Black Freethinkers

CHRISTOPHER CAMERON is an associate professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He is the founder of the African American Intellectual History Society, the author of To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Massachusetts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement, and a coeditor of New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition (Northwestern, 2018).

• Acknowledgments 3Introduction 51. Slavery and Reconstruction 162. The New Negro Renaissance 653. Socialism and Communism 1164. Civil Rights and Black Power 165Afterword 224Bibliography 236Endnotes 255

“Cameron offers a compelling survey of African American freethought across two centuries. Rather than treating secularism as a regulatory discourse of modern statecraft, Cameron unpacks the alienations, arguments, and aspirations of black secularists themselves. He brings depth and clarity to an aspect of African American religious history rarely given the sustained attention it deserves.”- Leigh Eric Schmidt, author of Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment  “In African American intellectual history, religious skepticism, agnosticism, atheism, and secular humanism have long been lost in the shadow of the black church. Taking a closer look at the evidence, Cameron shows that the experience of slavery and the degradations of proslavery Christianity also led some enslaved and free blacks in the nineteenth century to varieties of unbelief. This tradition laid a foundation for the next century, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Power movement and beyond. With deft readings of a host of fascinating figures, Cameron shows how black freethinkers made important interventions in American culture.”- Christopher Grasso, author of Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War