Egalitarian spiritual and legal traditions

pp. 25-46

in: Naomi Zack, Philosophy of race, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

The egalitarian spiritual and legal tradition started in the ancient world when Cosmopolitans and Stoics proclaimed human equality and brotherhood. Medieval theologians promised human equality in heaven. George Berkeley's plans for a seminary in Bermuda included Native Americans and James Beattie scolded David Hume for his lack of empiricism in describing Africans. Nineteenth-century African English and African American thinkers and activists resisted slavery. Jim Crow followed reining in the Reconstruction Amendments to the US Constitution. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights provided an aspirational foundation for global egalitarianism. In 1954, the US Supreme Court legally ended school segregation in Brown v Board of Education. The Civil Rights Movement motivated legislation against racial discrimination, in 1964–1965.