Foreword
CORNEL WEST
Martin L. Kilson Jr. was the greatest political scientist of his generation, someone who focused on both Afro-Americans here and Africans abroad. He also was the first Black tenured professor in the history of Harvard University. Many of us cannot conceive of our intellectual vocation and scholarly work without Kilson’s sterling example and genuine encouragement. In addition to myself, the highly acclaimed Fred Moton and the late Jerry Watts come to mind in this regard. There is no doubt that Kilson— alongside the great St. Clair Drake—is one of the two grand products and progeny of the golden age of the Black intelligentsia from the 1920s through the 1960s. This unsung, overlooked, and often downplayed generation of courageous and visionary Black intellectuals come alive in an unprecedented manner in this powerful and pioneering work.
Kilson highlights the “Afro-Americanization” of Negro colleges as a crucial institutional process, yet he never loses sight of the “perpetual interplay between formal ideas and Black equalitarianism struggle.” He has a deep appreciation of organic intellectuals such as the “brilliant” Sojourner Truth, Nancy Ruffin, David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, Horace Pippin, and Harold Cruse. Kilson’s rich conception of the “broad- gauged social- class basis of the evolving twentiethcentury African American intelligentsia” reveals how limiting and even impoverished the discourse on Black public intellectuals in our day has
been. Kilson puts forward a subtle and sophisticated analysis that remains attuned to the intellectual and ideological dynamics of flesh- and- blood thinkers as well as the power and political dynamics of institutional and structural realities. His own immersion into these multidimensional dynamics and realities gives him a very special key to unlock new insights.
Black political thought has moved closer to the center of serious inquiry as a recognized academic discipline with the publication of the monumental text edited by Melvin L. Rogers and Jack Turner, African American Political Thought: A Collected History (University of Chicago, 2021), as well as the historic book edited by Brandon Terry and Tommie Shelby, To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr. (Harvard University Press, 2018). Like Kilson’s path-blazing work, both anthologies acknowledge the “impact of the Du Bois–Washington cleavage on the early Black intelligentsia”— the clash between “a firmly progressive but pragmatic skepticism” and “an accommodationist leadership.” All three texts also lay bare the limitations of this Du Bois–Washington framework, which marginalizes Marcus Garvey’s explosive Black Nationalism and “the great Black radical Ida B. Wells-Barnett’s abolitionist antilynching movement.” As Kilson quotes her courageous words in regard to Washington’s compromising project, “This gospel of work is no new one for the Negro. It is the South’s old slavery practice in a new dress.”
Kilson then notes the strong words of the legendary Madam C. J. Walker at an event for Washington’s own National Negro Business League hosted at her Hudson River estate, Villa Lewaro, in late August 1918: “My message to my people is this: Go live and conduct yourself so that you will be above the reproach of any one. But should but one prejudiced, irrational boast infringe upon your rights as men—resent the insults like men . . . and if death be the result— so be it. An honorable death is far better than the miserable existence imposed upon most of our people in the south.”
For Kilson, the fundamental challenge of the golden age of the midcentury Black intelligentsia was “to smash the dual shackles of Bookerite accommodationist and fear of white racism.” This effort required a maturing and ripening of “a variant of Du Boisian civil rights activism” and an attention to decolonization in Africa. What Kilson calls “narratives of Blackness or tales of Black equalitarianism struggle” here and abroad— “sparked by pioneer Black dancers like Pearl Primus, Donald McKayle, and Katherine Dunham” alongside a host of other artists and figures— fan and fuel this political activism. Kilson’s text, so badly needed in our grim
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time of Black Lives Matter and Gilded Age excess, offers a highly illuminating and inspiring journey. His magnificent treatment of his mentor— the great Horace Mann Bond (beloved father of Julian Bond)—is one of the unique and beautiful moments in Afro-American letters. It is a singular combination of historical analysis, political inquiry, and personal tribute! The poignant triumph and tragedy of Bond’s marvelous calling and courageous career of “Christian self- efficacy activism” (to use St. Clair Drake’s apt words) are for the ages. Like Dante’s homage to Virgil, Kilson gently guides us from the inferno of Jim Crow America (Alabama, Louisiana, and Georgia, including the first pre-Bookerite leader, William H. Councill, in Huntsville and the life- changing lynching of Jerome Wilson in Franklinton, Louisiana, in 1934)— to the false promise of the racist North. Bond’s twelve years as president of the historic Lincoln University were groundbreaking—just as his political firing was pathetic (including a reneging on his salary and pension!). His commitment to decolonization in Africa was too much for his conservative white board. He responded by writing the definitive history of Lincoln University and cofounding (with John Aubrey Davis) the American Society for African Culture. Lincoln University graduates such as Nmandi Azikiwe of Nigeria and Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana played an important role in his new organization. Kilson’s marvelous tribute to his lodestar, Horace Mann Bond—much like Du Bois’s tribute to his own lodestar, Alexander Crummell, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—reveals Kilson’s left-reformist humanism.
