Black Intellectual Tradition Research Articles

The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century by Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum and James B. Stewart, and: African American Political Thought: A Collected History by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner (review)

The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century by Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum and James B. Stewart, and: African American Political Thought: A Collected History by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner (review)

Pauli Murray: Human Rights Visionary and Trailblazer

While other scholars have discussed Dr. Pauli Murray's remarkable contributions to race and sex equality law,1 few, if any, have placed her contributions within the context of the broader tradition of human rights law. And yet, she identified herself specifically through this lens, using the terminology and law of human rights, in part shaped by her friendship with First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, a delegate to the UN Drafting Committee for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).2 This essay addresses a lacuna in legal scholarship by exploring the ways in which Murray's work fits into the Black intellectual tradition concerning the human rights idea. It also seeks to provide a greater understanding concerning contributions to human rights (and more broadly, international law) made by Howard University School of Law, where she attended law school and one of us is on the faculty. Among other linkages, Clarence Clyde Ferguson, a dean of Howard Law School and former ambassador, was the first Black president of the American Society of International Law.

Countering miseducation: Situating K-12 Social Studies education within the Black Intellectual Tradition

“Countering Miseducation: Situating K-12 Social Studies Education within the Black Intellectual Tradition” combines two separate articles—Part I “Re-membering” The Teachings of PtahHotep: Educational Implications of the Oldest Book in the World” and Part II “Locating Early 20th Century K-12 Black Social Studies Educator, Leila Amos Pendleton, within the Black Intellectual Tradition.” Our aim is to speak to limitations and new possibilities in Social Studies education. We address lesser known Black intellectuals, PtahHotep in ancient Egypt [Kemet] and Leila Amos Pendleton, African American educator and social activist, and how their intellectual contributions expand the contours of school-based instructional knowledge for teachers and diverse learners. Moreover, this article uses African-centered perspectives to place key issues surrounding standards-based Social Studies instruction within the context of the Black Intellectual Tradition. In Part III, we conclude with a duoethnography discussion on the aforementioned intellectuals and the implications of their work for the continued development of Social Studies education.

Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum, and James B. Stewart, eds. The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 316 pp.

Derrick P. Alridge, Cornelius L. Bynum, and James B. Stewart, eds. The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2021. 316 pp. - Volume 62 Issue 1

“Come and get your soul food”: a duo-ethnographic account of black teachers modeling the praxis of the black intellectual tradition

In this paper, we contribute to the work in progress which outlines the contours of the praxis of Black intellectual traditions by illuminating the ways in which the pedagogy of Black teachers can serve as a model useful for the preparation of preservice and inservice teachers. Researchers have documented that the successful Black educators employ practices derived from critical perspectives that serve as the conduit for their instruction and interactions in schools. Through two different studies of Black teacher pedagogy, we position the work of Black teachers as a timely pedagogical intervention into anti-Black teaching and learning structures in k-12 education and teacher education that challenge the cultivation and enactments of liberatory visions of teaching and learning for Black children.

A call & response critical poetic inquiry of resistance ideologies among teachers and Black youth

Grounded in the Black intellectual tradition, this article explores how Black youth and teachers of Black youth operationalize resistance ideologies to combat hegemonic narratives about Black youth in U.S. urban school spaces. Using data from four Black youth and teacher participants, we applied a priori coding based on Bernard and Agozino’s description of Black free spaces and the Black Studies Theory of Alterity to identify the participants’ resistance ideologies and how they were evidenced. Next, we employed a call-and-response method of critical poetic inquiry to analyze participants’ responses, generate themes, and produce research poetry as findings. The three primary themes include (1) savior narratives for Black youth, (2) discipline and perceptions of Black youth, (3) the systems of belief within participants’ resistance ideologies. The findings are disseminated in a call-and-response format that joins the teacher’s perspectives with Black youth perspectives.

Keys to the city: race, place and class in America’s Black mecca

Considering the ways in which class and space inform the varied experiences of Black people is essential to a more complete understanding of the African reality. Situating these constructs within the context of the Black Intellectual Tradition sheds light on the history of scholars who, for decades, have encouraged this analysis. Starting with Du Bois, this study pays homage to and continues the work of analyzing race and class in Black spaces. Relying on thirty-four in-depth interviews, this research highlights the racialized and classed experiences of Black Atlantans. Drawing on the theoretical frames of Black placemaking, a premise that is encouraged in the Black Intellectual Tradition, I explain how, even in a Black mecca like Atlanta, certain class groups are left out of the educational opportunities and social privileges afforded to whites and economically advantaged Blacks. I use the term Black meccanisms to elucidate the way city institutions act as agents to help Atlanta maintain its Black mecca status, while simultaneously reinforcing class inequality. Community-engaged research empowers people to suggest and create solutions to the social problems they encounter. Therefore, my research gives voice to solutions participants agree would help undermine the effects of structural inequality – improved and diverse educational institutions.

