In a theo-political world turned upside down by police brutality and racist electoral politics, it is surprising and refreshing to read an account that seeks to recognize and revive the tradition of black natural-law theory. This is a tradition that has been neglected and mired in misunderstanding. In his eloquent book Black Natural Law, Vincent W. Lloyd argues that black natural law has historically had the capacity not only to develop critiques of the world's injustice but to develop through the nexus of both reason and emotions the social movements necessary to challenge and change the unjust status quo: “Black natural law appreciates the mix of reason, emotion and imagination that makes up our humanity, and black natural law concludes that human nature is ultimately unrepresentable” (preface).

By retelling a swath of American black history through the works of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Dubois, and Martin Luther King Jr., Lloyd traces the importance of black natural-law theory to the social movements that animated much of the last 150 years of American political life. In fact, Lloyd makes the bold claim that “black natural law offers the best way to approach politics, not just for blacks, but for everyone. It is the approach that ought to be taken” (preface).

This assertion might strike some as odd since natural law has been used to maintain the social order, particularly as its relates to gender and race. The amorphous qualities of “human nature” and the “created order” have a history of pasting “unnatural” or “disruptive of the natural order” on anything that was imagined by white patriarchy to challenge its naturalized power and superiority. But Lloyd has something else in mind. He details a natural law that is not tied to “can do this” and “can't do that” but rather is tied to a “higher law” which enables those who are suffering to challenge the social order. He insists throughout his book that black natural law privileges the oppressed and endows them with a particularly insightful knowledge. While this sounds more like dialectical materialism than natural law, Lloyd finds persuasive evidence for his reading not only in Douglass and King, where one would expect it, but in Anna Julia Cooper (“The God of history often chooses the weak things of earth to confound the mighty. … The Negro race in America has a veritable destiny in His eternal purposes,” 44), as well as in Dubois (“Those who regularly encounter the tragic, such as those who are poor and those who are black, have increased opportunities to discern the divine spark in the soul,” 68). Lloyd concludes, “the black natural law tradition holds that blacks have an epistemic privilege, allowing for especially clear knowledge of the higher law because of the dehumanization they have faced. Aware that they are human and that the law of the land refuses to respect their humanity, generations of black Americans have discerned natural law and used it to challenge the law of the land” (150).

Lloyd is careful to contend that black natural law does not require a particular set of beliefs, not even belief in God. The only belief threaded throughout is the conception of human ineffability and the desire to understand. Blacks have Truth, identified as the assessment of justice and injustice on their side, but they must, as DuBois notes, “bring it into the world with organization in boycott, propaganda and mob frenzy” (83). And Lloyd is impatient with black thinkers from Baldwin to Audre Lorde, whom he chides for only half embracing natural law and not moving toward this necessary political action: “Baldwin and Lorde, as writers, are content with the realm of words and feelings even as they gesture toward political problems.” For Lloyd it is imperative that black natural law not only critique the naturalized ideology of the day but that it seek justice through organizing and social movements.

Lloyd concludes his monograph with two chapters confronting contemporary black thinkers from Clarence Thomas, to bell hooks, to Cornel West, whose pragmatism, in the latter case, Lloyd worries disabled West from successfully challenging what were mistakenly perceived as the only viable options in the pragmatic administration of President Barack Obama. The only disappointment with the book is the one that Lloyd points out himself. There does not seem to be anyone or any movement currently on our political horizon with the wherewithal for rediscovering the “divine spark” again of the black natural-law tradition.