King suggests that the
movement entails human participation in the divine, he means that this
participation occurs just as much in the nitty-gritty practices of organiz-

ing as it does in the passion of mass meetings and the physical exertion of
walking to work. Organizing is more than the means of achieving a politi-
cal goal. King describes how it breaks down the divisions between reli-
gious denominations, classes, genders, age groups, and even races. These
effects happen in moments of acute struggle, but they also continue after
that struggle, and King notes how the black community itself was demo-
cratically transformed after bus integration was achieved.12
As the bus boycott went on for days and then weeks and then months
and eventually more than a year, the black community faced many hard-
ships. Initially, taxis had been organized to transport blacks to work at
reduced fares. Later, carpools were organized to transport boycotting
blacks to work for free. The powers that be in Montgomery pushed back
hard. They attempted to outlaw the carpool, they sowed division within
the movement leadership, and they intimidated blacks with threats of
violence. A bomb was thrown at King’s home. Much has been said about
how King interprets unearned suffering as redemptive, sometimes evok-
ing Jesus and sometimes evoking Gandhi. For King, suffering also has the
effect of cleansing the soul. Suffering forces reflection about who one is
and what the world is really like. Its effect is to allow us “to grow to our
humanity’s full stature” (196). What once seemed obvious is now called
into question through suffering. Put a different way, suffering is redemp-
tive because it opens the human heart to God’s law. The hold that the ways
of the world have on us is loosened, and we are able to better spot those
social norms and laws that are unjust. The suffering involved in civil rights
protests reinforced the protesters’ commitment because it continually
reminded them that they were moving toward justice. The protesters at
Montgomery, through their unwarranted suffering, were able to “trans-
figure” themselves as they attempted to transfigure society in general, as
King evocatively puts it (197).
King describes how the travails of protest leadership affected him. At
one point, he was feeling particularly weak and fearful. “At that moment
I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him
before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner
voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth’ ” (114).
Instantly, the fears and anxieties that King had felt were gone. King had
been worrying about the details of organizing and the challenges to over-
come. He had been worrying that this or that particular victory might
prove elusive. Reason produced emotion; the improbability of victory
produced fear. What happened next might seem like God miraculously
intervening in human history. But it is better understood as a mix of reason
and emotion pushing a human toward the realization that he is more than
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
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.
KING’S UNDERSTANDING OF NATURAL LAW
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
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
and its theological roots, in response to his poor debate performance,

King decided to add his second, less abstract formula for just laws. He
began arguing that segregationists should not engage in civil disobedi-
ence because justice has to do with laws being imposed by a majority on
a minority without the consent of that minority. This formula, framed
as shorthand for the abstract formula of natural law theory, made it
clear that segregation, when legally enforced, was necessarily unjust. It
was a formula that King did not think up himself, and it was certainly
not of divine provenance. A political science student at the University of
Minnesota named James Herriford watched King’s unpersuasive perfor-
mance in his televised debate and wrote to King with some suggestions.
It was Herriford who suggested that a law be deemed unjust if it “grants
privileges to the majority which are denied the minority” (7:190, n. 4).
King thanked Herriford for his felicitous formulation and asked for, and
received, permission to use it—which he did nearly every time he spoke
about natural law in the years to follow. Just as King argues that unjust
laws ought to be protested strategically, not simply ignored, his descrip-
tions of natural law were strategic. Even if access to natural law came
from the soul, it spread in the world through worldly means, including the
words of James Herriford.
While King’s account of natural law may have appeared naïve to a 1960
television audience, he had been using such accounts effectively as he
preached to black church audiences since his student days. Natural law,
sometimes phrased as moral law or God’s law, was a regular feature of ser-
mons that King repeatedly preached as he traveled, and these ideas occa-
sionally found their way into his political speeches. King would begin by
presenting various problems of the modern world: Mass production and
consumerism dominate culture. People are focused on buying goods and
acquiring wealth in order to buy even more goods. Our employers, gov-
ernment, and social institutions treat us as numbers, employee number
X or patient number Y. Modern society is thus dehumanizing, encourag-
ing us to think of ourselves as numbers, as objects interchangeable with
other objects, and it encourages us to treat others in this way. The world
has, in short, forgotten the soul. An effect of this forgetting, according to
King, is the morally troublesome spread of relativism and pragmatism, a
persistent theme of his early writings that nearly vanishes as the 1960s
begin. In a world where people are objects, morality is forgotten. The only
principle that matters is the principle of efficiency, getting things done
the fastest and at the lowest cost. Morals become facts about the world,
treated by the social scientist rather than the philosopher: People of this
type say they care about these things, valuable information for the mar-
keting executive. From this perspective, morals simply describe behavior,
with no normative force: “Morality becomes a thing that is measured in

terms of what the people are doing” (7:386). Individuals no longer act
based on what is right; they act based on what will get them their desires
the fastest. King describes the result as an “attitude of the survival of the
slickest,” which he associates with pragmatism (2:252). The only limit on
the means that can be employed to achieve desired ends is the possibil-
ity of punishment, hence the need to be “slick.” King intoned that this
world of instrumental reason, devoid of absolutes, threatens what is best
in America.
In his more reflective moments, King saw this sorry state of the
nation as a product of the natural inclination toward sin. Reason imag-
ines itself as autonomous, able to solve every problem and unravel every
mystery. This is a form of sin, imagining that humans can effectively
take the place of God, that there is no need for faith.14 King attempts
to build on his listeners’ intuition that there is more to the world than
human reason can comprehend and that the world needs values. What
these intuitions point to, King claims, is Christianity. Even in the ratio-
nalist, modern world, people act as if there are gods: They make gods
of earthly things. King calls these “little gods,” objects that promise
comfort but are ultimately fleeting. Sometimes he names science, plea-
sure, and money as these little gods, promising happiness but ultimately
causing more problems than they solve. The pursuit of science results in
the atomic bomb, the pursuit of pleasure results in the knowledge that
pleasure quickly fades, and the pursuit of money results in the disap-
pointment that what we cherish the most, such as friendship, is not for
sale. We imagine that these little gods sate the human heart, but it is only
God who sates the heart.15
After persuading his listeners that the world is in an unfortunate con-
dition, King works to persuade his listeners that Christianity, specifically
commitment to natural law, offers the proper remedy. He begins by turn-
ing to the soul, that part of the human being that cannot be reduced to
a number. “There is something that you can never see through a mirror,
because it is eternal. That is your soul; that is your personality; and that
is something that lives on” (7:446). Humans are both natural beings and
more than natural, capable of sophisticated intellectual thought. But rea-
soning is not the only trait that makes humans unique. King also includes
in his list of essentially human characteristics the “power of memory” and
the “gift of imagination.”16 Typical of the black natural law tradition, King
offers a subtle, multifaceted account of human nature. He also goes fur-
ther. In his view, the soul is not only irreducible to physical characteris-
tics, it also contains infinite power. It is capable of doing anything when
properly harnessed.17 The soul is sacred; this has been widely recognized
throughout human history, according to King, and was particularly well

articulated in the Declaration of Independence.
The soul is what makes humans more than collections of molecules,
and the soul is what connects humans with the infinite. Counseling the
mother of a biracial son, King urges that it is most important for her to
remind her son that he is more than what the world says about him. What
matters the most about the young man are not the things the world can
see but his sense of his own self-respect and dignity. This can be assured,
according to King, by teaching the child to have “a life whose center is a
fixed point outside of his own being” (7:452). In other words, appreciating
the irreducible worth of a human being requires acknowledging the pos-
sibility of an absolute, an infinite in which each human being is rooted.
This is how King understands humans to be created in the image of God;
we each contain within us something irreducible that echoes the para-
digm of irreducibility: the divine. Indeed, King at one point suggests that
the “inherent dignity of man” and “the image of God” are synonymous,
the latter simply the way that the former is expressed in the language of
“our Hebraic-Christian tradition.”18 The image of God means more than
a large quantity of human worth. It points to a qualitative difference in
the worth accorded to humans and the worth accorded to everything else
in the world. This distinctive property of humans is shared equally by
every human. There are not different levels of infinity in infinite worth;
all humans are equal in their possession of infinite worth. This, King sug-
gests, is the “indelible stamp of the Creator.”19
In King’s view, the task of religion is not to advance any particular set
of doctrines. The task of religion is to worship God by cultivating respect
for God’s image in humans. To be a “good neighbor,” as commended by
Christian churches, is to look “beyond the external accidents” of those
around us and to “discern those inner qualities that make all men human
and, therefore, brothers.”20 This is the first implication of God’s image in
humans; King will present many more. Love thy neighbor is meant in this
specific sense: training our perception so that we can recognize the infi-
nite worth beyond the particulars of age, race, gender, class, or beauty.
This infinite worth is found in the uniquely human capacities of the other,
capacities to reason, feel, and create, capacities that hold infinite power.
Promoting human brotherhood does not mean working together on cer-
tain projects or feeling an attachment to every other person. It means
training one’s perception in order to identify the humanity in each person
we encounter.
King believes an inclination to evil is also an essential part of human
nature, and he reflects on this sort of evil much more than Douglass,
Cooper, and Du Bois. For them, what is characteristically human images
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
“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
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
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.
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
to other members of their community, often their church community, for

support. This might seem eminently pragmatic and at odds with King’s
disdain for pragmatism, but from his perspective, God’s law is more about
rejecting easy answers in favor of the hard work of discernment and less
about searching for absolutes.
In many of King’s Ebony answers, he is careful to acknowledge the diffi-
culty of the situations his correspondents face and the emotional turmoil
they must be feeling. This highlights one of the other features of King’s
general approach to applying natural law. Empathy is necessary when one
comes to a moral problem, empathy that does not condescend but feels
pain together. It is empathy that is more than mere emotion; it also seeks
understanding. The circumstances of the situation must be taken into
account at the same time the pathos of the situation is recognized; one
without the other leads astray. To truly empathize, it is necessary to get
one’s hands dirty. The Good Samaritan, as King tells the story, “used his
hands to bind up the wounds of the robbed man’s body,” offering a model
of concern for the image of God in the other that leads from right percep-
tion to right action—and that ultimately implements God’s law. 35
The most famous way that King applies his natural law theory, of course,
is to condemn segregation. Segregation does not just involve some people
socializing over here and other people socializing over there. It involves
humiliation as blacks are prohibited from eating, drinking, recreating,
using the restroom, and being educated with whites, while there is, gen-
erally, no reciprocal prohibition enforced on whites. Even if there were a
reciprocal prohibition on whites, the set of ideas that circulated to justify
segregation left no doubt that blacks were to be understood as inferior to
whites, and reinforcing this belief was the effect of facially neutral segrega-
tion laws. 36 The result, according to King, is that blacks are “daily stripped
of our personhood” (7:473). The inherent, infinite worth of the human
being is ignored; blacks are treated as less than human, as objects with
only physical and not spiritual properties. Furthermore, treating blacks
like objects degrades the image of God in whites. Whites must repress
their capacity for the free exercise of reason and feeling in order to buy
into the false claims of segregation, even as they “know in their hearts”
that segregation is wrong. 37
Segregation is not unique in its dehumanizing effect. King provoca-
tively asserts, “I am absolutely convinced that there is no basic difference
between colonialism and segregation. They are both based on a con-
tempt for life, and a tragic doctrine of white supremacy” (5:243). King’s
worry about colonialism was not an example of his late radicalization by
the Vietnam War. Such a chronology of King’s development, so preva-
lent today, claims too much credit for King’s white interlocutors who, it
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
profit-making and profit-getting aspects of capitalism that we will forget

