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Melvin L. Rogers is associate professor of political science and associate director of the Center for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at Brown University. He is the author of The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought and The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy.
In 1965, a reporter for
Cumhuriyet, a Turkish daily newspaper, asked the novelist, playwright, and essayist James Baldwin then living in Istanbul about his dreams for the future of the United States. Baldwin, in his reply, chose instead to talk about the
history of the United States. He explained that the future he imagined already existed in the past of the country, namely in the Reconstruction era. “Black and white people were side by side even in trade unions in the South,” Baldwin said, and continued: “We had Black members in Parliament. … Unfortunately, northern capitalists and southern landlords [
aghas] destroyed this unity and order.”