Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012
ISBN: 9780674416406
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / Harvard University Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter



After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves free, yet largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Drawing on his professional research into political leadership and intellectual development in African American society, as well as his personal roots in the social-gospel teachings of black churches and at Lincoln University (PA), the political scientist Martin Kilson explores how a modern African American intelligentsia developed in the face of institutionalized racism. In this survey of the origins, evolution, and future prospects of the African American elite, Kilson makes a passionate argument for the ongoing necessity of black leaders in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, who summoned the "Talented Tenth" to champion black progress.

Among the many dynamics that have shaped African American advancement, Kilson focuses on the damage--and eventual decline--of color elitism among the black professional class, the contrasting approaches of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and the consolidation of an ethos of self-conscious racial leadership. Black leaders who assumed this obligation helped usher in the civil rights movement. But mingled among the fruits of victory are the persistent challenges of poverty and inequality. As the black intellectual and professional class has grown larger and more influential than ever, counting the President of the United States in its ranks, new divides of class and ideology have opened in African American communities. Kilson asserts that a revival of commitment to communitarian leadership is essential for the continued pursuit of justice at home and around the world.

Martin Luther Kilson Jr. was born in East Rutherford, New Jersey on February 14, 1931. He received a bachelor's degree from Lincoln University and a master's degree and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard University. He did field work in Sierra Leone under a Ford Foundation fellowship, studying the political system in that country as it shifted from British control to independence in 1961. When he returned to the United States, he became a research associate at Harvard's Center for International Affairs. He became a lecturer in government at Harvard in 1962, an assistant professor in 1964, and was the first African-American professor granted tenure in 1968. He served as the Frank G. Thomson professor of government at Harvard from 1988 to 1999, when he retired from teaching. He wrote several books including Political Change in a West African State and Transformation of the African-American Intelligentsia, 1880-2012. He died from congestive heart failure on April 24, 2019 at the age of 88.

(Bowker Author Biography)


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