certain ends of life” (5:414). This was a consistent theme of his; from the
first years of King’s career to the last, he enumerates these necessities of
life and urges struggle on their behalf as an explicit consequence of natu-
ral law. In his final book, Where Do We Go from Here?, he argues that if
we accept that the image of God is in human beings, reflection on that
image leads to the conclusion that we must also struggle against hunger,
poverty, and disease.40 In one of his first sermons, King intones, “Spiritual
solidarity is meaningless if it does not extend into economic brotherhood”
(3:450). When we are hungry, we are incapable of exercising our human
capacities and “the soul is crushed.”41 In his later writings and speeches,
King does become more specific about how the government can respond
to the demands of natural law around economic justice issues. He urges
massive federal investment in black communities, along the lines of the
Marshall Plan, detailing what he believes would be the most effective sup-
port for each sector of the black world. Yet King is also careful to distance
himself from any hint of Communist inclinations—precisely because
Communists do not believe in God’s law. They are willing to violate that
law, to damage the image of God in humans, in order to achieve noble
goals. Communists use humans as objects in the name of improving
humanity, King argues, and this must always be rejected.
While advocacy against segregation and for economic justice is what
King focuses his energy on, he also applies natural law to a range of other
issues. For strategic reasons, these issues remained on the back burner
during his political career. In light of the massive injustices of segregation
and poverty, and the opportune moment King perceived for mobilizing
the American population against segregation and poverty, these other
issues would have to wait to become the focus of organizing campaigns.
King unconditionally rejected the death penalty, even in cases of racially
motivated crime. It defaces the image of God. But King goes further, urg-
ing that the image of God ought not be defaced in any form of punish-
ment, presumably including prison. “The purpose of punishment,” he
writes, “is to improve the character and life of the person punished, rather
than pay him back for something that he has done to society” (5:229). In
other words, human laws align with God’s law if they allow for human
nature to move toward its ends, toward the full exercise of human capaci-
ties. Punishments that restrict the exercise of human capacities are prima
facie unjust from this perspective. Once again, King does not simply take
a sentence that appears in the Bible and apply it to his contemporary con-
text. He takes the essential message of the Bible, in his understanding,
mindful of the limitations on the human capacity to know God, as a start-
ing point for discerning a higher law. This higher law is not one that can
be immediately passed in the legislature. It requires deliberate thought to

understand what specific laws might be enacted in order for punishment
to emphasize the improvement of character.
King also weighed in on some of the most politicized natural law issues
of the present day, birth control and gay rights (he is not known to have
publicly expressed a view on abortion). Concerning birth control, King
makes a careful distinction between the natural world, which is created by
God for humans to use and manipulate, and human nature, in which the
image of God ought not to be defaced. For King, birth control only con-
cerns the former because there is not as yet human life present (4:326).
He believes planning is important to create healthy families that have
the means to survive and thrive. On the question of homosexuality, in
one of his Ebony advice columns, King describes same-sex orientation
as an “acquired” disorder (4:348). It is most often caused by traumatic
or abnormal childhood experiences that have been repressed, but these
can be unearthed through circumspection or with the help of a psychia-
trist, resulting in sexual orientation being corrected. Rather than viewing
King as applying natural law in a way that is bigoted, antiquated, or misin-
formed, it is important to note here that King does not apply a natural law
analysis at all. He is confronted with a practical problem, a young man who
asks King how his non-normative sexual desires might be corrected, and
King provides a practical solution. Rather than telling the young man that
nothing can be done or telling him simply to pray about it, King suggests
a way forward. He is silent on the question of whether social norms reflect
God’s law in matters of sexual orientation; his comments take the “ought”
of social norms as a given. Moreover, no questions of legal discrimination
are at issue here. There is no minority on whom laws are imposed, just an
individual asking how he might be less of an outsider. King does not find
that homosexuality violates God’s law, but he also does not urge that gay
identity be affirmed. For King, humans are complex and unique. The work
of being human is the work of exploring that complexity of self and world,
refusing shortcuts that would reduce one’s existence to a certain category.
Like others in the tradition of black natural law, King believes that nat-
ural law has implications for education. The end of education is human-
ization, King argues, where humanization is precisely the first part of
discerning God’s law. Humanization means understanding and devel-
oping human capacities while also girding oneself against the human
tendency to sin. The individual must be trained to “think imaginatively,
creatively, originally.” Education must encourage individuals to “love
truth and sacrifice for it” (5:412). In other words, education should teach
right thinking and feeling and also a commitment to the creative employ-
ment of those capacities. King is clear that creative engagement with the
world in the pursuit of truth, in the pursuit of justice, requires a thorough

familiarity with what has come before. The sparkle of the new should not
distract from the need to work with the terms and resources the world has
acquired over years past. Education that does not follow these outlines
would be unjust and at odds with God’s law. Worldly laws, policies, and
norms that promote such misguided forms of education are illegitimate,
in King’s view.
When a worldly law comes into conflict with the law of God, accord-
ing to King, the worldly law must be strategically opposed. In this, King
says that he is aligning himself with the views of Socrates, figures from
the Hebrew Bible (particularly Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego),
early Christians, the Boston Tea Party, and those Germans who sheltered
Jews from the Nazis. In each of these cases, a worldly law was defied in
the interest of a higher law. In each case, the consequences were willingly
suffered. Among the principles of natural law that King discusses is a
respect for the law, regardless of the law’s content. A consequence of this
is that, when worldly law is broken in the interest of advancing higher law,
this defiance must display respect for worldly law. When an individual
breaks the law, he or she must willingly, even happily, accept the penalties
assigned by the world for breaking the law. The individual’s attitude must
be “patient, loving, nonviolent” and never intoxicated with the righteous-
ness of his or her cause (5:545). King does not make clear whether this
attitude is required because it is the most effective way of advancing the
higher law, enhancing the drama of civil disobedience, or whether such an
attitude is required by the higher law itself. It seems likely that King holds
both views and believes that both are inextricably entwined. The natural
law is contagious: The more it is followed, the more likely others are to
acknowledge it.
King did believe that respect for the law could be taken too far. As the
civil rights movement advanced, and as King was increasingly in dialogue
with white allies, he became more explicit in his critique of those “white
liberals” who would support the causes King advocated but who urged
caution, moderation, and compromise. White liberals were, of course, the
audience for the letter from Birmingham, but they were also addressed at
length in King’s last work, Where Do We Go from Here? King diagnosed
the white liberal as “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” and said that
he “prefers tranquility to equality.”42 In other words, while the white lib-
eral acknowledges that racial injustice exists and ought to be rectified, the
white liberal privileges the regular and predictable functioning of the law
and believes that there are legal means for improving the law itself. King
makes space for his natural law view between white liberals and black mil-
itants who would ignore the law of the white world altogether, dismissing
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
King’s approach to implementing God’s law in the world is studied and

practical. One tactic he commends is carefully targeted and staged civil
disobedience. King acknowledges that this is not enough. Organization is
also necessary. Individuals must work together to create the institutions
they need in order to thrive, in order for God’s image to be honored.43
While this was an idea that King proclaimed in the abstract, he also at
times did the work of organizing himself. When King arrived at Dexter
Avenue Baptist Church, he prepared a list of initial recommendations to
help the congregation flourish. (He prepared a similar list upon his arrival
at Ebenezer Baptist Church to become co-pastor with his father.44) This
list of recommendations contains 34 points, many of them describing the
creation of church committees: a building fund committee, a new mem-
ber committee, a history committee, a scholarship committee, a cultural
committee, and many more. At both Dexter and Ebenezer, King also cre-
ated month clubs, in which members born in the same month could to get
to know each other by doing shared activities. Organizing in this sense
means building relationships among individuals and thus building an
infrastructure that is capable of advancing the interests of the community.
The church has a special role in implementing God’s law on earth, and
King describes how churches might be structured to expedite this goal.
Although King emphasizes the role of the individual, with his or her
infinite worth, he understands the individual as embedded in community.
God’s law is not implemented by a monarch or a state upon individuals.
It is cultivated by community, first and foremost by the church when it
is a robust social space with interlacing relationships, shared skills, and
exchanged information. King’s vision for church organizing was only par-
tially implemented, and on his departure from Dexter, he acknowledged
that his ambitions largely remained to be fulfilled. King had been dis-
tracted by activism, by the Montgomery bus boycott. Yet King envisioned
this protest itself as more than activism, more than proclaiming and dra-
matizing injustice. He put serious effort into structuring the Montgomery
Improvement Association in a way that would maximize the human and

financial resources of the black community in Montgomery and their sup-
porters. After the boycott ended successfully, King envisioned the infra-
structure that he and others had created and nurtured addressing a wide
array of problems confronting the city’s black population. These efforts
would include, in his vision, a black-owned bank, a credit union, voting
clinics, and educational institutes. This vision also did not come to pass,
but King clearly saw community organizing as an essential component
of implementing God’s law. As he put it, “I think that by our constant
working together and unswerving devotion to the idea of freedom and
human dignity, we will come up with the right answer” (7:209). Too often
it is only the second part of this sentence, the devotion to an idea, that is
emphasized, but for King, the devotion to an idea—derived from natural
law—goes hand in hand with “constant working together” (i.e., the con-
crete practices of organizing).
Very concrete human effort is needed to implement natural law, in
King’s view. God’s law gains traction on earth thanks to “the tireless
efforts and persistent work of dedicated individuals” (7:533). This effort
also has the effect of shaping individuals, making them more capable of
perceiving natural law and implementing it. Those who do not participate
in struggle become acclimatized to the status quo. They lose their critical
capacities, no longer using reason and emotion to perceive social prob-
lems. In a sense, the struggle for justice turns human beings from ani-
mals into agents.45 If it were not for this capacity to struggle for justice,
according to King, the laws of science would offer a complete explanation
of humanity’s past, present, and future.46 Our capacity to struggle derives
from our capacity to see ourselves as more than we appear in a mirror—to
see the infinite potential that, for King, means to see the transcendent, to
see and desire God.
King is also clear that implementation of natural law can only suc-
ceed with the help of God. This view follows from King’s broader view
of the way that God works in the world. First, it is important to note that
King does believe God works in the world, through history—a belief not
entailed by a commitment to natural law. No secular explanation of his-
tory suffices, according to King. Taking the example of the Montgomery
bus boycott itself, King argues that “every rational explanation breaks
down” and that “some extra-human force labors to create a harmony out
of the discords of the universe.”47 King labels this extra-human force God.
He sees history, just like each human being, filled with forces both good
and evil in conflict with each other. This conflict would be an eternal
stalemate if it were not for the existence of God who continually gives the
side of good a decisive push forward. Put another way, the social norms
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
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
Decline and Detritus
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.
Approaching the question of natural law’s decline from a different

angle, a story is often told about the religiously motivated generation of
civil rights protesters being replaced by a secular, Marxian, black power
generation epitomized by the Black Panthers. The story continues as
this radical generation was soon replaced by a professional class of black
government officials and politicians. The claim of this chapter is not
that black natural law went away when the civil rights movement gave
way to black power, but rather that elements of black natural law contin-
ued to be invoked in various ways during the decades that followed the
civil rights movement—invoked in ways that were disconnected from
the black natural law tradition. Black power, as a rallying cry, came to
national attention in 1966. In May of that year, the Baptist preacher and
Harlem Congressman Adam Clayton Powell told graduating seniors at
historically black Howard University that human rights come from God
and that “to demand these God-given rights is to seek black power—the
power to build black institutions of splendid achievement.”4 Here God’s
authority is invoked to justify organizing the black community. Yet there
is no explanation of how these rights might be discerned. Powell’s version
of natural law is just what King worried about: appealing to the authority
of God to advance a worldly political point without offering an account of
how we know God and how that knowledge is always partial. Those miss-
ing elements, in King’s view, both humble us and cause us to act strategi-
cally in the world.
Two months after Powell’s speech, civil rights activist James Meredith
was shot in Mississippi. King and younger, more radical members of the
civil rights community continued the march that Meredith had begun. It
was on this march that the young Stokely Carmichael, chair of the Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, invoked black power in his call for
blacks to take leadership of the fight for civil rights and to build economic
control of their communities. In his impassioned remarks, Carmichael
also affirms a central tenet of King’s version of natural law in its practi-
cal formulation: “We don’t have to … obey any law that we didn’t have
a part to make, especially if that law was made to keep us where we are.
We have the right to break it.” But immediately before this familiar claim,
Carmichael makes a much less familiar claim: “We have to define our
own ethic.”5 By the first-person plural here, Carmichael means blacks.
He is endorsing civil disobedience that mirrors that motivated by King’s
account of a higher law, but Carmichael refuses to endorse King’s account
of how natural law is discerned. King’s account is race-neutral, although
it offers blacks a privileged position. Carmichael implicitly calls for a spe-
cifically black process for determining which laws are just and which are
unjust, but he offers no hints at what form this process would take.
In October of 1966, Carmichael explicitly addressed “higher law” in

