CSPT is pleased to announce the winner for the 2025 Prize:

Melvin Rogers, Edna and Richard Salomon Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brown University, for his book The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023).

​

The following is the Prize Committee’s commendation for the book:

​

Melvin Rogers’ The Darkened Light of Faith offers an important defense of democracy, grounded in rigorous readings of African American political thought. The book shows that for thinkers like Frederick Douglass, David Walker, Anna Julia Cooper, and James Baldwin, white supremacy could never fully saturate American democracy because that democracy was constituted also by what Rogers calls these thinkers' “faith”: their lived commitment, in word and deed, to a vision of democracy where flourishing is available to all. The Darkened Light of Faith is a theoretically rich book, grounded in brilliant interpretations of individual thinkers, that fundamentally shifts our understanding of democracy by theorizing it through the lens of African American Political Thought.

​

2025 Prize Committee: 

Lida Maxwell (Chair)

Alison McQueen

Robert Nichols

​​

​

See past Spitz Prize winners here. 

​

​

​