Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012

Martin Kilson

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780674283541
• eBook ISBN:
  9780674416413
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Social Sciences

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

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

1

THE RISE AND FALL OF COLOR ELITISM AMONG AFRICAN AMERICANS

THE FOUNDATION YEARS of a modern social system for the majority of African Americans began after the Civil War, when the federal government enacted legislation to facilitate the full-fledged incorporation of the formerly enslaved Negro population—some four million souls—into America’s democratic processes. The progressive Republican Party legislators in Congress from northern and midwestern states who initiated this legislation in 1867 labeled it “Reconstruction policy”—a federal government policy that supported keeping federal armed forces in the South in order to advance voting rights and human rights for the formerly enslaved Negro population. The federal Reconstruction policy, however, barely survived a decade: by 1876. the tumultuous conflict surrounding the Hayes versus Tilden presidential election—whereby the election results were decided by the House of Representatives—resulted in legislative maneuvering that put Rutherford Hayes in the executive office and removed federal armed forces from the South. Thus, Reconstruction came to an end, and the southern states laid the foundation for a restoration of a racist oligarchy in their social and political system. This, of course, was a betrayal of the formative democracy experience of African Americans during Reconstruction—an experience that is vividly related by John Hope Franklin in his 1961 book Reconstruction after the Civil War.¹

Despite the demise of Reconstruction, however, it was during the last several years of this momentous period in modern American history (1875–1878) that the indispensable instrument for the emergence of a viable intelligentsia or professional class for African American society appeared: the Negro college. Apart from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and Wilberforce University in Ohio, which were founded before the Civil War by liberal white religious denominations associated with the antislavery movement, the vast majority of higher-education institutions for Negroes were located in the South (see Chapter 2, Table 2.5). It is interesting to note that a sizable segment of the earliest Negro colleges were initiated in the 1870s by the liberal white Methodist Episcopal Church denomination, which mobilized its own resources for an extraordinary college development program for Emancipation-era African Americans.

Instead of resting on its laurels after the founding of Wilberforce University in 1856 (which was transferred to the African Methodist Episcopal Church after the Civil War), the white Methodist Episcopal Church built on the momentum of its initial achievement. At the birth of its higher-education program for recently emancipated Negroes was the establishment of Clark University in Atlanta in 1869 and the launching of Meharry Medical College in Nashville in 1875–1876. These higher education institutions were followed later in the nineteenth century by a dozen additional institutions, including Rust College in Mississippi, Wiley College in Texas, Philander Smith College in Arkansas, Bennett College in North Carolina, Flint-Goodridge Hospital and Nurse Training School in Louisiana, Gammon Theological Seminary in Georgia, and Morgan College in Maryland. As reported in Monroe Work’s The Negro Year Book, 1931–1932, by the 1930s the higher-education institutions for Negroes established by the Methodist Episcopal Church had enrolled some 2,359 students.²

The white Methodist Episcopal Church’s contribution to higher education for African Americans in the post-Reconstruction period—along with contributions by African American religious denominations—helped to expand the small number of college-educated Negroes that W. E. B. Du Bois characterized in his renowned 1903 essay as the “Talented Tenth,” which recorded a total of 1,996 “college-bred Negroes” graduating in the academic year 1899–1900.³

Of course, the African American quest for modern advancement depended overwhelmingly upon the existence of a well-formed black intelligentsia or professional class. This book probes select aspects of the social, cultural, ideological, and political trajectories along which a viable black intelligentsia evolved in tandem with twentieth-century African American society in general. This book’s discourse intertwines core elements of the African American intelligentsia’s metamorphosis, on the one hand, and the overall development of African American society in the context of the twentieth-century American racial oligarchy, on the other.

This chapter provides an overview of the development of the black intelligentsia and discusses class and status attributes of the formative-phase black intelligentsia, the dynamics of black elite consolidation during the 1880s–1940s, and social democratization of the black elite during the 1930s–1950s. I examine how skin color and color-caste patterns—which is to say, “color elitism”—initially shaped a conservative social class system within the evolving African American intelligentsia of the early twentieth century. Then I discuss how color-caste patterns were eventually challenged by orientations of black ethnic identity—black-consciousness attitudes. This important development was fostered by the so-called New Negro Movement among black professionals from the 1920s into the 1940s.