a speech to a largely student audience at the University of California,
Berkeley. He began by distancing himself from the language of love.
“We’ve always moved in the field of morality and love while people have
been politically jiving with our lives,” he intoned.6 When faced with
blunt political power, Carmichael argues, appealing to love will have
little effect. Those with power are largely tone-deaf to the language and
practice of love, so fixed are they in the mindset of political calculation.
“You can’t move morally against Lyndon Baines Johnson because he is an
immoral man. He doesn’t know what it’s all about. So you’ve got to move
politically.” 7 When those who have power are putting all of their effort
into retaining and enhancing their power through political calculation,
it is necessary to play that game rather than imagine oneself to be above
it, Carmichael asserts. He is comfortable with the language of moral
judgment—he deems the Vietnam War clearly immoral—but he urges
that morality and politics must be treated as separate domains. In this,
he is not so far from King; the difference between the men is really over
tactics. Carmichael thinks that love is not an effective political weapon;
King thinks it is. Perhaps as the 1960s wore on, as love became increas-
ingly commoditized by mainstream American culture, the landscape had
shifted, and King had not responded appropriately. Yet the account of
higher law that Carmichael offers was quite different from that advanced
by King: “We have to say to ourselves that there’s a higher law than the
law of a fool named Rusk; there’s a higher law than the law of a buffoon
named Johnson. It’s the law of each of us. We will not murder anybody
who they say kill, and if we decide to kill, we’re going to decide who it
shall be.”8 Carmichael had returned to the seemingly naïve view that
King invoked in his disappointing debate performance of 1960: that the
higher law is determined by individual conscience. Carmichael offers
even fewer details than King did of how we are to listen to the voice of our
conscience. Indeed, Carmichael effectively brackets the moral question,
taking injustice as self-evident, and focuses entirely on the political—
invoking “higher law” as part of his political rhetoric and no more.
Jesse Jackson was fond of claiming the mantle of Martin Luther King
Jr. He was one of the first to reach King after he had been shot, and Jackson
claimed his clothes were stained with King’s blood. Jackson represents
the institutionalization of black political elites that accompanied the rise
of black electoral politics. Jackson would carefully imitate the oratori-
cal style of his former mentor, but, like Carmichael, he would direct his
oratory at a politics disconnected from theological (or ethical) founda-
tions. Jackson worked to advance the interests of the black community,
and himself, repeatedly invoking the words justice, morality, and God,
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
EMOTION AND NATURAL LAW
As Carmichael and Jackson turned away from ethics toward an auton-

omous sphere of politics, reflection on ethics fell to black writers.12
Unfortunately, these writers were often disconnected from politics, exist-
ing in something like an autonomous sphere of the intellect. A set of writ-
ers reformulated natural law based on confused ideas about love, creating
an account of natural law with limited political potential. Human nature
was understood to be essentially the capacity to love, feel, or desire.13
This is what gives humans infinite worth, this is how humans image God
(even if the word God is not invoked), and this is what leads to normative
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
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
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
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,
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
discernment is necessary to find these feelings, to find the erotic. Lorde

continues, “In order to perpetuate itself, every oppression must corrupt or
distort those various sources of power within the culture of the oppressed
that can provide energy for change. For women, this has meant a suppres-
sion of the erotic as a considered source of power and information within
our lives” (53). It is not just that the erotic is hard to find; it is that the pow-
ers that be make it hard to find because of its emancipatory potential—
and all the more so for those who have the most ready access to the erotic,
women. Here Lorde is hinting at the erotic as an authority that trumps
worldly authority. Social norms and laws that advance the interests of the
powers that be distort human nature and limit our access to the spiritual
plane. Such distortions, in order to access the authority of that spiritual
plane, ought to be challenged—even before a conversation about the con-
tent of that spiritual plane has begun.
Specific worldly experiences, including those that we most often asso-
ciate with the erotic, teach us about such distortions. Lorde describes
how, through erotic experiences, we learn about a “depth of feeling” that
exceeds all earthly things. Having experienced such feeling, we now find
ourselves unsatisfied with the world. We know there is more than what
we see and what we are told. Lorde interprets this as a “requirement
toward excellence.” We learn to aspire in other aspects of our lives to the
depth of feeling that we once experienced, for example, in the bedroom.
All of our activities can then be evaluated against this criterion, and we
should choose to participate in those that replicate the depth of feeling
we remember, while stepping aside from those practices that do not pro-
duce the requisite sensation. The means by which the powers that be mute
the power of the erotic is portraying it as limited to the bedroom, as a sui
generis experience that might be explained biologically or mystically, but
that is certainly not related to life in the ordinary world—in the living
room, the union hall, or the boardroom.18
Lorde urges us to reflect seriously, not superficially, on the phrase “it
feels right to me.” This phrase need not be dismissed as fundamentally
amoral, she asserts. The rightness referred to here, as well as the feeling,
can point beyond the immediate. It can point beyond the feelings we
have been trained into and beyond the feelings we experience alone. It
can point to the rightness of a moral absolute—as long as we are feeling
correctly, which is to say feeling in a way that taps into and exercises our
human nature. “The erotic,” Lorde asserts, “is the nurturer or nursemaid
of all our deepest knowledge” (56). This, presumably, is knowledge that
can be expressed, knowledge that enters the game of giving and taking
reasons. The erotic comes before the rational; it is an authority against
which knowledge and reason can be checked.
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
Marxist takes on black feminism. Later, at times in dialogue with Cornel

West, hooks began to embrace love as foundational for political reflection
and practice. She began to take this direction in 1990 when she describes
the “depths of longing in many of us” in a book titled Yearning.19 This long-
ing was expressed in various realms, including the political, but hooks
observes that political aspirations are often considered disconnected from
other longings, such as erotic longing. At this point, however, hooks sim-
ply makes a pragmatic political observation. More people could be mobi-
lized to achieve political goals if longing that was not explicitly political
could be harnessed by those whose concerns are political.
A few years later, hooks fully embraces love as the normative founda-
tion for politics. “Without love,” she writes in an essay titled “Love as the
Practice of Freedom,” “our efforts to liberate ourselves and our world
community from oppression and exploitation are doomed.”20 Specifically,
hooks urges an “ethic of love” that would stand opposed to the many
forces of domination that attempt to “seduce” us, including racism and
sexism. The forces that hooks opposes are underpinned by a certain way
of ordering desire that must be directly addressed. Moreover, when our
own desire for political change is rooted in the injury that we suffer, our
political vision tends to be distorted by our own particular perspective;
an ethic of love promises to right that perception.21 But hooks here turns
to love in a way that betrays an interest deeper than the pragmatic. She
describes herself as aligned with Martin Luther King Jr., in the view that it
is necessary to start “with love as the ethical foundation for politics.”22 She
does not, however, abandon her pragmatic orientation: She claims that
an ethical foundation will make for the most effective politics, a politics
that will most “enhance the collective good” (using rather more religious
terminology than is employed in hooks’s earlier, secular phase).23
hooks understands the privilege she accords to love as continuing a tra-
dition that was forgotten with King. In her broad-strokes account of the
second half of the 20th century in black America, King’s primary message
was one of love, but after the deaths of King and others, black Americans
lost hope and lost love. The black power movement rose and then fell, but
there was no return to love in black politics: “love was mocked.”24 Because
the black public square, never robust, had been further reduced by inte-
gration, King and other lost leaders were never mourned; collective mel-
ancholy set in. Such despair has concrete consequences: violence and a
focus on quick financial profit.
By portraying King as concerned with love and not law, and by over-
looking the contributions of Audre Lorde, hooks remains oblivious to
the need for discernment in love. For example, she writes, “Choosing
love we also choose to live in community, and that means that we do not
have to change ourselves.”25 Love here is portrayed as self-evident, just

a person expressing who she is. hooks positions herself as offering a cru-
cial extension to King’s thought on love. He was focused on love of the
other; she is focused on love of self. This is what is lacking in black com-
munities, she asserts, and lack of self-love results in boundless despair. 26
Blacks have hated themselves because of the negative connotations of
blackness and because of collective melancholia. Black power identified
the problem but offered a political rather than an ethical solution. hooks
positions herself as bringing together the best of the civil rights move-
ment and the best of black power to propose an ethic of self-love. Yet
hooks says so little about the content of love, or self-love, that it is hard
to see how normative conclusions would flow from them. hooks seems
trapped between her pragmatic political instincts and the attraction of
normative philosophical or theological reflection to ground her politics.
For example, describing self-love, she writes that it will “empower us to
create communities of resistance that can eliminate all forms of violence
in our neighborhoods.”27 This seems to be what hooks is really interested
in: the pragmatic effects of a self-love ethic. As we will see in the final
section of this chapter, focus on pragmatic effects has become standard
among the black political class.
REASON AND 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.
When Clarence Thomas led Ronald Reagan’s Equal Employment

Opportunity Commission, the federal agency charged with enforc-
ing workforce antidiscrimination laws, Thomas took on political theory
as a hobby. At least that is how he described it a few years later, at his
Supreme Court confirmation hearings, when he used this characteriza-
tion to deflect scrutiny of his writings from the period.29 Influenced by
a circle of Straussians, Thomas urged conservatives to embrace natural
law. 30 Thomas left no doubt about the account of human nature involved
in his commitment to natural law. He quoted the Federalist Papers, “It is
the reason, alone, of the public that ought to control and regulate the gov-
ernment. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the gov-
ernment.”31 Reason is foundational, emotion is secondary. Reason leads
to justice; sentiment, Thomas writes, leads to “sensitivity.”32 The former
is foundational for government; the latter conceals real injustices and is
potentially disruptive to the smooth functioning of government. Indeed,
the young Thomas even criticized the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board
decision outlawing school segregation because of its excessive reliance
on the emotions. Thomas singled out the line from the unanimous Brown
decision in which the Court worried about black plaintiffs’ “feeling of
inferiority as to their status in a community that may affect their hearts
and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”33 Thomas asserts that this
reasoning relies on a false understanding of political freedom. The Court
ought to have understood “man as the being capable of reasoning and
choosing objectively”—this, according to Thomas, is the reasoning that
allows slavery to be rejected. 34 Thomas proposes what he deems a better
justification for the Court’s ruling in Brown. Surprisingly, Thomas argues
that the main problem with segregation is that it runs in continuity with
slavery. (It would be interesting to see if Thomas will use the same rea-
soning when addressing mass incarceration.) Slavery violates natural law,
so what flows directly from slavery must also violate natural law. While
displaying an unexpectedly astute analysis of the aftereffects of slavery,
the point Thomas makes here also illustrates the arbitrariness that follows
from the ostensibly objective application of reason.
Thomas explains the appeal of natural law by claiming that it provides
the political theory that is best able to resist slavery. 35 He often invokes per-
sonal experiences of injustice suffered by his family to explain why natu-
ral law is so important to him. For example, he says that his grandparents,
who had very limited formal education, “knew we were inherently equal
under God’s law—the higher law—and that the way we were treated was
a crime against God even if no laws of man were violated.”36 Curiously,
despite his insistence that natural law is accessible by reason, Thomas
leaves it to the reader to guess how his grandparents gained knowledge of
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
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.
Natural law began as the central issue of Thomas’s confirmation hear-

