Outlines of Abolition Democracy

This study traces the outlines of democratic theories and practices as they took shape among African American leftists in the 1930s who wrote about the unfinished nature of abolition. Drawing on W.E.B. Du Bois’s framework of abolition democracy, first developed in his 1935 historical study Black Reconstruction, the book explores the resonances of this framework in a range of political writings, organizing efforts, and cultural representations of its time. Through close readings of published and unpublished texts by Du Bois, Richard Wright, Marvel Cooke, William L. Patterson, Louise Thompson, and Langston Hughes, the author argues that African American leftists of the Depression decade articulated radical visions of collective self-determination that would extend the unfinished work of positively substantiating the abolition of racial slavery to encompass comprehensive social, political, and economic transformation. In doing so, the study proposes that these intellectuals and activists laid critical groundwork for abolitionist projects that would develop in the wake of the civil rights movement and in response to an expanding carceral state in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.