On Being Brought from Africa to America to London: Teaching Phillis Wheatley in the Former Heart of Empire

This essay considers the transatlantic workings of different national formations of anti-Blackness and colonial whiteness across several centuries, by taking the 1773 London publication of Phillis Wheatley's Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral in relation to teaching Wheatley's poetry in London in 2019. The recognition Wheatley received and her careful negotiations with conditional white British benevolence must be understood alongside both the continual British disavowals of ongoing historical anti-Blackness and robust, widespread antiracist resistance, which are often dismissed as foreign problems imported from the United States. In this context, studying and teaching Wheatley dramatizes the threat of a dehistoricized exceptionalism that upholds a model of diasporic Blackness viewed as solely American, rather than convergent with Britishness. A conscientious pedagogy of teaching Wheatley requires attention to the shifting resilience of Blackness encountering adaptive environments of anti-Blackness that can masquerade as tolerant and civil as well as the colonial, eugenicist, bio-essentialist strain of British white feminism. Finally, the challenges of curriculum and classroom are placed into the wider setting of the hostile structures of UK higher education which still attempts to delegitimize Black intellectual traditions, to stifle the field of Black studies, and to undermine the emergence, as well as vitiate the perseverance, of Black scholars.

Blackening Aesthetic Experience

AbstractContemporary philosophy of art generally assumes that aesthetic experience is constituted by a certain ontological-phenomenological structure: the apprehension by a subject of an object. This article explores an underexamined critique of this philosophical model found within the black intellectual and artistic tradition. I will specifically focus on the version of this critique proposed by the similarly underexamined black philosophers Adrian Piper and Fred Moten. This critique, which I dub the subjectivizing concern, takes issue with the notion of ontological distance that I argue defines the subject-object model. I define ontological distance as the removal and alienation of the subject’s fundamental sense of self from that of so-called objects. The subjectivizing concern holds that this distance is not value neutral. Rather, the subject-object model is considered to be directly entwined with projects and practices of aesthetic and extraesthetic racism and antiblackness. After offering Piper’s own model of aesthetic experience—which she dubs catalysis—as an alternative, I propose three possible ways in which the subject-object model can be conceived as tied to antiblack racism.

“Sustaining the Truth of the Bible”: Black Evangelical Abolitionism and the Transatlantic Politics of Orthodoxy

This article examines how the black Presbyterian minister James W. C. Pennington (1807–1870) and other black evangelicals engaged with German academic theology to challenge Southern slavery and demonstrate fitness for citizenship. It also shows that these black evangelical leaders strategically associated themselves with the same conservative German religious thinkers admired by Southern slaveholders. Recovering this transatlantic exchange reveals the surprisingly conservative character of many black evangelical abolitionists as well as the roots of an enduring black intellectual and theological tradition that explicitly linked religious orthodoxy with racial equality.

Keisha N. Blain, Christopher Cameron, and Ashley D. Farmer, editors. New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition.

K<scp>eisha</scp> N. B<scp>lain</scp>, C<scp>hristopher</scp> C<scp>ameron</scp>, and A<scp>shley</scp> D. F<scp>armer</scp>, editors. <i>New Perspectives on the Black Intellectual Tradition</i>.

Haiti and the Black Intellectual Tradition, 1829–1934

In September 1829, David Walker published the first edition of his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a pamphlet that became a stirring call to arms for both slaves and free blacks alike. Walker's audience was blacks in the United States and his aim was to foster black unity and education, combat racial stereotypes, and make the case for the abolition of slavery. Like most abolitionists, black and white, Walker hoped that the end of slavery could come about through peaceful means. Unlike most other abolitionists, however, Walker openly called for slaves to violently resist their bondage, stating, “it is no more harm for you to kill a man, who is trying to kill you, than it is for you to take a drink of water when thirsty.” While advocates of pacifism and nonviolence often based their positions on their Christian faith, it was Walker's Christianity which lent support to his calls for revolutionary violence. “Does the Lord condescend to hear their cries and see their tears in consequence of oppression?” he asked. “Will he let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy always? Will he not cause the very children of the oppressors to rise up against them, and oftimes to put them to death?” Walker firmly believed that God would have his vengeance on blacks’ oppressors and that the vehicles for that vengeance might very well be the slaves themselves.

A wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness

a wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness is a call into grief for communities of Black folks working to survive Quarantine 2020. We meditate on what wake work looks and feels like in this particular season of Black suffering, as we grapple with the weight of quotidian Black death and the possibilities for the restoration of sacred Black lives. Using a methodology of reflexive poetics, we paint portraits of intimate ontology, inner worlds, and unraveling. We use repetition as a tool for deep emphasis, and write in and out of I and We statements to illustrate the multitude of voices present within this text - the collective love of we, the individual I, the communal fight of us, and the sacred oneness of Spirit. We work to reimagine our relationship with reading, writing and words in order to reject performative notions of intellect that often divorce us from the intimacy so necessary for engagement with the Black intellectual tradition, particularly the subsets of our tradition that center our imaginaries of fugitivity beyond suffering. We acknowledge that, in order to write care into the wake, we must first center language that makes space for our affective experiences. By refusing the gaze of academia and reclaiming our intimacy to education beyond the project of schooling, we free ourselves up to write creatively, illegibly, and in dissonance. In fact, we see our writing as a fugitive practice in and of itself, one that allows us to reclaim our voices to map out new sites of marronage where we might nestle ourselves up into alternative scapes of freedom.

A wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness

a wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness is a call into grief for communities of Black folks working to survive Quarantine 2020. We meditate on what wake work looks and feels like in this particular season of Black suffering, as we grapple with the weight of quotidian Black death and the possibilities for the restoration of sacred Black lives. Using a methodology of reflexive poetics, we paint portraits of intimate ontology, inner worlds, and unraveling. We use repetition as a tool for deep emphasis, and write in and out of I and We statements to illustrate the multitude of voices present within this text - the collective love of we, the individual I, the communal fight of us, and the sacred oneness of Spirit. We work to reimagine our relationship with reading, writing and words in order to reject performative notions of intellect that often divorce us from the intimacy so necessary for engagement with the Black intellectual tradition, particularly the subsets of our tradition that center our imaginaries of fugitivity beyond suffering. We acknowledge that, in order to write care into the wake, we must first center language that makes space for our affective experiences. By refusing the gaze of academia and reclaiming our intimacy to education beyond the project of schooling, we free ourselves up to write creatively, illegibly, and in dissonance. In fact, we see our writing as a fugitive practice in and of itself, one that allows us to reclaim our voices to map out new sites of marronage where we might nestle ourselves up into alternative scapes of freedom.

A wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness

a wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness is a call into grief for communities of Black folks working to survive Quarantine 2020. We meditate on what wake work looks and feels like in this particular season of Black suffering, as we grapple with the weight of quotidian Black death and the possibilities for the restoration of sacred Black lives. Using a methodology of reflexive poetics, we paint portraits of intimate ontology, inner worlds, and unraveling. We use repetition as a tool for deep emphasis, and write in and out of I and We statements to illustrate the multitude of voices present within this text - the collective love of we, the individual I, the communal fight of us, and the sacred oneness of Spirit. We work to reimagine our relationship with reading, writing and words in order to reject performative notions of intellect that often divorce us from the intimacy so necessary for engagement with the Black intellectual tradition, particularly the subsets of our tradition that center our imaginaries of fugitivity beyond suffering. We acknowledge that, in order to write care into the wake, we must first center language that makes space for our affective experiences. By refusing the gaze of academia and reclaiming our intimacy to education beyond the project of schooling, we free ourselves up to write creatively, illegibly, and in dissonance. In fact, we see our writing as a fugitive practice in and of itself, one that allows us to reclaim our voices to map out new sites of marronage where we might nestle ourselves up into alternative scapes of freedom.

A wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness

a wake work for 2020: on meeting black grief with tenderness is a call into grief for communities of Black folks working to survive Quarantine 2020. We meditate on what wake work looks and feels like in this particular season of Black suffering, as we grapple with the weight of quotidian Black death and the possibilities for the restoration of sacred Black lives. Using a methodology of reflexive poetics, we paint portraits of intimate ontology, inner worlds, and unraveling. We use repetition as a tool for deep emphasis, and write in and out of I and We statements to illustrate the multitude of voices present within this text - the collective love of we, the individual I, the communal fight of us, and the sacred oneness of Spirit. We work to reimagine our relationship with reading, writing and words in order to reject performative notions of intellect that often divorce us from the intimacy so necessary for engagement with the Black intellectual tradition, particularly the subsets of our tradition that center our imaginaries of fugitivity beyond suffering. We acknowledge that, in order to write care into the wake, we must first center language that makes space for our affective experiences. By refusing the gaze of academia and reclaiming our intimacy to education beyond the project of schooling, we free ourselves up to write creatively, illegibly, and in dissonance. In fact, we see our writing as a fugitive practice in and of itself, one that allows us to reclaim our voices to map out new sites of marronage where we might nestle ourselves up into alternative scapes of freedom.