ings when he was nominated to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court. Now
overshadowed in American cultural memory by the allegations of sexual
harassment leveled against him by Anita Hill, in the lead-up to the hear-
ings, professors and politicians alike weighed in as the public debated
natural law.43 It was an inconclusive debate, filled with conflicting defini-
tions of natural law, as well as suspicions about both political ideology and
religious belief. While Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee,
led by Chairman Joseph Biden, repeatedly tried to pin Thomas down
on natural law, pointing to his writings and asking him to explain or
elaborate, Thomas was largely nonresponsive. He had merely been sug-
gesting a way for Republicans to attract black voters, he offered. In other
words, Democrats voiced concern about commitment to moral absolutes
because they worried that these commitments concealed Thomas’s own
conservative political or religious beliefs while he played the pragmatist.
The black community itself was split. The Southern Christian Leadership
Council, founded by King and then led by Joseph Lowery, urged the
Senate to confirm Thomas, in part because “being Black has subjected
him to the ‘Black experience,’ ” and in part because “our reliance has
always been more on the Supreme Being than the Supreme Court.”44 This
represents a dramatic shift from the view represented by King that God
sometimes speaks through the Supreme Court, affirming principles that
are race-independent but are especially accessible to blacks. The National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People took a stance against
Thomas’s confirmation. They argued that “Judge Clarence Thomas’s judi-
cial philosophy”—by which they presumably meant natural law—“is sim-
ply inconsistent with the historical positions taken by the NAACP.”45 This
statement is just as perplexing as the SCLC’s, for the NAACP from its
founding by Du Bois and others has been closely associated with the black
natural law tradition. Thomas claims the mantle of this tradition. Instead
of judging him by the standards of the tradition, the NAACP rejects his
“judicial philosophy” altogether.
Four years after Thomas was confirmed by the Senate, in a 52-to- 48
vote, he gave an interview to the black-oriented magazine Jet. In this
venue, communicating with a black audience, Thomas is much more
explicit about the religious foundations of his natural law views, and he
is much more strident in expressing them. On the topic of affirmative
action, he does not hold back: “I can’t break from God’s law just because
they [whites] did. If they were wrong in doing that [race-based treatment],
then I am wrong in doing it to them. … You cannot embrace racism to
deal with racism. It’s not Christian.”46 This language suggests a much more
active, personal God than the God who is known through reflection on
human reason. It is perhaps a more candid glimpse of Thomas’s own views

or his perception of the black community’s desires. Either way, his state-
ment represents a further degeneration of the once-robust black natural
law tradition. Thomas suggests that God’s law can now be clearly known
without effort, and God’s law has no consequences for social movements,
only for individuals.47
Alan Keyes rose to political prominence around the same time as
Clarence Thomas. A student of the Straussian popularizer Allan Bloom
at Cornell, Keyes received his doctorate for a dissertation directed by the
Straussian political theorist Harvey Mansfield at Harvard. Like Thomas,
Keyes advanced in government service during the Reagan administration.
In the years since, he has run unsuccessfully for political office, includ-
ing for the U.S. Senate (once as Barack Obama’s opponent) and for the
Republican nomination for the presidency. He has also hosted political
talk shows on television and radio. Keyes essentially agrees with Thomas
that natural law centers on reason, but he adds details to Thomas’s broad-
strokes account. Keyes retells the story of the civil rights movement with
an emphasis on natural law. This story begins during slavery: “In the cap-
tor’s world, the enslaved is judged only for his material worth, as a posses-
sion. But in the moral world, the enslaved preserves a sense of intrinsic
worth by holding both himself and his captor to a moral, rather than a
material, standard.”48 In line with the black natural law tradition, Keyes
suggests that blacks have always known, even during slavery, that they are
more than they seemed to be to the white world. Keyes goes on to explain
where this sense of moral worth comes from: God. Slavery violates God’s
law, and those who were enslaved knew it. Keyes does not overly intellec-
tualize this point; he finds it displayed not only in political speeches but
also in songs and sermons.
Because they knew they were not mere objects, slaves—Keyes uses
the term “enslaved persons”—continued to exercise their distinctively
human capacities, though Keyes remains silent on what these are. This is
also the reason that blacks could struggle against their oppression. They
knew slavery was wrong without having to be told it was wrong because
they could access God’s law through human nature. Unlike Baldwin and
Lorde, Keyes is careful not to fully identify the divinity in humans with
God. In Keyes’s view, humans each possess “a divine spark”: the possi-
bility to participate more fully in God, but only a possibility. It was “by
nurturing and respecting this intrinsic potential,” this “divine spark,” that
blacks were reminded even in the darkest days of oppression that every
human being has inherent worth.49 This divine spark could be kept alive
with small acts of kindness that ran counter to the ideology of slavery and
that nurtured humans’ divine spark.
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
others responsible and to be held responsible. The conclusions that flow

from such a view of natural law are largely negative. Worldly laws must be
kept to a minimum so they do not interfere with our own ability to exer-
cise our capacity for responsibility. The result is a world of deregulation
and limited government. While Keyes envisions local organizations mov-
ing in where the state recedes, such local organizations have no role in his
natural law theory; they serve a purely pragmatic function. In contrast, in
the black natural law tradition, organizing motivated by natural law plays
a crucial role. Furthermore, in the tradition, natural law helps to orient
organizing efforts, while organizing improves our perception of natural
law. Neighborhood associations as they are seen in Keyes’s account, with
no positive moral guidance, could go badly wrong—as happened when
neighborhood watch participant George Zimmerman shot a 17-year-old
black boy, Trayvon Martin.
Although Benjamin Carson is of the same generation as Thomas and
Keyes, he arrived at politics much later, and through a quite different path.
After years as an acclaimed neurosurgeon at one of the nation’s premier
hospitals, Carson decided to turn his attention to public policy informed
by his Christian faith. To the surprise of some who assumed that a highly
educated black doctor would be a liberal, Carson expressed a host of con-
servative perspectives that made him a darling of the Republicans—and
that made President Obama visibly uncomfortable when Carson spoke at
the annual National Prayer Breakfast in 2013.
Like hooks, Carson represents the farthest stage of the degeneration of
natural law in a certain direction, yet Carson, like hooks, self-consciously
positions himself as carrying forward the legacy of King. Carson thor-
oughly embraces the Bible, using it liberally, though often indirectly, in
his writings on politics. Biblical quotations form the chapter epigraphs
of his book One Nation, but he rarely discusses them in the text. Just as
liberal black politicians perform the cadences of King without engaging
King’s content, conservative black politicians use the Bible to evoke reli-
gion without engaging it. 51 This latter technique gestures toward an evan-
gelical Christianity the form of which has been substantially influenced
by black religious practice. Authors need not repeatedly proclaim that
they have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ; readers can tell from
the epigraphs. At times, Carson is even more explicit. He recalls various
moments in his life when he confronted particularly severe challenges,
such as a harrowing airplane ride in Alaska. At these moments, he turns
to prayer. Indeed, Carson writes that he “asks God for wisdom and guid-
ance on a daily basis, and His answers were instrumental during my surgi-
cal career, especially when dealing with situations that were unique and
extraordinarily complex.”52
When Carson invokes God’s law, it is as an authority higher than

worldly authorities, but its content is now determined by the will of God,
understood anthropomorphically—God is the sort of creature with
whom we can have a personal relationship. America’s founders, Carson
writes, “were clearly guided by the hand of God.”53 Those famous words
of the Declaration of Independence ensuring equality in line with the law
of God were whispered in the ears of their human authors from above,
as it were. Human nature continues to play a crucial role—the capacity
to allow oneself to be guided by God is essential—but unlike the black
natural law tradition, Carson has little interest in explicating this capac-
ity. At the same time that Carson proclaims the divine inspiration of
the American political tradition, he argues that “logic and fairness” can
solve many of the problems facing the nation. 54 Here it seems as though
Carson is aligning himself with Thomas and Keyes, making reason the
human capacity that allows for God’s will to be done in the United States
of America.
Like Keyes, Carson understands the legacy of King to largely involve
black self-improvement. “According to Dr. King, your life is what you
make it. Education and career development is [sic] the responsibility of
the individual, not their parents, teachers, or anyone else.”55 Without a
belief in God’s authority, people would be guided by the principle “If it
feels good, do it.”56 With a belief in God, humans know that we will be
held accountable to a standard not of our making, so we begin to hold
ourselves to that higher standard, leaving aside what Carson considers the
vacuous authority of sensation and emotion. We are experiencing social
disorder, Carson asserts, because the “Judeo-Christian standard” has
been abandoned. 57 We must return to this standard by reading the Bible
and through prayer—or, it seems, through logic.
FROM NATURAL LAW TO PRAGMATISM
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
through characteristically human qualities; the pragmatist might be

implicitly relying on some such capacity that he or she simply does not
make explicit because his or her vocation is as a politician rather than an
ethicist. Yet without explicit reflection on its moral anchor, the increas-
ingly strong pragmatic current in black politics often unquestioningly
accepts the ways of the world—or the ways of the white political elite, if
it is their world the black political elite now inhabits. Moreover, with the
rapid rise of a class of elected and appointed black politicians, responsive-
ness to voters, parties, or interest groups often replaces responsiveness to
an authority higher than any worldly law or social norm.
One perhaps surprising example that illustrates a shift toward pragma-
tism, but that continues to invoke religious language, is one of the last
broad-based mobilizations of the black community, the Million Man
March. Orchestrated by Louis Farrakhan and an array of religious lead-
ers, the march brought together such luminaries as Cornel West, Jesse
Jackson, and Martin Luther King’s son, Martin Luther King III. Ahead
of the march, organizers declared October 16, 1995, a “holy day of atone-
ment and reconciliation” intended to bring blacks back into harmony with
God in order to “renew our determination to do God’s will and seek jus-
tice, freedom, and empowerment for our people.”58 In other words, the
march was intended to help blacks access God’s law and implement it in
both their own lives and the world.
After a long day of speeches, prayers, and songs, Louis Farrakhan took
to the stage and spoke of the soul. Conscious of the diversity of his audi-
ence, the Muslim leader spoke in terms that he thought would appeal to
all, while not accepting a secularist idiom. “The soul is the essence of a
person’s being,” Farrakhan intoned. “When the soul is covered with guilt
from sin and wrongdoing, the mind and the actions of the person reflect
the condition of the soul. So, to free the soul or the essence of man from
its burden, one must acknowledge one’s wrong.”59 Here Farrakhan sounds
much like the black natural law tradition, but with a crucial difference: The
form lacks content. Reflection on human nature leads to normative pre-
scriptions, but Farrakhan offers no account of what human nature might
consist of and no account of how reflection on it might take place. All that
is clear is that something is amiss, that our souls are obscured. The appar-
ent solution that Farrakhan offers is no more than a restatement of the
problem. He urges his listeners to confess that their souls are obscured.
This structured the march itself: The program was organized around the
themes of confession, atonement, forgiveness, and reconciliation.
When Farrakhan turns to an analysis of the social world to motivate his
sense that the soul is obscured, he speaks in equally general terms: “Black
men, we got to stop what we’re doing where it is. We cannot continue
the destruction of our lives and the destruction of our community.”60

