Last week I began preparing for a civics-education symposium on April 24 at the Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State. I’ll be talking with Michael Clune about the various challenges universities are facing.
I asked my Claude Opus 4.6 Extended to please give me a background on the history of the various centers and the movement generally. I already knew that the Chase Center was one of a dozen or so new civics institutes established at public universities by state legislatures since 2017, with similar centers at ASU, the University of Florida, the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Tennessee, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and elsewhere.
Claude began by finding a foundational intellectual document for the movement: an AEI white paper entitled Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education, by Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, and a model 14-week syllabus, “Civic Thought 101,” based on the report. New courses and centers were needed, the report proposes, because academic departments including political science, history, philosophy, and literature had turned away from the foundational questions of democratic life. Nobody was asking the foundational questions.
The foundational questions, according to the AEI report, include what constitutes a just economic order, where the line between politics and religion lies, when traditional laws should be kept and when they should be changed, and what the scope of the citizen’s responsibility is. The specifically American questions are about overcoming divisions of American political life and the distinctive possibilities and demands of American citizenship.
I asked Claude where across the current university structure such questions were already being asked.
Working for several long minutes, Claude reported back that there was a particular academic unit asking these same foundational questions at nearly every university in the country: African American Studies, or Black Studies. Every disciplinary question posed by the AEI report and syllabus as foundational to Civic Thought had a substantial, continuous body of scholarship in the African American intellectual tradition that engages it directly. Claude compiled this helpful visual (with footnotes):
Why, I prompted Claude, does the report not mention Black studies in its diagnosis, its proposal, or its footnotes, even though it mentions Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr? Claude’s answer:
The field is named for a people, not for its questions. Political science is named for what it studies. Philosophy is named for what it does. History is named for its temporal orientation. African American studies is named for the population whose experience it examines. When the authors of the report went looking for who in the university is asking the foundational questions of democratic life, they appear to have searched by method and by question. A field named for a people does not surface in that search, even when the reason the field exists is that the people in question are the ones for whom the foundational questions were never settled. The name makes the questions invisible. It files the field under "population" rather than under "problems of self-government," and the white paper's entire argument is organized around problems of self-government.
Claude also pointed out that the report defines the foundational questions of democratic life as universal questions. Universal questions, in the report’s framework, are asked by scholars working in universal traditions: Aristotle, Cicero, Tocqueville, Locke, the Federalist. A field organized around a particular population does not register as a field working universal questions, because the organizing category — a people — codes as particular. The white paper’s framework sorts “particular” and “universal” into different bins. African American studies goes into the particular bin. Civic thought goes into the universal bin.
I agree with Claude that the AEI report gets the relationship between the particular and the universal backward. The reason African American studies never stopped asking the universal questions is that the particular experience of Black Americans is the one in which the universal questions were never abstract. You can look at a question such as “can we rule ourselves?” as a seminar topic or survival question. The particular experience is where the universal question was worked hardest, which means the deepest scholarship on the universal question is located in the field that studies the particular experience. The report assumes that a field organized around a particular people is studying that people, not studying the questions that the people were forced to think about every single day.
The AEI report asks: “Is democracy fated to burn brightly and quickly consume itself, as it did in ancient Greece? Do republican forms of government necessarily succumb to the temptations of oligarchy, populism, empire, and despotism, as they did in ancient Rome?”
Claude may have known these questions have been asked in African American studies for 200 years (since David Walker’s Appeal) because I’ve given it some of my readings this past year about the classical curriculum at many HBCUs, notably Fisk University. As Kenneth W. Goings and Eugene O’Connor write:
African-Americans could, as their white counterparts did, draw inspiration from Republican Rome as the model for the politics and culture of the early United States. Third, as early as the eighteenth century, African-American scholars had been making a connection between Northern Africa, the Mediterranean, and the Classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Classically educated African-Americans looked to antiquity to elucidate a glorious past antecedent to slavery.
The AEI white paper proposes that the new field of civic thought can be distinguished from great books programs because civic thought students: “will begin from the effort to understand the political and social contexts in which they are already implicated.” I can understand Claude noticing that starting from the contexts in which you are already implicated (rather than from a position of detached freedom) is what African American studies has always done, because it had no alternative. This is not a methodological innovation.
