“Africana philosophy” is the name for an emergent andstill developing field of ideas and idea-spaces, intellectualendeavors, discourses, and discursive networks within and beyondacademic philosophy that was recognized as such by national andinternational organizations of professional philosophers, including theAmerican Philosophical Association, starting in the 1980s. Thus, thename does not refer to a particular philosophy, philosophical system,method, or tradition. Rather,Africana philosophy is athird-order, metaphilosophical, umbrella-concept used to bringorganizing oversight to various efforts ofphilosophizing—that is, activities of reflective,critical thinking and articulation and aestheticexpression—engaged in by persons and peoples African and ofAfrican descent who were and are indigenous residents of continentalAfrica and residents of the many African Diasporas worldwide. In allcases the point of much of the philosophizings has been to confermeaningful orderings on individual and shared living and on natural andsocial worlds while resolving recurrent, emergent, andradically disruptive challenges to existence so as to survive,endure, and flourish across successive generations.

The emergent third-order work defining the field has been focused onidentifying for research and teaching, and for further refinements andnew developments of, instances of philosophical articulations andexpressions regarding what has been, and is, of thoughtful, aestheticsignificance to persons African and of African descent. This work hasproduced educative catalogings and critical surveys of particular ideasand idea-spaces; intellectual and aesthetic expressive agendas,practices, and traditions; and networks of individuals, organizations,and institutions serving philosophizing in African andAfrican-descended life-worlds.

• 1. The Concept of Africana Philosophy
• 2. Philosophizings Born of Struggles: Conditions of Emergence of Africana Philosophy
• 3. Africana Philosophy: Continental Africa
• 4. African Philosophy: Contributions
• 5. Africana Philosophy: The African Diaspora
• 6. African American Philosophizings Born of Struggles
• 7. 1600–1860
• 8. 1860–1915
• 9. 1915–2000
• 10. 1950–Present: Professional Philosophers of African Descent
• 11. Publishing and Professional Africana Philosophy
• 12. Africana Philosophy: Contributions
• 13. Future Developments
• Bibliography
  • Africana Philosophy
  • African Philosophy
  • African American Philosophy
  • Afro-Caribbean Philosophy
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. The Concept of Africana Philosophy

There are significant challenges to the viability of the conceptAfricana philosophy as well as to an effort to map out anencyclopedic overview of the extended and still expanding range ofendeavors covered by the term. Foremost are the challenges to orderingthrough a single concept the geographical, historical, socio-political,and cultural differences and complexities that have defined andcontinue to define the realities of life of the many persons andpeoples identified as “African” and “of Africandescent” in many locales throughout the world. Yet, the viabilityof the concept is grounded on several centuries of continuous, linked,complicated histories during which Black peoples of Africa, and theirdescendants, have been regarded as and engaged with, and more or lesshave come to regard themselves, as “African” peoples, aspersons and peoples “of African descent.” The longhistories of this regarding, by others and by themselves, have thusconditioned substantively the history-makings, the socio-politicallives, the culture-makings and culture-mediations, intellectualproductions and philosophizings included, of persons and peoplesAfrican and of African descent.

On these socially constructive historical groundings rest several keyheuristic presumptions that are central toAfricanaphilosophy as a metaphilosophical concept for organizingintellectual praxes. First, the presumption that there are sufficientdistinguishing anthropological, historical, and other commonalitiesand similarities that are shared, more or less, by the manybio-cultural groupings of human beings who have been identified, andwho subsequently generally have come to identify themselves, as, inpart, “African” or “of African descent” towarrant ordering under a general heading particular instances ofphilosophically articulate thought expressed by persons in thesegroupings and shared with and debated by others within and beyond thegroupings. These identifications are consequences of the imposition onthe peoples of the continent named “Africa” of anattempted homogenizing racializing ontology by peoples ofnation-states on another continent that was named “Europe”in an aspiration for geo-political and anthropologicalunification. Many “Europeans” came to believe that beneaththeir many formidable differences there was a foundational commonalitythrough shared raciality and other constitutive virtues that wasdefinitive of their anthropological and historical superiority asharbingers of a theologically and philosophically sanctioned destinyto achieve global predominance. It was out of this toxic mix ofconvictions and aspirations that particular Europeans set aboutconstructing racialized, rank-ordered philosophical anthropologiesthrough which they construed a continent of diverse peoples as asingle “race” of “Africans” or“Negroes.” The outcomes of the histories of theseinventive forgings through complex, centuries-long struggles againstEuropean imperialist impositions and the adaptive endurances ofcolonization and dispersing enslavements by persons and peoplesAfrican and African-descendant provide the warrant for the presumptionof commonalities embraced by the conceptAfricana philosophywhen considering the philosophizings of people African andAfrican-descended subsequent to their encounters with impositions ofimperialism by people(s) of Europe and European Diasporas.

This first presumption is tempered by a second: namely, that thebio-cultural groupings of peoples African and of African descent arenot homogeneous, racially or otherwise, neither individually norcollectively, but are constituted by differences and dissimilaritiesas well as by similarities and commonalities. All the more so asconsequences of the various groups having created differinglife-worlds in differing geographical, political, and historicallocations prior to and as a consequence of impositions and disruptionsof their lives fostered by Europeans and others on one hand; and, onthe other, while living interactions and cultural exchanges with otherpeoples, European and European-descended peoples included, which havegiven rise to differences in individual and group genomes, histories,cultures, interests, and aspirations. Furthermore, identified sharedsimilarities and commonalities are understood to becontingent, thus neither necessary nor inherent and fixed andthus the same for all persons African or of African descent. Thispresumption rules out any ahistorical, a priori claims regardingsupposedly definitive “natural” characteristics of“the” thought of African and African-descendedpeoples assumed as non-contingently widely and generally shared acrossextended historical times and geo-cultural spaces.Africanaphilosophy as an ordering concept, then, is neither the promiseof, nor an aspiration for, a unifying philosophy already shared, or tobe shared, by all properly thoughtful persons African and/or of Africandescent. Judgments regarding the always-contingent distinguishingfeatures of philosophizing thought and expression by persons Africanand of African descent, and of the extent to which such features areshared—to what degree, under what circumstances, to whatends—are to be achieved by way of combined efforts ofphilosophical anthropology, sociology of knowledge, and intellectualhistories: that is, by way ofhistorically and socio-culturallysituated comparative studies of instances of philosophizing.

A third presumption:Africana philosophy should not beregarded as normatively prescriptive for philosophers identified asAfrican or of African descent, as setting requirements for what theirphilosophizing must have been, or must be, about and to what endsbecause of their racial/ethnic identities. Such identities neitherconfer nor require particular philosophical commitments or obligations.Substantive differences among African and African-descended thinkershave been, and must continue to be, acknowledged and taken into accountin the ordering of the field and setting agendas for Africanaphilosophy. There have been, are, and will likely continue to bepersons African and of African descent for whom their identities assuch are of no import for their philosophizing.

Of particular importance, work in Africana philosophy is alsoconditioned by the presumption that contributors need not be personsAfrican or of African descent. This presumption rests on theunderstanding that the conditioning circumstances, motivations, modes,agendas, and importance of the philosophically articulate thought andaesthetic expressions of persons African and of African descent can beidentified, understood, researched, taught, commented on, and taken upwith respectful competence by persons neither African nor of Africandescent. By virtue of their competencies such persons may be identifiedappropriately as, for example, “Africanists” or“Afro-Caribbeanists” or “AfricanAmericanists.”

Finally, the extent to which these heuristic presumptions are cogentand effective in guiding work in Africana philosophy is a matter thatis to be continuously explored and tested in the agora of disciplined,ethical scholarship and thus confirmed or disconfirmed, to whateverextent appropriate, in accord with proper methods of critical reviewproperly deployed.

2. Philosophizings Born of Struggles: Conditions of Emergence of Africana Philosophy

The metaphilosophical efforts to map out and order a complexdiscursive field of articulations and practices asAfricanaphilosophy are, indeed,emergent disciplinary ventures ofthe late twentieth century. However, many of the instances ofthoughtful articulation and aesthetic expressiveness that are beingidentified and explored as instances of philosophizing were neitherproduced nor guided by norms and agendas of the discipline of academicphilosophy as institutionalized for centuries in various countries ofWestern European and North America. The same is true for the needs,motivations, objectives, and many of the principal intellectualresources that motivated and oriented those instances of articulationand creative expression and the formation of the networks ofidea-spaces and discursive communities that nurtured them. For Africanand African-descended peoples were of little or no philosophical oranthropological significance to those who have been the designators,historians, practitioners, and mediators of the discipline’sinstitutionalized canons of issues, figures, agendas, conceptual andmethodological traditions, problem-sets, texts or text-analogs,organizations, and institutions. The pre-Modern histories of Africanand African-descended peoples; the centuries-long colonized, enslaved,and otherwise utterly dehumanizing unfreedom of Black peoplesthroughout the continents of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and theCaribbean; the rapacious unjust exploitation of their bodies, lands,resources, and life-opportunities—all of these went mostlywithout explicit comment in the discipline of Philosophy, not even as afocus of protest, notwithstanding all of the vaunted concern within thediscipline for conceptions offreedom,justice,equality,human nature, andhuman well-beinggenerally. Even as European and European-descendedphilosophesof the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries fashion decidedlynew philosophical anthropologies, socio-political philosophies, andphilosophies of histories into complex Enlightenments to ground andguide quests to realize the global instantiations of Modernities inwhich reason-guided freedom and justice would be foundational to thespread of the racialized, capitalist civilizational projects ofEurocentrism (Amin 1989), there was almost total silence about the intended andunintended consequences for peoples African and of Africandescent—except for claims that colonization and enslavement wouldbring them much needed “civilizing.”

Evolving academic, and subsequently professionalized, Philosophythus aided and abetted, and was a substantial institutionalizedbeneficiary of, these projects well into the twentieth century when thevarious forms and movements of resistance of African andAfrican-descended peoples to dehumanization were made more challengingwhile animated by motivating declarations of their claims to theirhumanity and their rights to freedom, justice, and full citizenship. Bythe middle of the twentieth century, throughout Africa, the Caribbean,and the Americas these movements had won major victories of liberationfrom the oppressive regimes of Eurocentric racial apartheid andexploitation. The movements were also contributing to progressivetransformations of these regimes that helped to open them tosubstantive measures of real freedom and justice not only for personsand peoples African and of African descent, but for other persons andpeoples of color and, even, for women of European descent.

These historic movements and developments provided contemporarypioneers of Africana philosophy rich, exemplary ideas, idea-spaces,agendas, and social networks on which to draw for motivations,missions, and other resources to forge intellectual agendas andstrategies and social networks needed for philosophizing in theinterests of people African and of African descent. Hence, thetwentieth-century emergence of Africana philosophy as an internationalfield of and for discursive intellectual and expressive aesthetic workwith a distinctive mission: to gather up and explore criticallythoughtful articulations and aesthetic expressions by and about personsand peoples African and of African descent as instances ofphilosophizing; and to fashion revised or new articulations and artfulexpressions in keeping with, and as aids to, quests for freedom,justice, and human dignity by and for these persons and peoples.

Examples of such mission-driven creative intellectual and expressivework in service to the liberation and redemption of Black peoples werealready at hand in several other disciplines: in history and sociology,music and literature, art and dance, religion and theology. Moreover,outside of academic disciplines, many among several generations offiercely independent, extraordinarily formally and informally educated(and in some instances self-taught) socially, politically, andaesthetically engaged female and male black intellectuals and artists,who devoted much of their lives to service as uplifters of Blackpeoples, had pursued their often very highly productive, and certainlyvery influential, intellectual and expressive work without ongoingaffiliations with institutions of higher education, and without theassistance of sources of support for articulation and expression, thatwere dominated and controlled by Europeans and people of Europeandescent. This independence was crucial to the production of theirseminal reflections, articulations, and artistic creations andexpressions. Many of them helped to found and were affiliated with andsupported by religious and educational institutions, character-buildingwomen’s and men’s clubs and literary societies;international missionary ventures; benevolent and politicalorganizations; publishing and commercial enterprises; and with local,regional, and international anti-colonial and liberatory organizationsfounded and operated by and devoted to the uplift, freedom, andwell-being of African and African-descended peoples. As inspiring rolemodels, much of their work became resource-reservoirs for newgenerations of women and men determined to continue the quests forliberation and justice for Black peoples. A matter of significantinfluence was that many of these important figures had becomeinternationalists in understanding the similarities and commonalities ofthe plights suffered by African and African-descended peoples due tothe shared agendas for racialized oppression and exploitation forgedand fostered by White peoples of various nation-states. Consequently,more than a few of the new generations of twentieth-century African andAfrican-descended fighters for freedom and justice cultivatedinternationalist, “Pan African” (Geiss 1974) understandings of andaspirations for what would be needed in the way of intellectualresources and strategies to assist with claiming and realizing the fullhumanity of and just freedom for African and African-descendedpeoples.

Many of the contemporary disciplinary pioneers of thephilosophizings that are now being gathered under the umbrella ofAfricana philosophy, though participants in institutionalized,professional philosophy, have also been intellectual and spiritualmembers of the new generations of freedom fighters or otherwisesubstantially influenced by them. Thus, many have drawn theirmotivations, aspirations, and resources for philosophical work frombeyond the canonized motivations and traditions of thoughtinstitutionalized in the discipline. Energized and emboldened by thelegacies of the role models and liberatory movements, they have takenon the work of challenging the discipline in order to create roomwithin its intellectual and organizational structures and processeswherein they could pursue agendas of giving consideration to matters ofphilosophical import to persons and peoples African and of Africandescent, and of particular import to themselves as persons African andof African descent engaged in philosophizing formally andprofessionally.

Among the challenges was the need, first, to reconsiderlong-prevailing defining assumptions regarding the nature of properly“philosophical” thought: namely, that such thought ischaracterized by a loving quest for wisdom pursued by persons who havethe most highly cultivated forms of disciplined thought, and whoselives are materially conditioned such that they have the leisure todevote substantial amounts of their time and energy toreflectivethought and to working out their thinking for articulate,systematic expression inwriting.

It became apparent to many—though by no means to all—ofthe contemporary pioneers of Africana philosophy within academicphilosophy that this image of the ideal philosopher was not appropriatefor respectfully identifying or characterizing many of thephilosophically thoughtful and expressive persons African and ofAfrican descent, those, especially, who lived several centuries ago.Certainly, throughout the centuries of radically disruptive anddehumanizing encounters between peoples African and of African descentand peoples of Europe and of the Euro-Americas, and others, thephilosophizing efforts of Black people have, indeed, been “bornof struggle,” as the philosopher Leonard Harris has so aptlynoted. The experiences, thus the philosophizing, of many of thesepersons—and of generations of millions who were theircontemporaries, millions more who came before them, and millions morewho came after them—were conditioned profoundly by racialized andgendered exploitative settler-colonialism in their homelands; forothers by racialized and gendered capture, relocation, enslavement, andoppression inThe New World thousands of miles from their ortheir ancestors’ homelands; and in all such cases by racializedand gendered imperialist encroachments on the very core of theirbeing by which they were forced to become and to be colonized“natives” and slaves,ontologically as well associo-economically. Survival and endurance of such conditions by thosewho managed to do so required coordinated efforts of recovery andretention, or the recreation, of the integrity of personhood andpeoplehood, even of basic humaneness, thus required thoughtfulontological and political work of the most fundamental significance.So, too, crucial intellectual efforts of the kinds designated moral,ethical, epistemological, social, religious, theological, andaesthetic.

Thus, survival and endurance of conditions of racialized andgendered colonization, enslavement, and oppression—not conditionsof leisured freedom—compelled more than a few Africanand African-descended persons to philosophize. Almost daily, even onwhat seemed the most mundane of occasions, oppressed Black people werecompelled to consider the most fundamental existentialquestions: Continue life during what would turn out to becenturies-long colonization and enslavement, of brutal, brutalizing andhumiliating gendered and racialized oppression? Or, seek“freedom” in death? Suffer despair until mad? Or, findresources for continued living through surreptitiously nurturedappreciations of the sacred and beautiful, of irony and tragic comedy,while cultivating hope and patience aided by discoveries and creationsof beauty and humaneness in the midst of the physical andsoul-distorting psychological brutalities of enforced impoverishmentsof conditions that were not in any way “mundane” living?Die at one’s own initiation? Or, capitulate to dehumanization?Or, struggle to find and sustain faith and hope for a better life, onearth as well as in the afterlife, through creativity and beauty inspeech, dance, and song while at work and rest; in thought andartistry; in finding and making truth and right; in seeking and doingjustice; in forging and sustaining relations of family and communitywhen such relations were largely prohibited; in rendering lifesacred?