In our current environment, Horace Mann Bond would, I believe, recognize the need for a rebirth of Christian-humanist activism among the greed- and plutocracy-polluted corporatist stratum above all. I have in mind especially a rebirth of Christian-humanist activism on behalf of vanquishing the demeaning poverty that exists. If he were with us today, Bond’s intellectual prowess would contribute boldly to this kind of Christianhumanist activist rebirth. This grand declaration reminds us of the precious legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. to which Bond, Kilson (in his distinctive, secular way), Preston Williams, Katie Cannon, and I are wedded! John Aubrey Davis—Kilson’s other great mentor— indeed was “a rare breed.” Davis’s elite education at Williams College, the University of Wisconsin, and Columbia University was rare. His activism with the New Negro Alliance (including alongside Thurgood P. Marshall) was rare. His directorship of President Roosevelt’s Fair Employment Practices Committee at the age of thirty- one was rare. His professorships at Howard University,
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Lincoln University, and City College of New York were rare. And his cofounding of the American Society for African Culture was prophetic. Kilson’s treatment of three towering figures— Ralph Bunche’s early Marxist years, E. Franklin Frazier’s scathing indictment of the Black bourgeoisie, and Harold Cruse’s influential Black Nationalism— are now more relevant than ever. Contemporary discussions of Black Marxism, racial capitalism, abolitionism, Afro- pessimism, Afro- futurism, Black womanism, and Black Nationalism loom large. Yet Kilson’s empirically based, analytically acute judgments are leaven in this loaf. Needless to say, Kilson’s close readings of Bunche’s prize-winning Marxist dissertation at Harvard on Togoland and Dahomey, of Frazier’s famous critiques of the Black middle class, and of Cruse’s fraught Black Nationalist project are absolutely brilliant. I was elated to see the chapter on the pioneering Adelaide Cromwell, and even more so to know that this chapter was written by the distinguished Harvard- trained anthropologist Marion D. de B. Kilson— Martin Kilson’s brilliant wife and life companion. I can attest to the depth, breath, and scope of this magnificent marriage and partnership (as parents of such wonderful children and scholarly products)! Cromwell’s unique trajectory from the acclaimed Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, to Smith College in 1936, to her groundbreaking Harvard doctoral dissertation on Black and white elite women in mid-twentiethcentury Boston, and on to subsequent works on her historic family remains too often overlooked. Marion Kilson masterfully takes us step-by- step, text-by-text through Cromwell’s rich corpus in a clear and succinct manner. From Cromwell’s aunt Otelia Cromwell, the first Black student to attend and graduate from Smith College, in 1900, to Adelaide Cromwell’s crucial years in Africa, including her major paper delivered at the Newark National Conference on Black Power in 1967, “What Is Africa to Us?,” Martin Kilson ends this fabulous scholarly book with a fascinating typology of Black intellectuals— reform- leftist, ethno- activist, conservative, and establishmentarian— and examinations of the literary giant Ismael Reed as populist and myself as radical humanist. So Kilson’s magisterial text begins with a heartfelt gratitude to his towering mentors and ends with a call to keep the grand Du Boisian tradition alive. Progressive Black intellectuals today have, I believe, a special obligation to scrutinize the new ranks among conservative and establishmentarian Black public intellectuals. It is a task we owe our forefathers and foremothers of the
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twentieth- century African American intelligentsia, who laid the foundations on which we function. May the rigorous cerebral and joyful visceral legacy of the great Martin L. Kilson Jr.—my dearest teacher, mentor, and lodestar—forever be one of the foundations on which we remain true to our calling, work, and witness!
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