Farrakhan is leveraging the intuition—or the religious tradition, or the
conservative white rhetoric—that blacks are not living up to their poten-
tial because of a moral flaw in need of repair. Indeed, Farrakhan suggests
that the cause of black suffering is not some violation of God’s law, but
rather God’s desire for blacks to be more faithful. When blacks see that
they suffer, they are more likely to “come back to Him and make ourselves
whole again.”61 This sense of making oneself whole through reunion with
God is a central theme in Farrakhan’s speech, but it too is never filled
in with content that could produce normative conclusions. The most
Farrakhan offers is the repeated reminder that humans are created in the
image of God and that this image has been obscured.62
Farrakhan, however, does offer some normative conclusions. They just
do not flow from the natural law ideas that he invokes. He presents practi-
cal solutions to practical problems. He asks his several hundred thousand
listeners to take a pledge. It calls for self-improvement and community
improvement in general, but it also includes commitments not to hit one’s
wife, not to sexually abuse children, not to “use the ‘b word’ to describe
any female,” not to use drugs, and to support black institutions.63 While
these are all normative conclusions that address problems that Farrakhan
argues blight the black community, the pathway from his account of the
soul to these solutions remains obscure. It seems as though Farrakhan is
pairing a pragmatic black nationalist politics with conceptual fragments
from the black natural law tradition.
While Barack Obama would seem to represent the polar opposite of
Louis Farrakhan in nearly every way, Obama too uses conceptual frag-
ments from the black natural law tradition. While Farrakhan is outside
of electoral politics and speaks principally to blacks, Obama seeks to
cultivate a broad base of support among blacks, but also and even more
so among whites. While Farrakhan persists in the pretense that his nor-
mative conclusions flow from natural law premises, Obama often resists
normativity. In the speech that first brought him to national attention,
at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, Obama points to the
“inalienable rights” of the Declaration of Independence, and he describes
“God’s greatest gift to us” as “the belief that there are better days ahead.”64
Instead of giving America law, God gave America the assurance of prog-
ress. Americans, black and white, just need to accept this, to have faith in
it. There are no prescriptions that must be followed other than the belief
that things will be better, and even this is not framed as a conditional but
as an imperative. In a sense, Obama represents an extension of the emo-
tional thread of the degenerate black natural law tradition, for it is faith
and hope portrayed as feelings that he commends in order to reap riches.
Obama’s speech is particularly odd because it in some ways participates in

the tradition of the American jeremiad, but only the good half.65 There is
no condemnation of evil practices that run counter to God and will bring
destruction if not rectified. There is only milk and honey that will neces-
sarily follow in times to come.
Obama did have a friend who could speak powerfully in a normative
idiom, his minister, Jeremiah Wright. But when that normative idiom
came to the attention of the American media and then the public, Obama
distanced himself from Wright. In his acclaimed speech addressing the
ensuing controversy, “A More Perfect Union,” Obama again takes as cen-
tral those ideals of equality and justice enshrined in the Constitution and
the American political tradition. He dramatizes those ideals by offering his
speech in Philadelphia, at the National Constitution Center, and taking as
his title a phrase from the Constitution’s preamble. Today, according to
Obama, we fall short of these ideals, but realizing this is simply motivation
to pursue them more vigorously. Obama presents his own campaign as
part of this pursuit, an attempt “to continue the long march of those who
came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more car-
ing and more prosperous America.”66 This, Obama suggests, is what God
ordains. Each generation struggles toward these American, God-given
ideals, and Obama’s campaign represents this generation’s struggle. The
problem with Wright, Obama lectures, is that he expressed “views that
denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.”67 Wright’s
remarks were divisive, and the nation needs unity in order to advance
toward its ideals—ideals shared, according to Obama, by both blacks and
whites. In a sense, the black natural law tradition has declined to such an
extent that it has become illegible; or it is excluded from spaces of elec-
toral politics when audiences are mixed. The controversy over Wright
began, after all, when the public learned that Wright judged America
against God’s law and concluded, “God damn America.” In the current
context, God’s law is reduced to the inevitable betterment of our lives and
our worlds—as long as we vote for the right person. Ideology critique and
social movements are entirely disconnected from natural law.
Many religious progressives who became disillusioned with Obama
have become smitten with another figure, one who invokes the legacy
of King even in his name, Rev. Dr. William Barber II. A black preacher
and a leader of the North Carolina NAACP, Barber catalyzed the Moral
Mondays movement in which progressives protested weekly at the North
Carolina state capitol building, often subjecting themselves to arrest.
There was no single issue that brought together the Moral Mondays
coalition. Protesters voiced concerns about environmental protection,
economic justice, abortion rights, racial justice, cuts to social welfare
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
In one sense, Douglass is simply describing one among many enduring

problems faced by blacks living in the United States, whether they live
in the post-Reconstruction era or in the era of mass incarceration.2 Yet
there is something special and especially troubling about the issues to
which Douglass draws our attention. The injustice he describes is not con-
fined to a single law or a set of laws that are morally wrong, that are out of
CO N C L U S I O N ( 145 )
harmony with natural law. He describes, rather, an entire system of laws

that is unjust. This is quite a different problem than those of slavery and
segregation, and it is also quite different from the social norms that sanc-
tion much racial discrimination and micro-aggression.
What does the black natural law tradition have to say to such systemic
injustice? It can name this injustice, as Douglass does. It can explain how
a perverse legal system degrades and dehumanizes. But at this point, the
resources of the tradition would seem to be exhausted. With no specific
unjust laws to target, the only hope for political change would be apocalyp-
ticism. The entire system of laws would need to be overturned and God’s
law implemented in its place. This radical impulse toward revolution or
eschaton is at odds with the measured, politically strategic instincts of
the tradition. When too much is demanded too quickly, without practical
wisdom and political calculus, we tend to deviate from natural law.
This apparent impasse between the scope of the problem and the delib-
erateness of the strategy for remediation may very well explain the col-
lapse of the black natural law tradition. After slavery, it quickly became
clear that a host of racist laws persisted and that these could be targeted.
The deep problems with the legal system itself that Douglass identified
could wait until the lower-hanging fruit had been picked. After the end of
legal segregation, there were no longer specific laws to target that indis-
putably ran against natural law. One response was to set aside substantial
engagement with natural law in favor of either a literary realm discon-
nected from the political (Baldwin, Lorde) or the crude pragmatism of
electoral politics (Obama). If the natural law tradition were to persist, it
would be forced to confront pervasive injustice in the legal system—and
that, it would seem, beckons apocalypse.
Recently, this last option has gained traction in the scholarly com-
munity under the name of Afro-pessimism. 3 Theorists under this banner
have investigated the persistence, through many shifting forms, of anti-
black racism throughout the history of the West. They claim that Western
metaphysics or theology has rooted deep within it a commitment to the
dehumanization of black bodies. The very concept of the human has been
defined in such a way as to exclude blacks. Black life is a life foreclosed,
at every moment present but ignored, counted only to be condemned.
Slavery and segregation were, in this view, symptoms of a deeper prob-
lem, just as the racism of the legal system is a symptom. Within this total-
izing rubric, the disease of anti-blackness is so intransigent that there is no
hope.4 Or, in a theological register, the only hope is for apocalypse: for a
time when all worldly laws will be struck down, when the law of God will
be implemented, and when black bodies will be resurrected. Although
Afro-pessimist theorists may be committed in principle to resisting
racism—given the intense foreclosure of black humanity, black life itself

comes to be coterminous with resistance—there is neither a sense that
practical wisdom is needed to engage with the social and political world
nor a sense that normative conclusions can be drawn from any form of
reflection on human nature. Practical wisdom buys into the logic of white
supremacy when what is needed is for that logic to be upended. Reflection
on human nature is impossible because the foreclosure of black humanity
has been so thorough. We are left waiting for the apocalypse.
Afro-pessimism results in a solipsistic retreat into the supposedly fore-
closed self. White supremacy cuts off or perverts all possibilities for black
sociality on this theory. It similarly cuts off or perverts all possibilities for
intergenerational transmission. 5 What is left is the individual, black and
alone, facing the indestructible behemoth of white supremacy. The indi-
vidual will try to resist, will try to take up David’s slingshot. But with no
criteria by which to know justice, with his or her own sense of self always
mangled by the crushing force of white supremacy, there are few pebbles
to throw and no one with whom to consult to learn how to fashion a
slingshot. All that is left is to pray or retreat into memories—or memoirs.
Must the black natural law tradition really collapse when faced with
the challenge of a racist legal system? I see no reason why this must be so.
Consider again what black natural law most centrally entails: ideol-
ogy critique and social movement organizing. These are the responses
that necessarily follow from proper reflection on human nature and its
distortions. Both of these are called for and are very possible responses to
a racist legal system. Upon seeing a chain gang outside her train window,
Anna Julia Cooper responds by calling for the creation of a Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Humans. That is to say, she calls for organizing,
and she does it in a text that performs ideology critique, calling into ques-
tion the wisdom of the world. The black natural law tradition embraces
the need for robust institutions in the black community to cultivate right
perception of natural law, and it puts front and center the role of intergen-
erational transmission in cultivating such right perception.
What, then, of the worry that the systemic violence of the American
legal system leaves black natural law flummoxed because it presents no
point of attack, no single law that can be compared unfavorably with natu-
ral law? Such points of attack could serve two purposes. On the one hand,
they could motivate calls for justice. The canonical formulations of black
natural law do not begin by attacking specific laws, however. They begin
by reflecting on how human nature is distorted by institutions, laws, and
social norms. The second purpose that an attack on specific laws might
serve is to offer a way of implementing natural law. But the black natural
law tradition emphasizes the need for practical wisdom and patience in
CO N C L U S I O N ( 147 )
the implementation of natural law. The Montgomery bus boycott initially

did not demand integration; it demanded first-come, first-served seat-
ing on buses, whites from the front and blacks from the back. Douglass
remained a slave, patiently waiting for the right opportunity to escape all
the while building community with his fellows, even after triumphing in
his fight with Covey and thus confirming his right to freedom. Specific
laws may be attacked, but only at the proper moment.
The challenge of America’s racist legal system offers an opportunity
to confirm and refine the black natural law tradition. Focusing on one or
another law to be fixed tempts us to forget what is most basic in that tradi-
tion: ideology critique and social movement organizing. Confronting the
racist legal system teaches blacks to look suspiciously on the wisdom of
the world, to work together to build power, and to patiently wait until the
right moment to rise up and destroy the demonic forces that hold more
than a million of our black brothers and sisters in cages.
Afterword
Beyond Secularism and Multiculturalism
I n the popular imagination, there is much confusion about the mean-

ing of natural law. This was certainly evident during the Thomas con-
firmation hearings, the scene of a public conversation about natural law,
not only in the hearings themselves but in newspaper editorials and other
media. This conversation is little remembered because it was so overshad-
owed by the sexual harassment allegations later leveled against Thomas.
At the start of the hearings, Biden began by differentiating what he consid-
ered good natural law philosophy from two forms of what he considered
bad natural law philosophy, which he labeled “radical natural philosophy.”
According to Biden, one type of radical natural philosophy involves the
claim that there is a moral code “in nature” or “in one’s nature”; another
type involves the claim that there are natural law economic rights tied to a
free market economy. But there is also another sort of natural law, accord-
ing to Biden, a good sort of natural law, one that, he asserted, “I believe
most Americans subscribe to.” This good sort of natural law involves the
claim that the Supreme Court ought to strike down unjust laws—unjust
because they are not in line with the U.S. Constitution. Biden offers the
example of laws that restrict the right to privacy, of course, with Roe
v. Wade in mind. The sort of natural law that Biden commends sounds
suspiciously like basic, uncontroversial constitutional jurisprudence: The
Constitution is the highest law of the land, and the Supreme Court can
overturn a law in conflict with it. While this view has little in common
with the contemporary Catholic natural law position, it does resonate
with a theme found in the black natural law tradition, where there is at
AF TERWORD ( 149 )
times a near conflation beetween higher law as an appeal to federal or con-

