Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition

The vital influence of Black American intellectuals on the legacy of Thomas Jefferson’s ideas

The lofty Enlightenment principles articulated by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, so central to conceptions of the American founding, did not emerge fully formed as a coherent set of ideas in the eighteenth century. As Hannah Spahn argues in this important book, no group had a more profound influence on their development and reception than Black intellectuals. The rationalism a...