For centuries, persons African and of African descent, forthemselves as well as for their associates and successors, havehad to ponder the most fundamental questions of existence as adirect consequence of their life-constraining, life-distortingencounters with various self-racializing and other-racializing peoplesof Europe, the Euro-Americas, and elsewhere. And in choosing to liveand endure, peoples African and of African descent havehad toforge, test out with their lives, and then refine and further live outexplicit strategies by which to avoid being broken by brutality andhumiliation and succumbing to fear, despair, or the soul-devouringobsession with vengeance. They havehad to share with theirassociates, and those succeeding them, their creative and sustaininglegacies for infusing life with spirit-lifting artfulness and theirarticulated ponderings and strategies for surviving, living, andenduring with hopedespite the circumstances. They havehad to philosophize, and to share their philosophizings, inorder to forge the cross-generational bonds of respectful,extended-family, community-sustaining love and mutuality without whichneither survival nor endurance would have been possible.

Indeed, endurance of gendered and racialized colonization,enslavement, and oppression that would be continued for centuriesrequired very compelling, sustaining, persuasive beliefs and nurturedinvestments in finding and creating soul-nurturing art andexperience-verified praxis-guiding thoughtfulness. These beliefs andaesthetic considerations had to be articulated and communicated forsharing, sometimes surreptitiously, in order that persons and peoplesendure. And enduring required that the brutalities and humiliations hadto be countered that were directed, first and foremost, at the definingcore of their verybeing—that is, at their foundationalnotions of themselves as persons and as distinctive, racializedpeoples—so as to bring about their cross-generational living ofsocial death (Patterson 1982). This particular persons did, throughout Africaand African Diasporas, and without either the guidance or sanction ofacademic Philosophy and the discipline’s most canonicalpractitioners even as some among the latter subjected African andAfrican-descended peoples to their ontological racism.

It has been instances of such compelled, articulated thoughtfulnessthat contemporary proponents of Africana philosophy have brought intothe discipline of academic Philosophy as the initial historic instancesof philosophizing constituting the new field. The identification andcareful exploration of and commentary on the forms and efficacies ofthis growing collection of works of thoughtful articulation andaesthetic expression are now principal forms of endeavor in Africanaphilosophy. The creation and expression of new articulations andexpressions of thoughtfulness by persons African and of Africandescent, and by other philosophers not African or of African descent,on these works as well as on old, continuing, or emergent issuespertinent to Africans and people of African descent make for otherforms of endeavor in Africana philosophy.

These efforts of recovery, exploration, commentary, and critiqueconstitute an ongoing project-of-projects with several agendas. A firstagenda involves, as just noted, the identification and recovery ofinstances and legacies of the ‘philosophizings born ofstruggles’. Another very important agenda is the identificationand recovery of philosophizings that were engaged in long before thecenturies-long struggles with peoples of Europe began. A third agendais to learn from the philosophizings the lessons of the considerationsthat governed or substantially conditioned the organization and livingof life in the various circumstances in which peoples of Africa forgedtheir evolutionary adaptations. Another agenda: to understand andappreciate fully those philosophizings that nurtured endurance in theface of brutalizing assaults on peoples’being in orderto learn from the life-affirming, very passionate intellectual andemotional endeavors of those among severely abused peoples who havebeen, and continue to be, those who work at gathering themselves, theirpeoples, and even those who have abused them into humane integrity,individually and collectively. It is to learn how and why it was and isthat from among peoples abused and degraded for centuries in conditionsof continuous terrorism there have been steady successions of personswho have spared substantial portions of the emotional and intellectualenergies they managed to preserve and cultivate, along with nurturedsenses of their sacred humanity, to devote to quests for freedom andjustice, hardly ever to quests for vengeance.

Yet another agenda is to compare the philosophizings of personsAfrican and of African descent intra-racially and inter-racially, as itwere—that is, to seek out the similarities and differences in thevarious instances and modes of thought and expression of personssituated in similar and different times and places in order to learnmore about the forms and agendas of human species-being as manifestedin philosophizing. An important consequence of pursuing this agendashould be significant contributions to inventories of thoughtfulnessand aesthetic expression in the storehouses of human civilizations,contributions to the enlargement and enrichment of canons of Philosophy,and contributions to revisions of histories and of historiography in thediscipline.

Still another agenda is to make of Africana philosophy a collectionof resources that inspire philosophizing, now and in the future, andthat guide such philosophizings by the best lessons found in thecollection, among them lessons in how to gain and sustain integrity ofbody and soul, of person, of womanhood and manhood, of childhood andyoung-adulthood, of family and community, of “racial” andcultural being, of belief in the sacred sanctity of truth, of justice,and offreedom through the exercise of faith andhope-sustaining, pragmatically focusedreasoning and creativeaestheticexpression in cross-generational conditions ofdehumanizing brutality. Among the lessons to be relearned: hownot to abuse persons and peoples; hownot torationalize abuse; hownot to live massive lies andcontradictions and lives of hypocrisy.

What follows are brief surveys of several historically contextualizeddevelopments of philosophizing now being explored as instances of thephilosophizing constitutive of the field of “Africanaphilosophy.” The survey is not meant to be exhaustive, but onethat provides examples and solicits additional contributions in orderto make the account more comprehensive and accurate.

3. Africana Philosophy: Continental Africa

The various peoples on the continent that came to be called“Africa” had constructed a variety of more or less complexsocieties of varying scale and scope many generations before fifteenthcentury encounters with acquisitive explorers and adventurers from thevarying configurations of polities, regions, cities, and states thathave been identified as Europe and from elsewhere. Several of theseancient societies—the kingdoms of Mali and Ghana and the royaldynasties of Kemet (Ancient Egypt), for example—had evolvedcomplex social strata that included persons of accomplished learning.Some of these persons were stationed in institutions devoted to theproduction and distribution of knowledge and creative expression and tothe preservation of that knowledge and expression in written andartistic works stored in libraries and other repositories and, in thecase of works of art, incorporated into the ontologically-structuredroutines of daily life. Others, in social orders in which advancedknowledge was produced and mediated via oral literatures andtraditions, were selected and trained to begriots: that is,persons with rigorously structured memories who thus became the livingrepositories, guardians, and mediators of a people’s and/or apolitical community’s genealogies and intellectual legacies,their keepers of wisdom. And in order to preserve shared, adaptive lifeacross generations in all of the various social orders, it was sociallynecessary to construct and maintain interpretive orderings of naturaland social realities, as well of creatively imagined origins andgenealogies and constructed histories, by which to meaningfully orderindividual and shared life.

The production of these interpretive and expressive orderings, theworking out of the norms by which to structure, justify, and legitimatethe interpretations so as to order personal and social life, were,indeed, “philosophical” endeavors: labors devotedto the production of successful, time-tested, enduring thought-praxisand aesthetic strategies by which to resolve emergent and recurrentchallenges to transgenerational survival and flourishing. These wereexperience-conditioned thoughtful means by which to provide knowledgeto guide the ordering of meaningful individual and shared lifetransmitted across generations past, present, and future. Such effortsare as old as the peoples now routinely referred to as“Africans.” And the efforts were not destroyed by theholocausts of imperialist colonization and domination, nor byracialized enslavement and apartheid-oppression, fostered by Europeansand others. Still, the philosophizing efforts were disrupted anddistorted to various degrees in many instances, were creativelyadaptive in many others.

For example, during twentieth century anti-colonial and decolonizingstruggles to regain freedom from the domination and authoritativejurisdiction of white racial supremacy over the lives, lands, andresources of African peoples, the disruptions and distortions wouldcompel reinvigorated and determined adaptive creativity on the part ofAfrican peoples who endeavored to recover and repair old, and/or toinvent new, agendas and strategies for living in keeping with their willto endure. There is a long history of efforts by scholars African andof African descent to reclaim Egypt from the intellectual annexation toEurope that was urged by Hegel in hisThe Philosophy ofHistory. It is still the case that many people throughout Europeand the United States regard Egypt as being in “the MiddleEast” rather than as constituting the northern portion of theAfrican continent. This costly mis-education of popular imaginationspersists, as well, in historical accounts of various areas of thought(though increasingly less so in historiography related to Africa). Thesystematic production of ignorance and distorted, unethical“knowledge” about the peoples of Continental Africa persistsin academic Philosophy, especially in the training of newprofessionals; in the writing of canonical histories of the discipline;and in the construction of disciplinary curricula though progressivechange has begun. Few in academic Philosophy not engaged in the work ofAfricana philosophy are likely to know of a long tradition ofscholarship contesting the claims of the Greco-Roman“origins” of Philosophy, an example of which is thecontroversial work by George G.M. James,Stolen Legacy (James 1954), inwhich he argues, as the title declares, that Greek thinkers“stole” Egyptian intellectual legacies that have since beenattributed erroneously to Greek thinkers as their creations.

A provocative and controversial argument, indeed. Still, widespreaddisciplinary ignorance regarding the histories of ancient peoples andcivilizations other than those stipulated as being ancestors ofEuropean White peoples is a direct and continuing consequence of racismin the formation, organization, and practices of communities ofdiscourse and scholarship and the development of racially segregatedidea-spaces, intellectual traditions and networks, and scholarlyorganizations throughout Europe and North America. For example, fewacademic philosophers and workers in other disciplines who are neitherAfrican nor of African descent are likely to know of the Associationfor the Study of Classical African Civilizations, an internationalorganization of scholars and intellectuals African and of Africandescent who are determined to “rescue and rehabilitate” thehistories, intellectual traditions, and wisdom philosophies of AncientAfrica. Thus, few academic philosophers are likely to know of thescholarship of various persons in the Association such as MaulanaKarenga (1986) and Jacob H. Carruthers (1984). Both scholars have contributedadditional research and scholarship to studies devoted to reclaimingEgyptian thought-traditions asAfrican traditions of thought.These scholars’ efforts and works are paradigmatic examples ofthe determined production and mediation of new knowledge of African andAfrican-descended peoples by African and African-descended, and other,scholars who have deliberately worked independently of the mainstreamorganizations of academic professionals in Philosophy and otherdisciplines.

With little to no evidence in much of the canonical literature andcurricula of academic Philosophy that Western philosophers have focusedattention on questions of historical relations between Egyptian andGreco-Roman thinkers, or on African thinkers and traditions of thought,a number of the pioneers of Africana philosophy have turned toindependent, often controversial figures and scholarly projects outsideof academic, professional Philosophy for their inspiration and forintellectual resources and strategies in taking on the challenges ofcreating intellectual spaces in academic Philosophy for “mattersAfrican.” A major resource and intellectual mentor continue to beworks by and the person of Cheikh Anta Diop, the intellectually daringand pioneering Senegalese scholar who, inThe African Origin ofCivilization: Myth or Reality, published in the early 1970s,argued for the reality of the African origin of human civilization. Diop had begun thechallenging work of reclaiming African heritages decades earlier byarguing in a dissertation submitted for the Ph.D. at the University ofParis that ancient Egyptian civilization was a black Africancivilization. His explorations in support of his claims have enormousimplications for revisions to histories of the origins of WesternPhilosophy. Similarly, Martin Bernal’s loudly and heatedlycontested multi-volumeBlack Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots ofClassical Civilization is by far the most widely read, andintensely debated, work in this vein to which many have turned.However, Bernal’s work, which acknowledges a long line of Africanand African-descended scholars who are his precursors, Diop included,has raised hardly a ripple in academic Philosophy. The discipline hasthus long been overdue for a spirited and disciplined criticalreconsideration of the possibilities and realities of informingGreco-Romanand African Egyptian contributions to thehistories of emergence and development of philosophical thought thathas been canonized as foundational to the genealogy of WesternPhilosophy. Africana philosophy has been forged as a novel context ofprovocations for such critical reconsiderations.

Meanwhile, for several decades academic philosophers in Africa, andelsewhere, have been involved in intense debates and discussions thathave prompted reconstructions of disciplinary enterprises of Philosophy(departments in educational institutions as well as national andinternational organizations of professional philosophers). The initialfocal question at the center of the debates and discussions was whetheror not there were proper instances of Philosophy in traditional (i.e.,pre-Modern) Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular. The publication in 1945of Placide Tempels’La Philosophie Bantoue triggeredmuch of the debate.

The historical context in which the debates and discussions emergedand in which they were waged was conditioned thoroughly by Europeancolonial domination and exploitation of African peoples rationalizedthrough rank-ordering racial characterizations. This rationalizing workwas aided significantly by the intellectual efforts of canonicalEuropean philosophers. David Hume, in a footnote in his “OfNational Characters,” philosophized about the “naturalinferiority” of Negroes to White people (Hume 1742) and was supported byImmanuel Kant (1764), who elaborated his own theory of inferior and superiorracial types in his writings on anthropology (Kant 1798). Since successivegenerations of European and Euro-American White people had beeneducated into widely-shared common senses of their racial superiorityto inferior Africans by such supposedly philosophically well-reasoned,science-verified, and theologically sanctioned teachings, the claimthat there were Africans capable of producing thought of the caliber ofPhilosophy was regarded by most of them as utterly preposterous.

At the core of the controversy was the pressing questionwhether African persons were fully and sufficiently human and capableintellectually in comparison to the model human par excellence: theman of Europe, the White Man, the avatar for all White peopleand for humanity proper, whose defining characteristics were capacitiesfor reasoning and articulate speech (logos). Consequently, theclaim ofBantu Philosophy made by Placide Tempels, a Belgiumpriest engaged in missionary work in the then-called Belgian Congo,that Bantu Africans (related ethnic groups identified by the dominantlanguage group, Bantu, spoken by the related groups) had an indigenousphilosophy was a serious challenge to the racialized philosophicalontology-cum-anthropology that undergirded colonial domination andexploitation. However, Tempels tempered the unsettling implications ofhis claim by also claiming that Bantu Africans did not have consciousknowledge of their philosophy. Rather, he claimed, it was he who wasable, using the tools at his disposal by virtue of his training inPhilosophy, to engage in a hermeneutic of the practices and language ofthe Bantu and extract the constitutive epistemology and axiologystructuring the operative, behavior-guiding philosophy at work in theirlinguistic practices and normative actions.

Nonetheless, the impact ofBantu Philosophy wassubstantial. Of particular consequence, the debates it prompted helpedto direct the attention of researchers and scholars in severaldisciplines (anthropology, ethnology, history, religion, philosophy) tothe identification and exploration of the articulate systems of thoughtof various groups of “traditional” Africans. A number ofEuropean scholars and researchers who had spent years studying andliving among various African peoples were pleased to find confirmed inTempels’ book their own positive assessments of Africans’thought-systems, social organization, and artistic creativity. Others,however, disagreed and challenged Tempels’ claims, in aparticular case criticizing him for mistaking an “impetusfor” philosophy in the language and behavior of Bantu-speakingAfricans as evidence of a developed capacity for articulating a properPhilosophy. This critic concluded that Bantu-Africans had not yetfulfilled the conceptual conditions for “taking off” intophilosophizing properly (Crahay 1965). Other scholars engaged in comparativeexplorations of thought-systems of various African peoples counteredthe criticism by providing accounts of a number of such systems thatgave clear evidence of their very capable and developedrationality (Forde 1954; Fortes 1965).

The subsequent decades of debates (mid 1940 through the 1980s)regarding the possibility of African philosophy and disclosures of thelong-developed rationality and humanity of African peoples weresignificant consequences for intellectual agendas and practices ofrevolutionary developments in political arenas manifested inanti-colonial struggles throughout the African continent, and inefforts to construct new political, economic, social, and culturalorders after the successes of those struggles. A significant numberamong new generations of African intellectuals—many of themeducated in institutions in Africa, many of which were administered bypersons of European descent; and more than a few of them educatedfurther in the most elite institutions of the colonizing “MotherCountry”—became radicalized in their opposition toracialized colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples andresources. A number of these engaged intellectuals regarded Tempels andsimilarly oriented European and Euro-American thinkers as allies intheir struggles against the dehumanizing rationalizations thatsupported European colonialism. Some regardedBantu Philosophyas a defense, even a vindication, of Africans as rational human beingsquite capable of managing their own lives and therefore capable ofindependence from colonial rule. Others, however, thoughtTempels’ claims, and similar offerings by others, were misguidedand misleading candidates for proper instances of philosophical thoughtby Africans. For these dissenters such candidates were really moreethnological studiesof African peoples than philosophicalarticulationsby them, and that their proponents were moremisguided in seeming to attribute unconscious, unwritten, and widelyshared putative philosophical systems to all of the persons in theparticular groups under discussion. These dissenters disparaged suchaccounts as “ethno-philosophy.”