Out of the mouths of LLMs.
¹Benjamin Storey and Jenna Silber Storey, Civic Thought: A Proposal for University-Level Civic Education (American Enterprise Institute, December 11, 2023), citing Peter Levine, What Should We Do? A Theory of Civic Life (Oxford University Press, 2022), as the canonical formulation. The paper makes this question “the citizen’s question” and the founding question of the field they call Civic Thought. Douglass and King appear on the model syllabus, in the section on the American republic, alongside Tocqueville and the Federalist. But the white paper does not read either figure as a scholar working inside a continuous intellectual tradition that runs from David Walker’s 1829 Appeal through Anna Julia Cooper, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Dorothy Roberts, Cornel West, Manisha Sinha, Brandon Terry, and the historians’ brief filed in Trump v. Barbara in 2026.
² Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852), is the tradition’s most famous instance of asking what we should do when “we” is contested. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (Dial Press, 1963), poses the question as the central one for postwar America. Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black: How Race Still Enslaves the American Soul (Crown, 2016), takes Levine’s question explicitly and answers it from inside the African American intellectual tradition.
³ Storey and Storey, Civic Thought, list these as the kinds of questions citizens have to make judgments about, in the report’s introduction.
⁴ W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (Harcourt, Brace, 1935), is the most sustained American argument that the question of a just economic order cannot be separated from the question of who is included in the political community that orders it. Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Zed Press, 1983; UNC Press, 2000), is the foundational work on the relation between racial capitalism and self-government. Manning Marable, How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America (South End Press, 1983); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard, 2013); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (Basic Books, 2014); Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (UNC Press, 2019). The slavery-and-capitalism literature of the past fifteen years is largely the work of the field arguing that the American economic order cannot be understood without the labor and law of enslavement.
⁵ Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford University Press, 1978); Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Exodus! Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (University of Chicago Press, 2000); Anthea Butler, White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America (UNC Press, 2021); Curtis J. Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford University Press, 2008). The literature on the Black church as political institution from C. Eric Lincoln and Lawrence Mamiya forward is the field’s continuous engagement with this question. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” (1963) is the canonical American text on where the line between politics and religion lies and when conscience requires crossing it.
⁶ Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall on the question of when the Constitution must be reread; Derrick Bell, And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice (Basic Books, 1987); Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Harvard University Press, 1991). The Critical Race Theory literature, in its origins, is a body of work on exactly this question — when traditional law must be kept, when it must be changed, and what the cost of either is.
⁷ Jenna Silber Storey, “Civic Thought 101” syllabus (American Enterprise Institute / Hoover Institution, October 5, 2024). The questions are listed in the syllabus as the organizing questions for the course.
⁸ Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Christopher James Bonner, Remaking the Republic: Black Politics and the Creation of American Citizenship (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020); Stephen Kantrowitz, More Than Freedom: Fighting for Black Citizenship in a White Republic, 1829–1889 (Penguin, 2012). The “distinctive possibilities and demands of American citizenship” are the explicit subject matter of these books.
⁹ Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Harvard University Press, 2003), is the major work on how African Americans built and used political institutions in the period the question covers. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877(Harper & Row, 1988), and Kate Masur, An Example for All the Land: Emancipation and the Struggle over Equality in Washington, D.C. (UNC Press, 2010), are both works on how American institutions did or did not organize the civic life of the newly freed.
¹⁰ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, is in part a study of how the greatest division of American political life — the division over slavery and its aftermath — was fought, partially overcome, and then re-entrenched. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Harvard University Press, 2001), studies the reconciliation that came at the cost of African American civil rights. Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2016), and The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic: Reconstruction, 1860–1920 (Liveright, 2024), trace the same division across two centuries.
¹¹ Patrice D. Rankine, Ulysses in Black: Ralph Ellison, Classicism, and African American Literature (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006); Margaret Malamud, African Americans and the Classics: Antiquity, Abolition, and Activism (I. B. Tauris, 2016); Michele Valerie Ronnick, ed., The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship (Wayne State University Press, 2005). The HBCU classics tradition and the African American engagement with Roman political thought, from Phillis Wheatley through W. E. B. Du Bois, is a developed subfield.
