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126 he black public intellectual is not a recent phenomenon. A public intellectual is in many ways both a scholar and an activist, but a black public intellectual is an altogether different creation. Black intellectuals by their very nature either are forced or choose to be both scholars and activists, and they embrace a synthesis of the two, so as to each become in many ways a scholar activist. This is the result of circumstance, with the most visible circumstance being an environment of segregation and continued discrimination. For some time mainstream white academia looked down upon those who mix the “intellectual” with the “political”—but black intellectuals, regardless of their brilliance or wit, have been relegated to a second-class status both as intellectuals and as human beings. In the case of the Howard intellectuals, their lot as second-class citizens was inextricably bound to an unwarranted second-class status as intellectuals . In essence, for black public intellectuals at Howard University, the public was private, and vice versa. The discrimination they experienced at work was the same discrimination they experienced outside the ebony tower, when they were not teaching, lecturing, or writing books. Well before book deals and lecture tours became lucrative, black intellectuals engaged the black public on issues of race and world affairs. These intellectuals were a loose collection of individuals and organizations that were at the same time transnational and global in composition, perspective, and outreach. These men and women were cosmopolitan. They traveled the world, acutely aware of and deeply engaged in the important issues of the day such as segregation, integration, anticolonialism, and the like. For them, the realities of life under the veil of segregation were never far from their minds as they wrote, taught, and thought. For them, the developT Chapter Four Public Intellectuals and the Black Public Sphere at Howard Public Intellectuals and the Black Public Sphere 127 ment of theories was useful only if it could effectively bring about social change in America and around the world for people of African descent. Members of the Howard University intellectual community were active and influential black public figures who operated within the context of a domestically segregated and globally colonized black public sphere. The black public sphere consisted of a larger network of black scholars in the United States, along with African and Caribbean scholars throughout the world, and mainstream white and Jewish scholars. Within this web of interconnected relationships were representatives of philanthropic groups such as the Phelps Stokes Fund and the Carnegie Corporation. The backdrop of this global black public sphere was a highly segregated and colonized world, where many black scholar activists were not welcomed in mainstream academic circles. Most would argue that the phenomenon of the black public intellectual is of recent origin. By definition, a public intellectual is an educated individual who engages the people on public issues and whose thought and work influence, define, and transform those issues. Harvard University government professor Martin Kilson offered “an operational definition of Public Intellectuals and their function.”1 Kilson argues that public intellectuals “historically and presently” operate “to fashion moral, ethical, and policy criteria or options for mediating among the competing perceptions of the generic issue-spheres in modern society.” These spheres are recognized as “the opportunity/privilege issue-sphere and the sacred/profane issue-sphere.” Kilson goes on to assert that, historically, the opportunity/privilege issue-sphere has been the main area of concentration for public intellectuals, mainly because “situations and problems relating to the opportunity/privilege gap emerged first as sources of national crises.” For African Americans, issues of segregation, civil rights, and colonialism are examples of opportunity/privilege matters beginning as national crises. I argue that black scholars in the Howard community were public intellectuals who responded to these issues through scholarship, other writings, and their public outreach and activities within the African American community. They responded also through associations with other scholar activists and with both national and global organizations, forming loosely configured networks of national and international black public intellectuals. The global networks they committed to largely addressed the issue of developing Pan-African linkages in order to challenge segregation , colonialism, and global racism and to unite under a common commitment to a shared cultural past, both real and imagined. Howard intellectuals were public intellectuals because of their role as scholars who In Search of the Talented Tenth 128 were simultaneously activists, concerned in particular with issues of race and class. Furthermore, Howard scholars...

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