Black Intellectuals: Race and Responsibility in American Life (New Edition) - Softcover

Banks, William M.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393316742 ISBN 13: 9780393316742

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 1996

Synopsis

“An important book, significant because it highlights the diversity and richness of Afro-American intellectual life throughout our nation’s history.” ―Jerry G. Watts, New York Times Book Review

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

About this title

Review:

Banks, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has written a scholarly history of black American intellectuals covering some 250 years of progress. The slave generations of African-Americans had precious little opportunity for intellectual pursuits. Initially the community's intellectuals were mostly Christian pastors struggling to reconcile Christianity with the barbarous oppression of their people. Later freed negroes agitating for abolition became more prominent, and the founding in 1827 of Freedom's Journal provided a literary outlet for their work. After reconstruction, a network of black colleges and the proliferation of black newspapers and magazines secured a solid base for an intellectual life that today is thriving more than ever before.

About the Author:

William M. Banks is a professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Oakland, California.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0393316742
• ISBN 13: 9780393316742
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368