stitutional law and higher law as an appeal to God’s law.
In the scholarly literature, as in the popular imagination, there are
many species of natural law.1 Notoriously, natural law was once widely
invoked to justify slavery.2 It was God’s law that some were made black
and others white, that some were made masters and others servants. For
a time, there was an embrace of natural law in some Protestant circles,
but by the 20th century in the United States, the rejection of natural law
was one of the main ways that Protestants distinguished themselves from
Catholics (and, indeed, associated Catholics with Jews, both sharing a
misguided legalism). 3 Leo Strauss and his followers lament the loss of
ancient natural law theory with the rise of modern conceptions of nat-
ural rights.4 There are varied histories of natural law, connected in var-
ied ways with God’s law, in Judaism and Islam, as well as Christianity.5
Although Thomas Aquinas is so often portrayed as the locus classicus of
all natural law theory by proponents of conservative Catholic natural law
today, Aquinas was part of lively debates with his contemporaries about
the meaning and significance of natural law, and it was certainly not clear
in his day that Aquinas’s perspective (or a perspective attributed to him)
would prevail.6 The dominance of just one strand of natural law thought
today has encouraged the forgetting of these diverse, sometimes conflict-
ing varieties of natural law. Explicating black natural law is meant, in part,
to loosen the dominance of one approach to this rich vein of ethical and
political thought.
In addition to the varied approaches to natural law over the centuries,
in recent years, natural law has become what contemporary Anglophone
jurisprudence defines itself against. In this context, natural law is dis-
tinguished from positive law. Philosophers committed to a positive law
position hold that there is no necessary connection between law and mor-
als; those committed to a natural law position hold that there is. In other
words, natural law jurisprudence holds that our view of the law can be col-
ored by our moral beliefs, our beliefs about right and wrong. To this, one
might respond: Isn’t the claim of natural law trivially true? Isn’t law obvi-
ously connected with our beliefs about right and wrong? Proponents of
positive law would note that what matters, to judges, lawyers, and citizens,
is simply that a law exists; it is a separate issue altogether, an issue for a
distinct political process, to create good or just laws. That moral question
is bracketed when we think about jurisprudence, claim positive law theo-
rists: A law is a law, with all that entails (e.g., an obligation to obey). Not
so, say natural law theorists: An unjust law is no law at all; citizens have
no obligation to obey unjust laws. Note how natural law in this context
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
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 )
as feminist politics), and in the future, as the problems that differentially

address racial minorities recede, it may not be best suited for any politics.
While this approach purports to offer a sure footing for black politics,
it concedes too much to multiculturalism. Rather than fearing race and
seeking to manage it, this approach to black politics desires race and seeks
to justify its desire—seeks to do so hysterically, to borrow the language
of psychoanalysis. Multiculturalism speaks of each culture from a neu-
tral point of view, standing above the fray and listening to the wisdom
of each, as it were. Each culture has its own special language, music, art,
and dance, arising because of the special circumstances encountered in
each culture’s special history. For the multiculturalist, it is reasonable and
commendable for those who share a culture to use its resources to address
problems they encounter; it is reasonable and commendable for those
who share a culture to increase their capacity to address such problems by
deepening their knowledge of their culture. The premise of multicultural-
ism, framed in this way, is that social problems are self-evident, and the
only question is how to most effectively mobilize our resources to address
them. But this is misleading, for there is not a neutral place or person to
adjudicate what counts as a social problem, or discern the relative urgency
of social problems. During segregation and apartheid, the oppressed
communities saw different, and more urgent, social problems than pur-
portedly neutral observers (who may include members of the oppressed
communities at a scholarly distance from their own racial locations).
Put another way, power mystifies by concealing the injustices it creates,
and by shifting our attention to different, less threatening injustices. The
social problems that multiculturalism addresses may be of this less threat-
ening type, and addressing these may even serve to further mask others.
Black political thought that starts from multiculturalism lacks resources
to challenge these deepest, most troubling social problems because they
are not obvious.
Just as black natural law names an approach to political engagement not
contaminated by secularism, it also names a style of political engagement
not contaminated by multiculturalism. Both are essentially fantasies, and
fantasies are a middle-class luxury. As an approach to political engage-
ment, black natural law has a distinctive way of identifying and prioritiz-
ing what counts as a social problem, exemplified in the tradition of black
political thought. Indeed, the central feature of black natural law is its
persistent challenge to the mystifications of power that conceal how the
status quo furthers the interests of the wealthy and the powerful. Because
the wisdom of the world is the idiom in which the interests of the wealthy
and powerful are concealed, black natural law must appeal to a higher law.
To recover black natural law, we must understand it as the politics of a

tradition, not just the politics of a culture. Culture in ordinary language
is associated with pluralism and relativism; we can understand or excuse
an action because it is a product of someone’s culture. Studies of African
American culture that illuminate one or another aspect of that culture
often shy away from explicit discussions of normativity. They often pres-
ent themselves as offering resources for black political thought, or refram-
ing the conversation about black political thought. In other words, they
present themselves as useful. In contrast, a tradition entails “standards of
rational justification”: What is or is not useful is relative to a tradition.10
As Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, what counts as a good reason is deter-
mined by a tradition. What counted as a good reason in the Newtonian
tradition of scientific inquiry does not count as a good reason within the
Einsteinian tradition of scientific inquiry. What counted as a good reason
in the tradition of white political thought in the segregated South or of
Northern white liberals during segregation does not count as a good rea-
son in the black natural law tradition. The project of this book has been
to make explicit the contours of the black natural law tradition. A tradi-
tion is more than standards of rational justification. It is a community’s
practices over time, supported by institutions. To be properly raised in
a tradition is to become competent in that tradition’s practices, to per-
form them naturally—as second nature. It is also to feel the right feelings,
to value the right values, and to reason in the right way. Parents, teach-
ers, and fellow community members help raise children (or immigrants
or converts) into the tradition. So do exemplary performances of art, lit-
erature, and rhetoric. Such great works condense, affirm, and transmit a
tradition’s ethical substance. Those who deviate from their tradition are
reprimanded because the tradition determines what is right, what one
ought to do.
We need not think of traditions as painfully claustrophobic. Traditions
are dynamic, with some practices falling away and new practices devel-
oping. New histories shift the importance of different aspects of a tradi-
tion. New exemplary performances (novels, speeches, plays) create new
possibilities for the tradition. The norms embodied in traditions are con-
tinually contested according to forms of contest internal to the tradition.
Nor need we think of traditions as hermetic. While the boundaries of the
Amish tradition seem quite tight, those of other Christian traditions, or
what some have called the American democratic tradition, have broad
borders of gray. Moreover, allegiance need not be given exclusively to one
tradition. One could participate in, say, both the American democratic
tradition and the Orthodox Jewish tradition. Both could have normative
force and could determine what one ought to do.
AF TERWORD ( 155 )
Understanding black natural law as embodied in a tradition offers a

way to circumvent both secularism and multiculturalism. Religious prac-
tices count just like ostensibly secular practices in determining the ethical
substance of a tradition, whether that tradition is American democracy or
Orthodox Judaism—or the African American political tradition. Indeed,
the division between religious and secular practices may not even make
sense within the vocabulary of a tradition. To talk about the African
American political tradition is not to make any claims about the biology
of race or the significance of skin color. It is simply to pick out a set of
practices of a community (the boundaries of which can be left vague) over
time that embodies certain values, attitudes, and dispositions. But, unlike
cultures, traditions are incommensurable. Because the very standards of
rationality, of what counts as making sense, are embodied in a tradition,
there is not a neutral standpoint from which multiple traditions can be
viewed. Such an imagined neutral standpoint, free of all religion and cul-
ture, is a fantasy of secularism and multiculturalism.
Approaching black political thought as a tradition makes us reconsider
the relationship between ethics and politics—a topic of particular impor-
tance for discussions of natural law, which often straddle this divide.
From the perspective of tradition, ethics is not about what decision to
make given a dilemma (should you save three healthy drowning chil-
dren or five sick ones?). Rather, ethics is a way of life: a set of dispositions
inculcated through life in a community. With those dispositions, anyone
would automatically make the “ethical” choice when presented with a
moral dilemma. From the perspective of tradition, politics is not about
devising a theory of justice that anyone would rationally adopt in order to
live with his or her fellow creatures. Politics is about finding ways to use
the shared values of a community as a guide for creating institutions that
allow us to live together and flourish. In other words, from the perspective
of tradition, ethics informs politics; politics implements ethics.
Ignoring tradition can seem innocuous. For example, it may seem
better to start by imagining a rational individual whose preferences are
shaped by the several communities of which he or she is a member. The
individual then is subject only to norms that she or he can rationally jus-
tify. But this is false consciousness. How an individual understands his
or her desires and what counts as a good reason are shaped by his or her
tradition. Indeed, Hegel compellingly argues that freedom is not lack of
norms; quite the opposite, freedom is made possible by competence in the
shared norms of a tradition. Familiarity with standard grammar is a pre-
requisite for writing great poetry, a paradigmatic exercise in freedom.11 To
pretend to be free independent of tradition is actually to make oneself less
free, for without acknowledging the norms of a tradition, one is unable to
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 )
19th century, to King’s anti-segregation supporters in the 1960s, and to

Thomas’s supporters, a variety of Catholic and secular conservatives, in
the 1990s. But this view is unsatisfactory: Douglass, King, and Thomas
took their natural law language seriously, and it was woven into the sub-
stance of their own intellectual (religious, political, judicial) identities.
Another way to deflate natural law language, to reduce it to rhetoric, is
presented by Jeffrey Stout, who also desires to make natural law, or at least
natural law language, accessible beyond conservative Catholic circles.12
Stout takes his lead from philosophers of science who imagine the laws
of nature as an ideal system of equations governing the behavior of the
universe, only a portion of which we now know but all of which we can
aspire to learn by the “end of inquiry.” Perhaps, he suggests, natural law
is similarly what obtains at the end of moral inquiry. We may catch only
glimpses of natural law now, but a commitment to natural law is a com-
mitment to the possibility of an end of inquiry—and this possibility moti-
vates inquiry itself. Or, less strongly, and in an idiom Stout would prefer,
this possibility is a commitment implicit in the practice of inquiry.
Stout’s account of natural law is deflationary insofar as it provides a
framework for talking about natural law language without entailing any
problematic (or perhaps even debatable) metaphysical commitments.
God and all God’s avatars are gone. But are we left with anything more
than mere rhetoric, the phrase “higher law” providing extra oomph to cer-
tain moral claims? It is unclear whether Stout takes natural law to be mere
rhetoric: He is re-describing a certain morally efficacious rhetorical trope
in palatable philosophical terms (as a pragmatist, he can aspire to little
more). But in the deflationary move that Stout makes, the robust intellec-
tual work that someone like Douglass or King performs is lost. Moreover,
the black natural law tradition explored in this book is critical: It humbles
rationalists and sentimentalists of all stripes.
While Stout deflates the claims of natural law, Cristina Traina attempts
to pluralize them.13 For her, natural law is not a certain set of conclusions
or precepts, but rather a process of reasoning that takes account of “the
innate rational inclination to the good.” To begin that process of rea-
soning necessarily involves examining local circumstances and varying
capacities. “The good” that we all innately pursue, according to Traina,
is not the same for everyone; rather, it is always named in a local idiom.
Traina suggests that her view “accounts for historical and cross-cultural
diversity in experience and even in norms without relinquishing its pro-
phetic edge.”14 Further, her position is one in which “centripetal and cen-
trifugal forces are balanced, so that diverse ethics move in orbits rather
than collapsing indistinguishably into a common center or spinning off
wildly and randomly to the far reaches of the universe.”15
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 )
is based on a conception of the human as not purely rational, but rather

