African American Intellectual History

Before and since the explosion of scholarship on Black historical subject matter during the latter part of the Black Power era, 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 is most concerned with discussing important scholarship, salient characteristics, and trends and key turning points in Black intellectual history during the first three quarters of the twentieth century and some of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Black intellectual history should not be viewed in vacuo, and, thus, this chapter also surveys some basic trends in mainstream US intellectual history, highlighting a group of its leading practitioners’ general disregard for African American intellectuals. Given the abundance of scholarship in Black intellectual history for close to a century, like all historiographies, some sagacious decisions are made about which of the field’s major practitioners and publications to include and showcase. Central to this approach is Adolph Reed Jr. and Kenneth W. Warren’s 2010 perceptive observation: “The academic practice of intellectual history is itself a historical phenomenon.”