From Du Bois to Obama: African American Intellectuals in the Public Forum

Preface

ix Preface When I first set out to write about African American intellectuals, I was considering a straightforward narrative of who was who in the long struggle to point out and/or frame the discussion of the conditions and experience of black Americans. That notion very quickly went by the wayside as I realized that in the late twentieth century, African American intellectuals were not only a visible entity but also influential in the general intellectual discourse of the nation . The reasons for this were many, but in the end, the consideration of them led me to the writing of this book. In short, those reasons had to do with the success of integration owing to the Civil Rights movement on creating a large and solid black professional middle class, a general shift in the demographics of the nation that has challenged the racial formation of what the American identity is about, and the perennial but now seemingly decisive role that African American cultural productions have played in the last half century of America’s history. To that end I have framed this book as a series of historical meditations on what it has meant to be an African American intellectual from the era of the Great Depression to the historic moment of the election and inauguration of the United States’ first black American president. Of course that election was the furthest thing from my mind as I read the various intellectuals covered in this book. But, given the dramatic changes that have occurred over the last seventy-odd years, the election of Barack Obama owes much to the piercing insights and steady growth in visibility and influence of African American public intellectuals. It is certainly no accident that Obama himself is an intellectual who has learned much from those who came before him. As I learned, the major black intellectual who overshadows all black public intellectuals in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is W. E. B. Du Bois. His genius and expansive mind laid the groundwork that all black intellectuals across the spectrum of ideology or disciplinary leanings must work through. Needless to say, I remain in awe of his immense intellectual prowess and influence. %DQQHU+DOH\)URQWPDWWHULQGG $0 Preface x This book has many people for whom I am in great debt. Of course the assessments here are my own and they bear no burden of responsibility for my renderings. To that end I wish to thank, for their encouragement and stimulating conversations about black intellectuals and the life of the nation in general, Robin D. G. Kelley, William Julius Wilson, David Levering Lewis, Trudier Harris-Lopez, Darlene Clark Hine, Stephanie Shaw, Patricia Williams, Eugene D. Genovese and the late Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Mark M. Smith, David Chappell, Louis Ferleger, Jay Mandle, Joan Mandle, Rhonda Levine, Julius Lester, Arnold Rampersad, Adolph L. Reed, Reverend Eugene Rivers III, Randall Kennedy, Larry Greene, Barbara Jeanne Fields, Julie Saville, and Daryl Michael Scott. There have been many others too numerous to name here, but they should know that my gratitude and indebtedness goes out to them. The staffs at the Spingarn-Moorland Research Center at Howard University and the Schomburg Center for Black Culture in New York City have been immensely helpful in getting rare books and papers of some of the events and intellectuals that I discuss. This research was aided by generous grants for my home institution, Colgate University. It was also at Colgate that I was able, with the inspiration and help of Roy Bryce La-Porte, to inaugurate a series of lectures by leading African American intellectuals in honor of W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois during the 1990s. My students, over the years that this book was being written, were very helpful in their thoughts, comments, and in some cases research into certain parts of this book. In particular I would like to thank Vicky Chung for her gathering of information on Asians and African Americans in California during the 1930s. Many thanks for the following students for their comments in classes I have taught on black intellectuals and the Civil Rights movement and during office hours: Breanna Johnson, Christopher Ekpo, Kia King, Erin Lyons, Gabrielle CaseyJones , Lynne Ai, “JJ” Hackett, Alexandra Wolters, Paige Carlos, Daniel Cantor, and Jacqueline Adlam. Again there have been so many others who could be mentioned but they, too, have my thanks. As this book went to Southern Illinois University Press, I must...