African and African-descended intellectuals involved in andotherwise supporting anti-colonial liberation struggles andpost-colonial efforts to rehabilitate and further development newAfrican nation-states found in these raging debates intellectualweapons with which to reclaim, reconstruct, and redefine the histories,personhood, peoplehood, needs, and future possibilities of Africanpeoples. Life under exploitative, dehumanizing colonialism compelledintellectual and artistic engagements with prevailing conditions andspurred the nurturing of imaginative visions of possibilities ofliberation and of how liberation might be achieved; whether and howmodes and agendas of life before the holocausts might be recovered,restored, or adapted to new circumstances as thinkers and practitionersof the religious and theological, creative and expressive artists ofliterature, music, sculpture, dance, and painting all grappled with theprofound existential challenges of the loss of personal and communalintegrity through the violent imposition of the conflicts of Traditionand Modernity and the need for liberation and freedom.Twentieth-century struggles on the African continent have thus hadsignificant consequences for, and impacts on, creative intellectual andexpressive work in and with regard to continental Africa, and theAfrican Diaspora generally, in giving rise to widespread, prolific, andin many cases especially important articulations of social, political,ethical, and expressive aesthetic thought and feeling. Thesearticulations and expressions have become important object-lessons aswell as inspiring resources of agendas and critiques drawn on to forgedistinctive disciplinary enterprises of academic Philosophy. They havebecome, as well, the focus of informative critical thought for a numberof philosophers focusing on “matters African.”

For example, the Tempels-inspired debates over the possibilities forand nature of philosophizing by persons African became focused, for atime, on discussions of the nature and anthropological distributions ofmodes of rationality unique to philosophizing, discussions that quicklyprompted intense debates about the universality or relativity of“reason,” whether there were cultural (or racial or ethnic)differences in the nature or the exercise of reasoning, by personsAfrican in particular historical and cultural contexts in particular.Positions taken in these and other focal debates were developed fromthe resources of a variety of traditions and schools of academicPhilosophy and other disciplines, including analytic philosophy,phenomenology, hermeneutical, and existential philosophizings, variousmodes of social and political philosophy, and Afrocentrism.

Today there are a significant and still growing number of formallytrained African philosophers throughout the world who draw on andcontribute to the discipline and profession of Philosophy. Explicitdevelopments of discursive formations, within and beyond thediscipline, that are distinguished as being “African” havebeen unfolding through efforts by persons African, African-descended,and not of African descent to identify, reconstruct, and createtraditions and repositories of literate African thought and artisticexpression—oral, written, and in iconic forms of art—asforms of philosophizing. An important development has been the takingon for serious consideration the expressed articulate thought ofparticular persons past and present who were and are without formaltraining or degrees, in academic Philosophy especially, but who haveengaged in and articulated more or less systematic reflections onvarious aspects of life, and the inclusion of instances and traditionsof such expressed articulate thought in revised and new canons ofAfrican philosophical thought. An important leading example of effortsalong these lines has been the groundbreaking work of deceased Kenyanphilosopher H. Odera Oruka on the philosophical thought of traditionalAfrican sages. Engaging in actual field work in Kenya, Orukainterviewed and conversed with several locally recognized and respectedsages and amassed a substantial body of transcribed, critically edited,and now published texts that are the focus of critical studies as wellas motivations for more refined work of the same kind in numerousplaces on the African continent. Other philosophers, a number of themfrom other countries and not of African descent, have taken upOruka’s lead and continue to explore the articulate thought ofindigenous sages while incorporating the sages’ articulationsinto their research, scholarship, and course-offerings. “Sagephilosophy” has thus become a subfield of energetic work inAfricana philosophy in continental Africa (Oruka 1990b).

The Tempels-inspired debates over whether African orAfrican-descended peoples have philosophies or can philosophize havebeen resolved—or are no longer taken seriously—and givenway to explorations of other concerns. Both the anti-colonial strugglesand the challenges of sustaining post-colonial successes and resolvingsetbacks and failures have prompted much academic philosophizing. Theevidence is the development of programs of study leading to advancedand terminal degrees in Philosophy with strong emphasis, in a number ofinstances, on African philosophy in a significant number ofinstitutions of higher education in several countries (Kenya, Nigeria,Peoples Republic of Congo, Ivory Coast, Republic of Benin, Senegal,South Africa); the appearance of a variety of journals and otherpublished (and unpublished) philosophical writings and other modes ofarticulate expression (literary works, especially); the development ofnational organizations (in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and elsewhere)and international organizations (the Inter-African Council ofPhilosophy and the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association, the latter withheadquarters in Cairo, Egypt, with members from throughout NorthAfrica, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, Europe, and elsewhere) ofprofessional philosophers and other knowledge-workers; and theorganization of national, regional, and international conferencesdevoted to explorations of topics and issues explicitly characterizedas philosophical.

The continuing maturation of these developments is evident in theemergence of different philosophical orientations, agendas, and focithat have, in turn, prompted several thinkers to endeavor to developcritical, metaphilosophical overviews of developing schools or trendsthat account for their emergence and implications, their similaritiesand differences. H. Odera Oruka (1990a) provided one such overview anddistinguished what he termed four “currents” in Africanphilosophy. One of these, already mentioned, he joined others inlabeling and characterizing asethno-philosophy: that is,second-order works that purport to identify and engage in an exegesisof the philosophical schemes and significances of articulated thoughtsand expressions, acts, and modes of behavior shared by and thuscharacteristic of particular African ethnic groups. Another current,previously mentioned as having been initiated by Oruka, he termedphilosophic sagacity to distinguish what he regarded as therigorous and critically reflective thought of independent-mindedindigenous thinkers who were not formally educated in modern schools.Nationalist-ideological philosophy for Oruka was constitutedby the articulations of persons actively engaged in political life,especially those who led or otherwise contributed substantially tostruggles for African independence and sought to articulate conceptionsby which to create new, liberatory social and political orders. Hisdesignation for a fourth current,professionalphilosophy, was reserved for work by academically trainedprofessional teachers and scholars of academic Philosophy and theirstudents.

Other nuanced characterizations and examinations of trends inphilosophizing on the African continent have been developed. O. Nkombeand Alphonse J. Smet (1978) identified anideological trend, quitesimilar in characterization to Oruka’s“nationalist-ideological current,” that includes severalvery rich lines of articulate socio-political thought devoted toreconstructing the political and cultural situations of African peoplesthat were consequences of European imperialism, enslavement, andcolonization: African personality; Pan-Africanism; Négritude;African humanism; African socialism; scientific socialism;Consciencism; and African “authenticity.” A second trend,thetraditionalist, includes efforts that are quite similar toOruka’s sage philosophy in that the efforts are focused onidentifying philosophizing practices by traditional Africa thinkers,exploring the philosophical aspects of manifestations of thesepractices, and examining just how these practices resulted in thedevelopment of repositories of wisdom and esoteric knowledge. Nkombeand Smet identified a third trend: the intellectual orientations andpractices ofcritical thinkers characterized by thesethinkers’ critiques of the projects of persons grouped in theideological andtraditionalist trends structuringtheir critiques by norms and strategies drawn from familiarLeft-critical (Marxist), Liberal Democratic, and creativeappropriations of other traditions of European thought. Thinkers in thecritical group applied the label“ethno-philosophy” to a number of the instances of thoughtin thetraditionalist trend to set apart the latter modes ofthought, as previously noted, as more akin to ethnology than properphilosophizing. Finally, Nkombe and Smet labeled a fourth grouping thesynthetic trend, one characterized by the use of philosophicalhermeneutics to explore issues and to examine new problems emerging inAfrican contexts.

Still other scholars have attributed somewhat differentcharacterizations to these and other traditions or modes ofphilosophizing in Africa and, importantly, identified newerdevelopments. An example of the latter is the pathsettingmetaphilosophical and anthologizing work of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, thedeceased philosopher from Nigeria who pioneered bringing into severalidea-spaces and discursive communities of academic Philosophy in theUnited States and Africa the interdisciplinary writings of contemporaryscholars and artists from across Africa, African Diasporas, and othercountries all of whom are significant contributors topostcolonial philosophizings. These are critical explorationsof the challenges and opportunities facing Africans and people ofAfrican descent in various national and transnational situationsdefined by configurations of conditionsafter colonialism inwhich political liberation has not ended the suffering of Africanpeoples, resolved long-running problems of individual and socialidentity, or settled questions regarding the most appropriate relationsof individuals to communities; of appropriate roles andresponsibilities of women and men and their relations to one another;of justice and equity after centuries of injustice and dehumanization;or of the most appropriate terms on which to order social and politicallife (Eze 1997).

The heuristic value of the concept ofpostcolonial is not tobe underappreciated, for the various instances in which the successesof defeating the classical, directly administered colonial ventures inAfrica of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been compromisedby situations of indirect rule, or neocolonialism, effected througheconomic control of the new African nation-states by Western Europeanand U.S. American transnational capitalist enterprises andmultinational organizations and agencies supposedly providing adviceand aid. These compromises must be fully appreciated in order tounderstand the prospects for full national independence andself-determination in the areas of economic, political, social, andcultural life generally. Of decisive issue is on what terms, via whichstrategies, African countries will contend with emergent challenges,some of which are of magnitudes and character neither encountered norimaginable by “traditional” African thinkers, or, even, bycontemporary thinkers. Foremost are the challenges from the scourge ofHIV AIDS, which is proving to have as much impact demographically,thus in other areas of life, as were depletions of populations duringthe centuries of export enslavement though with consequentialdifferential impacts on age groups. Likewise challenging are questionsof the priority and efficacy of armed struggle and the terms ofengagement in light of recent and ongoing histories of such ventureson the African continent, too many of which involve conscriptingchildren into armies as armed warriors. Still other challenges: theterms and practices of political governance, at the level of the stateespecially, as many African nations struggle against collapse ordebilitating dysfunction due to corruption, crippling economicexploitation, massive underdevelopment of human capital—offemales especially—scarcities of food and other vital resources,and due to campaigns of genocide as ethnic affirmations coupled withethnic denunciations ‘go imperial’.

Scholarly efforts to develop informative and criticalmetaphilosophical overviews of African philosophical trends, currents,and schools of thought, in part to forge new conceptions through whichto take up these and other pressing challenges, are confirmation ofthe rich diversity of formal philosophizing by academic philosophersand other intellectuals and artists that emerged on the Africancontinent during recent decades, and of the continuing maturation oftheir efforts. A significant number of these intellectual workers,philosophers among them, have cultivated international relationshipswith other scholars and artists and their organizations; and some ofthem have spent several years in, or even relocated to, the UnitedStates, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, and other countriesfor both formal education and to work in institutions of highereducation. In the process of doing so many have also developed theprofessional relations, practices, and levels of accomplishment andrecognition that have led to the publication of works that arecontinuing to attract wider critical attention in various discursivecommunities and are being added to course and seminar readings. Thesemovements, relocations, cultivations of transnational relationships,and expansion of the literature of published works have enriched thedevelopment of new idea-spaces, the circulation of ideas, theformation of new discursive communities, and thereby contributedsubstantially to the development of Africana philosophy. There are nowhistories of African philosophy and major collections of writings inthe subfield by professional African, African-descended, and otherphilosophers published by major, transnational publishing firmscovering a still-expanding list of subject-matters organized, in manyinstances, by themes long established in academic Philosophy:historical studies; issues of methodology, logic, epistemology,metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics; philosophy of religion; politicaland social philosophy (Hallen 2009; Kwame 1995; Mosley 1995; Wiredu2004). In several noteworthy instances, these philosophizings areconducted by way of deliberate explorations of articulations of thesettled thought structuring the life-worlds of particular ethnicgroups. Such explorations are being conducted in increasing numbersand, in the process, are rehabilitating and giving new meaning andheuristic direction to the once disparaged notion of“ethno-philosophy” by establishing the legitimacy andresourcefulness of culturally and ethnologically contextualizedstudies of articulated thought. As well, such studies will proveimportant for comparative studies of philosophizing (Bell2002). Hopefully, these efforts will motivate similar studies in otherparts of the world, contribute to comparative studies that willenhance our understandings of philosophizing globally, and curtailpractices of making false generalizations in some modes ofphilosophical discourse, as, for example, characterizing thethought-endeavors of canonical Greek and European thinkers as being“universal” in their defining features or salience whilebeing silent about the racial/ethnic, cultural, and genderedcharacteristics of the endeavors on the pretext that such matters areof no consequence for the thinkers’“philosophy.”

4. African Philosophy: Contributions

As an ongoing project-of-projects, it would be unwise to attempt acomprehensive and definitive catalog and assessment of the thematicfoci across the full range of articulations and discussions still beinggathered and explored under the heading of “Africanphilosophy” even as new discussions are emerging. Still, a numberof developments are worth noting.

Several canonical subfields of academic philosophical discoursesstand to be enriched by the inclusion of explorations ofsubject-matters within African contexts. As already noted, historicalaccounts of “Philosophy,” in the so-called“West” especially, are being reconsidered in light ofcritical explorations of more recently disclosed relations between andamong peoples and places in Africa and “the West” orEurope—among Greece, Rome, and Egypt definitely—and in light offurther explorations of the impact of such relations on even canonicalthinkers in Europe. In general, the discussion of “theorigin of philosophy” in Ancient Greece must be replaced bycomparative explorations of the emergence of philosophizing in varioussettings around planet earth, including pre-colonial North Africa,Ethiopia (home of Zera Yacob and Walda Heyat, two seventeenth centuryphilosophers (Sumner 1976–78)), and places on the continent in which Arabic was aprincipal language.

As well, new questions should be posed and explored, among these thefollowing: How are canonical figures and subject-matters of theEuropean Enlightenments to be understood in light of the extensiveinvolvements of European nation-states—and of canonicalfigures—in colonial imperialism and the enslavement of Africanpeoples? How did the centuries-long institutionalization of enslavementaffect the philosophizing of various European thinkers with regard tonotions offreedom, theperson, thecitizen,justice, of manhood and womanhood? What was the impact oncanonical European thinkers of the presence among them of thearticulated thought and the persons of such figures as Anton WilhelmAmo (c. 1703–1758), a native of Ghana who, at age three, wastransported to the Netherlands to be educated and baptized in keepingwith colonial Dutch efforts to Christianize Africans? Amo settled inGermany and became a highly educated and influentialteacher-philosopher. As more research and scholarship on such figuresare completed, understandings of eighteenth century intellectualcommunities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe will have to be revised;so, too, notions of the meanings and influences of notions ofrace and their impacts on intellectual productions as well ason social life.

Work in Africana philosophy in general, and African philosophy inparticular, compels comparative studies. No longer can it be presumed,certainly not taken for granted, that many canonical notions, evenso-called “perennial” or “universal” issues,have the salience or global significance these issues have long beenassumed to have. Conceptions of personhood in several indigenousAfrican schemes of thought (of Akan and Yoruba peoples, for example)invite comparisons and rethinking of notions of personhood longsanctioned in some legacies of Western European and North Americanphilosophizing. For example, Kwasi Wiredu (1987) of Ghana has arguedpersuasively that in the indigenous conceptual-ontological schemes ofthe Akan it would not be possible, in the normal course of matters, togenerate the “mind-body problem” so central to thephilosophizing of René Descartes. Explorations of matters oflogic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics in Akan andother schemes of thought will illuminate the extent to which WesternEuropean and North American inventories of philosophical“problems” will have to be revised. Likewise forexplorations in the areas of religion, aesthetics, politics, and themeaning of social life.

While there are near daunting challenges being faced by Africanpeoples and other citizens of the continent’s nation-states thatcompel problem-solving philosophizing for enhanced living, there are,too, example-lessons of such engaged philosophizing that warrant closeand appreciative study. One such example is the transformation underway in South Africa from the White Racial Supremacy of racialapartheid to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy. A crucial factorconditioning the transformation has been the soul-wrenching work ofthe Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which sponsored publichearings during which victims of the evils of apartheid, andperpetrators of the evils, disclosed the truths of their suffering andof their dehumanizing aggression, respectively. Grounding premises ofthe TRC project were that disclosures of thetruths ofsuffering and of abuse were necessary in order toachieverestorative justice, not just compensatory orretributive justice; and that restorative justice is in keeping withphilosophical notions such asubuntu—love, generosity,forgiveness—that are foundational to communal life at its best,thus are essential to the rehabilitative healing that must be livedthrough in forging new persons for a new and democratic South Africa(Bell 2002, Chapter 5, “African Moral Philosophy II: Truth andReconciliation,” pp. 85–107). Here, then, a case-study inthe articulation and testing out of a new conception of justice, ofethics more generally, in an African context, a case-study that shouldalready be substantively instructive. Such comparative work inacademic Philosophy that engages seriously and respectfullyphilosophical articulations of African and African-descendant thinkinghas only just begun…

5. Africana Philosophy: The African Diaspora

The centuries of enslaving-relocations of millions of Africanpeoples to the New Worlds of colonies-cum-nation-statescreated by European and Euro-American settler-colonists beginning inthe sixteenth century, and the subsequent centuries-long continuationsof descendants of these African peoples in, and migrations of othersto, these locales, occasioned the formation ofnew peoples ofAfrican descent in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere.Individuals and groupings of these peoples developed and perpetuatedshared creative responses to the impositions of various forms ofsystematized racialized oppression and class exploitation motivated andrationalized by notions of White Racial Supremacy, and further complicated byconsiderations of sexuality and gender. In the New Worlds, as hadbecome the case in Africa after the colonizing and enslaving incursionsof acquisitive peoples from Europe and the Arabian peninsula, therecurrent and decisive foci of life in the racialized crucibles werethe struggles to endure while resolving mind- and soul-rending tensionsthat threatened and otherwise conditioned self- and community-formationand living.

