LancasterHistory, in partnership with Franklin & Marshall College, will welcome Dr. Melvin L. Rogers of Brown University on Tuesday, March 24, at the Barshinger Center for Musical Arts at Franklin & Marshal College, to discuss the importance of democratic faith in the United States.
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.Important 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.