Democracy’s Unfinished Work: Abolition, Sanctuary, and the Civil Rights Struggle
Thursday, September 3, 12:00 pm to 1:30 pm
2026 APSA Annual Meeting & Exhibition — Boston, MA | Register here
In-Person | Full Paper Panel
Participants:
- (Chair) Paul E. Herron, Providence College
- (Discussant) Robinson Woodward-Burns, Howard University
Session Description:
This panel examines how abolitionist critique, political theology, fugitive resistance, and legal struggle have theorized democracy as a fragile and unfinished project—one whose legitimacy depends on moral authority, collective obligation, and contested practices of enforcement, refusal, and the struggle to secure civil rights. Bringing together analyses of abolitionist political theology, sanctuary within regimes of unfreedom, Reconstruction-era political thought, and twentieth-century civil rights litigation, the panel traces how democratic authority and political membership have been challenged and reimagined in response to racial domination and state violence.
The first paper approaches John Greenleaf Whittier’s antislavery thought as a form of political theory grounded in political theology. Through abolitionist critique via biblical interpretation, Whittier evaluates slavery and the Fugitive Slave Act as failures of democratic legitimacy rather than merely moral wrongs. By casting abolitionists as agents of collective accountability and legal compliance as a potential form of political apostasy, the paper shows how Whittier theorizes civic obligation and democratic authority beyond constitutional form alone.
The second paper examines histories of fugitivity within free Black communities in the slave South, focusing on practices of “hiding in plain sight” as modes of sanctuary and political resistance. Challenging accounts that locate sanctuary primarily outside slave states, the paper recovers how free Black communities mobilized concealment, passing, and mutual protection to subvert racial and state violence from within regimes of domination. By connecting these historical practices to contemporary Black strategies of evasion under the carceral state, the paper theorizes sanctuary as an abolitionist politics of refusal that reimagines democratic life beyond state-centered enforcement.
The third paper turns to Frederick Douglass’s post–Reconstruction political thought, examining his critique of democratic failure across the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. Writing from within the Republican Party and the federal state, Douglass reframes democracy as a problem of enforcement rather than constitutional design. His emphasis on electoral strategy, party loyalty, and federal authority advances a theory of democratic maintenance in which political membership and freedom depend on sustained institutional commitment to emancipation’s promises.
The fourth paper analyzes the transformation of Black legal and political consciousness from the 1930s through the early 1960s, tracing the shift from individualized state tort actions to collective federal civil rights claims. Recovering the role of Black newspapers, civil rights organizations, and Reconstruction-era statutes such as Section 1983, the paper shows how police violence and racial terror were reconceptualized as systemic violations of political standing requiring federal constitutional protection. This legal evolution reflects a broader rethinking of democratic authority and the state’s obligations to secure equal political membership.
Taken together, the panel argues that American democracy has repeatedly been theorized not as a settled achievement but as an ongoing struggle over legitimacy, obligation, freedom, and the meaning and enforcement of civil rights—pursued through prophetic critique, fugitive refusal, institutional enforcement, and abolitionist reimagination.
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