By the post–World War II period, the prewar New Negro Movement had facilitated ideological patterns among African American professionals that amounted to what might be called the “social democratization” of the black intelligentsia. Accordingly, by the 1950s a major by-product of this social democratization was a precipitous decline in the color elitism dynamic that was prominent in the ranks of the African American intelligentsia from the 1880s into the 1940s. This in turn facilitated the development of the militant phase of the Civil Rights movement from the 1950s through the 1960s.

Throughout this chapter, I use the terms “black intelligentsia” and “black professionals” interchangeably. Why? Because in the development of the twentieth-century African American social system, the opportunity to occupy what might be called “intelligentsia roles” was not limited to African American individuals with “formal knowledge-producing credentials,” as the late social theorist Seymour Martin Lipset put it. It is useful here to refer to Lipset’s formulation of the generic attributes of an intelligentsia personality, which appeared in a 1959 special issue of Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In his famous article, Lipset defined the core or generic function of intelligentsia as follows: “We shall here consider intellectuals to be all those who create, distribute, and apply culture—the symbolic world of man, including art, science, and religion.” Lipset then elaborates the range of generic intelligentsia functions. “Within this group,” he observed, “two main levels may be discerned: the hard core, who are creators of culture—scholars, artists, philosophers, authors, some editors, and some journalists; and second, those who distribute what others create—performers in the various arts, most teachers, most reporters. A peripheral group are those who apply culture as part of their jobs—professionals such as physicians and lawyers.”⁴

As it happened, weakness in color elitism’s patterns facilitated a relative fluidity in the ideological boundaries between black Americans’ social classes. This fluidity, in turn, enabled a variety of artisan-class and working-class individuals (such as carpenters, mechanics, bricklayers, farmers, cooks, valets, and chauffeurs) to awake one day and, in the proverbial blink of an eye, recast themselves as “self-identified” intelligentsia-type personalities—insofar as such persons articulated social and political ideas for broader consumption in African American society.

One such prominent figure in the 1920s and 1930s was a working-class immigrant from Jamaica named Marcus Garvey, who in his early adult years was employed as a banana picker in Costa Rica, a common laborer on the Panama Canal, and a trade union activist in Jamaica. After migrating to New York City in 1916, Garvey became a kind of street-corner preacher in Harlem around 1918, and after World War I he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). From the 1920s through the 1930s, the UNIA propelled Garvey to the top ranks of African American cultural and political leadership.⁵

A similar self-made intelligentsia-type figure between the late 1940s and middle 1950s was Malcolm Little, who, after a career as a street hustler and a period of imprisonment, fashioned for himself a self-styled transfiguration via the Nation of Islam Movement and became Malcolm X. He accordingly evolved into an influential “self-made intelligentsia-type figure” in African American society by the mid-1950s, interacting with a wide circle of professionally educated African American intelligentsia personalities. As Columbia University historian Manning Marable relates in his 2011 book Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, Malcolm X sustained interactions with mainstream African American intelligentsia circles until he was assassinated in the mid-1960s.⁶

Interestingly enough, there were precedents for self-made intelligentsia-type personalities like Malcolm X in the post–World War II era that extend back to the pre–Civil War era—a period that witnessed the rise of antislavery black abolitionists. Those early nineteenth-century self-made black abolitionist intelligentsia personalities were, in a basic sense, foundational figures in the life cycle of the modern African American intelligentsia. Among them were stellar African American leadership figures like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, J. W. C. Pennington, John Sella Martin, and William Cooper Nell, to name a prominent few.