There were several major sources of these tensions. One, the traumasof theradical dislocations experienced by themillions of persons kidnapped and purchased into relocation toenslavement through terrifying transport across thousands of miles ofocean during which many thousands died. Another, the soul andpsyche-taxing ambiguities and ambivalences of being compelled to becomeand be, in important senses, both New World “African”and “American,” “Canadian,”“Brazilian,” “Puerto Rican,”“Trinidadian,” “Haitian,”“Jamaican,” “French,” “British,”etc., while, as slaves, being denied full access to the resources ofthe prevailing meanings and practical realizations of the definingidentities of the most highly valued anthropological categorizationsand social positions in the socio-political orders of the new statesand locales as well as to the material resources crucial for realizinglives of well-beingand denied full retention of and access tothe self-and community-defining resources of their natal cultures.

How the various African-descendant persons and communities resolvedthese tensions conditioned the formation of new identities,life-agendas, and praxes for living. Fundamental were the recurrent andvaried quests tosurvive andendure. With whateversuccess there followed other fundamental recurrent and variedendeavors. Among themost compelling were quests to define andsecurefreedom, quests that were profoundly affected by theabsence of any recourse to protections of law and by severe limitationsimposed on Black peoples’ participation in what has come to becalled “the public sphere.” Participation in this spherewith protection of laws—for example, to articulate one’scase for impartial and fair recognition and respect as a human being,particularly as a woman or man of a despised race—was hardly everallowed in slave-holding polities, and very infrequently even inlocales where slavery had been abolished as invidious discriminationagainst persons of African descent continued. When speaking out orotherwise expressing oneself on one’s or one’speople’s behalf was prohibited or strenuously circumscribed andcould be punished by beatings, imprisonment, or death with no legalprotection, the tensions were indeed wretched.

The variety of reasons for and means of coping in suchcircumstances, and the variety of conceptions of life to be lived andof freedom to be achieved in the various New World locales, wereapproached differently by activist thinkers of African descent,conditioned by adaptive continuations—more or less—of someOld World African cultural agendas and practices. The efforts gave rise todevelopments of different traditions of thought guiding the formationand pursuit of what would become, over time, a variety of agendas,foci, objectives, and strategies of intellectual and practicalengagement. It is these variegated, historically conditioned, sociallygrounded, imperatives-driven thought and praxis complexes, immersed inand growing out of concerns and struggles for survival, endurance, andhuman dignity in freedom, that are being recovered and studied as theearliest instances of philosophizing by diasporic persons of Africandescent and form the bases of the unfolding of several subfields ofAfricana philosophy.

6. African American Philosophizings Born of Struggles

The United States of America is one of several New World diasporiccontexts of focus for these recovery and study efforts that are beingconducted under the heading of “African Americanphilosophy.” What follows is a historically contextualizeddiscussion of several instances of the emergence ofphilosophizingsborn of struggles. However, it would be an ethical travesty and acase of epistemological presentist imperialism to require thatthoughtful, critically reflective articulations by African Americansconsidered as instances of philosophizing worthy of the criticalattention of professional philosophers first meet rigorous, formalstandards for “right reasoning” settled on by professionalsin the discipline during the late twentieth and early twenty-firstcenturies. For the contexts in which folks of African descent werecompelled to reflect on and reason about their first-order livedexperiences were substantially conditioned by the agendas and sociallogics of projects of White Racial Supremacy and constitutive invidiousanthropologies of raciality, ethnicity, and gender, not agendasgoverned by the academic logics of abstract formal reasoning. Thepressing exigencies of daily, cross-generation life under racializedenslavement and oppression were what compelled reflectivethoughtfulness, not leisured, abstractive speculation. Again, what hasto be witnessed and appreciated across the historical and hermeneuticaldistances of centuries of history and life-world experiences structuredby contemporary personal and social freedoms are the natures of thelived experiences and situations of those whose articulations, whosephilosophizings, are considered as having beenborn ofstruggles.

Much psychic energy had to be expended by New World African andAfrican-descended peoples contending with the institutionalization oftheir enslavement and oppression otherwise that was racialized,thereby naturalized, and thoroughly sanctioned and justified by everyenterprise of deliberate, normative thought and aestheticexpression—law, science, theology, religion, philosophy,aesthetics, and secular “common sense.” (For a historicalaccount of African-American life in the United States see Franklin andMoss, Jr. 2000.) In each case a primary resource was the foundationalmetaphysical and ontological “unit idea” of a hierarchicalGreat Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1964) on which each race was believed tohave a fixed and determining place. Accordingly, aslivingproperty it was encumbered on enslaved Africans andtheir descendants to live so as to make good on the investments intheir purchase and maintenance by engaging in productive labor,without compensation, and to endure and reproduceasontological slaves in order to sustain and justify theinstitution of their imprisonment. According to this supposedlydivinely sanctioned philosophical anthropology, African andAfrican-descended children, women, and men were defined asconstituting a category of being to which none of the normative moraland ethical notions and principles governing civilized lifeapplied. Pressed into an ethically null category, they were compelledto live lives ofsocial death stripped of defining webs of ennobling meaningconstituted by narratives of previous histories, renewing presents, andimagined and anticipated futures of flourishing, cross-generationalcontinuation.

On the whole, they did not succumb to the requirement to becomesocially dead, certainly not completely, though many thousands did.Always there were those who cultivated strengths of body,mind, soul, and spirit and exerted these in defense of the preservationof senses of themselves and of their peoples, of their“race,” as having worth beyond the definitions andvaluations set on them by rationalizations of institutionalizedenslavement and oppression.Always there were those who, inthe cracks, crevices, and severely limited spaces of slave life andconstricted freedom, preserved and shared fading memories of lives ofbeauty and integrity before the holocaust; who found, created, andrenewed nurturings of imaginings of better life to come throughmusic-making, dancing, and creative expression in the artful fashioningand use of items of material culture, and in the communal and personalrelations, secular and spiritual, that the slaves formed, sustained,and passed on.

Nurtured by these efforts, they resisted the imposition ofontological death and nurtured others in resisting. They reflected ontheir existence and the conditions thereof; conceived of and put intopractice ways to endure without succumbing, ways to struggle againstenslavement and the curtailment otherwise of their lives andaspirations; and conceived and acted on ways to escape. They studiedcarefully their enslavers and oppressors and assessed the moralsignificance of all aspects of the lives enslavers and oppressors ledand determined how they, though enslaved and despised, must livedifferently so as not to follow their oppressors and enslavers on pathsto moral depravity. They conceived of other matters, including theterms and conditions of freedom and justice; of better terms andconditions of existence and of personal and social identities; of howto resist and endure while creating things of beauty; how to love inspite of their situations; conceived of their very nature as livingbeings …

7. 1600–1860

These considerations took various forms within and across thecenturies. More than a few African and African-descendant personswould engage in concerted intellectual and practical actions directed againstthe enterprise of enslavement in all of its forms. Their considerationsand articulations can be found in various repositories ofphilosophizings: in the lyrics and rhythmic structures and timings ofvarious genres of music-making; in newspaper writings and pamphlets;in poetry and other modes of creative writing; in letters; in slavenarratives and autobiographies; in the legacies and documentaryhistories of institutions, those of Black churches and churchdenominations especially; in those of women’s and men’sservice organizations; in the documentary histories of conventions andconvention movements; etc. For from the earliest instances of theenslavement of Africans in the colonies in the 1600s and continuingthrough the 1800–1865 Civil War between forces of the Union ofNorth and East and forces of the Confederacy of the South, militantagitation for the abolition of slavery was a prominent endeavor amongpersons of color both “free” and enslaved, as were effortsto achieve greater respect and freedom for Black women from maledomination and oppression and from sexual exploitation as well as fromracism. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), a young, lettered house-slavein Boston, Massachusetts, wrote poems “on various subjects,religious and moral,” in one of which she expounded on thesignificance of “Being Brought from Africa to America” andextolled Christians to remember that though Negroes be “black asCain,” they, too, can be “refin’d and join th’angelic train” (Wheatley [1773] 1997). Aside fromWheatley’s highly polished and thoughtfully probing poetry,thefact that she had penned the verses prompted suchdisbelief that her master, and a prominent group of White men of thecity, including the governor and lieutenant governor of the state,felt compelled to write letters to the publisher and the readingpublic to attest that Wheatley had mastered the English language andwas, indeed, the author of the verses. Lettered articulation, in highverse no less, was a significant counter to claims of Negroinferiority, hence the need for legitimation of Wheatley’swritings by White persons of significant standing in order for thosewritings to enter a race- and gender-constricted literary publicsphere.

Wheatley was the first in what would become a long and continuingline of enslaved persons of African descent in the United States whotook up creative and other genres of writing as a means for engaging inresisting oppression and for reclaiming and exercising their humanitythrough thoughtful articulation. Slaves’ narrations of thestories of their lives and of the conditions of enslavement and of theiraspirations and quests for freedom, constitute an extraordinarily richbody of literature to be studied forphilosophizings born ofstruggles. Olaudah Equiano’sThe Interesting Narrativeof the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Writtenby Himself (1789) is but one example of such narratives. Considercarefully Equiano’s recounting having to wrestle with and reclaimhis sense of self, even his name, after having been stolen into slaveryas a child, transported to the New World, and being renamed“Gustavus Vassa.” A profound and consequential instance ofexistential philosophizing, Equiano’sNarrative, one that discloses the significance of acompelled struggle to reclaim and exercise a person’s right, andpower, of identification of self and social being…

For a Negro, slave or free, to indulge in the articulation ofcritical reflections on the nature of their being and the conditions oftheir life was a bold contradiction of prevailing characterizations ofAfrican peoples and their descendants in the racialized ontologies ofWhite Racial Supremacy, and a dangerous threat to the enterprise. DavidWalker (1785–1830) exemplified the threat. He sent shockwaves of fearacross the slaveholding South, especially, with the publication andwide distribution of hisAppeal in Four Articles; Together with aPreamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular andVery Expressly, to Those of the United States of America (1829) inwhich he advocated forcefully that Coloured people rise up in armedstruggle against their oppressors. Moreover, in articulating hisprovocative appeal in a written document, Walker employed with greatskill and impact a strategic use of rhetoric to gain leverage in thepublic sphere: while ostensibly directing theAppeal to anaudience of “Coloured Citizens” almost none of whom wereregarded as citizens and very few of whom, among those enslavedcertainly, could read and, if they could, would have been prohibitedfrom getting their hands and minds on such an appeal, in truth was alsodirected at White slaveowners and oppressors. This strategy wouldbecome a staple in the arsenal of discursive strategies Black folks woulduse to engage in the work of articulating their considerations andadvocating for life-enhancing changes.

Frederick Douglass (1817–1895), a passionate and indefatigableopponent of enslavement, the institution of slavery, and of thesubordination of women (“What Are the Colored People Doing forThemselves?” 1848; “Prejudice Not Natural,” 1849;“The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,”1854), would use the strategy with superbly nuanced skill. Anespecially brilliant thinker and prolific writer, he was alsobrilliant in his oppositional eristic engagements over theconstitutional, biblical, and ethnological justifications of Negroinferiority and enslavement and over a wide range of other subjects,including the compelling need for appropriate education (directed atpreparing the formerly enslaved for productive, economicallyself-sustaining labor), good character, and political equality.Douglass was an astute critical thinker and speech-maker, and was aforemost thinker with regard to such matters as the constitutionalityof slavery, of the meanings offreedom andjustice,and of the implications of both for enslaved, free, and freed Negroes(Douglass 1845). Maria Stewart (1803–1879), likewise committedto freedom and justice for Black people, was a pioneering feminist inspeaking out publicly (“Religion and the Pure Principles ofMorality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build,” 1831) andthus took advantage of cracks in the public sphere to advance thecause for abolition and the liberation of women (Stewart1831). Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree, 1797–1883) was alegendary unlettered but unnervingly bodacious itinerant intellectualprovocateur who agitated for ending enslavement and the subordinationof women (“Woman’s Rights,” 1851). On one celebratedoccasion, Truth walked uninvited into a Women’s RightsConvention of assembled White people, sat down on the edge of thespeakers’ stage until she simply had to be recognized, and thendelivered her now famous “Ar’n’t I a Woman?”speech (Truth 1851).

If slavery were abolished, what did the vocal Negro advocates thinkwould be the most appropriate modes and ends of life for Negro men andwomen?

For some it would or should involveassimilation, that is,processes by which one racial and/or ethnic group is absorbed byanother, for some physically as well as socio-culturally, with onegroup relinquishing its own racial and/or ethnic culturaldistinctiveness to take on the defining life-world character andpractices of another. For early African American assimilationists thiswould have meant accepting as appropriate and sufficient goals forAfrican American life the country’s pronounced cultural, social,political, and economic ideals—though generally withoutendorsements of the superiority of the White race—as proof oftheir humaneness and of their having “risen” from acondition of “savagery” to having become“civilized,” particularly by having becomeChristianized.

However, particular care must be taken in characterizing an engagedthinker’s commitments and aspirations as“assimilationist.” While appropriate and useful in someinstances, in others the label is often misused or misplaced, forvarious thinkers were quite nuanced in articulating their positions onvarious matters: for example, in advocating assimilation of prevailingeconomic ideas, principles, and practices while advocating social,cultural, and political independence for Black people. Douglass, oneof the most well-known of African American cultural and politicalassimilationists, is an instructive example. He was not an advocate ofthe assimilation of the Negro race into the White race; rather, hepreferred, at the extreme, the assimilation of all distinct races intoa single, blended race, so to speak, so that there would no longer bedistinct races in which aspirations for super-ordination andsubordination could be invested. Similar views on cultural andeconomic assimilation were articulated by T. Thomas Fortune(1856–1928), the journalist and advocate of Black unionizing andpolitical independence (“Political Independence of theNegro,” 1884), and by the radical abolitionist Henry HighlandGarnet (1815–1881), who at one point was convinced that“This western world is destined to be filled with a mixedrace” (“The Past and the Present Condition and theDestiny of the Colored Race,” (1848; 1996, p. 200), emphasis inthe original).

On the other hand, there were Negro women and men of theseventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of enslavement forwhom the prospect of assimilating with White people in any fashion oron any terms was to be firmly rejected. Such sentiments were especiallyprominent during the decades leading up to the Civil War as conditionsbecame even more constraining for supposedly free-born and freedpersonswith the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law that stripped awayany legal protection for escaped and former slaves who made it to freestates by declaring it legal for any White person to apprehend anyNegro who could not document their free status and return the person toenslavement. Garnet, responding to the circumstances the law created,is representative of those Black folks who became advocates of theemigration of Negro people to Africa. He was the founder of the AfricanCivilization Society, an organization that promoted emigration ofAmerican Negroes to Africa in keeping with a more positive agenda thanwas the case with the American Colonization Society, which wasorganized by White people to foster the relocation of troublesomeabolitionist free Negro people to Liberia, the colony founded withfederal support by White Americans intent on preserving the institutionof slavery and White Racial Supremacy.

Emigrationist considerations and projects thus becameprominent ventures during this period, advocated with persuasive forceby other very able activist thinkers, among them Edward Blyden(1832–1912), James T. Holly (1829–1911), and Martin Delany(1812–1883). Delany’sThe Condition, Elevation,Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the UnitedStates (1852) was an especially well-reasoned critique of notionsofcitizen prevailing in the United States and a detailing ofconditions affecting Colored people, including, in his estimation,their overreliance on “moral theorizing” and not enough onpragmatic political reasoning informed by comparative studies of thehistories of oppression of other “nations” withinnation-states dominated by an antagonistic national (i.e., racial)group (Delany 1852; 2004). Based on his analysis, Delany was convincedthat people of color could not enjoy lives as full citizens with fullrespect and rights in the United States. Hence, he reasoned, people ofcolor should leave the country for South America—though later hewould advocate emigrating to Africa—to establish their ownindependent nation-state. (However, when the Civil War erupted, Delanywas persuaded by Frederick Douglass, his former colleague inpublishingThe North Star newspaper, to join other Black menin forming a regiment to aid the Union forces in defeating theConfederate Army and the South’s agenda for the continuation ofthe enslavement and oppression of Black people.)