as also defined by the capacity for emotion. Or, more generally, human
nature is paradoxical; every attempt to label it fails. Reason is compli-
cated by emotion, and emotion is complicated by reason. In other words,
black natural law criticizes the wisdom of the world through reflection on
human nature, but this criticism is not fueled by the content of human
nature. Just the opposite: Because the content of human nature is inex-
pressible, black natural law criticizes attempts by the wisdom of the world
to fix human nature (e.g., as rational, as emotional, or as desiring specific
goods).18 For this reason, black natural law is critical of slavery, segrega-
tion, and mass incarceration, each of which is justified by its attempt to
give human nature certain content.
Black natural law is embodied in African American tradition; it is the
style of political engagement characteristic of that tradition. It is self-
evident to poor black people that they are not who they are told they are on
a daily basis, that the wisdom of the world is wrong. While the preceding
chapters focused on four canonical figures representative of mainstream
black political thought, there are also individuals outside this canon who
similarly reflect on paradoxical human nature to motivate a critique of
the wisdom of the world. These other figures are cornerstones of the black
intellectual tradition, exemplifying and explicating its practices and val-
ues and showing that black natural law is deeply woven into the tradition.
However, as intellectuals instead of political leaders, their focus is on the
critical side of black natural law, rather than on social movement organiz-
ing, an equally important aspect of black natural law.
Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Richard Wright’s Native Son, is some-
times considered a flawed character because of his lack of humanity, or
our lack of access to his humanity. Yet this is precisely what makes Native
Son so compelling: We know that he is human, yet none of our expecta-
tions for human nature are present in this character; we do not have access
to Bigger’s reasoning or emotions. The limitations of the wisdom of the
world are on display by what this character lacks. This impulse is explored
even more fully in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. The narrator—who, sig-
nificantly, remains nameless—begins with trust in the wisdom of the
world, the white world. With each incident detailed in the narrative, he
loses an aspect of his self-understanding and, simultaneously, his faith in
the wisdom of the world. Misadventures take away his education and job
prospects, his political identity, and even his doppelgänger. Eventually,
he ends up alone in a dark basement, invisible. In the final paragraphs,
he reflects, “In going underground, I whipped it all except the mind, the
mind. And the mind that has conceived a plan of living must never lose
sight of the chaos against which that pattern was conceived. That goes for
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
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.
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.
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 )
10. Du Bois, Correspondence, Vol. 3, 395.

11. Du Bois, “Sociology Hesitant,” 44.
12. Du Bois, “Atlanta Conferences,” 85; “Sociology Hesitant,” 40.
13. “Sociology Hesitant,” 40.
14. Ibid., 40, 43. This point is explored and developed in Chandler, X: The Problem of the
Negro as a Problem for Thought.
15. Du Bois, Darkwater, 140.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., vii.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid., 21.
20. Ibid., 20.
21. Ibid., 21.
22. Du Bois, Dark Princess, 306.
23. Du Bois offers an alternative formulation in Souls that emphasizes the importance of
community: “This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of
culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his
latent genius” (Writings, 365).
24. Classically, Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights.
25. Du Bois considers laws and social norms together, arguing that antiracist work must
address “irrational and unconscious habit, long buried in folkways and custom”
through both “legal enactment” and “intelligent propaganda” (Writings, 776).
26. Du Bois, Religion, 168.
28. Du Bois, Religion, 24–25.
29. Du Bois writes in Dark Princess of the effects of the protagonist’s fulfilling work: “He
had a singular sense of physical power and spiritual freedom. There was no doubt in
his heart concerning the worth of the work he was doing—of its good, of its need. …
He felt here no compulsion to pretend; to believe what he did not believe; or to be that
which he did not want to be” (266).
30. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, 396. While Du Bois is often condemned for his over-
emphasis on black criminality, here Du Bois goes on to assert that the lack of suitable
jobs has “increased crime and increased excuse for crime.”
31. Terrence Johnson develops this theme in Du Bois rather differently in his Tragic
Soul-Life.
32. Du Bois, Darkwater, vii.
33. See Medina, Epistemology of Resistance, where Du Bois is specifically discussed.
34. Cf. Agamben, Time That Remains.
35. On this scholarship and Du Bois’s relation to it, see Evans, The Burden of Black Religion.
38. Ibid., 305.
39. Du Bois, Religion, 99; see also Du Bois, Darkwater.
42. See Haynes, Noah’s Curse.
43. Du Bois, Darkwater, 3. On the circulation of this text in the black community, see
Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois, Chap. 1.
45. Du Bois, Religion, 25, 28.
46. Smith, Weird John Brown, Chap. 4.
47. Du Bois, John Brown, 356.
48. Ibid., 7.
49. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 392, 390.
51. Ibid., 159.
( 166 ) Notes
52. Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 392.

53. See especially Writings, 1001.
54. Du Bois, Darkwater, 48. See also Writings, 653, where Du Bois writes of how the
European bourgeoisie was consolidated through “the majesty of judge and police and
in human law which became divine.”
55. Du Bois, John Brown, 65.
57. Ibid., 154.
58. Ibid., 153.
59. On this distinction, see Sabl, Ruling Passions.
60. Du Bios, Philadelphia Negro, 393.
61. Du Bois specifically lists “sexual immorality,” “disease,” and “crime” (“Study of the
Negro,” 8). Elsewhere, he adds “loafing,” “gambling,” and prostitution (Writings, 823).
62. See Writings, 838, though in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois is less sanguine about
the role of the preacher. There he writes, “The congregation does not follow the moral
precepts of the preacher, but rather the preacher follows the standard of his flock, and
only exceptional men dare seek to change this” (205). Of course, Du Bois would laud
such exceptional men.
63. This was a position Du Bois developed in Souls. Earlier, in The Philadelphia Negro, Du
Bois privileged the social scientific, writing that blacks’ “church is, to be sure, a social
institution first, and religious afterwards, but nevertheless, its religious activity is wide
and sincere” (205).
65. Ibid., 26.
66. I explore these issues further, and in more theoretical terms, in “Of Fathers and Sons,
Prophets and Messiahs.”
68. Ibid., 4, 206.
69. E.g., Du Bois, Philadelphia Negro, 390.
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 )
14. See King, Strength to Love, 136.

15. See King, Papers, 2:225; Strength to Love, 106.
16. King, Strength to Love, 90.
17. See King, Papers, 7:542, on the political potential of “soul force.”
18. King, Testament of Hope, 118–119; see also Where Do We Go from Here? 180.
19. King, Where Do We Go from Here? 97.
21. Ibid., 20, 90.
22. Ibid., 92.
24. King, Strength to Love, 57; King, Testament of Hope, 10.
26. Ibid., 91.
27. Ibid., 2, 32.
28. Ibid., 2.
29. Ibid., 5.
30. Ibid., 6.
31. King develops this point in his Papers, 4:250.
34. King cites a student’s favorite quotation from William Blake as exemplifying this
point: “I sought my soul, but my soul I could not see, / I sought my God, but he eluded
me, / I sought my brother, and I found all three” (Testament of Hope, 166).
35. King, Strength to Love, 21–22.
36. This was, in fact, the case in Brown v. Board of Education: School funding and other
arrangements had been equalized, or at least that was a premise the Court adopted in
deciding the case.
37. King, Testament of Hope, 119, 357.
38. Thomas F. Jackson, From Civil Rights to Human Rights.
39. King even uses the recently popularized language of the “1%” to make this point: “One
tenth of 1 percent of the population of this nation controls more than 50 percent of the
wealth, and I will say this afternoon or this evening without any hesitation, that there
is something wrong with a system where some people can wallow in wealth and others
do not have the basic necessities of life” (Papers, 7:481).
41. King, Strength to Love, 52, 89.
43. Ibid., 131.
44. See King, Papers, 2:287, for Dexter, and 5:377 for Ebenezer.
45. In contrast to the tradition, see Agamben, The Open. King’s view is close to that of
Alain Badiou on this point.
46. King writes, “The Darwinian theory of evolution is valid in the biological realm, but
when a Herbert Spencer seeks to apply it to the whole of society, there is very little
evidence for it” (Papers, 7:533).
47. King, Stride Toward Freedom, 51.
48. See especially King, Papers, 7:166.
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
5. Carmichael, “Black Power,” 164.

6. Carmichael, Stokely Speaks, 55.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 53.
9. Jackson, “How We Respect Life.”
10. Ibid.
11. For further discussion of the analogy between slavery and abortion, see Hart, “Slaves,
Fetuses, and Animals.”
12. More precisely, it fell to black preachers and black writers, with these two domains
also increasingly differentiated. I leave it to others to explore the changing role of black
natural law in organized black religion.
13. Jennifer Nash argues that this represents a longer, black feminist tradition (Nash,
“Practicing Love”). My reading of Cooper suggests otherwise.
14. On the development of the theme of love in Baldwin’s work, see Lloyd, “The Negative
Political Theology of James Baldwin.”
15. Parenthetical references to Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
16. Linda Zerilli makes this point in her compelling critique of the recent affect theory fad,
“The Turn to Affect and the Problem of Judgment.”
17. Parenthetical references to Lorde, Sister Outsider.
18. Like Baldwin, Lorde is particularly concerned with religious beliefs that degrade sen-
suality. She writes, “We have attempted to separate the spiritual and the erotic, thereby
reducing the spiritual to a world of flattened affect, a world of the ascetic who aspires to
feel nothing” (56).
19. hooks, Yearning, 12.
20. hooks, Outlaw Culture, 243.
21. Wendy Brown makes a similar point, without redemptive love, in States of Injury.
23. Ibid.
24. hooks, Salvation, xxii. See also Outlaw Culture, 245.
26. See also Cornel West’s reflections on black nihilism in Race Matters.
27. hooks, Salvation, 224.
28. This is forcefully argued in Finnis, Aquinas.
29. Thomas repeated this characterization in his much later autobiography. During his
confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court, Thomas stated, “I don’t see a role
for the use of natural law in constitutional adjudication” (Hearings, 112). It is difficult
not to read such claims as disingenuous, given how Thomas discusses specific Court
cases in his writings on natural law. Further, Thomas wrote, “The higher law back-
ground of the Constitution, whether explicitly appealed to or not, provides the only firm
basis for a just, wise, and Constitutional decision” (121).
30. On Thomas’s Straussian pedigree, see Tushnet, “Clarence Thomas’s Black Nationalism”
(338, n. 85). It is likely that Thomas has also been influenced by followers of Aquinas.
Although his grandmother, who raised him, was a Seventh-day Adventist, Thomas
attended Catholic schools and considered the priesthood. Thomas left the Catholic
Church for 28 years before returning in 1996. See Thomas, My Grandfather’s Son.
31. Thomas, “The Higher Law Background,” 64.
32. Thomas, “Toward a ‘Plain Reading’ of the Constitution,” 699.
33. Ibid., 698.
34. Ibid., 699.
35. Hearings, 114.
36. Ibid., 156.
37. E.g., ibid., 113.
38. Thomas, “Civil Rights as a Principle,” 392.
39. Ibid., 402.
40. Thomas, “The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission,” 35.
41. Thomas, “Why Black Americans Should Look to Conservative Policies,” 8.
42. Dworkin, Freedom’s Law, Chap. 15.
Notes ( 169 )
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
abolitionists, 6, 15, 16, 26, 27, 28 Blackstone, William, 4–5

