Times of crisis call for powerful rhetoric. This section consists of seven speeches that address political, moral, or educational crises of their time. They range from high points of rhetoric to dishonest or ineffective displays of rhetoric. The speakers include Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Allan Bloom.

This introduction opens with an analysis of the way that black intellectuals from throughout the French Empire and the United States understood their relationship to Western civilization more broadly and the Republics of France and America in particular. It positions this book in the heart of contemporary historiographical debates about the relationship between anti-racist and anti-colonial activism and claims to citizenship and human rights. In so doing it brings into conversation the two disparate historiographies of rights and race in the United States and the French Empire and makes an argument for breaking down the division between the “interwar” and “postwar” periods when thinking about these histories.

This epilogue briefly comments on the legacy of the men and women who form the focus of the study. Drawing upon the arguments made in the preceding chapters, it argues that the diverse thought of black thinkers and activists from the French Empire and United States has indelibly shaped our notions of race, citizenship and republicanism in America, France and the Western world. It reiterates the centrality of the belief that the guarantee of rights in the face of difference would emanate from the sovereign power of the republican nation-state rather than from any international institutions. This was the case even where the struggle against racism and imperialism was understood in global terms.