It is important to note, however, that emigrationists were oftenmotivated not only by desires to escape the various modes andintensities of disrespect for their racial being and humanity byrelocating to Africa, in particular, but also in order to fulfillaspirations to engage in missionary work among native peoples on thatcontinent in order to “raise” them from“savagery” to “civilization” through educationand Christianization. Edward Blyden, for example, spent a large portionof his life engaged in educational and missionary work in Liberia.James T. Holly, who advocated emigration to, and himself subsequentlysettled in, Haiti and authored a lengthy work devoted to“defending the inherent capabilities of the Negro race, forself-government and civilized progress” (A Vindication of theCapacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and CivilizedProgress, 1857), was a clergyman. So, too, was the indomitableQueen’s College of Cambridge University-educated AlexanderCrummell (1819–1898), who devoted twenty years of his life toeducational and missionary work in Liberia and Sierra Leone followed byyears of pastoral work in the United States. Crummell (“TheRelations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa,”1860; “The Race Problem in America,” 1888) was a formidableand very articulate thinker, author, speechmaker, and organizer withcommanding presence. He was a principal founder of the American NegroAcademy (1897–1924), a gathering of astute minds and engaged Negro mendevoted to analyzing the conditions of life of Negroes in the UnitedStates, to determining how best to protect them from the continuingravages of centuries of enslavement, and to determining how best todevelop the race to achieve political and social equality and economicjustice.

Worthy of critical exploration in the case of these figures: theextent to which, and on what terms, each of them embraced (assimilated)prevailing European and Euro-American conceptions ofcivilization and the processes and conditions, states ofcharacter in particular, by which a person or people could be said tobe “civilized.” It is apparent in their writings and thelogic of their missionary work, in other lands as well as within theUnited States, that neither figure accepted the long-prevailingarguments that the Negro race wasinherently and ineradicablyinferior. To the contrary, close scrutiny of their articulations willreveal that each was convinced that the civilizational inferiority ofcontinental Africans, and of the ignorant, brutally constrained Negroesof deficient character in the United States, was due to conditions ofdeprivation fostered by the enslavement and racism perpetrated by Whitepeople. At the core of the missionary work of these men, and of many oftheir female and male contemporaries and successors, including personswho worked at “uplifting” enslaved and freedpersons in theUnited States, was a principled and dedicated commitment towell-reasoned and forcefully articulated belief in the God-givenhumanity and inherent worth of persons of the Negro race, and ferventand equally dedicated belief in the ameliorative and progressivebenefits of education and racial independence. And each of theseseminal figures took himself or herself as a living example of theactualization of the potentiality for substantial, qualitativedevelopment and advancement by Negroes, contrary to thecharacterizations of the race by those who rationalized and otherwisesought to justify enslavement and constrictions of the range ofpossibilities for Negro development. The articulations of a significantnumber of such persons have been preserved in the vast body of writingscontending with enslavement, with aspirations and quests for freedomand justice, with what a constitutionally democratic and multiracialUnited States of Americaought to be in order to includeColoured people as full citizens and fully respected human beings.Theirs are, indeed,philosophizings born of struggles.

8. 1860–1915

Beyond question, one of the particularly acute axial periods ofhistory for people of African descent in the United States of Americawas that of the half-decade of civil war (1860–1865) continued throughensuing years of Reconstruction-struggles between White proponents of aculture of aspiring aristocratic genteel racial supremacy and apolitical economy devoted to developing industrial and financecapitalism in the North and East of the country who also wanted to preservethe federated union of states, and White proponents of a regionalcivilization devoted to a decidedly pronounced and violentlyaristocratic Southern hegemonic White Racial Supremacy based on apolitical economy of agrarian capitalism supported by enslaved Negrolabor, proponents who forged a Confederacy out of states that secededfrom the Union in order to preserve their distinctive civilizationalproject. For a great many Black people, the hope was that the Unionforces would prevail in the war, the institution of slavery would beabolished, and they would be freed and free to enjoy lives of fullcitizenship. More than a few devoted themselves, in various ways, toaiding the Union efforts, some even as fighting soldiers. FrederickDouglass played a major role in persuading President Abraham Lincoln toallow Negro men to join the Union army as fighting soldiers and inpersuading many men to join. With President Lincoln’sissuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freeing the slaves inthe Confederate states and Union victory in the Civil War two yearslater, the day ofJubilation! for Black people and otheropponents of the institution of slavery appeared to be at hand.

And so it seemed. There followed a brief, euphoric period of statutoryfreedom during which Black people held elective and appointive officesin many states that had been part of the Confederacy and otherwisemade initial significant gains in other areas of life. However, apost-war (1877) so-called compromise between Republican economic andpolitical forces in the North and East and those of Democrats in theSouth settled a disputed presidential election (a contest RepublicanRutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden) and allowed a Southnot completely vanquished by the lost war to regain power in itsregion in exchange for Republican hegemony in the federalgovernment.

Violent terrorism and brutal repression of Negroes followedimmediately, in the South especially, which spawned two decades (mid1860s-1880s) of post-Reconstruction struggles by newly-emancipatedBlack people to survive conditions in which they had been set adrift bymany former allies in the North and East and were being pressed backinto near-slavery by forces in the South. A Great Migration ensued ashundreds of thousands of Negroes left the South for hoped-for betteropportunities without racial violence in the East, North, Southwest,and West of the United States, in some cases in response to persuasivearticulations by various spokespersons (Edward W. Blyden, James T.Holly, and Alexander Crummell, among others) who renewed calls forvarious programs of emigration or what some scholars have termedseparatist Black Nationalism: migrations within and out of thecountry to sites on which all-Black communities and towns would beformed (away from the United States in Africa; within the country inKansas and Oklahoma, for example).

Migrations within the United States were by far the most significantof the relocations. And the movements greatly accelerated over thedecades as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and theU.S. American economy was undergoing transformation into an industrialgiant and international power as a consequence of meeting the needs ofproduction to support the country’s participation in the FirstWorld War and other developments. In the North, Northeast, and West ofthe country this industrialization created historic demands for workersand, subsequently, historic opportunities for work. Meanwhile, in theSouth rapidly increasing mechanization in agriculture and subsequentdecreasing reliance on the labor of nearly-enslaved, hyper-exploitedNegro tenant farmers and workers, and increasing industrialization inthe region, left the greater majority of Black people in dire straits.These developments, combined with hopes for life unrestricted by racialsegregation enforced by brutal violence, by lynchings especially,exerted additional pull-and-push forces that prompted hundreds ofthousands to join in the migrations to the country’s industrialcenters.

In settling in the new locales, the migrants and their subsequentgenerations began to undergo what, with hindsight, became a historicand wrenching transformation of what had been, for the most part, abrutally oppressed, illiterate, yet resolute agrarian peasantry into anethno-racial urban working class, and the transformation of asignificant few of them into a modern middle class. With thetransformations came vexing challenges and opportunities. Among themost compelling needs were for forms of life appropriate to the newurban circumstances—as well as for those who remained in therebuilding South—that would sustain the person and a people andpromote flourishing life in conditions of intense competition withother ethno-racial class groups, and high risks of socialdisintegration and failure as invidious racism, unchecked by federalrestraints, became ever more intense and widespread. There were, then,compelling needs for social and cultural as well as economic support asnuclear and extended family units were disrupted in being stretchedacross long miles of migration and crucial forms of communal andorganizational support that helped to sustain life in the South were invery short supply in the new urban centers. Once again, in the contextof demanding needs to be met in the struggle to survive and endure,particularly thoughtful and articulate Black persons took up thechallenges of conceiving what was best to be done for the well-being ofthe race, and how best to achieve well-being.

African American women were especially prominent in endeavoring toattend thoughtfully and pragmatically to the well-being of the race,but also in endeavoring to make good for Black women on the promisesof Emancipation for social, political, and economic freedom. Anexemplary figure in this regard is Anna Julia Cooper (1859?-1964), whograduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and, at age sixty-five,completed a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne onSlavery andthe French Revolutionists, 1788–1805 (Cooper 1925). Acareer educator before earning her doctorate, Cooper was a pioneeringfeminist who set out a provocative view of what she regarded as thesuperior capacity of women to lead the reformation of the human racein her bookA Voice from South (1892). Poet, journalist,novelist, and essayist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911)weighed in with a forceful argument that the “spiritualaid” that women can provide is crucial for moral development andthe social advancement of the human race (“Woman’sPolitical Future,” 1893). Memphis, Tennessee-born and OberlinCollege-educated Mary Church Terrell (1863–1954) lived a stellarlife of articulate leadership in uplift and advocacy organizationsdevoted to the development and well-being of Colored women (ColoredWomen’s League, the National Association of Colored Women),commitments articulated in “The Progress of Colored Women”(1898, published 1904) and other writings. Fluent in severallanguages, Terrell forged relations with Negro and other women inseveral countries who worked for reforms on behalf of women. Andparticular note must be taken of the audacious, pistol-totting IdaB. Wells-Barnett (1862–1931), an investigative journalist andnewspaperwoman who took it upon herself, as an anti-lynching crusader,to investigate cases of lynching across the country to document thefacts of each case, which she published in 1895 asThe Red Record:Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the UnitedStates with an introductory letter from Frederick Douglass, withwhom she collaborated in many endeavors. During an especially violentand trying period, courageous, thoughtful, and articulate activistBlack women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell, and othersinitiated what would become a long and varied tradition of feministphilosophizing and work by women of African descent devoted to theenhancing development of Negro persons, families, organizations, andcommunities.

Few of these thoughtful feminists, it should be noted, were energeticadvocates of Nationalist emigration during this turbulentperiod. Perhaps because many Nationalist agendas and articulationswere soon eclipsed (though by no means completely silenced) during theyears of 1880–1915 that came to be largely dominated by thepersuasive ameliorative leadership of Booker T. Washington(1856–1915), an educator and strategic power-broker who focusedhis considerable efforts on uplifting a Black southern peasantry intoeducated literacy for economic self-reliance and on the nation-wideorganization of Negro businesses for the pursuit of predominance incertain sectors of the economy. After delivering a poignant and craftyinvited “Atlanta Exposition Address” to resounding praiseduring an 1895 international industrial exposition, Washington,already well on his way as a leader recognized as such by Negropeople, was elevated by certain powerful and influential White peopleto the vaunted position astheir leader and spokesman for“the Negro” to whom they would turn to broker matters inrace relations. The key to this positioning was the reaction of manyWhite people, concerned about post-war transformations under way inrace relations, to the following declaration in Washington’sExposition address: “In all things that are purely social we canbe as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all thingsessential to mutual progress” (Washington 1895; 1992, p. 358).Concentrating on the first part of his statement, anxious White peopleinterpreted his public endorsement of the “purely social”separation of the races as an endorsement by Washington of thehegemony of White people in all areas.

It was not. In fact, Washington was explicit in the address indeclaring that it was “important and right that all privilegesof the law be ours…” He went further in articulating avision of “that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come ina blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities andsuspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in awilling obedience among all classes to the mandates of law”(Washington 1895; 1992, p. 359). Hearing, apparently,whatthey wanted to hear, not the fullness ofwhatWashington wanted them to hear, anxious White people ofpower and influence certified him a ‘good and safe’ Negroand promptly made him their go-to Negro designated by them as“the Leader of the Negro people.” Washingtonaccommodated them, in service to his own ego as well as in service tothe benefit of the Negro race (by his own reasoning, of course). Hewas brilliantly skillful in executing a nuanced, pragmatic strategy ofwearing a mask ofseeming accommodation to White hegemony ashe promoted Negro empowerment and self-sufficiency through educationthat stressed disciplined comportment, thrift, industrial andagricultural work, and ownership of property (and while clandestinelysupporting securing political equality for Negroes). As an enlargedfigure who brokered the largesse and influence of White people flowingto Negroes throughout the nation, and as the founding administrativeand educational leader of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama that continuesto provide education to persons of African descent, Booker T.Washington’s philosophizings, political engagements, andpractical endeavors would have widespread, profound, and lastingimpact.

Washington was challenged, publicly and on several fronts, by, amongother thinker-activist Black persons, the astute and irrepressiblethinker-scholar (and more) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868–1963)whose philosophical stances and strategies for transforming theconditions of existence for Black people weresubstantiallydifferent from Washington’sseeming public accommodationto White social hegemony. In the view of some, Washington might bebetter described as a social separatist and economic and politicalconservative committed to Black economic independence made evenstronger by the predominance of Negroes in some sectors of the nationaleconomy resulting in the dependence of White folks on the productivityof Black folks. To this end, for Washington and similar conservativeaccommodationists, the economic and political hegemony of White peoplewas to be finessed by strategies ofseeming acceptance byBlack people that masked surreptitious opposition as Colored peoplepursued economic self-reliance, full political citizenship, andeventual social acceptance that was to be “earned” byforming and exercising good character and responsibility througheducation for, and the practice of, honest, socially productive, andeconomically rewarding work.

Du Bois, however, argued forimmediate recognition of andrespect for Negro people with full civil and political rights (thoughhe supported qualifications for exercising the franchise forall voters), social equality, and economic justice. He becamean outspoken critic of Washington’s leadership (“Of Mr.Booker T. Washington and Others,” 1903) having become impatientwith the latter’s accommodating gradualism and thespirit-sapping impact he (Du Bois) thought this was having on thoseBlack folks who were ready, even overdue, for full equality andrespect (Du Bois 1903; 1992). In contrast to Washington, Du Bois mightbest be described as acultural nationalistadvocatingpluralist integration: pursuit of a raciallyintegrated socially and politically democratic socio-politicalorder—and, later in his long life, a democratic socialisteconomic order—in which diverse racial and ethnic groupscultivate and share, and benefit mutually from sharing, the productsof their cultural distinctiveness to the extent that doing so does notthreaten the integration and justness of the social whole.

The two men were from profoundly different backgrounds. Washington hadbeen born into slavery, but with the aid of education and characterdevelopment at Hampton Institute he was able to advance to nationaland international prominence as an educator and figure ofunprecedented influence, which he recounted in his widely read andinspiring autobiographyUp From Slavery (Washington 1901;1963). Du Bois, on the other hand, never had living experience withslavery, nor, even, with much in the way of invidious racialdiscrimination before entering college in the South. Withundergraduate degrees from Fisk University and Harvard University,studies at the University of Berlin, and a Ph.D. in History fromHarvard, Du Bois was one of a very few exceptionally highly educatedpersons in the United States. Drawing on his learning and witharrogant confidence in his education-enhanced, penetrating, creative,and critical intellect, varied, frequent, and penetrating scholarlyand creative explorations of the history, conditions, and futureprospects of the Negro and other oppressed races, as well as ofWestern Civilization, became his passionate and committed life’swork.

Du Bois far outstripped Washington in the range of his (Du Bois’s) concerns, thedepths of his explorations, and the extent of his seminal involvementsin and contributions to international organizations and movementspressing for independence for colonized African and other peoples, hiscontributions to a number of the international Pan-African Conferences(1919, 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945) and Movement being but one example.And of particular note, Du Bois studied philosophy with William Jamesand others while a student at Harvard, and, for a moment, consideredpursuing a career in the discipline. Though he chose otherwise, hisvast and rich articulations are frequently philosophically novel andastute and thus all the more engaging for researchers, scholars,teachers, artists, and millions of readers in various educated publics.HisThe Souls of Black Folk (1903), for example, has been aseminal text for generations of African Americans, and others, who werecoming of age intellectually. Many were aided, especially, by hispoignant characterization and exploration of the vexing tensions of theexperience of “double consciousness”—of the“twoness” of being both Negro and American—and by hispromising exploration of how best to work at resolving the tension by‘merging’ the two selves into one ‘truer’self.

From Du Bois, then, a philosophy of the soul, if you will, motivatedby the compelling needs of a racialized people subjected toontological as well as social, political, economic, and culturaldegradation. In particular, during the turbulent decades of theorchestrated failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction, when realpossibilities for racial and economic democracy were being killed atbirth by the proponents and guardians of capitalism and White RacialSupremacy, Du Bois initially worked out his affirmativeculturalnationalist position on the raciality of the Negro, and of otherraces, in “The Conservation of Races” (1897; 1992). Thiswas an effort at conceptionalization to which Du Bois would return andrework several times, even near the end of his extraordinarily longand productive life, as in “Whither Now and Why” (1960;1973). Throughout his life Du Bois remained convinced that people ofAfrican descent should articulate and appropriate a racial identitybased on shared history and culture and continue to invest in theirhistorical legacies and cultural creativity while holding open to all,“on the principle of universal brotherhood,” theorganizations, institutions, and cultural riches in and through whichthe life-worlds of Negro peoples are forged, sustained, andshared.

