Abstract
What is African American Politics? What form should it take? How does it conceptualize white supremacy? In In the Shadow of Du Bois, Robert Gooding-Williams uses the work of W. E. B. Du Bois and Fredrick Douglass to provide answers to these questions. While the choices of Douglass and Du Bois make a great deal of sense, they reproduce the tendency of confining political theory to literature – a move that bounds the genre in problematic ways. In this article, I in effect attempt to “unbound” the genre by considering Ella Baker, a civil rights era political organizer.
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Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Nolan Bennett and the members of the Georgetown University theory group, P. J. Brendese, Bryan Carter, Nathan Gies, Jay Gillen, Serra Hakyemez, Errol Henderson, Jim Johnson, Ainsley LeSure, Jon Masin-Peters, Barbara Ransby (for sharing four of Ella Baker’s interviews), Robbie Shilliam, the anonymous reviewers, and the editorial staff of CPT who provided such thoughtful suggestions. Finally I owe a great deal of gratitude to the organizers and activists in Baltimore and elsewhere working to keep the SNCC organizing tradition alive. (RIP Betty Garman Robinson.)
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Spence, L.K. Ella Baker and the challenge of black rule. Contemp Polit Theory 19, 551–572 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00448-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41296-020-00448-8