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About:
The Level of Human Rights: Malcolm X and the Dilemmas of Black Internationalism, Then and Now
In the early 1960s, Malcolm X challenged the focus of the civil rights movement, urging African Americans to shift from seeking justice through “civil rights” and U.S. institutions and instead frame their struggle as one for "human rights" on the global stage. Central to Malcolm’s idea was a call for involvement from the United Nations. This lecture explores both the opportunities and contradictions in Malcolm’s ideas of global politics by examining how they compare to earlier but lesser known African American efforts to engage with the United Nations, like those of W.E.B. Du Bois and William Patterson. By considering the competing philosophies of global justice advocated by Black intellectuals, the lecture will explore how these still under appreciated ideas might inform today’s controversial and contentious struggles for both peace and racial justice.
Speaker :
Professor Brandon M. Terry
Brandon M. Terry is the John L. Loeb Associate Professor of the Social Sciences at Harvard University and the co-director of the Institute on Policing, Incarceration, and Public Safety at the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. For 2024-2025, he is the Joy Foundation Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Born in Baltimore, Terry earned a PhD with distinction in Political Science and African American Studies from Yale University, an MSc in Political Theory Research at the University of Oxford, and an AB, magna cum laude, in Government and African and African American Studies from Harvard College.
An award-winning scholar of African American political thought, political theory, and the politics of race and inequality, Brandon is the editor, with Tommie Shelby, of To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018) and the editor of Fifty Years Since MLK (MIT Press, 2018). His forthcoming book, Shattered Dreams, Infinite Hope: A Tragic Vision of the Civil Rights Movement (Harvard University Press) interrogates the moral and political significance of different narratives of civil rights history in political philosophy and public life. He is currently at work on a study of the political thought and judgment of Malcolm X, tentatively titled Home to Roost: Malcolm X Between Prophecy and Peril (Penguin/Random House). He has also published work in Modern Intellectual History, Political Theory, The New York Review of Books, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Boston Review, Dissent, The Point, and New Labor Forum and been interviewed by The Ezra Klein Show, Vox, the New York Times, and other media outlets.
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