Booker T. Washington died in 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois nearly half acentury later (…on the evening before the historic 1963 March onWashington for Jobs and Freedom as hundred of thousands of Negroes andother supporters converged on the nation’s capital to press forfull civil and economic rights). The deaths of both brought to a closetheir long reigns of Black male leadership prominence, andpredominance, in various arenas. Still, they were far from being theonly leaders of their people. For as the nineteenth century gave way tothe twentieth, Black women were again substantial contributors to theintellectual explorations, organizational work, and local, national,and international movements seeking freedom and enhanced existence forAfrican and African-descendant peoples. They were, as well, influentialon Black male leadership. In 1897, for example, Du Bois accepted aninvitation from Alexander Crummell to become a member of the AmericanNegro Academy to share in the critical work of developingunderstandings of the deteriorating situation of Black people in thenation, made worse by widespread racially-motivated violence, in orderto develop and implement strategies to protect and advance the race.(Du Bois offered his proposal in “The Conservation ofRaces,” the second Occasional Paper delivered to the group.) Duelargely to Crummell’s objections, Black women were not initiallyallowed to become members of the Academy. However, while Crummell was asubstantial influence on Du Bois, he (Du Bois) was also influenced byAna Julia Cooper who advised his thinking on a number of mattersregarding which he conversed with his male colleagues in the Academy.Other women—Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, JaneAdams—also exerted critical influence on Du Bois through theirideas, their organizational work, and their personal relations withhim.

These and other thoughtful, articulate, and engaged Black women didnot allow themselves to be limited to subordinate roles of influence onmale leaders. Rather, as was true for many of their foresisters, theyhad important matters of concern about which they thought seriously,discussed in their women’s clubs and other organizations, wroteand spoke, and worked with determination to effect progressivetransformations in the lives of women and their families as well as forthe racial group and the society as a whole. From the especiallyviolent and trying decades of Reconstruction on into the early decadesof the twentieth century, women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell,and others contributed substantially to what has become a long andvaried tradition of woman-focused philosophizing and artisticexpression by women of African descent in the United States.

Continuing the tradition, Elise Johnson McDougald, for example, wroteof “The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and RaceEmancipation” (1924–25; 1995); Alice Dunbar-Nelson(1875–1935) of “The Negro Woman and the Ballot”(1927; 1995); Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander of “Negro Women inOur Economic Life” (1930; 1995); and Florence “Flo”Kennedy produced “A Comparative Study: Accentuating theSimilarities of the Societal Position of Women and Negroes”(1946; 1995). Working through, and often leading, local, regional,national, and international secular and church-related women’sclubs and organizations, these and other Negro women gave definingshape to legacies of feminist and womanist engagement and leadershipthat are now being reclaimed and studied for inspiration andguidance. And the efforts and contributions of several of these womenwould be joined to those of later generations who would become majorcontributors, in thought and in other ways, to developments that wouldunfold as history-making movements devoted to cultural expressiveness,gaining more in the way of civil and economic rights, to gainingpower,Black Power!, and to gaining more freedom, rights, andrespect for women of all ethno-racial groups and socio-economicclasses.

9. 1915–2000

The historical context for the subsequent and more recentdevelopments and movements was set by transformative dislocations andreconfigurations that intensified competitions within and amongethno-racial groups and socio-economic classes that affectedsignificantly relations between White and Black races, in particular,as the country went through unprecedented industrial and economicgrowth and increasing predominance in the Western hemisphere as aconsequence of the Great Depression (1929 through the late 1930s andinto the early 1940s) and attendant disruptions, recovery from whichwas spurred significantly by involvements in the Second World War(1939–1945) and the Korean War (1950–1953). There followed severaldecades of economic expansion and rising prosperity for urban,industrial workers among whom were large numbers of Black workers,descendants of earlier migrants to the urban centers, who benefittedfrom the industrial intensifications and thus expanded significantlythe growing modern, educated, increasingly economically viable,church-going, community-sustaining, psychologically secure andincreasingly self-confident aspiring Black working and middle classesthat were determined to provide successive generations with greaterfreedom, respect, and economic security bolstered by high expectationsfor even greater successes and achievements. Spread across both classeswere the tens of thousands of Black men who returned to civilian lifefrom the country’s recently racially integrated Armed Forcesafter serving at home and overseas to help “make the world savefor democracy.” A great many of these veterans, supported byNegro women and men who kept the home-front while enduring thedifficulties of wartime sacrifices as they worked the nation’sfields and factories though still denied the fullness of citizenship,were unwilling to acquiesce to the subordination to racial apartheidand invidious racial discrimination required by the doctrines andprograms of White Racial Supremacy that still held sway.

This context became the nurturing soil in which various forms of BlackNationalism flowered once again as the influence of Washington’sphilosophy and strategies declined. Caribbean-born immigrant MarcusGarvey (“Race Assimilation,” 1922; 1992; “The TrueSolution of the Negro Problem,” 1922; 1992; “An Appeal to theConscience of the Black Race to See Itself,” 1923; 1992), proponent ofa militant Black Nationalist philosophy of independence andself-reliance for Black peoples world-wide, and of the emigration ofpeople of African descent from the U.S. and elsewhere “back toAfrica,” rose to prominence from his base in New York City asthe most successful mass organizer of Black people in the history ofthe U.S. with the founding and internationalization of his UnitedNegro Improvement Association (UNIA) (Garvey 1925; 1986; Martin1986). Garvey’s organizational and socio-political movement,fueled by his “Philosophy and Opinions” carried by hisorganization’s newspapers and other publications withinternational reach, along with the eruption of the HarlemRenaissance, likewise in New York, an eruption of literary andartistic productions motivated by very thoughtful and passionateaffirmations of African ancestry and of the positive, creativeimportance of the cultural and aesthetic significance of AfricanAmerican life, were two of the most significant emigrationist andcultural nationalist developments of the period. Both were articulatedthrough and otherwise spawned new, profoundly influential modes ofcreative, reflective thought and expression.

The Harlem Renaissance was an extraordinary eruption of heightened,critical, and creative self-conscious affirmative racial identificationby thoughtful Negroes bent on expressing their affirmations of theirraciality through all of the creative arts and modalities ofarticulation, a development unprecedented in the history of thepresence of peoples of African descent in the United States (Huggins 2007). Thecultural significance of the productions and articulations; of theengagements, practices, and creations of the bold and talentedparticipant-contributors; of the organizations, institutions, andpublications they created and endeavored to sustain (some successfully,many others not) devoted to culture creation, refinement, preservation,and mediation— all continue to have substantial influences eventoday, most especially in terms of the novel ideas and idea-spaces anddiscursive communities that were created and articulated through thebodies of literature and works of art, music, and dance that are stillbeing mined productively by contemporary artists and scholars. Theproducers and carriers of the Renaissance were natives of the whole ofthe African Diaspora, across the Atlantic World especially, as well asfrom across the African continent, and they drew on the cultural andhistorical legacies of both (and on those from other parts of the world)for inspiration and content for their philosophizing artisticcreativity in defining and giving expression to TheNewNegro.

Alain Leroy Locke (1886–1954), the first African American toearn a Ph.D. in Philosophy, from Harvard (having already earned adegree from Oxford and having studied philosophy at the University ofBerlin), and the first to be named a Rhodes Scholar, was one of thesignificant intellectual and facilitating midwives to the productionand publication of much creative work during the Renaissance (as wasDu Bois). As the guest editor for a special March 1925 issueofSurvey Graphic devoted to explorations ofraceand the New York of people of African descent, Locke, titling theissueHarlem: Mecca of the New Negro, brought together forthe issue writings of fiction and poetry; articles on music, drama,the Negro’s past, “Negro Pioneers,” “The NewScene,” “The Negro and the American Tradition”; andmuch else by a racially mixed large group of authors with expertise ina wide variety of fields. Among these: Du Bois (“The Negro MindReaches Out”); Elise Johnson McDougald (“The Task of NegroWomanhood”); pioneering Africanist anthropologist Melville J.Herskovits (“The Negro’s Americanism”); sociologistE. Franklin Frazier (“Durham: Capital of the Black MiddleClass”); the young poet and creative writer CountéeCullen (“Heritage”); Howard University-based educator andscholar Kelly Miller (“Howard: The National NegroUniversity”); poetess Gwendolyn B. Bennett and creative writerLangston Hughes writing on music; poems by Angelina Grimke; and alarge number of others. After the great success of the special issue,Locke edited and published an anthology,The New Negro, thatincluded revised versions of most of the material from theSurveyGraphic special issue, but with much new material and artwork byWinold Reiss, a very accomplished artist from Bavaria (Locke1925).

In the judgment of many scholars of the Renaissance,The NewNegro became, in the words of one, “virtually the centraltext of the Harlem Renaissance.” The title was taken from thecollection’s lead essay, “The New Negro,” which waswritten by Locke. In the essay Locke endeavored to characterize the“New” Negro, the circumstances of the emergence of thischaracter-type, the nature of its shared pride-of-race character, itspsychology and mission and relation to the Negro masses, and theconsequences of the emergence of the New Negro for race relations inthe United States and for developments in Africa and the AfricanDiaspora for which this new group-figure would serve as theavantgarde. The anthology, then, is a gateway to an importantselection of articulations by figures who were seminal contributors to,as well as beneficiaries of, the Harlem Renaissance, and to the vastand still growing multidisciplinary body of works that explore variousaspects, figures, contributions, and consequences of theRenaissance. And Locke’s lead essay is a poignant gateway intohis career of philosophizing as well as an adept example of an attemptto simultaneously characterize and give agenda-setting character andguidance to an extraordinary praxis-guiding artistic and intellectualrevolution the focal points of which were determined efforts ofracial-group self-affirmation and self-determination, beginning withthe radical ontological work of redefining and revaluing onprogressive terms the meaning ofthe Negro, then setting thetasks by which theNew Negro—the “thinkingNegro,” as Locke characterized the group in hisessay—would lead through decidedly Negro Africanist-inspired,philosophically-minded cultural creativity and articulate expressionsofphilosophizings born of struggles…

And lead they did, as a number of the persons, organizations, andinstitutions participating in and contributing to the Renaissance, theGarvey and other movements, and others in the social classes that wereinspired by and fed them all became prominent figures in the CivilRights/Freedom Movement of the 1950s-mid 1960s during which“civil rights” and “integration” were majorobjectives of struggle. The National Association for the Advancementof Colored People (NAACP), the NAACP Legal and Educational DefenseFund (which became formally independent from the NAACP in 1957), andthe National Urban League were but three of several organizations thatwould lead the continuing, but substantially reenergized,organizationally strengthened, and philosophically prepared and focusedstruggles to secure legally sanctioned and guaranteed democraticfreedom, social and political equality, economic justice, and humandignity for Negroes in the United States of America. Publications andstatements from these and other organizations; member correspondences;legal briefs and papers from court cases; the creative and scholarlyworks from members and descendants of the Renaissance, Garvey, andother movements; Black newspapers of the period—all are richrepositories of the philosophizings fueling and guiding the new phaseof struggle.

Studies of these philosophizings are likely to reveal that whilethere definitely were persons and organizations advocating radical,even revolutionary, transformations of the political economy and socialorders of the United States, overwhelmingly the pursuit ofdesegregation and racial integration as important manifestations of theachievement of democratic freedom, social and political equality,economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes using moderate butprogressive strategies of legal and civil-disobedience struggles weredominant means and agendas of social and political effort exerted bypeople of African descent in the United States over the lasthalf-century and more. These commitments were manifested mostprofoundly in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement.

“The Movement,” as it was experienced and known by manyof those intimately involved, proved to be aphenomenallyhistoric, personally and socially transformative, national movement withprofound international ramifications in Africa—South Africaespecially—and other countries. Initially, the attack on racialapartheid in the quest for racial integration was pursued through legalchallenges tode jure racial segregation. A major victory wasachieved with the unanimous 1954 rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court inBrown v. Board of Education I andII that declaredracial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, therebyoverturning the Court’s 1896Plessey v. Fergusondecision that declared that government-sanctioned racial segregationwas constitutional as long as “separate but equal”resources and facilities were provided. The team of engaged andcreative Black (and White) legal warriors from the NAACP Legal Defenseand Education Fund and other thinker-scholars (historians,sociologists, social psychologists) were successful in persuading theJustices on the Court that the invidious discrimination suffered byBlack folks within the schemes of White-dominated racial segregationwas manifested not only in decidedly unequal resources and facilities,but, through “inferior” education in Negro schools, indebilitating damage to the psychic souls and self-concepts of Negroes,the children especially, which severely impaired their capacity todevelop into and be the kind of persons who could meet the fullresponsibilities and enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. In short,the legal team forged a legal strategy that rested on the constructionand successful articulation of a sophisticated philosophicalanthropology, aided by empirical psychological, sociological, andhistorical studies, in support of an argument regarding the vitallinkage between the integrity of personhood and democratic citizenship,thus between the enabling of democratic citizenry and the education ofthe person free of resource-impoverishment and the distortions of thesoul that were consequences of hierarchic, invidious racialdiscrimination that was being imposed on Negro children in raciallysegregated schools. The Court was persuaded...

However, this historic victory through persuasive philosophizing wasinitially stymied by recalcitrant, segregationist local governments andan overwhelming majority of White citizens in the Confederate South andby much foot-dragging by local governments and White citizens in otherregions of the country. White opponents of racial integration who weredetermined to preserve segregation and White Supremacy unleashed yetanother wave of violent terrorism. Nonetheless, the advocates ofdesegregation and integration were determined to secure full rights andhuman dignity for Negro Americans. A new philosophy and strategy ofstruggle was adopted that, through the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi,had proven successful in defeating Great Britain as the colonial powerdominating India: non-violent direct action in the pursuit of justicegrounded in an explicitphilosophical commitment to thesanctity of human life, includinglove for opponents, and tothe redeeming and restorative powers, personally and socially, ofprincipled commitment to engagement in nonviolent struggle.

Gandhi’s philosophy, the history and intricacies of themovement he led in India, and his leadership were studied closely by ayoung Negro missionary to India from the United States, James MorrisLawson, Jr., who, due to his commitments to nonviolence, had alreadybeen imprisoned for refusing induction into the military during theKorean War. Noting from news accounts that reached him in India thatthe Civil Rights/Freedom Movement in the United States was gathering force,Lawson returned to the country determined to find ways to becomeinvolved and contribute. While studying theology at Oberlin College inpreparation for a career as a minister in service to the Movement forsocial justice, he was introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr., who cameto Oberlin to deliver a speech. Lawson was persuaded by King that he (Lawson)should “not wait, come now” to the South to aid theMovement by, among other things, providing instruction in thephilosophy of nonviolence. Lawson transferred to the Divinity School ofVanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and was soon deeplyengaged in providing intellectual and spiritual guidance and inspirationto the educational, psychological, philosophical, and practicalpreparation of legions of mostly young college students in the city whowere committed to engaging in nonviolent struggle to end theindignities suffered by Black people as a consequence ofdejure White Supremacy and racial segregation. The campaign theywaged, led by Fisk University co-ed Diane Nash and with the support ofincreasing numbers of Nashville’s Black citizens, White collegestudents, and that of more than a few very principled and dedicatedanti-segregation White citizens, was eventually successful in bringingabout the formal desegregation of the city’s public facilitiesand commercial establishments. Many of the Nashville Movement’sleaders and stalwart participants, Lawson included, would become majorcontributors to the national Movement while other student-participantshelped to bring about further historic transformations in the city andelsewhere in the South, through their courageous participation in theFreedom Rides, especially. (A critical, full-length biography andphilosophical study of James M. Lawson, Jr. and his philosophicalcommitments and engagements have yet to be undertaken and completed…)

A philosophy of nonviolence grounded in Christian love motivated andguided determined Black people, and allied White and other people, inachievingunprecedented progressive transformations ofcenturies-hardened, intellectually well-supported social, political,and, to notable extents, economic life in a United States of Americaordered since its founding by philosophies of White Racial Supremacyand Black racial inferiority and subordination. Martin Luther King,Jr. (“Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience,” 1961;“The Ethical Demands for Integration,” 1963) has becomethe signature figure among several of the leaders of this Movement,marked distinctively by his profoundly thoughtful Christiantheological and philosophical commitments to nonviolence as thegrounding for personal and shared social life as well as for engagingin struggles for freedom and justice (Washington, J.M. 1986). However,the groundwork for the Movement he would be called to lead had beenlaid and further developed by many other organizationally-supportedNegro women and men of articulate thought and disciplined action fromlabor and other constituencies: among these A. Philip Randolph (whoserved as a founding organizer and president of the Brotherhood ofSleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council,and vice president of the AFL-CIO) and Bayard Rustin (a veteran ofstruggles for civil and other rights for Negroes and workers of allcolors), who were the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington forJobs and Freedom during which King delivered the speech (“I Havea Dream...”) in which he invoked a vision for America that becamehis hallmark and a guiding theme of the Movement.

