In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

217 8 The Black Scholar, the Humanities, and the Politics of Racial Knowledge since 1945 Jonathan Scott Holloway In 1963 the eminent historian John Hope Franklin offered his assessment of the cost of racial thinking to the store of knowledge. The assessment was not positive. Likening black scholars’ situation in the academy to a dilemma, Franklin angrily lamented the loss that defined black scholars’ lives. In the late nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries, Franklin observed, black academics had to fight against a social Darwinist ideology that deemed them incapable of coherent thought in the first place.Though not confined solely to writing in a reactive mode, black intellectuals still had to overcome political, social, economic , and cultural barriers that severely limited their professional opportunities and conspired in such a way that they had to carry a heavy burden of proof that they were capable. Franklin’s anger and sorrow were clear: “It must have been a most unrewarding experience for the Negro scholar to answer those who said that he was inferior by declaring: ‘I am indeed not inferior.’”1 Franklin asked readers to put themselves in these scholars’ shoes to try to come to grips with the loss they and the larger intellectual community suffered . There had always been a pressure to publish, Franklin told his readers, but black scholars were under a different kind of pressure from the one felt by their white counterparts. Franklin continued: Imagine, if you can, what it meant to a competent Negro student of Greek literature, W. H. Crogman, to desert his chosen field and write a book entitled The Progress of a Race. Think of the frustration of the distinguished Negro physician C. V. Roman, who abandoned his medical research and practice, temporarily at least, to write The Negro in American Civilization. What must have been the feeling of the Negro student of English literature Benjamin Brawley, who forsook his field to write The Negro Genius and other works that underscored the intellectual powers of the Negro? How much poorer is the Jonathan Scott Holloway 218 field of the biological sciences because an extremely able and well-trained Negro scientist, Julian Lewis, felt compelled to spend years of his productive life writing a book entitled The Biology of the Negro?2 These observations concerned scholars from the first half of the twentieth century. Given the fact that Franklin published his essay on the cusp of some of the greatest civil rights changes in the nation’s history and at a time when blacks were never closer to full citizenship rights and a generalizable social acceptance into the mainstream, one might expect that Franklin’s model of black intellectual struggle no longer applied. Sadly, this conclusion would be wrong. In a fundamental sense not much had changed as far as the professional possibilities for black scholars. Of the relatively few blacks who were teaching at universities in the mid-1960s, the great majority had to live their careers in a highly prescribed fashion. Upon entering the university’s front door, they were greeted with an expectation of expertise that was both intense and narrowly conceived. Black scholars were to know “black things” best and little else beyond that. It is here where most conversations regarding black involvement in the academy start and end. This much is understandable, given the long history of academic segregation. Indeed, read collectively, the literature on black intellectuals is reducible to what I have termed elsewhere “the crisis canon.”3 Owing in large measure to social realities, political expectations, personal senses of duty, and the effects of plain and simple racism, the great majority of the literature on the black scholar is written from the perspective of crisis. Black scholars have been in “crisis,” have faced unique “dilemmas,” and have “failed.”4 Speaking in general terms, crises are problems that have escalated to the point where they are given attention in the best and worst ways. Without doubt, the most tradition-bound individuals and institutions in the academy viewed the post–World War II democratization of higher education as a crisis.5 Would standards perish? Would the campus community as “community ” suffer with the push to diversify (first age and income, later gender and race)? But crises, when taken seriously, do get addressed as people try to ameliorate their root causes. Radical or even modest change, however, has a way of precipitating unintended consequences. In some ways, this may be what is so shocking about the “crisis” of...

Share