Democratic Faith: From Abolitionism to Civil Rights
Schedule
Tue Mar 24 2026 at 07:30 pm to 09:00 pm
UTC-04:00Location
Barshinger Center For The Musical Arts | Lancaster, PA
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A moral and political vision of democratic faith has guided the struggle for racial justice from the abolitionist movement in the 19th century to the civil rights movement in the 20th century. Figures such as Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith, alongside David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, and Martin Luther King Jr., reveal that faith in democracy is not a matter of optimism but of moral courage—the conviction that equality must be enacted in both public institutions and everyday life. Drawing on this inheritance, Dr. Melvin L. Rogers of Brown University, considers how such faith can sustain us amid the moral and political crises of our own time. In the year of America’s Semiquincentennial, these questions lie at the heart of our past, present, and future. Dr. Melvin L. Rogers is the Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Democracy Project at Brown University. A leading scholar of American and African American political thought, his work examines the moral and spiritual foundations of democracy. He is the author of the award-winning The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023), The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (University of Chicago Press, 2009), and co-editor of African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago Press, 2021).
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Where is it happening?
Barshinger Center For The Musical Arts, 628 College Ave, Lancaster, PA 17603-2874, United StatesEvent Location & Nearby Stays:
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