Certainly, Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most prolific andprofoundly influential, even historic, figures of African descent whosearticulations continue to compel widespread, intensive study asespecially rich instances of religious, moral, theological, andsocio-political philosophizing. Still, King’s articulations, aswell as the sacrificial life he lived and gave in leadership service,firmly and uncompromisingly grounded inespecially thoughtfulcommitments to Gandhi-inspired nonviolence (“Nonviolence andRacial Justice,” 1957; “The Power of Nonviolence,”1958) and Jesus-inspiredagape love (“Love, Law, andCivil Disobediance,” 1961; “A Gift of Love,” 1966)await full and widespread appreciation as the truly phenomenal gifts ofinspiration, commitment, and guidance to a social movement that theywere. They were gifts that, infused in and channeled by the Movement,changed the legal and social structures, the culture of race relations,and thereby the history of the United States. These gifts also inspiredothers in their struggles for similar changes elsewhere in the world.The consequences of the Movement that embodied these gifts confirmed,once again, that the combination of love and nonviolent struggle could,indeed, succeed. And, as has been the case throughout the history ofthe presence of persons of African descent in this country, theseparticular philosophical gifts were neither forged and developed in,nor mediated to others from, the contexts of academic Philosophy, butwere, indeed,philosophizings born of struggles, gifts thatchanged a country for the better that, it is feared, has yet torecognize and embrace fully the confirmed lessons the giftsembody…

Overwhelmingly, the pursuit of desegregation and racial integrationas goals of movements for democratic freedom, social and politicalequality, economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes has beena dominant item on the agendas of social and political philosophiesmotivating and guiding struggles exerted by people of African descentin the United States over the last half-century and more, manifestedmost profoundly in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement. However, theMovement’s integrationist agenda, moral-persuasionist strategies,commitment to nonviolence, and explicit commitment to a theologically andreligiously grounded notion of love for the Movement’s opponentswas strongly challenged by other organizational forces (mid-1960s tothe early 1970s), especially by “Young Turks” in theMovement’s Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), aninfluential number of whom were inspired by the revolutionaryphilosophies conveyed in the speeches, writings, and organizationalactivities of Malcolm X and the anti-colonial engagements and writingsof Frantz Fanon as well as by major figures in decolonizing liberationmovements in Africa and elsewhere that were being waged through armedstruggle. These Young Turks, and others in a variety of decidedlyLeft-Nationalist organizations and proto-movements who were inspired byvarious notions of revolutionary transformation, initiated yet anotherresurgence of Black Nationalist aspirations and movements that came tobe referred to collectively as the Black Power Movement. The period wasalso complicated by competitive conflicts with a cacophony of personsand organizations espousing commitments to anti-Nationalistmulti-racial, multi-ethnic socialist and communist agendas.

This was a period of unprecedented tumult, complicated by violentrebellions by Black people in urban centers across the country, and by thenation’s involvement in a gone-badly-wrong and increasinglyunpopular war in Vietnam that was highlighted all the more by national andinternational movements against the War led principally by young,college-age people, many of whom had come of age politically throughtheir involvements in or educative witnessing of the Civil Rights andBlack Power Movements. Of particular note, a significant number ofyoung White women who had been intimately involved in the Civil Rights,Black Power, and Anti-War Movements had become increasingly poignantlyaware of the disrespect for, misuse, and underutilization of women bymany men in the Movements and became radicalized into forging amovement to address their concerns, which was subsequentlycharacterized as the Second Wave Feminist Movement.

All of these developments were fueled by and fostered intenseintellectual adventures, some of which were also fertilized bypractical engagements of various kinds. The Black Power Movement, inparticular, overlapped with and both fueled and was fueled byphilosophizings and engagements that were definitive of more expansiveand consequential Black Consciousness and Black Arts Movements that, ashad the Harlem Renaissance of several decades earlier, spurred anintensive and extensive renaissance of aggressively radical andexpressive creativity in the arts that was centered, once again, onreclaiming for self-definition and self-determination the ontologicalbeing of persons and peoples of African descent, with influences, inmany instances, from various Leftist ventures, nationalist andinternationalist as well as socialist and communist. This was anunstable and volatile mixture that cried out for a clarifyingphilosophy to provide guidance through the thicket of ideologicalpossibilities and the agendas for personal and communalidentity-formation and life-praxes that each proffered with greater orless coherence and veracity.

More than a few spokesmen and spokeswomen came forward tophilosophize on behalf of their group’s or organization’s(or their own) vision for ‘what was to be done’ to insureliberation forBlack people, people ofAfrican descent. (“Liberation” was the watchwordfor the new agenda; “Negro” and “Colored” weredenigrated and cast aside, no longer acceptable as terms of racialidentification). Politics—and all aspects and dimensions ofindividual and social life were explicitly politicized—becamedefined by and focused through the lenses of the substantive symbolicsof racialized and enculturatedBlackness, even as theintellectual warriors waging the conceptual and other battles on behalfofBlackness struggled to find adequate terms and strategieswith which to forge satisfactory and effective articulations of thepassionately sought and urgently needed new identities as articulationsof long standing identities and life-agendas were discredited and thusrendered inadequate for a significant and influential few. For still agreat many other “Negro?”, “Black?”,“Colored?”, “African- American?”,“African-descended?”, and “American?” persons therewas more than a bit of psychic turmoil and tension, no less ofconsternation and confusion. And hardly any of these persons, nor evenmany of the most ardent warriors calling for and/or purveying newnotions and definitions of “Black consciousness” and“Black” agendas for individual and shared lives, knew ofand had recourse to Alain Locke’s sober and soberingwell-reasoned “The New Negro,” nor the rich resources thathad been created by the producers and carriers of the HarlemRenaissance. And so the intensified ontologizing philosophizingproceeded at near breakneck speed driven largely by a generation ofyoung adults few of whom had, nor would accept, much in the way ofintellectual or practical guidance from the experienced and wise ofprevious generations for whom many of the young and arrogant had too littlerespect…

The reason, Harold Cruse, a wise and very experienced elder of Leftand Nationalist organizations and struggles and a formidable thinker inhis own right, was careful to point out, was due to a severe andconsequential disruption of the passing-on of experience-tested andverified knowledge from one generation to another by the ravages of thewitch-hunting and persecuting of any and all accused of being aCommunist or Communist sympathizer during the crusading campaign led bySenator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Many lives and careers weredestroyed as a result of McCarthy’s campaign, and many personsand organizations with Leftist commitments were either destroyed ordriven underground, or otherwise left severely tainted and thus made an“untouchable” bereft of employment, even for one-timefriends and close associates. (W.E.B. Du Bois was one who suffered thisfate, which is largely why he made the momentous decision to renouncehis citizenship and leave the United States for residence in Ghana, wherehe died…) The radical Young Turks, then, not short of courage orpassion, set out on a mission all but impoverished, in many cases, ofmuch needed historical and intellectual capital, thus were sometimes poorlyarmed for the battles they sought to wage. Still, thetrans-generational disruption that Cruse pointed out was not complete.There were those who filled the gap between the Harlem Renaissance andthe rise of the newBlack renaissance who would be ofsignificant influence and guidance, and would serve some in the new movements as personal as well asintellectual mentors and role models: Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, Ralph Ellison,Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and JamesBaldwin, among several others.

There would be muchphilosophizing born of struggles by thenew generation. Much credit has to be given to those who had thewherewithal of discipline and fortitude, and good fortune, to surviveand leave legacies of accomplishment that continue to enrich Blackfolks, and others. The Black Arts Movement, for example, had profoundimpacts through the productions and articulations that gave newdirections and meanings to artistic creativity, to the agendas guidingcreativity and expression and the mission of service to variousaudiences. A manifesto, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” byHoyt Fuller (1923–1981; Fuller 1994) and his work as editor ofthe journalNegro Digest, which later was renamedBlackWorld and was followed byFirst World when the publisherof the latter was pressured to discontinue publication of a journalserving Black radicals, were path-setting ventures during a periodmuch in need of clear paths. Likewise “The BlackAesthetic” by the essayist and theorist Addison Gayle,Jr. (1932–1991), his introduction to an anthology that he editedand published bearing the same title (Gayle, Jr. 1972). A collectionof writings on theory, drama, music, and fiction by many of theleading artistic minds in the new Black generation,The BlackAesthetic has come to be regarded by scholars as “thetheoretical bible of the Black Arts Movement” and thus did forthe makers of this Movement what Locke’sThe New Negrohad done for the makers of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Fuller andGayle would play roles similar to Locke’s in serving as midwivesto the creative and critically-minded development of a sizable portionof a generation of seriously radicalizedBlackthinkers-artists.

The new activist thinkers-artists of the 1960s—Nikki Giovanni,Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, Larry Neal, Mari Evans,Haki R. Madhubuti, and Maulana Karenga, for example—were asproductive, formidable, and widely influential as were theNewNegroes of the 1920s and 1930s, even more so as they exploited theadvantages of access to the enabling resources of the media of radio,television, and recordings in addition to print media, and to the humanresources that became available through lecture-circuits on college anduniversity campuses. Many of these Black warriors of the intellect andarts took up positions, some settling into them for the long term, onthe faculties of colleges and universities and helped to developmentthe guiding philosophies and wage the political battles that ushered innew programs in Black and African Studies. In so doing they magnifiedthe forcefulness and range of their intellectual and artistic powersand contributions, and helped to alter cultural and intellectual scenesin the United States and the African Disapora…

10. 1950–Present: Professional Philosophers of African Descent

Until quite recently, there were very few person of African descentwho were professionals in the discipline of Philosophy. As already noted, W.E.B. DuBois was one of a very few to study Philosophy formally while a studentat Harvard but decided against pursuing it professionally. Alain LeroyLocke was one of the first persons of African descent in America toearn a doctoral degree in Philosophy (Harvard University, 1918). A fewmore followed decades later (1950s), among them Broadus N. Butler, MaxWilson, Berkeley Eddins, and, still later, Joyce Mitchell Cook, thefirst African American female to earn a Ph. D. in Philosophy. Thesewere some of the pioneering persons of African descent in the UnitedStates who entered the profession of academic Philosophy with thecertification of a terminal degree in the discipline.

More recently (late 1960s through the 1970s) successive generations ofpersons of African descent have entered the profession as cohorts ofnew generations of young Black women and men entered the academy withthe expansion of opportunities for higher education that came as aresult of the successes of the desegregation-integration and CivilRights Movements. More than a few of these persons were influenced bythe Black Power, Black Consciousness, and Black Arts Movements, aswell, and in some cases by independence and decolonization movementson the African continent and in the African Diaspora in theCaribbean. The emergence of and pursuit of distinctive agendas withinacademic Philosophy to articulate and study philosophizings by personsAfrican and of African descent were initiated by several of the newentrants, agendas that grew out of and were motivated by thesemovements. Thus, the new entrants were determined to contribute aseducators, sometimes as engaged intellectuals involved in movementorganizations, by identifying and contributing to, or by helping toforge anew, philosophical traditions, literatures, and practicesintended, in many instances, to be distinctive of the thought- andlife-agendas of Black peoples. Here, then, the wellspring of concernsand aspirations that gave rise to calls for, and efforts to set out,“Black” philosophy, then “Afro-American,” andlater “African American” philosophy, precursive effortsleading to what is now the more or less settledname, butstill developingconcept, ofAfricana philosophy.

Formal, professional recognition and sanctioning of these efforts,which had been pursued, with significant impact, through presentationsof papers on and discussions of various topics in sessions duringannual meetings of divisions of the American Philosophical Association(APA) and other organizations of professional philosophers and other organizations ofteacher-scholars such as the Radical Philosophers Association (RPA) andthe Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP),were achieved when, in 1987, the APA recognized the efforts ashaving established a legitimate sub-field of Philosophy and made“Africana philosophy” an officially listed specialty in thediscipline. Across the years, the APA’s Committee onBlacks in Philosophy has been instrumental in organizing a number ofthese important sessions, though, of no less importance, many suchsessions were hosted by other sympathetic and supportive committees ofthe APA as well as by other organizations of professionalphilosophers that held meetings concurrent with those of divisions ofthe Association. Thus, the recognition and sanction have come, tosignificant degrees, as results of long efforts led by philosophersRobert C. Williams (deceased), William Jones, Howard McGary, Jr., andLa Verne Shelton, among others, each of whom gave years of service aschairpersons of the APA’s Committee on Blacks inPhilosophy. Each also contributed early articulations that initiatedthe work of forging the sub-field.

Also of special importance to this long development towardsrecognition and legitimation, and to the production of much of theearly writings, presentations, and critical networking collegialitythat have been foundational to the development of Africana philosophy,were a series of conferences devoted to explorations of “BlackPhilosophy” or of “Philosophy and the BlackExperience” that were held during the 1970s, most of themorganized and hosted at Historically Black Colleges and Universities(HCBUs: notably, Tuskegee University, Morgan State University, andHoward University) though important gatherings were also held at theUniversity of Illinois-Chicago Circle (ca 1970, another thirtyyears later), Haverford College (an international gathering in thesummer of 1982 of African and African American philosophers andteacher-scholars from other disciplines), and, more recently, at theUniversity of Memphis. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is thePhilosophy Born of Struggle Conference, which has been hosted annuallyfor fifteen years primarily through the indefatigable efforts of J.Everet Green and Leonard Harris, and the Alain Locke Conferenceorganized and hosted biannually by the Department of Philosophy ofHoward University (Washington, DC).

The development and institutionalization of African Americanphilosophy, of Africana philosophy more generally, with recognition bythe American Philosophical Association—though not by all, oreven most, departments of Philosophy in academicinstitutions—have also been facilitated by the noteworthysuccess of many of the pioneers in securing and retaining positions inacademic departments (of Philosophy, of Philosophy and Religion, ofPhilosophy and other disciplines) in various institutions of highereducation across the country. A substantial few of these persons haveearned tenure and promotions, several to the rank of Professor, whileseveral have even been appointed to endowedprofessorships. Consequently, a slowly increasing number ofphilosophers who are African or of African descent now hold positionsin departments and programs that serve graduate and professionalstudents. Of importance, then, have been the growing number oflectures and seminars in colleges and universities across the countrygiven and directed by philosophers of African descent in response toinvitations, and as part of regular curricular offerings,respectively, of departments of Philosophy, often with the cooperationand co-sponsorship of other departments and programs. These invitedpresentations and regularized curricular offerings reconfirm andstrengthen the intellectual legitimacy of much work in Africanaphilosophy while doing much the same for the invited and teachingphilosophers.

One especially significant consequence of these important developmentsis that several of these persons now have built legacies of teachingand scholarship that span decades with significant influences ongenerations of students. Practitioners of Africana philosophy are evenproducing new generations of practitioners. And practitioners of allgenerations are contributing to the literature of articulateexpression of what is now a substantial and growing body of workssupporting teaching, research, and scholarship in Africana philosophywhile, in the process of doing so, also initiating, and otherwisecontributing to, substantial changes to discursive agendas. Certainly,the example beyond debate continues to be critical explorationsofrace and of “racism,” matters that havedistorted the basic institutions, virtually all considerations andpractices, and all lives across the entirety of the history of theUnited States of America, and that of much of the world. However, itwas not until philosophers of African descent focused theirphilosophizing on critical engagements with the racial conditioningsof the profession and of life generally that discussions, teaching,and scholarship within professional Philosophy were opened to andconditioned by new critical discursive agendas affecting numeroussubfields within the discipline and the organization of theprofession, evident in the surge of writings by philosophers Africanand of African descent published in mainstream journals and bymainstream publishers.

Race Matters by Cornel West (1994) became the national andinternational best-seller that propelled West into prominence as anacademic philosopher and preacher-become-public intellectual whocontributed to reinvigorated public critiques of racism withprofessionally attuned philosophical acumen. Yet, his earlierpublicationProphesy Deliverance! An Afro-American RevolutionaryChristianity (1982) had even greater impacts on discourses withinthe academic disciplines of Philosophy, Theology, andReligion/Religious Studies, in particular. Of especially notableinfluence were his genealogy of racism and his sketching out of fourdistinctive traditions of responsive thought generated by Blackthinkers. West’s genealogical critique drew on several canonicalfigures (Nietzsche, Michel Foucault) and was thus emblematic of hisexpansive learnedness and creative ingenuity in drawing on canonicalfigures to redirect critical thought back upon the social orders andhistory-making practices of those subjecting folks of African descent,and others, to dehumanization.

Others contributing to and shaping such critiques include HowardMcGary, whoseRace and Social Justice (1999) brought togethera number of seminal essays in which he explored moral and politicalquestions regarding race and racism in a new and distinctive (anddistinctively embodied) voice among practitioners of AnalyticPhilosophy, a voice concerned with social justice, with issues ofequity and inclusion especially, while drawing on and highlightinglived experiences of African Americans conditioned unjustly andimmorally. For McGary, philosophical work was no longer to be confinedto analysis restricted to ‘getting the termsright’. Rather, having lived experiences of invidious racialdiscrimination and impediments to accessing and exploiting conditionsof possibility by which Black persons might forge individual andgroup-shared flourishing lives, across generations, McGary hasremained committed to disciplined, well-argued clarifications andrevisions of key notions by which to pursue and secure social justice,most especially for those “least well off”: theBlackunderclass.

