This essay analyzes Ralph Ellison’s 1943 “Editorial Comment” from the Negro Quarterly. In the editorial, Ellison highlighted the shortcomings of black America’s attitudinal responses to World War II; as a corrective, he offered “critical participation,” which entailed supporting U.S. and Allied principles while remaining vigilant against white supremacy. I argue that Ellison’s editorial signified more than just a meditation on wartime political strategies; it also marked the articulation of black community. Through a close reading of Ellison’s editorial, I contend that the text grounded black community in the enactment of self-conscious doubleness. Ellison’s appeal to self-conscious doubleness contributed to African American intellectual culture in that it outlined an innovative way for navigating the constraints of “double consciousness.” Rather than regarding doubleness as indicative of a static identity, Ellison engaged it as a source of dynamic rhetorical possibility.

This essay examines Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1967 speech “Where Do We Go from Here?” Delivered at the 11th annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), the speech addressed the contentious racial politics that permeated the post–Voting Rights landscape. I argue that the speech constituted King’s call for the SCLC to reinvent its ethos—both its “character” and its “dwelling place.” In issuing this call, King cultivated new possibilities for the conceptualization and practice of social justice activism.

By turning to the case study of the 1893 pamphlet The Reason Why the Colored American is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition, we identify forensic rhetoric as a critical, yet under-theorized, tool of racial justice advocacy. Written by Ida B. Wells, Frederick Douglass, Irvine Garland Penn, and Ferdinand Lee Barnett, The Reason Why challenged systemic exclusion and racial oppression by utilizing a forensic rhetoric characterized by a forensic persona, a substantive focus on past guilt, and an end goal of justice. We conclude by considering the possibilities of forensic rhetorical form in contemporary racial justice advocacy. We argue that the genre of forensic rhetoric can work with public audiences, not by enabling immediate justice, but by imagining possibilities new for justice and political being.

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