Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012

Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012 PDF

Author: Martin Kilson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0674283546

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After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Martin Kilson explores how a modern African American intelligentsia developed amid institutionalized racism. He argues passionately for an ongoing commitment to communitarian leadership in the tradition of Du Bois.

Black Intellectuals and Black Society

Black Intellectuals and Black Society PDF

Author: Martin L. Kilson

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2024-07-09

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 0231560907

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This book presents the trailblazing political scientist Martin L. Kilson’s essays on leading Black intellectuals of the twentieth century. Kilson examines the ideas and careers of several key thinkers, placing their intellectual odysseys in the context of the dynamics that shaped the Black intelligentsia more broadly. He argues that the trajectory of twentieth-century Black intellectuals was determined by the interplay between formal ideas and Black egalitarian struggle. Beginning with the tension between W. E. B. Du Bois’s civil rights activism and Booker T. Washington’s accommodationism, Kilson explores the formation and evolution of Black intellectuals and activists across generations. Chapters consider Horace Mann Bond’s career in higher education, political scientist John Aubrey Davis’s transition from civil rights activist to federal policy technocrat, Ralph Bunche’s writings on European colonial rule in Africa, Harold Cruse’s classic polemic The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual, E. Franklin Frazier’s analysis of the Black bourgeoisie, Adelaide M. Cromwell’s studies of the challenges facing elite Black women, and Ishmael Reed and Cornel West’s advocacy as public intellectuals amid a conservative turn. Offering timely and engaging insights into the lives and work of pivotal Black intellectuals and activists, this book sheds new light on the abiding questions and debates in Black political thought.

Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012

Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012 PDF

Author: Martin Kilson

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2014-06-17

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 0674416414

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After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves free, yet largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Drawing on his professional research into political leadership and intellectual development in African American society, as well as his personal roots in the social-gospel teachings of black churches and at Lincoln University (PA), the political scientist Martin Kilson explores how a modern African American intelligentsia developed in the face of institutionalized racism. In this survey of the origins, evolution, and future prospects of the African American elite, Kilson makes a passionate argument for the ongoing necessity of black leaders in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, who summoned the “Talented Tenth” to champion black progress. Among the many dynamics that have shaped African American advancement, Kilson focuses on the damage—and eventual decline—of color elitism among the black professional class, the contrasting approaches of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and the consolidation of an ethos of self-conscious racial leadership. Black leaders who assumed this obligation helped usher in the civil rights movement. But mingled among the fruits of victory are the persistent challenges of poverty and inequality. As the black intellectual and professional class has grown larger and more influential than ever, counting the President of the United States in its ranks, new divides of class and ideology have opened in African American communities. Kilson asserts that a revival of commitment to communitarian leadership is essential for the continued pursuit of justice at home and around the world.

A Black Intellectual's Odyssey

A Black Intellectual's Odyssey PDF

Author: Martin Kilson

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2021-07-06

Total Pages: 149

ISBN-13: 1478021519

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In 1969, Martin Kilson became the first tenured African American professor at Harvard University, where he taught African and African American politics for over thirty years. In A Black Intellectual's Odyssey, Kilson takes readers on a fascinating journey from his upbringing in the small Pennsylvania milltown of Ambler to his experiences attending Lincoln University—the country's oldest HBCU—to pursuing graduate study at Harvard before spending his entire career there as a faculty member. This is as much a story of his travels from the racist margins of twentieth-century America to one of the nation's most prestigious institutions as it is a portrait of the places that shaped him. He gives a sweeping sociological tour of Ambler as a multiethnic, working-class company town while sketching the social, economic, and racial elements that marked everyday life. From narrating the area's history of persistent racism and the racial politics in the integrated schools to describing the Black church's role in buttressing the town's small Black community, Kilson vividly renders his experience of northern small-town life during the 1930s and 1940s. At Lincoln University, Kilson's liberal political views coalesced as he became active in the local NAACP chapter. While at Lincoln and during his graduate work at Harvard, Kilson observed how class, political, and racial dynamics influenced his peers' political engagement, diverse career paths, and relationships with white people. As a young professor, Kilson made a point of assisting Harvard's African American students in adapting to life at a white institution. Throughout his career, Kilson engaged in pioneering scholarship while mentoring countless students. A Black Intellectual's Odyssey features contributions from three of his students: a foreword by Cornel West and an afterword by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten.