Continuing such efforts, in a different register, with substantial andinnovative contributions is Paul Taylor (who studied with McGary atRutgers University). HisRace: A Philosophical Introductionstands out as an especially clearly-articulated, nuanced, clarifyingnavigation of many of the complexities of conceptualizationsofrace firmly situated in reconstructions of historicalpractices guided by political and other agendas. Yet, it isTaylor’sBlack is Beautiful: A Philosophy of BlackAesthetics that is especially noteworthy. It is, perhaps, thefirst-in-decades book-length “assembling” (Taylor’sown characterization of his effort) of adeliberatelyphilosophical theory of Black aesthetics: thatis, a critical theoretical exploration of the roles expressivepractices and objects play when taken up by Black folks in thecreation and maintenance of their lifeworlds. (The philosopher AlainLeroy Locke, midwife to the New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissance,preceded Taylor by half-a-century in taking seriously Black expressivelife, as did W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, JamesBaldwin, Toni Morrison, and numerous others.) Taylor’s effortsare doubly innovative in his endeavor to bridge two discursivecommunities heretofore not in communication: professionalphilosophers, and others, concerned with aesthetics who have hadlittle to no concern with aesthetics in Black life; Black artists andcritics fully immersed in the productions of and engagements withexpressive practices and objects in Black life with little to noengagements with resources drawn from academic, professionalPhilosophy. As did Alain Locke, Taylor aims to contribute to a newgeneration of articulate thinkers who are focusing their criticalacumen on the expressivity and performativity in productions of self,and of self in relations with others, of those who have beenracialized asBlack.

But, how have folks African and of African descent been figured in theexpressive practices and products, and in the theorizings of suchaesthetic ventures, produced, in both cases, by folks not Black?Robert Gooding-Williams is but one of several philosophers of Africandescent who probes these questions in hisLook, A Negro!Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics (2006), acollection of essays connected, he notes, by his persistent effort toexplore whether it is possible to interpretrace in ways thatwould be in keeping with what is required in political and culturallife if the United States as a polity were to become actuallystructured by democratic principles and practices while adult citizensfully acknowledge the history and continuing legacies of White racialsupremacy that have structured the polity from its inception. In thechapter on “Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell,and Astaire,” for example, Gooding-Williams rehearses accountsof aesthetic experiences by the canonic figures Kant (re:“aesthetic judgment”) and Nietzsche (re: embodiedsensibilities) in preparation for a critical reading and assessment ofthe philosopher Stanley Cavell’s aesthetic reading of how thedancer Fred Astaire is rendered in a particular movie in which hestars (The Band Wagon) as the focal character who isable/enabled to reclaim himself (i.e., make a “comeback”)as a star dancer. What Gooding-Williams lifts up is Cavell’sfailure tosee that the Astaire-character is enabled by aBlack male character who, in shining Astaire’s shoes, transfersto Astaire and his feet a restoration of rhythmic capabilities by wayof the rhythms the Black shoeshine-man articulates while brushing theAstaire-character’s shoes and polishing them with hisshine-rag. All of which presumes something (on the part of thefilm-maker; so, too, Cavell, though differently...) about theembodiment of enabling aesthetic capabilities of particular kinds inthe being of the Black character representative of theculturally-inflected raciality of Black people.

There are centuries-long, quite rich traditions of thoughtarticulated, and political praxis engaged in, by Black folks for whomit is the case that the constitutive racially of Black folks is suchthat it sets the terms not only of identity, but, as well, of theethical imperatives of intra- and interracial mutualities, that is, ofvarious modes and instances of solidarity. And, as well, forcompelling pragmatic reasons: to contend with, ultimately to overcome,invidious racial discrimination and oppression. No small matters forpersons and peoples suffering racialized dehumanization andexploitation thus in need of shared motivating and guiding notions ofhow to gain and sustain freedom and justice. Many concerned to forgefreedom in just conditions have sought morally compelling guidingunderstandings in shared raciality, in being, by particularunderstandings of raciality, a distinctivepeople, adistinctivenation of Black people. Hence, traditions of“Black Nationalism,” waxing and waning across thecenturies, resurgent more recently in various forms (music and art;“Afrocentric” thought) and locales in the United States,in particular. Tommie Shelby, who became a certified professionalphilosopher after the resurgent Black nationalisms of the Black Powerand Black Arts movements, while deeply committed to philosophicalengagements with and out of contexts of lived experiences of Blackfolks in which much of his life has been conditioned, has, inhisWe Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of BlackSolidarity, endeavored to work out a philosophically clarifiedand justified account of the terms and agenda of solidarity as a basisfor organized and coordinated struggles for justice. The account isintended to be both motivating and welcoming of the solidaristiccooperation of persons Black and non-Black without needing to resortto what he reasons to be the philosophically indefensible racialessentialism of various construals of Black nationalism. Yet, theaccount is intended to be in keeping with important conceptual andnormative groundings of Black political cultural life that are, aswell, compatible with a notion of political liberalism worked out byJohn Rawls. With Shelby’s efforts, too, there is the hard workof extending decidedly prominent mainstream philosophical thought(that of of Rawls in this particular case) to a creatively criticalengagement with unjust limiting conditions on the lives of Black folksin conjunction with efforts of philosophical reconstruction anddefense of principles of Black solidarity that embrace a notionofBlackness suitable for emancipatory work.

11. Publishing and Professional Africana Philosophy

Leonard Harris has been a pioneer of published works on AfricanAmerican philosophy and continues to be a major contributor in manyways, not least as an editor of collections that have made widelyavailable important texts that otherwise would not have gotten theattention of researchers and scholars concerned with thephilosophizings of Black folks. Of particular note, his editedcollectionThe Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance andBeyond (Harris 1989) provides ready access to philosophicalessays from among Locke’s more than three hundred published andunpublished essays and book reviews. And hisPhilosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophyfrom 1917 (Harris 1983) was for many years the only widelyavailable, somewhat historically organized collection of writings byAfrican American professional philosophers and other philosophizingBlack scholars. (An important earlier collection is PercyE. Johnston’sAfro-American Philosophers. (Johnston1970)) More recently new collections devoted to African AmericanPhilosophy have been organized and published by Tommy L. Lott (Lott2002); by Lott and John P. Pittman (Lott and Pittman 2003); and byJames A. Montmarquet and William H. Hardy (Montmarquet and Hardy2000).

This publishing is an important part of the story of Africanaphilosophy, and helps to make and legitimate the case that personsAfrican and of African-descent, on the African continent and in theAfrican Diaspora in the Americas and elsewhere, are creators andcustodians of Africana philosophy. A number of publishers haverecognized and accepted these developments and, after substantial,long-standing resistance and outright refusal by many to recognizehistoric writings by persons of African descent and contemporaryscholarship by philosophers African and of African descent as properinstances of philosophical work, have made a priority of adding worksof Africana philosophy to their lists of published works.

Of particular publishing significance is the continuing, regularappearance of issues ofPhilosophia Africana: Analysis ofPhilosophy and Issues in Africa and the Black Diaspora, a journalfor which Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze of DePaul University was foundingeditor until his unexpected death in 2007.PhilosophiaAfricana remains the only scholarly journal in the United Statesthat is devoted to Africana philosophy, though increasingly otherphilosophy journals are accepting and publishing writings that fallwithin the subfield. None, however, have been as generous asPhilosophical Forum, which, under the editorial directorshipof Max Wartofsky (deceased), devoted two entire special issues toexplorations of philosophical matters of particular concern to Blackphilosophers. Noteworthy, too, has been the continuing midwifing of NewYork-based publisher and scholar Alfred Prettyman, who has devotedtime, energy, and other resources to nurturing The Society for theStudy of Africana philosophy (originally the New York Society for theStudy of Black Philosophy), an organization of philosophers and otherengaged thinkers of African descent, and persons not of Africandescent, who come together in his home to present and discuss ideas andworks on the way to publication or recently published. For a briefperiod Prettyman was editor and publisher of the now dormantTheJournal of the New York Society for the Study of BlackPhilosophy.

The professional recognition and legitimation of Africana philosophygenerally, of African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophyas sub-foci of the field; the notable success enjoyed by a slowlyincreasing number of persons African and of African descent in beinghired, retained, and promoted by departments and programs ininstitutions of higher education; more publishing opportunities; acontinuing vigorous schedule of regular conferences and conferencesessions devoted to explorations of matters pertinent to thefield—all of these continue to be crucial to building andenhancing the literature-base of the field and to facilitatingteaching, research, scholarship, and other collegial engagements andpractices that are essential to forming and sustaining nurturingdiscursive communities devoted to engaging philosophizing productive ofAfricana philosophy. And the enterprise is being enriched by theparticipation and contributions of an increasing number of persons,students and professionals, who are neither African nor of Africandescent.

12. Africana Philosophy: Contributions

Substantial progress has thus been made in mitigating some of theimpediments that had long hampered recognition of and attending to thephilosophizing efforts of persons African and of African descent.Nonetheless, still more mitigating work remains. There is the need, forexample, to bring to consideration for better appreciation the writingsof several generations of especially thoughtful and insightful Blackessayists and novelists, poets and musicians, artists and dancers,preachers and theologians, and other public-speaking Blackintellectuals who, through their means of expression, havephilosophized about the conditions and prospects of Black folks and, inmany cases, have helped to sustain the will and determination toendure the assaults on the humanity, on thebeing, ofpersons and peoples African and of African descent. In this regard, toolittle attention has been given, for example, to the philosophicalwriter-novelist Charles Johnson who, before he became a distinguishednovelist, was a graduate student in Philosophy. The articulated thoughtof many other Black writers, some of them novelists, also compel close,appreciative readings by philosophers for what these articulationsdisclose of the writers coming to terms thoughtfully and creativelywith the exigencies of existence for Black folks as the writersimagined or re-imagined them in the locales and historical moments oftheir writerly creations. Likewise in many sermons, speeches, letters,songs, and dances created and expressed, creatively very often, bythoughtful Black persons.Of necessity, then, Africanaphilosophy must be an even more intensive and extensiveinterdisciplinary enterprise.

A principal impediment to the recognition and appreciation of thephilosophizings of Black folks have been the thorough investments inEurocentrism and White Racial Supremacy that have grounded andstructured so much of the historiography within the discipline ofPhilosophy for so very many decades. Resolving these misconstruals ofthe discipline’s history will require substantial revisions,ones inclusive of the philosophizings of persons of many excludedgroupings. In so doing, careful work must be done to reclaim forwider distribution and careful study as many as possible of theearliest articulations—many of which were neverpublished—that helped pave the way to the development of AfricanAmerican philosophy, of Africana philosophy more generally, as fieldsof discourse (Kuklick 2001; Kuklick 2008).

With hindsight, an especially crippling factor in the development ofAfricana philosophy within academic Philosophy in the United States(throughout the African continent and the African Diaspora, in fact)has been that far too little of the attention of the pioneers, and ofpresent practitioners, has been devoted to issues that are ofsignificance to women African and of African descent even though, ashas been indicated through the narration of the history ofphilosophizing born of struggles, the contributions of Blackwomen have been significant though seldom with the prominence ofattention they should have had outside of women’s circles. Aswas shown, in the New Worlds in which African peoples were beingre-made/were remaking themselves into new persons and peoples ofAfrican descent, numerous Black women across the generations werechallenged to think hard and long about the assaults on theircommunities, their families, their very bodies and souls. Here, then,acompelling need to foster and support the philosophizingefforts of Black women who direct our attention to the lives andphilosophizing of Black women, historically andcontemporarily. Noteworthy in this regard are the groundbreaking,inspiring efforts of philosopher Kathryn Gines in founding theCollegium of Black Women Philosophers. The Collegium is bringingtogether women from across the country in conferences devoted torecovering and recognizing the contributions of pioneering womenphilosophers of African descent while exploring present issues andforging agendas of further work to be done.

13. Future Developments

The possible futures of developments in Africana philosophy inAfrican and the African Diaspora are open. The initial work of makingthe case for and legitimacy of African American, African, and Africanaphilosophy and its subfields has been accomplished with significantsuccess even without universal acceptance and respect. That is to beexpected, for no intellectual movement or disciplinary sub-field everwins acceptance by all. Still, there is more to be done by way ofconsolidating the gains while forging new developments as minds areturned to challenging issues, many of them novel. To note, for twodecades much of the effort of practitioners of Africana philosophy hasbeen devoted to explorations ofrace, a foundational andpervasive complex of forceful factors shaping virtually all aspects anddimensions of life in the formation of Modernity in Europe and theAmericas, and in every instance in which Europeans encroached on thelands and lives of peoples around the globe. Achieving justice withoutracism in polities bequeathed by Modernity is hardly finished business.So, the need to rethinkrace will be with us for a whileyet.

However, the need will be generated by resolutions of olddifficulties and challenges. Success will bring new challenges. Amongthese, settling such questions as whether there can and should benorms, practices, and agendas that are definitive of philosophizingidentified as instances of “Africana” philosophy. If so,then on what terms, and to what ends, are the requisite agendas, norms,and practices to be set to serve the best interests of African andAfrican-descended peoples, without injustice to non-Black peoples, andthereby provide those philosophizing with normative guidance whileconforming to norms that ensure propriety and truthfulness indiscursive practices on conditions of warrant that are open to and canbe confirmed by persons who are neither African nor African-descended?Should such concerns continue to be appropriate conditioners ofphilosophical effort? The praxes and supportive discursive communitiesconstitutive of Africana philosophy will have to meet certaininstitutionalized rules governing scholarly practices even as those ofus committed to the development of the enterprise contribute tocritiques and refinements of these institutionalized rules whiledevising and proposing others.

The work constituting Africana philosophy, on the African continentand throughout the African Diaspora, has helped to change the agendasand rules of discourse and praxis in Philosophy and other disciplinesand discursive communities in contemporary academic institutions andorganizations. The enterprise has been a significant contributor to theemergent recognition of the need to give greater respectful attentionto raciality and ethnicity (as well as to gender, sexual orientation,and other constitutive aspects of our personal and social identities)as conditioners of philosophical praxis without thereby invalidatingreconstructed notions of proper reasoning. As well, practitioners ofAfricana philosophy have aided the development of much wider and deeperrecognition and acknowledgment of inadequacies in basic notions andagendas in the legacies of Western Philosophy thereby helping to openus all to challenging new needs and possibilities for further revisingphilosophical traditions and practices. The expansion of academicPhilosophy to include Africana philosophy is indicative of efforts toachieve greater intellectual democracy in multi-ethnic, multi-racialsocieties. These developments should be continued, aided byphilosophizing persons who are neither African nor of African descent,nor, even, professional academic philosophers, and continued as part ofa larger, ongoing effort to appreciate and learn from the manylife-enriching creations ofall peoples as contributions tothe treasure-houses of human civilization.

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Africana Philosophy

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African American Philosophy

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Afro-Caribbean Philosophy

• Bogues, B. Anthony, 1997,Caliban’s Freedom: The EarlyPolitical Thought of C.L.R. James, London: Pluto.
• –––, 2003,Black Heretics, Black Prophets: RadicalPolitical Intellectuals, New York: Routledge.
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• Grimshaw, A., 1992,The C.L.R. James Reader, Oxford:Blackwell.
• Henry, Paget, 2000,Caliban’s Reason: IntroducingAfro-Caribbean Philosophy, New York: Routledge.
• –––, 2005, “Africana Phenomenology: Its PhilosophicalImplications,”The C.L.R. James Journal, 11 (1):79–112.

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• African Philosophical Bibliography:An extensive bibliography, according to theIntroduction, of “philosophical Literature on Black Africa” thatincludes “Philosophy books, articles or texts written byAfricans, including Afro-Americans of the Diaspora, as well as allphilosophical works published on Africa or edited in Africa, whateverthe origins and nationalities of the authors” (Hountondji,Paulin J. (ed), Bilan de recherche philosophiqueafricaine. Répertoire alphabétique / PhilosophicalResearch in Africa. A Bibliographic Survey. 1ère partie/Part l:1900–1985, Cotonou, Conseil Interafricain de Philosophie /Inter-African Council for Philosophy., 1987, pp.VIII-XI, X-XV).
• Conference on The Role of Africana Philosophy in 21st Century Struggles: at Texas A&M, in 2016..
• Caribbean Philosophical Association.
• African Resource, hosted by the Africa Knowledge Project.
• Africana Philosophy, section at PhilPapers.org devoted to African/Africana Philosophy.

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