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2 | Foundations of Black Political Activism: Pushing Idealist Boundaries “The macro-historical perspective seems to me to be eminently sound. . . . There are certain ‘realities’ of developments over time that should not be overlooked. The courts have faced these matters headon and . . . were not blind to the historical purpose of continuing racial exclusion. . . . Today . . . we should not be blind to the need to take race into account for the ultimate purpose of inclusion.” —Charles Hamilton, 1994 This chapter offers an essential context for any analysis of contemporary African American politics and for this particular analysis of the approach taken by the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) to the Voting Rights Act (VRA) and the Fourteenth Amendment: nineteenth-century black political thought. With respect to contemporary work on African American politics, this chapter attempts to ‹ll in the gaps of what has been termed the “political context variable”—that is, an approach to representative politics from a black, or race-conscious, perspective.1 This chapter also illustrates how African Americans’ “quest for universal freedom” has consistently sought to expand the scope of the core American values of liberty , equality, and democracy.2 Moreover, since its inception in 1971, the CBC has advanced a race-conscious quest for universal freedom to its fellow legislators at each renewal of the VRA. It has had considerably less success with the Supreme Court in cases involving minority voting rights. However, simply because the caucus’s perspective troubles the majority on the Court does not rob that perspective of its value. The caucus, like the black leadership that preceded it, has often provoked dif‹cult but necessary discussions of the centrality of race in American democracy. Such discussions are all the more crucial now, as America attempts to untangle persisting knots of racial tension and inequality while crossing the threshold into a putatively postracial era. 34 The goal of this chapter is to remedy ahistorical approaches to American politics that“warp and distort”contemporary studies of race and politics .3 Such distortions include the misperceptions that black politics were nonexistent prior to the 1960s and that African Americans were politically “awakened” during the 1950s–60s. Another misperception is that because the civil rights movement accomplished so many of its goals, racial discrimination has been all but eradicated from American society and that moments of racism are rare and isolated and the related view that contemporary racial inequality results from blacks’ failure to avail themselves of the opportunities that emerged out of the civil rights movement. Overall , these misperceptions make it easy to believe that America is indeed color-blind and that remedial or preventive race-conscious laws such as the VRA are now obsolete.4 Such conclusions not only marginalize blacks’ participation in America’s political development but re›ect a disturbing disconnection from reality. By no means does this chapter attempt to cover the entire body of nineteenth-century black political thought. It is impossible for one chapter or even one book to do justice to this rich literature. This chapter emphasizes the political contributions of black leaders, particularly of the antebellum era, who have been overlooked in political science or overshadowed by luminaries such as Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Booker T.Washington,W. E. B. Du Bois, and Ida B.Wells. It also situates these larger ‹gures in context with other lesser-known but equally signi‹cant black leaders of their time. Finally, this chapter will show that the CBC’s substantive and rhetorical roots reach far deeper than the civil rights movement or the twentieth century. This chapter also corrects the misperception that because blacks during the antebellum and early Jim Crow eras were largely disenfranchised, they were politically disengaged as well. Such misperceptions are fueled in part by the dearth of early black voices in the canon of American political thought and development. Because nineteenth-century blacks had virtually no formal political presence except during the brief Reconstruction era, they tend not to be studied as political actors. Until the past ‹fteen or so years, scholarship on black leadership and political thought has been classi‹ed under African American studies, history, or similar disciplines. Indeed, a particularly thorough and illuminating analysis of black political thought appears in a volume on the history and in›uence of African American art on American history .5 While the interdisciplinary nature of black political thought is one of its strengths, this body of thought needs to be more fully incorporated into political science. For example, students encountering these...

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