Apropos of Africa

Apropos of Africa PDF

Author: Martin Kilson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-10-28

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1136253092

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First published in 1969. This is part of a series that comprises reprints as well as original works on various aspects of African life- history, institutions, culture, political and social thought, and eminent African personalities. As 'Africana' in the title indicates, the term 'African' is used liberally and includes persons of African descent in the New World whose life and work are clearly and deeply identified with Africa. The reprints are in most part landmarks of African writing and each will contain a new introduction placing the author's life, ideas and activities in perspective.

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle

Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle PDF

Author: Anthony Sean Neal

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2022-07-20

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13: 1793640521

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Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle: A Freedom Gaze describes the ideas that defined the movement and struggle to be free by Black people in the United States during their Modern Era. Using a historical perspective, this work engages the question of how the historical experience of oppression and the denial of humanity created space for the development of a certain consciousness. The existence and demonstration of agency within the ideas of the African diaspora and the creation of an intentional community with the aim of defining and attaining freedom are dissected in order to understand the Black community as a whole during the modern era. This book was nominated for ​the 2023 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Award in nonfiction.

We Are Worth Fighting For

We Are Worth Fighting For PDF

Author: Joshua M. Myers

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2022-04

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1479816760

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The Howard University protests from the perspective and worldview of its participants We Are Worth Fighting For is the first history of the 1989 Howard University protest. The three-day occupation of the university’s Administration Building was a continuation of the student movements of the sixties and a unique challenge to the politics of the eighties. Upset at the university’s appointment of the Republican strategist Lee Atwater to the Board of Trustees, students forced the issue by shutting down the operations of the university. The protest, inspired in part by the emergence of “conscious” hip hop, helped to build support for the idea of student governance and drew upon a resurgent black nationalist ethos. At the center of this story is a student organization known as Black Nia F.O.R.C.E. Co-founded by Ras Baraka, the group was at the forefront of organizing the student mobilization at Howard during the spring of 1989 and thereafter. We Are Worth Fighting For explores how black student activists—young men and women— helped shape and resist the rightward shift and neoliberal foundations of American politics. This history adds to the literature on Black campus activism, Black Power studies, and the emerging histories of African American life in the 1980s.

A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass

A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass PDF

Author: Neil Roberts

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2018-06-29

Total Pages: 426

ISBN-13: 0813175631

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“A splendid opportunity to rethink Douglass’s political thought . . . relevant today given the discourse of white nationalism in the United States.” —Choice Frederick Douglass was a writer and public speaker whose impact on America has been long studied by historians and literary critics. Yet as political theorists have focused on the legacies of such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Douglass’s profound influence on Afro-modern and American political thought has often been undervalued. In an effort to fill this gap in the scholarship on Douglass, editor Neil Roberts and an exciting group of established and rising scholars examine the author’s autobiographies, essays, speeches, and novella. Together, they illuminate his genius for analyzing and articulating core American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom, particularly in the context of slavery. The contributors explore Douglass’s understanding of the self-made American and the way in which he expanded the notion of individual potential by arguing that citizens had a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also those of their communities. A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass also considers the idea of agency, investigating Douglass’s passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Various essays illuminate Douglass’s complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others explore and critique concepts of masculinity, gender, and judgment in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass’s contributions to pre- and post-Civil War jurisprudence. “Rich insights from scholarship both old and new. A fine collection.” —Political Theory

The Lost Black Scholar

The Lost Black Scholar PDF

Author: David A. Varel

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-04-13

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 022653491X

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Allison Davis (1902–83), a preeminent black scholar and social science pioneer, is perhaps best known for his groundbreaking investigations into inequality, Jim Crow America, and the cultural biases of intelligence testing. Davis, one of America’s first black anthropologists and the first tenured African American professor at a predominantly white university, produced work that had tangible and lasting effects on public policy, including contributions to Brown v. Board of Education, the federal Head Start program, and school testing practices. Yet Davis remains largely absent from the historical record. For someone who generated such an extensive body of work this marginalization is particularly surprising. But it is also revelatory. In The Lost Black Scholar, David A. Varel tells Davis’s compelling story, showing how a combination of institutional racism, disciplinary eclecticism, and iconoclastic thinking effectively sidelined him as an intellectual. A close look at Davis’s career sheds light not only on the racial politics of the academy but also the costs of being an innovator outside of the mainstream. Equally important, Varel argues that Davis exemplifies how black scholars led the way in advancing American social thought. Even though he was rarely acknowledged for it, Davis refuted scientific racism and laid bare the environmental roots of human difference more deftly than most of his white peers, by pushing social science in bold new directions. Varel shows how Davis effectively helped to lay the groundwork for the civil rights movement.