abortion, x, xi, 112, 122, 142, 148 Blake, William, 167n34
abstractions, 39– 40, 49 Bloom, Allan, 136
affect theory, xiv, 168n16 Brown, John
affirmative action, 133–34, 135 Douglass’s view of, 23–24
African religion, 31, 72–73 Du Bois’s view of, 77–78, 85
Afro-pessimism, 145– 46 Brown, Wendy, 168n21
agnosticism, 42– 43 Brown v. Board, 100, 132, 167n36
alcohol, 43, 163n6. See also temperance Buber, Martin, 88
movement Butler, Judith, 170n18
Allen, Barbara, 166n13
animals, 7, 8, 20, 63 Cain, Herman, 169n51
Anti-Slavery Society, 16 capitalism
apartheid, 134, 153 Cooper’s critique of, 43, 44, 45
Aquinas, Thomas, 88, 131, 134, 149 Douglass’s critique of, 7, 163n6
art, 69–70, 80, 154 Du Bois’s critique of, 81
Auld, Thomas, 29–30 King’s critique of, 110–111
Thomas’s embrace of, 133
Badiou, Alain, 167n45 Carmichael, Stokely, 120–121, 122
Baker, Ella, 161 Carson, Ben, viii, 138–139
Baldwin, James, 91–92, 99, 123–27, 129, Carter, J. Kameron, 164n12, 169n3
145, 161 Catholic natural law, conservative, ix, 33,
Barber II, William, 142– 43 149, 156
beauty, 42, 63– 64, 70, 79– 80 charisma, 71, 161
Bible children, 39, 50–51, 53–54, 56, 64, 85– 86,
Barber’s use of, 143 103, 106, 123, 126. See also education
Carson’s use of, 138 Christ. See Jesus
Douglass’s use of, 12 Christianity
Cooper’s familiarity with, 33–34 Baldwin’s view of, 123–25
King’s use of, 111, 113 Cooper’s view of, 34–35, 36, 41, 43– 44,
Biden, Joseph, vii, x, 135, 148 45, 51–52
Birmingham, King’s letter from, vii, 88– 89 Douglass’s view of, 15, 28
birth control, King’s view of, 112 Du Bois’s view of, 58, 60– 61, 67, 73,
Black Panthers, 120 78–79, 84– 85
black power, 120, 130, 131, 160 Episcopal Church, 35, 43
black studies, xiii Thomas’s relation to, 168n30
black theology, 160 civil disobedience, 48, 100, 105, 113, 120
( 178 ) Index
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 )
Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 121 natural world, 7

Judeo- Christian tradition, vii, 103, 139 neo-orthodoxy, 92
Netherlands, religious persecution in, 13
Keyes, Alan, 136–38 New Age spirituality, 124
Kilpatrick, James J., 100, 123 Nygren, Anders, 117
King Sr., Martin Luther, 92
King III, Martin Luther, 140 Obama, Barack, 136, 138, 141– 42,
145, 161– 62
labor, 52, 64, 67, 87, 133, 169n47 Oberlin College, 34
laughter, 2, 7, 20, 64, 71–72 oppressed, epistemic privilege of. See
Levinas, Emmanuel, 170n18 epistemic privilege
liberalism, theological, 92 organizing, ix, 161
Lincoln, Abraham, 27–28, 133, 134 Cooper’s view of, 32, 53, 55–56
logic, 47, 63– 64, 139 Douglass’s view of, 3, 15, 23, 25, 26, 27
Lorde, Audre, 127–29, 130, 133, 145 Du Bois’s view of, 76, 83– 85, 87
love Keyes’s view of, 138
Baldwin on, 123–27 King’s view of, 96–97, 114–15, 117
Carmichael on, 121
Cooper on, 39, 40, 44, 47, 51, 52, 56 Parks, Rosa, 93
Douglass largely ignores, 12 parties, political, 27
Du Bois on, 63, 66– 67, 71, 74, 86 peace, illusion of, 24, 45, 116
hooks on, 130–31 perception
King on, 89, 95, 96, 99, 103, 105, distortion of, xii, 12–17, 20, 23, 25, 73
116–17, 118 of human nature, 1
Lowery, Joseph, 135 improving, 18
lynching, 43– 44, 59, 75, 79 of natural law, xii
See also epistemic privilege
MacIntyre, Alasdair, 154 performance, xii, xiv, 11, 25, 26–27, 94. See
Madonna, black, 44 also rhetoric
Malcolm X, 160 personalism, 92
Mansfield, Harvey, 136 Pharisees, Douglass’s view of, 13, 15
Martin, Trayvon, 138 Phillips, Wendell, Douglass’s
Meredith, James, 120 view of, 18
micro-aggression, 145 Pilate, Pontius, 79
Million Man March, 140 pirates, 5, 6, 24
modernity, 101, 156 politics, distinguished from ethics, 155
Montgomery bus boycott, 92–99, 147 Powell, Adam Clayton, 120
Montgomery Improvement psalms, 34
Association, 114–15 pragmatism, 131, 139– 43, 156, 161– 62
Moral Mondays, 142 prisons, 111, 132, 144, 162
Moses, 74–75, 161 progress, 8, 10, 14, 20, 36, 72
motherhood, 12, 41– 43, 53. See also children propaganda, 59, 83
Muhammad, Elijah, 125, 160 property, 13
multiculturalism, 152–53, 155, 160
murder, 5, 17–18, 121 Reagan, Ronald, 132
Reed, Adolph, 118
Nash, Jennifer, 168n13 religion. See Christianity
Nation of Islam, 125, 160, 161 Religious Right, 119
National Association for the Advancement respectability, 56–57
of Colored People (NAACP), 55, 59, responsibility, 137–38
83, 135 Revolution, French, 48– 49
( 180 ) Index
rhetoric, viii, 18, 122, 154, 156–57 Thompson, Maurice, 42, 45

Douglass’s use of, 2, 3, 7 Tillich, Paul, 88
King’s use of, 88–92 tradition, 154–56
rights, group, 133 collapse of natural law, vii, x
rights, human, 20 dogmatic embrace of, 13
Roe v. Wade, 148 features of black natural law, viii-ix
Rusk, Dean, 121 politicization of, x
tragedy, 68, 69, 70
sacrifice, 76–78 Traina, Cristina, 157–58
saints 18-19, 107. See also exemplars, moral Tuskegee Institute, See Washington,
St. Augustine’s Normal School Booker T.
(now St. Augustine’s University), tyranny, 5, 6–7, 24, 31. See also
33–35, 54 dictatorship
salvation, 6, 36
Scott, Dred, 1–3 Universal Negro Improvement
secular, religious opposed to, xiv Association, 160
secularism, 150–52, 155, 156, 160
secularization, 150–51 Vietnam War, 109, 121
segregation, vii, 83, 88, 93–96, 98, violence, 24–25, 45, 96, 131
100–101, 105, 109–10, 116, 145, 153
self-evidence, x, 3, 8, 12, 16, 30, 38, Walker, Alice, 90–91, 92
98, 139– 40 Washington, Booker T., 54, 67
selfishness, 14, 53, 66, 67 West, Cornel, 130, 140, 161, 168n26
settlement house movement, 56 whites, 14, 73, 77, 80, 98–99, 109, 113, 116,
Sharia, 150 119, 126–27
sin, 102, 160 Wilberforce University, 34–35, 58
social movements, x, 3, 23, 33. See also Wilderson, Frank
organizing memoir, 146
sociology, 58, 60– 61, 107 synthesizing Afro-pessimist
solidarity 16, 45, 50, 53, 111 thought, 169n3
South Africa, 133 wisdom, practical, 25, 26, 27, 28, 31, 64,
Southern Christian Leadership Council 134, 146, 147– 48
(SCLC), 135 witnessing, 9, 10, 24, 66, 100, 108
Spencer, Herbert, 167n46 women
spirituals, 9, 79 Cooper’s view of, 32–33, 36, 37, 44,
Staël, Germaine de, 36 45– 46, 50–54
Stout, Jeffrey, 157, 170n8 Douglass’s view of, 10–11, 13, 26
Strauss, Leo, 131, 132, 134, 136, 149 Du Bois’s view of, 63– 64, 75
Student Nonviolent Coordinating feminist natural law, 157–58
Committee, 120 Lorde’s view of, 128
suffering, 19, 50, 70, 72, 97, 100, 141 See also motherhood
Supreme Court, 1– 4, 93, 94, 98, 132, 135, 148 work. See labor
World War, Second, 38, 57
Taney, Roger, 1 Wright, Jeremiah, 142
temperance movement, 23, 163n6 Wright, Richard, 159– 60
Ten Commandments. See Decalogue Wynter, Sylvia, xi
Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 77
Thomas, Clarence, vii, viii, 131–36, 137, Zerilli, Linda, 168n16
148, 161 Zimmerman, George, 138

Lloyd, Vincent W - Black Natural Law (2016)

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Black Natural

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of congress cataloging in publication data

world. In short, natural law means many things to many people—though

hot-button conservative causes of the day—to oppose abortion, to oppose

see it as characterized by a commitment to ideology critique and social

something about our current cultural moment that makes us uncomfort-

With vivid imagery, Douglass evokes an authority beyond the world. It is

offers normative implications of this reflection; and he offers thoughts on

focusing on the phrase “our common humanity.” This is the cornerstone

As we have seen, Douglass is committed to the existence of an authority

the same regardless of the name he uses. Indeed, Douglass’s vocabulary is

it. While Douglass is most concerned about tyranny as idolatry, he is also

Human nature in the complex, mysterious sense that Douglass

whites, witness human capacities being exercised, the witnesses them-

On Douglass’s view, the explanation is clear: The “judgment of women in

DISTORTED PERCEPTION OF HUMAN NATURE

in the New Testament, and the Pharisees in particular. They encounter

Treating some human beings as objects to be bought and sold or, as

So absorbed in his or her own profit, or perceived happiness, the slave-

RIGHT PERCEPTION OF NATURAL LAW

The first step in discerning natural law, as we have seen, is attending to

is because, without distortions, no decision or action is needed. In such

determining how we ought to respond to injustice. Instead of copying a

WHAT NATURAL LAW ENTAILS

has nothing more touching, reason nothing more noble, imagination

including women’s suffrage, Irish freedom, and the temperance move-

there is no genuine law at all. In a context thoroughly filled with violence,

Douglass certainly favors proclaiming natural law, shouting it from the

full human capacities be mobilized in pursuit of the political problem of

thing expressed is the soul” (5:140). Several different expressions can

slow to act on the principles of liberty and equality. In Douglass’s analy-

So far we have considered Douglass’s spoken words. He was a powerful

“Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge,” he writes, “my spirit

F or Anna Julia Cooper, natural law liberates society’s weakest. It brings

Natural law theories begin with an account of human nature, of what

Accounts of human nature offered by natural law theorists often focus

struggling and accepting involve both rational and emotional work. We

that institutional religion must be held accountable to actual experiences

to become so oriented. As we will see, for Cooper, mothers have a crucial

and God’s image in humans through specific normative claims. Lynching

world. She condemns those who display “narrowness of vision” or “drowsy

just as racial equality is guaranteed by Christ. Racial injustice cannot be

specifics that we must respond. Certainly reason is necessary, but reason

While Cooper’s dissertation, written late in life, largely conforms to aca-

of [women’s] nature” (112). These are moral instincts, or at least instincts

EDUCATING AND ORGANIZING

Much of Cooper’s long life was spent not as a spokesperson or an activist

(258). It is important to pause on Cooper’s reasoning here. She is commit-

presents a different story. The desire for nobility in Cooper’s epigraph is

W . E. B. Du Bois is often considered a decidedly secular black

nature point to what he thinks is most important about human nature: the

Our humanity is essentially indiscernible; it is what marks the limits of

Du Bois’s description of black double consciousness is one of the most

as though this is not true beauty at all, just a particular representation

is also uniquely human—and, Du Bois adds, it is “the greatest of the gifts

externally in the natural world. Now, God is accessed internally, through

Du Bois continues to exploit the double meaning of Matthew’s airplane

rewards that are an order of magnitude greater than worldly pleasures.45

Discerning the mechanics of Du Bois’s religious-ethical project means