Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life

by William M. Banks

"An important book, significant because it highlights the diversity and richness of Afro-American intellectual life.... It will surely be a crucial reference work for years to come". -- New York Times Book ReviewIn the volumes of literature on black history and thought, few have focused on the black thinkers who have shaped the course of American culture. This landmark work charts the contours of black intellectual life across American history and chronicles its fluctuating fortunes.

Black Intellectuals offers a centuries-deep analysis of black life, beginning with the arrival of Africans as slaves, when medicine men and conjurers held ancient, powerful wisdom. Author William Banks goes on to discuss prominent figures ranging from black pioneers like Alexander Crummell, Frederick Douglass, and Anna Cooper to intellectuals of the modern age such as W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, E. Franklin Frazier, Toni Morrison, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. These and hundreds of other black scholars and artists -- many of them interviewed for this volume -- people an enlightened and imaginative landscape, fascinating for both its range and its diversity.

Genres: Race, History, African American

246 pages, Paperback

First published February 17, 1996

About the author

William M. Banks, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California Berkeley joined the Berkeley faculty in 1970. During the early years he served as Chair and guided the then Program into full departmental status in the College of Letters and Science. From 1987-1989 he served as Provost of Undergraduate Affairs for the Berkeley campus.

Professor Banks was selected as a Fellow at both the National Humanities Center and the Center for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences. Culminating several years of research and interviews, Banks produced Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (W.W. Norton, New York, 1996). Black Intellectuals was reviewed and touted in a range of journals and publications from The New York Times Book Review to The Observer of London. The publication won the American Book Award in 1967. Transcripts and audiotapes of Banks’ interviews with selected intellectuals like Harold Cruse, Nell Painter, Clayborne Carson and Henry Louis Gates are housed in the John Hope Franklin Collection at Perkins Library, Duke University. His personal and professional papers can be found in the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. Though retired, Banks continues to lecture and consult throughout the country.

Reviews

[Juliana Maximiano Torres Carneiro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great response to Kruse’s work with lots more to add and a more detached look into the mid century civil rights movement. Still, we need a more generous book on the early 20th century black socialists, this isn’t it.

[R. Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful, intently prophetic, enlightening, a very important weapon in the war against ignorance of the soul of the children of this idea; america...

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

AN INTERESTING CONSIDERATION OF BLACK INTELLECTUALS

William M. Banks is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California at Berkeley.

He writes in the Preface to this 1996 book, "In focusing on black intellectuals, as an entity in themselves, this book explores a number of deeper questions: How did racial discrimination and prejudice shape the emergence and activities of African-American intellectuals? How did race define them? How did race influence individuals' life choices and attitudes? What are the central controversies among black intellectuals, and between them and their white counterparts?"

Here are some quotations from the book:

"Frederick) Douglass's predicament illustrates a dilemma of the black intellectual who hoped to develop egalitarian relationships with powerful whites. True collegial relationships within the abolitionist movement were undermined by the whites' sense of racial and social superiority." (Pg. 24)
"Relegated to the margins of mainstream cultural institutions, most black intellectuals expressed little of the general frustration articulated by the Lost Generation." (Pg. 81)
"Under fire from student activists, universities responded to political threats rather than to the intellectual challenge posed by the idea of black studies." (Pg. 187)
"No person was more involved in stimulating intra-group dialogue about American social policy during the seventies than Thomas Sowell." (Pg. 228)

[Jasper Rubley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Contains a reasonably easy to understand timeline of Black Intellectual History, despite all the condensing required for such a work; vastly ignores the roles of marxism, anti-imperialist thought, and queer liberation within black liberation spaces of the 60s and beyond.