Baha'i Chair Annual Lecture: Brandon M. Terry

"The Level of Human Rights: Malcolm X and the Dilemmas of Black Internationalism, Then and Now"

In the early 1960s, Malcolm X famously criticized the philosophical and political bases of the African American “civil rights” movement, calling instead for a turn to what he called “the level of human rights” and redress through the United Nations rather than the U.S. federal government. This lecture seeks to understand the political and philosophical contradictions of Malcolm’s internationalism by placing its surprising mix of revolutionary liberalism and anti-imperialist nationalism in productive tension with earlier African American internationalisms, especially efforts at “worldmaking” through the United Nations. Recovering the important philosophical differences within oft-collapsed accounts of “black internationalism,” the lecture takes stock of the different philosophical justifications for engaging the politics of global governance by W.E.B. Du Bois and William Patterson. Taking seriously these distinctions as central to the careful study and reconstruction of black political thought, I consider the lessons that Malcolm’s trajectory portends for contemporary efforts to connect aims of global justice and peace to African American struggles for racial justice.

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.