The Spirit of Freedom: Black Thought, Civic Virtue, and the Courage to Transform Democracy

Can courage of conviction co-exist with civic virtue? This seems to be a rather urgent question of our time. Achieving high-minded civic ideals is never easy, not least among those who have faced what Rogers Smith calls ongoing “civic estrangement,” an experience he says underlies the appeal of exclusionary populism, which it turns out, just won the last election.¹ Salamishah Tillet describes this state for African Americans as “the protracted experience of disillusionment, mourning and yearning” that continued even after the Civil Rights Movement.

To read the full article, please visit the Institute for Social Concerns website.