Political Economy and the Tradition of Radical Black Study

A central concern of the Black Intellectual Tradition (BIT) since the close of the nineteenth century has been the explicit connection between the historical and structural development of the world capitalist economy on the one hand, and on the other, freedom struggles forged by African descendants. This dynamic, interwoven relationship, according to some critical observers of history, illuminates a key dimension of the modern Black experience.1 While Black Studies inherited this distinct political economic tradition, the status of political economy frameworks in the field is marginal. Because Black communities have produced a unique political economy tradition borne from necessity, study, and an incessant will toward freedom, this tradition must occupy a greater role in the work and practice of Black Studies. As a contribution toward that vital goal, I will introduce and analyze several key concepts, theories, and debates that have animated the radical Black political economy tradition. Based on my brief reflections on the lives, work, and politics of several radical Black scholar-activists within and beyond the U.S., I conclude by discussing how their ideas can serve the transformationalist vision of Black Studies.

Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White

Reviewed by: Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement by Monica M. White Greta de Jong Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement. By Monica M. White. Justice, Power, and Politics. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. xviii, 189. $27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-4369-4.) Freedom Farmers: Agricultural Resistance and the Black Freedom Movement traces the roots of contemporary food justice activism to black intellectual traditions and agricultural practices dating to the colonial era. As Monica M. White shows, African Americans’ relationship to the land was not defined solely by the oppressions inflicted by slavery and sharecropping. Agriculture was a site of struggle where black people pursued goals of economic and political empowerment and fought to overturn racist structures that were designed to keep them powerless and poor. This history has largely been ignored in popular portrayals of the local and organic food movement, which is often cast as a form of food snobbery practiced by status-conscious white people who shop at Whole Foods. In fact, the origins of this movement lie in the civil rights movement and earlier struggles for justice by African Americans. White notes that landownership and food production were central to black conceptions of freedom, from the gardens tended by enslaved people to supplement their diets, through the self-sufficiency and self-determination advocated by Marcus Garvey, to the black-owned farms, grocery stores, and restaurants established by Black Power advocates in the 1960s to supply African American communities with healthy food. Booker T. Washington’s training programs for farmers at Tuskegee Institute, George Washington Carver’s pioneering research into organic farming techniques, and W. E. B. Du Bois’s promotion of cooperative business models that provided alternatives to capitalist exploitation receive sustained attention for their contributions to strategies of “collective agency and community resilience (CACR),” a theoretical framework that White offers as a way to understand all of the activities described in the book (p. 5). Using archival records, interviews, and newspaper sources, White analyzes four cooperative projects that enacted CACR in the late twentieth century. Civil rights activist Fannie Lou Hamer founded Freedom Farm Cooperative in 1967, providing employment, affordable housing, and training to members who saw clear connections between financial independence and the ability to exercise their political rights in Sunflower County, Mississippi, where white supremacists used economic reprisals to retaliate against African Americans who registered to vote. Similar motivations and strategies characterized the North Bolivar County Farmers Cooperative in neighboring Bolivar County, Mississippi. The Federation of Southern Cooperatives deployed CACR on a regional level, helping organize, finance, provide technical assistance, and train participants in cooperatives throughout the South from the late 1960s to the present. The descendants of southern migrants to Detroit, Michigan, including many who had participated in the civil rights and Black Power movements, formed the [End Page 232] Detroit Black Community Food Security Network in 2006 after deindustrialization, white flight, and disinvestment left the city with only one remaining large chain grocery store. The case studies demonstrate how rural and urban social justice activism were connected, as African Americans responded to mass unemployment and poverty caused by the loss of agricultural jobs in the South and factory jobs in the North. Writing consciously with an eye on the uses of the past for understanding the present and influencing the future, White recovers the lost stories of black activists who worked to ensure access to adequate and nutritious food for low-income communities, promoted alternatives to capitalist economic exploitation, and demanded a voice in the decisions affecting their lives. Scholars of African American history, agricultural history, and urban history will find much value in this book. Additionally, the brief length and clear writing style make Freedom Farmers ideal for classroom use. Greta de Jong University of Nevada, Reno Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Black Girlhood in the Nineteenth CenturyAmerican Tomboys, 1850–1915

Pedagogy for partisanship: research training for Black graduate students in the Black intellectual tradition

Current and former students of two professors in a southern research university and a community educator, all participants in an African-centered research collaborative/apprenticeship, describe what and how we study together and our struggle to use our knowledge and research in service to our community. We uplift the works of key Pan-African/Black/Africana Studies/Nile Valley scholars to illustrate the African epistemic foundation of our collaborative/apprenticeship. We describe how we utilized the methodology of narrative inquiry to explore our experiences as participants in the HeKA (Heritage Knowledge in Action) research collaborative and how HeKA has provided ways of knowing and being centered in our culture and heritage. We present our findings, which include some of the dilemmas of Black doctoral students and emerging scholars engaged in HeKA and how this collaborative/apprenticeship serves as an emancipatory praxis to enable the next generation to realize their goals of partisan research and pedagogy in higher education.