Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life

Front Cover
W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 - 335 pages
"An important book, significant because it highlights the diversity and richness of Afro-American intellectual life.... It will surely be a crucial reference work for years to come". -- New York Times Book ReviewIn the volumes of literature on black history and thought, few have focused on the black thinkers who have shaped the course of American culture. This landmark work charts the contours of black intellectual life across American history and chronicles its fluctuating fortunes.Black Intellectuals offers a centuries-deep analysis of black life, beginning with the arrival of Africans as slaves, when medicine men and conjurers held ancient, powerful wisdom. Author William Banks goes on to discuss prominent figures ranging from black pioneers like Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Cooper to intellectuals of the modern age such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Toni Morrison, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. These and hundreds of other black scholars and artists -- many of them interviewed for this volume -- people an enlightened and imaginative landscape, fascinating for both its range and its diversity.
 

Contents

Laying the Foundations
3
Black Thinkers in a White Movement 2323
22
The Black Intellectual Infrastructure
33
Slowly Making Their Mark
48
Prosperity Change and More of the Same
68
A Talented But Trapped Tenth
92
Not a Lull Not a Storm
118
Standing at the Crossroads
144
Capturing the Definition
160
Rude Awakenings
173
Imagining for the People
196
What Shall I Render?
221
EPILOGUE Or Crust and Sugar Over
242
NOTES
301
INDEX
323
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