Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought

Kristin Waters

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781496836755
  9781496836748
• eBook ISBN:
  9781496836786
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Co-winner of the 2025 Frantz Fanon Award for Outstanding Book in Caribbean Thought from the Caribbean Philosophical Association

Named a 2022 finalist for the Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History from the African American Intellectual History Society

Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought tells a crucial, almost-forgotten story of African Americans of early nineteenth-century America. In 1833, Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879) told a gathering at the African Masonic Hall on Boston's Beacon Hill: "African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States." She exhorted her audience to embrace the idea that the founding principles of the nation must extend to people of color. Otherwise, those truths are merely the hypocritical expression of an ungodly white power, a travesty of original democratic ideals. Like her mentor, David Walker, Stewart illustrated the practical inconsistencies of classical liberalism as enacted in the US and delivered a call to action for ending racism and addressing gender discrimination.

Between 1831 and 1833, Stewart's intellectual productions, as she called them, ranged across topics from true emancipation for African Americans, the Black convention movement, the hypocrisy of white Christianity, Black liberation theology, and gender inequity. Along with Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, her body of work constitutes a significant foundation for a moral and political theory that is finding new resonance today—insurrectionist ethics.

In this work of recovery, author Kristin Waters examines the roots of Black political activism in the petition movement; Prince Hall and the creation of the first Black masonic lodges; the Black Baptist movement spearheaded by the brothers Thomas, Benjamin, and Nathaniel Paul; writings; sermons; and the practices of festival days, through the story of this remarkable but largely unheralded woman and pioneering public intellectual.

Table of contents

• Cover
• MARIA W. STEWART and the ROOTS of BLACK POLITICAL THOUGHT
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Poem: “The African Meeting House”
• Introduction: Maria W. Stewart: Her Life and Thought
• Chapter One: “Many Flowers among Us”
• Chapter Two: “Call Me Lib”
• Chapter Three: “Stolen from Africa”
• Chapter Four: “The Day of Small Things”
• Chapter Five: “Bound out in a Clergyman’s Family”
• Chapter Six: “Laugh an’ Sing Until Tomorrow”
• Chapter Seven: “In Saucy Defiance”
• Chapter Eight: “Served as a Seaman”
• Chapter Nine: Partus Sequitur Ventrem
• Chapter Ten: “He Refused Unless We Would Ride on Top”
• Chapter Eleven: “The Sun Has Risen Gloriously upon the Earth”
• Chapter Twelve: “The Circle of your Acquaintance”
• Chapter Thirteen: “The Great Day Has Arrived”
• Chapter Fourteen: Celebrating Revolutions
• Chapter Fifteen: Holy Vows
• Chapter Sixteen: Black Founders and the Roots of Black Political Thought
• Chapter Seventeen: “To Ameliorate Our Miserable Condition”: The Second Half of the First Wave
• Chapter Eighteen: “The Most Noble, Fearless, and Undaunted David Walker”
• Chapter Nineteen: “Cup of Sorrow”
• Chapter Twenty: Meditations
• Chapter Twenty-one: Maria W. Stewart and the Principles of Moral and Political Theory
• Chapter Twenty-two: “A Rational and Accountable Creature”
• Chapter Twenty-three: “Why Sit Ye Here and Die?”
• Chapter Twenty-four: “On African Rights and Liberty”
• Chapter Twenty-five: “Farewell Address”
• Postscript
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR