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This chapter explores another dimension of the culture/politics conundrum: the 1990s debates about black public intellectuals in the United States. It places the mid-1990s debates about black public intellectuals within a hemispheric perspective, expanding the contours of its polemics beyond the borders of the United States to illustrate the American part of the discussion of what it means to be a public intellectual, black or otherwise.

This chapter offers an intellectual history of a concept that has divided African American intellectuals as much as it has brought them together: Afrocentrism. It is a way of narrating the past that is at once an example of myth-making and historical narration, while also a source of racial identification for some. Long before the appearance of a professional class of black intellectuals, the challenges of historical racism compelled some blacks to seek historical knowledge. The chapter comments on the divisive and often critical reception that Afrocentrist scholars have experienced, especially in regards to the bifurcation in the field between advocacy and scholarship. Moreover, it illuminates fundamental flaws in Afrocentric historiography in relation to engaging the conflict over heritage, culture, and history.

Urban unrest over-determined the ways in which black British life, and particularly the life of black young men, was thought about in the late 1970s and the 1980s. This chapter provides an account of policing conflicts in this period and analyses how they were narrated by those black radical intellectuals who used such conflicts to talk about conditions of blackness and politics of race in Britain in the lead-up to and early years of Thatcherism. Such writers emphasized black youth culture as a repository of a long and continuing struggle against the historical experiences of colonialism and slavery, and they suggested that by looking to the experiences of black youth, the contradictions and antagonisms of Britain’s whole political structure might come into better focus.

This chapter recounts the circumstances surrounding John Johnson’s decision to discontinue Black World and terminate Hoyt Fuller. It recalls the broad national outcry and subsequent efforts by the Black intellectual community to replace the magazine with the short-lived journal First World. More than just an attempt to chronicle the life and death of a seminal Black periodical and its short-lived replacement, the chapter elucidates how these magazines’ respective trajectories embodied larger shifts and rifts among Black intellectuals and within the Black Arts movement. In recalling this history, the chapter explores the very meanings of Black intellectual community in the 1970s while paying close attention to intraracial class politics. In essence, it argues that the slow demise of Jim Crow exacerbated preexisting class (and ideological) divisions within the Black intellectual community, and these divisions, once inflamed, had a tremendous impact on Black institutions and the shape of Black intellectual praxis.

The chapter is anchored in a survey of African American-owned small presses, literary journals, and magazines to demonstrate how the Black Arts Movement’s editors negotiated readerly taste and institutional politics to bring Black Arts to the masses. I consider, for example, Dudley Randall at Detroit’s Broadside Press, Naomi Long Madgett at Lotus Press (also Detroit), and Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) at Chicago’s Third World Press alongside Hoyt Fuller’s work for periodicals in Chicago (Negro Digest/Black World), and Nommo, the small literary journal of the Organization of Black American Culture. The chapter also reveals how post-civil rights black literary publics formed and considers how, for example, the establishment of Howard University Press in 1974 extended the black intellectual tradition’s effort to recover a “usable past.”

This chapter departs from a new object of knowledge identified in 1928 by W. E. B. Du Bois in response to a question posed by a young Black high school student. The student asked why the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) would ostensibly reinforce a sense of racial separation/inferiority through the organization's choosing to ‘designate, and segregate us as “Negroes,” and not as “Americans”’. In his response to the student, Du Bois pointed out that, ‘It is not the name — it's the Thing that counts’. That is to say, what counts is the fictively-constructed and epistemically-elaborated system of meanings imposed on the population that in turn evokes the ‘feeling of inferiority’, regardless of what particular names Black Americans choose to call themselves. The chapter traces the way in which Black intellectual tradition has been compelled to confront and/or transform this ‘Thing of being Black:’, as an indispensable part of coming to terms with and theorizing anew the ‘Thing of being Human’.

In the battle of equality education, African Americans first had to challenge the assumptions made by whites about black intellectual inferiority. This chapter focuses on the achievements that black community leaders made in the school equality battle. It also highlights two important curricular reform movements that uncovered the barriers to curricular equalization in the Jim Crow South. The chapter further explores why state school leaders were willing to make educational equality concessions and why this victory, in the state's early black public high school development context, was initially more figurative than absolute. The chapter then discusses the arguments made by the black educators and historic movements during the 1920s in the context of cultural citizenship. The chapter concludes with a detailed discussion of Negro jobs, vocational training, and struggles for economic citizenship.

Pauli Murray was one of the young activists that Mary Church Terrell mentored. In the 1940s, Murray enrolled at Howard University Law School and went on to graduate as the only woman and top student in her class. In the 1930s, the convergence of several important Black male intellectuals at Howard University, including Abram Harris, E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, had cemented a new formal model of the academically trained Black male public intellectual. When Murray enrolled in the 1940s, she experienced great sexism from these Black male intellectuals. She termed their treatment of her, “Jane Crow.” While she went on to have a storied career as a legal expert, Episcopal priest, poet, and writer, all of which place her firmly in the tradition of the race woman, her identity as both a woman and queer person in the 1940s and 1950s collided with the Howard model of public intellectual work. This chapter brings together Murray’s time and training at Howard, her archives, and an examination of her two autobiographies to suggest that her concept of Jane Crow grew out of the collision of race-based sexual politics and limited ideas among Black men about who could provide intellectual leadership for Black people. Moreover, Jane Crow exposed the heterosexist proclivities of Black public leadership traditions, and offers a framework for thinking about how Black women negotiated gender and sexual politics even as they devoted their lives to theorizing new strategies for racial uplift.

This book asks what people of color thought about both the racial inequalities and the discourses of racial harmony so central to Brazilian public life in the twentieth century. It does so by considering the words and actions of black intellectuals—a group of men and a few women of some education and public standing, who proudly claimed their African racial or cultural heritage and who aspired to represent other Brazilians of color in national discussions about race and national identity since the early 1900s. It traces the emergence of their writings and organizations in the rich political and cultural life that evolved, with local variations, among people of color in the cities of Sao Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador da Bahia. In recovering their work, the book that follows provides an intellectual and cultural history of the idea of racial harmony in twentieth-century Brazil, told through the life stories and the ideological and political struggles of a small but influential group of black men and women.

This chapter examines how black intellectual-activists with varying and competing political orientations constructed the iconography of Japan's race-conscious defiance against the global white polity in their poems and prose. It shows how such a work of political imagination, termed pro-Japan provocation, nurtured the distinct ethos of black self-determination in opposition to the Wilsonian project of liberal internationalism. It first considers William Monroe Trotter's “Fifteenth Point”—the abolition of race-based policies in all nations—before turning to New Negro radicalism that recognized the efficacy of pro-Japan provocation. It then discusses the appearance of Japan's racial-equality clause, along with New Negro intellectuals' race consciousness and the issue of white supremacy, at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference. It also looks at the opposition of New Negro intellectuals and writers to the terms of disarmament agreed upon at the Washington Conference of 1921–1922.

This chapter analyses the theological tenets present in the historical black church tradition undergirding freedom movements. It discusses the role of the church, black religious intellectuals of the 1920s-1930s and certain theologies—the creative authority of God, the idolatry of segregation, the exodus, the person of Jesus, and redemptive love. The chapter reveals how these animated early civil rights actions and activities in Americus.

Chapter three argues that the work of the Hampton Folklore Society must be understood within, but also beyond, the bounds of both the Hampton Institute and the “scientific” frame offered by the American Folklore Society. This chapter shows how the folklorists, focusing specifically on folklorists Robert Moton, resisted having their work confined to the ideology of the Hampton Institute, while also questioning the politics of assuming a “scientific,” and often objectifying, approach to the study of their own traditions. Set within the context of the emergence of the “New Negro” ideal, the second half of this chapter examines how the Society became a site of lively dialogue, where members of the larger black intellectual community, particularly Anna Julia Cooper, debated folklore’s role in creating a “new,” distinctly African American literature rooted in a social justice agenda.