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Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. Iconoclastically attacking the left (including James Baldwin and Audre Lorde), right (including Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson), and center (Barack Obama), Lloyd charges that many Black leaders today embrace secular, white modes of political engagement, abandoning the deep connections between religious, philosophical, and political ideas that once animated Black politics. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd shows how appeals to a higher law-- God's law--have long fueled Black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, mobilizing communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: while charismatic leaders may catalyze group reflection and mobilization, all people are capable of discerning the higher law using their human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, Lloyd argues, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A Black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: either overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the Black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and all of today's stark racial inequities. Black Natural Law will change the way we understand natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While it draws particularly on African American resources, the book speaks to all who seek a politics animated by justice.

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