African American Political Thought
Learn how the political tradition of Black Americans has made an indelible impression on American history.
It may seem strange to call someone who never held government office a “statesman,” but Booker T. Washington has a claim to that august title. His admirers regularly drew the comparison between Washington and his namesake, George Washington. Like President Washington, Booker T. Washington had as his primary project the strengthening of fraternal bonds between citizens, believing such bonds to be the necessary foundation for constitutional liberty.
In his Farewell Address, George Washington had prayed that “Union and brotherly affection may be perpetual.” Despite these words of counsel, the Union nearly foundered on the moral and geographic sandbar of slavery. After the Civil War, there was tremendous work to be done, as Lincoln said, “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and “to achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves.” This was the task that Booker T. Washington set for himself. Not only did he put forth a solution to the main problem left unresolved by the Founding Fathers—whether and how blacks would become full participants in the American polity—but he also made significant strides in implementing that solution. This virtual seminar will delve into Washington’s writings to understand both his remarkable personal accomplishments and his redemptive moral vision and subtle statesmanship.
Image: Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of the Harmon Foundation.
Diana Schaub on Booker T. Washington
This course is offered by Humanities at Hertog. It takes place weekly on Mondays, via Zoom, from 6 PM to 8 PM ET. Fellows will receive a $150 stipend contingent upon participation in the course and completion of a brief response paper. All course materials will be provided.
Faculty
Diana Schaub
Diana J. Schaub is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland and a member of the Hoover Institution’s task force on The Virtues of a Free Society. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics.
Diana Schaub
Diana J. Schaub is Professor of Political Science at Loyola University Maryland, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, as well as a member of the Hoover Institution’s task force on The Virtues of a Free Society.
She is the author of Erotic Liberalism: Women and Revolution in Montesquieu’s “Persian Letters” (Rowman & Littlefield, 1995), along with a number of book chapters and articles in the fields of political philosophy and American political thought. She is coeditor, along with Amy and Leon Kass of What So Proudly We Hail: The American Soul in Story, Speech, and Song (ISI, 2011). She is a frequent contributor to opinion journals such as the Claremont Review of Books, the Weekly Standard, National Affairs, and the New Atlantis.
From 1994 to 1995 Professor Schaub was the postdoctoral fellow of the Program on Constitutional Government at Harvard University. From 2004 to 2009 she was a member of the President’s Council on Bioethics. She has taught at the University of Michigan at Dearborn and served as assistant editor of The National Interest. She earned an A.B. from Kenyon College, where she was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and an M.A. and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