¹² Shelley P. Haley, “Be Not Afraid of the Dark: Critical Race Theory and Classical Studies,” in Prejudice and Christian Beginnings, ed. Laura Nasrallah and Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza (Fortress Press, 2009); Patrice D. Rankine, Aristotle and Black Drama: A Theater of Civil Disobedience (Baylor University Press, 2013). On African American oratory as a tradition continuous with classical rhetoric: Shirley Wilson Logan, “We Are Coming”: The Persuasive Discourse of Nineteenth-Century Black Women (Southern Illinois University Press, 1999); David Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad: Appeals for Justice in America, rev. ed. (Temple University Press, 2005; orig. The Afro-American Jeremiad, 1990). The African American oratorical tradition is one of the most studied bodies of rhetoric in the American academy.
¹³ Eric Adler and Bryan A. Krieger, “On Saving the Humanities: A Response to the 2025 Civic Thought and Practice Conference,” American Enterprise Institute, November 14, 2025, identifying these as the organizing questions of civic-thought reading. The Storeys list “Who Should Rule?” as a representative question raised in civics center courses.
¹⁴ Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (A. C. McClurg, 1903), and Black Reconstruction, both pose the question of who should rule and answer it as a question about the conditions of multiracial democracy. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (Random House, 1952), is in part a meditation on the same question. Adolph Reed Jr., Class Notes: Posing as Politics and Other Thoughts on the American Scene (New Press, 2000); Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), explicitly reframes the social-contract tradition’s “who rules” question through African American political theory.
¹⁵ Kevin Quashie, The Sovereignty of Quiet (Rutgers, 2012), Imani Perry, Looking for Lorraine (Beacon, 2018) and South to America (Ecco, 2022).Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own (Crown, 2020). The good life as a question for African American intellectual life runs from Du Bois’s “Of the Wings of Atalanta” in Souls through the contemporary literature.
¹⁶ Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), and Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford University Press, 2017); Tommie Shelby, Dark Ghettos: Injustice, Dissent, and Reform (Harvard University Press, 2016); Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (Aldine Printing House, 1892), the first sustained American philosophical treatment of distributive justice from inside the experience of exclusion.
¹⁷ University of Florida Hamilton Center for Classical and Civic Education, course “What Is America For?”, listed in the center’s course offerings.
¹⁸ Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992); the 1619 Project, edited by Nikole Hannah-Jones (initial publication New York Times Magazine, August 2019; book The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story, One World, 2021), is the most prominent contemporary public answer to “what is America for” produced by the field. Annette Gordon-Reed, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W. W. Norton, 2008); Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Harvard University Press, 2010).
¹⁹ University of Tennessee Institute for American Civics, course “Construction and Reconstruction of the American Republic.”
²⁰ Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, is the foundational work on Reconstruction as a question for democratic theory and remains the most-cited single book in the field. Eric Foner, Reconstruction (Harper & Row, 1988); Steven Hahn, A Nation Under Our Feet (Harvard University Press, 2003); Manisha Sinha, The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (Liveright, 2024); Kidada E. Williams, I Saw Death Coming: A History of Terror and Survival in the War Against Reconstruction (Bloomsbury, 2023). The construction-and-reconstruction question is the field’s home ground.
²¹ Salmon P. Chase Center for Civics, Culture, and Society at Ohio State University, CIVICLL 2000, “Can We Rule Ourselves?” Course catalog description: “This course surveys the origins, institutions, achievements and failures of past efforts at self-government.”
²² Du Bois’s argument in Black Reconstruction is that the Reconstruction governments were the closest the United States came to multiracial democracy and were destroyed for that reason; the question “can we rule ourselves” has no more sustained American treatment. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Beacon Press, 2002), is on the same question read forward through the twentieth century.
²³ University of Texas at Austin School of Civic Leadership, required course “Perennial Problems in Civic Thought.”
