Derrick P. Alridge - The Black Intellectual Tradition: African American Thought in the Twentieth Century

CHAPTER 1

AFRICAN AMERICAN INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

THE PAST AS A PORTHOLE INTO THE PRESENT AND FUTURE OF THE FIELD

PERO GAGLO DAGBOVIE

Intellectual historyin unembellished terms, the history of ideas and of those who formulated, articulated, and documented their thoughts in different time periods and varying contextsis a foundational subspecialty of African American history that has expanded by leaps and bounds since the mainstreaming of the study of African American history sometime during the Black Power era. Since its earliest expressions, those who have practiced Black intellectual history have, broadly speaking, been concerned with explaining how African American spokespersons have thought and written about their peoples unique status, which has been primarily characterized by varied forms of racial oppression. It may seem that we are now existing in an era during which old-fashioned African American intellectual historyonce widely known as Negro thought scholarshipis steadily being superseded by what many social and cultural historians of the Black past understandably hold to be more fascinating and enriching subject matter. Even so, African Americanists continue to creatively interpret the beliefs and writings of well- and lesser-known Black leaders, activists, thinkers, and theorists, predominantly those operating from the late nineteenth century through the Black Power era. On a refreshing note, new generations of Black scholars, like those belonging to what Michael Eric Dyson has called an emerging black digital intelligentsia, have challenged and expanded upon long-standing canonical interpretations of the Black intellectual enterprise. More symbolically, in the twenty-first century, various scholars have evoked the notion of Black thought in their book titles.

A voluminous amount of scholarship has been published by African Americanists on what today could be construed as African American or Black intellectual history. Focusing on the ideas of an assortment of scholars (mainly historians), this chapter discusses what I perceive as being an important (by no means comprehensive) body of scholarship, salient characteristics and trends, and key turning points in Black intellectual history during the first three quarters of the twentieth century.

In 1961 intellectual historian, clergyman, and longtime professor at North Carolina Central University Earl E. Thorpe (19241989) authored The Mind of the Negro: An Intellectual History of Afro-Americans, a relatively inconspicuous

Approximately a decade after Thorpes Mind of the Negro appeared, notions of the existence of an overarching American mind and the preoccupation with elite or nonordinary American spokespersons ideas and worldviews were being increasingly challenged by an array of historians and scholars who were influenced by the growing popularity of social history or history from the bottom up. That the title of Thorpes study implies the actuality of the Negro mind during a decade when claims about an American mind were eroding is not surprising. With the exception of Merle Curti, dubbed the dean of American intellectual historians by some of his progeny in the 1970s, White US intellectual historians like those who contributed to and read the Journal of the History of Ideas (founded in 1940 by philosopher Arthur O. Lovejoy) did not genuinely integrate African Americans into their syntheses of the American mind or American thought during the first half of the twentieth century that coincided with a so-called golden age of American intellectual history. The recognition that Blacks possessed intuitive opinions and ideas of substance often materialized in the form of occasional token nods to Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and W. E. B. Du Bois. From the 1950s through as late as the first decade of the twenty-first century, leading White intellectual historians regularly ignored and marginalized the existence of a Black intellectual tradition.

Generally speaking, Blacks beliefs, attitudes, and thoughts have, of course, differed significantly from Whites because of how race has been constructed in the United States. Beginning with the era of US slavery (17891865), the periodization of African American intellectual history is starkly different than that of its mainstream American counterpart. Adding African Americans to the pantheon of American intellectuals significantly complicates how the totality of US intellectual history is understood and described. Black intellectual history has its own distinct creation story, evolution, and subfields. It possesses what Du Bois called a sense of two-ness, or duality. It can be considered a part of American intellectual history, yet its distinctiveness warrants that it be its own freestanding field. Still and all, in order for US intellectual history to be complete, African American subject matter must be considered and in some cases even centered.

In retrospect Thorpes Mind of the Negro, a byproduct of the civil rights movement, was certainly an expression of what Alan K. Colon and later Manning Marable describe as the corrective principle of the Black intellectual tradition. Similarly, historians engaged in African American intellectual history in the twenty-first century could also be considered, albeit to a lesser degree, vindicationist in their appeal. Those active in Black womens intellectual history have overwhelmingly participated in rehabilitative scholarly endeavors. As Brittney Cooper has recently argued, Black women thinkers must be taken seriously, and their works must be theorized. For Thorpe, Black intellectual history essentially amounts to the thoughts and ideas of African American men from the age of slavery through contemporary times. He acknowledges that enslaved African Americans and their descendants in the South represented the majority of the Black population through the first half of the twentieth century, and, therefore, the history of the Negro mind largely constituted the history of the perceptions and ruminations of the Black masses who were most impacted by slavery, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow segregation. Because like his White American counterparts he focused on the written record, Thorpe placed a spotlight on the documented beliefs and viewpoints of articulate Blacks.largely unchallenged until Black women scholars launched the Black womens studies and history movements during the 1970s and 1980s.

In The Mind of the Negro, Thorpe explores how African American men have pondered and grappled with various issues, in some cases for more than a century, including Africa, slavery and freedom, religion, family, history, segregation, education, politics, democracy, the US presidency, capitalism, socialism, communism, materialism, war, myths, and, in broadest terms, the meaning of their existence. At the most basic level, Thorpe surmises that there were two central themes of Black intellectual history: the quest for freedom and defending the race against the charge of biological and racial inferiority. He identifies the end of the Reconstruction era as signaling a major shift in African Americans collective consciousness and approaches to dealing with racial oppression. By this time, he deduces, African Americans had largely adopted self-help ideologies and programs. Reinforcing the problematic dichotomies and categories advanced during the 1940s and 1950s by political scientist Ralph Bunche, sociologist Gunnar Myrdal, and historian August Meier, Thorpe argues, Negro thought is basically accommodation and attack thought. He recognizes some of the tendencies, variations, and faults of Negro thought, highlighting class divisions and the impact that slavery and Jim Crow segregation had on the Blacks cumulative psyches. Yet, he does not provide a penetrating definition of Black intellectual history as a specific subfield. A close reading of