In one of Afrofuturist musician Sun Ra’s songs, June Tyson chants: “When the Black man ruled this land, Pharaoh was sitting on his throne.” This illustrates a common theme in Afrofuturist work, often denoted using the Twi word Sankofa, of recovering from the past in order to build the future. Afrofuturist artists frequently draw on the cultural legacy of, inter alia, Egypt, Ethiopia, and Haitian Vodou as historical starting points for re-envisioning the present and future.

But actually, “when the Black man ruled this land,” at least as a first-order approximation (and with apologies for the gendered quota-tion), was Reconstruction—when the Constitution was reshaped by the self-assertion of the freed.

This Essay offers a Sankofa approach to recovering the Constitution from the forces of white supremacy and reaction which have long betrayed the legacy of Reconstruction. Drawing on Peggy Cooper Davis’s Neglected Stories, and bringing her call to reclaim the experiences of the freed in our understanding of the meaning of the Reconstruction Amendments together with constitutional and democratic theory, this Essay argues that the route to the Constitution’s future—a future that envisions the empowerment and inclusion of subordinated and excluded and minoritized groups—goes through an aggressive reinterpretation of the past, one which is inspired by the common law tradition as well as Black intellectual history. Ultimately, it defends what I call constitutional Sankofa, a Black-centric interpretation of the constitutional past that chooses its historical material, within the realm of permissible historical interpretation, in order to pursue liberatory ends.

Continue reading Constitutional Sankofa.

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