²⁴ The “perennial problems” formulation collapses to the questions already cited here; the African American intellectual tradition has worked all of them. The point of the comparison is that the framing assumes the perennial problems are the ones the Western canon has worked, and the African American canon has been working the same problems in continuous engagement with the Western canon since Wheatley.
²⁵ Storey and Storey, Civic Thought, list the four civic habits of mind: an ethic of responsibility, the capacity to consider the civic community as a whole, the ability to read the situation and imagine consequences, and the deliberative and persuasive capacity.
²⁶ The African American jeremiad tradition (Howard-Pitney, The African American Jeremiad) is in essence a centuries-long argument for civic responsibility, addressed to the American polity by people the polity excluded. Glaude, Democracy in Black; Imani Perry, Breathe: A Letter to My Sons (Beacon Press, 2019). The “ethic of responsibility” is the explicit subject of the entire tradition of African American political address.
²⁷ Civitas Institute at UT Austin, the Chase Center, Arizona State SCETL, and the AEI/Johns Hopkins Civic Thought Project all list civil discourse and the cultivation of disagreement as central to their pedagogy. The Storeys’ work on Tocqueville and on French liberal political thought is largely about this question.
²⁸ The African American oratorical and literary traditions are constitutively about how to argue across the most extreme conditions of disagreement — disagreement under which one party denies the other’s standing to speak. Frederick Douglass’s debates with William Lloyd Garrison; Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois on the conditions of Black education; Ida B. Wells in Southern Horrors (1892) and A Red Record (1895); James Baldwin’s debate with William F. Buckley at Cambridge in 1965. The tradition is the American case study in civil discourse under conditions where civility itself is contested.
²⁹ Salmon P. Chase Center course “Profiles in American Leadership” (CIVICLL 3560); the Hamilton Center’s leadership programming; the Civitas Institute’s leadership track. Leadership is one of the most-emphasized themes across all civics centers.
³⁰ The literature on African American leadership is one of the largest subfields in the field. August Meier, Negro Thought in America, 1880–1915 (University of Michigan Press, 1963); David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868–1919 (Henry Holt, 1993), and W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919–1963 (Henry Holt, 2000); Taylor Branch’s three-volume America in the King Years (Simon & Schuster, 1988, 1998, 2006); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (UNC Press, 2003); Erica Armstrong Dunbar, She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (37 Ink/Atria, 2019). Leadership in this literature is studied as the central practical question of how the work of constituting a people gets done.
³¹ African American studies is constituted around this question. The works here are the field’s founding texts: David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829); Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) and “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (1852); Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice from the South (1892); Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and Black Reconstruction (1935); Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997); Martha S. Jones, Birthright Citizens (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
Addendum: out of the mouth of the great Claude McKay, as Jacob Bacharach reminds me:
I’m not sure the individuals behind this push to teach civics are demanding methodological “innovation” (from your conclusion), nor do I think they would necessarily exclude these weighty African-American thinkers that you reference from a civics curriculum. In fact, if they did urge something like that, I would resist their project with as much energy as I could muster since, by doing so, they would reveal themselves as captured ideologues and partisan/racist hacks.
I think what they are looking for is not methodological innovation, but a change in methodological emphasis. Black Studies approaches American civic life, by dint of its own methodological emphasis/focus, with a highly critical lens. There is nothing wrong with that, of course, but a more general grounding in civic education must also inculcate in the student — to quote from the AEI article — “the willingness to take joint responsibility for the challenges facing one’s country…refusing to adopt a posture of ‘estrangement’ from it, an attitude of unquenchable ‘dissatisfaction…and disgust with things as they are,’ [but]…striving rather to understand oneself as implicated…” The article goes on: “To cultivate the capacity for taking joint responsibility, one must strive to know and love [!] the object of one’s efforts…”
In my experience that is not a primary focus of the average Black Studies program, and for sound methodological reasons.
This essay went in a direction that was entirely unanticipated, but which offers a stinging rebuke to the motivation and structure of such civic institutes- if their purpose is to restore faith in democracy, ask the big questions, and inculcate values, why limit their focus to a sanitized corpus of exclusively W.E.I.R.D. texts?