The professionally educated modern African American intelligentsia began to emerge in the Emancipation era after the Civil War. Let me first delineate a developmental overview of the black intelligentsia, starting with its formative phase from the 1870s to the 1920s. The formative phase was developmentally significant for two reasons. First, it witnessed two important events that shaped the sociological character of the first three generations the black intelligentsia. One significant event was the rise of a group that historian Richard Bardolph, in his trailblazing 1959 book The Negro Vanguard, called the “out-of-bondage elite”: the first generation of black Americans who acquired middle-class attributes during the South’s Reconstruction period, when over 90 percent of black Americans resided in the South. The second significant event was what historian Willard Gatewood dubbed the “colored aristocracy”: the skin-color-obsessed segment of the African American professional class from the late nineteenth century into the first three decades of the twentieth century.⁷

The African American intelligentsia’s second developmental phase can be called the elite social democratization phase, which began in the mid-1920s and was completed by the 1950s. The New Negro Movement of progressive intellectuals (writers, actors, academics, lawyers, schoolteachers, and others) initiated the social democratization phase among the evolving twentieth-century black intelligentsia. During this phase, progressive ideas about black consciousness challenged the colored aristocracy’s obsession with color elitism among the formative-phase African American intelligentsia. This black-consciousness challenge eventually produced a genuine social democratization dynamic within the evolving African American society. Above all, the black-consciousness social democratization elements in the New Negro Movement elevated the ideological and cultural status of “blackness.” Blackness (or “Blackways,” as the African American sociologist Hylan Lewis called it in his classic 1955 book Blackways of Kent) was now for the first time freed from denigration by the color-elitism-obsessed elements among middle-class African Americans.⁸

The third developmental phase, the elite maturation phase, ran from the middle 1960s into the twenty-first century. During this period, an elected black political class emerged alongside a broad-based African American professional class. As of 2010, African Americans had nearly ten thousand elected office holders nationwide, forty-two federal-level legislators in the U.S. Congress, and over twenty thousand federal and state bureaucrats—not to mention an African American president of the United States. It should be noted, finally, that as the twenty-first century progresses, the African American intelligentsia has entered what might be called an elite normalization phase, a developmental period during which the mainstream elements in the African American intelligentsia experience a slow but steady systemic incorporation within broad spheres of American life and institutions.

From our vantage point here in the early decades of the twenty-first century, it might be difficult to appreciate the strong influence of skin color and color-caste ideas and patterns in shaping the character of the African American intelligentsia during its formative phase from the 1880s into the first two decades of the twentieth century. I grew up in a small black community in a small eastern Pennsylvania factory town during the 1930s, the son of a lower-middle-class African Methodist clergyman. The black population was about three hundred when I was born in 1931, in a total population of four thousand, about 30 percent of whom were Italian American factory workers. Thanks to my father’s penchant for relating tales about African American history, I was familiar with the following Negro folk expression: “If you’re light, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black [that is, dark-skinned], stay back.” This folk expression speaks volumes about the place of skin-color attitudes in delineating status patterns among African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century.

As I entered my freshman year in 1949 at Lincoln University—one of Pennsylvania’s two colleges for African Americans—I was one among about six hundred other young black men, half of whom came from middle-class backgrounds and all of whom were seeking entrée into the African American professional class. It was here that I became more aware of the meaning of skin color and color-caste patterns in African American society. I began to recognize the knowledge I had gained from my father’s ancestral tales, many of which involved skin color and color-caste issues in African American life. Some of these tales concerned my Free Negro forebears of the late eighteenth and nineteenth century who lived in Maryland’s Eastern Shore counties, some of whom had light skin and brown skin. They were the Lee, Taylor, Emory, Kennard, Brown, Martin, and Kilson clans.

My paternal great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Isaac Lee, was born to a Free Negro family in 1808. He was a literate artisan—a boot maker—who in the late 1840s founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Kent County, Maryland—the St. Paul A.M.E. Church. My paternal great-grandfather, the Reverend Joseph Martin, who was Isaac Lee’s son-in-law, pastored the St. Paul A.M.E. Church after the Civil War during the Emancipation period. My father—a person with light brown skin—told stories in which both his clergymen great-grandfather (Issac Lee) and grandfather (Joseph Martin) chastised light-skinned and brown-skinned families for behavior that my father called “mulatto arrogance.” My father said that his two clergy ancestors believed that a main obligation of light-skinned and brown-skinned Free N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr.
• Prologue: The Origins of the Black Intelligentsia
• 1. The Rise and Fall of Color Elitism among African Americans
• 2. Black Intelligentsia Leadership Patterns
• 3. Ideological Dynamics and the Making of the Intelligentsia
• 4. Black Elite Patterns in the Twenty-First Century
• Illustrations
• Appendix: Class Attributes of Elite Strata
• Notes
• Analytical Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index