## 1. The Concept of Africana Philosophy




There are significant challenges to the viability of the concept
*Africana philosophy* as well as to an effort to map out an
encyclopedic overview of the extended and still expanding range of
endeavors covered by the term. Foremost are the challenges to ordering
through a single concept the geographical, historical, socio-political,
and cultural differences and complexities that have defined and
continue to define the realities of life of the many persons and
peoples identified as "African" and "of African
descent" in many locales throughout the world. Yet, the viability
of the concept is grounded on several centuries of continuous, linked,
complicated histories during which Black peoples of Africa, and their
descendants, have been regarded as and engaged with, and more or less
have come to regard themselves, as "African" peoples, as
persons and peoples "of African descent." The long
histories of this regarding, by others and by themselves, have thus
conditioned substantively the history-makings, the socio-political
lives, the culture-makings and culture-mediations, intellectual
productions and philosophizings included, of persons and peoples
African and of African descent.




On these socially constructive historical groundings rest several key
heuristic presumptions that are central to *Africana
philosophy* as a metaphilosophical concept for organizing
intellectual praxes. First, the presumption that there are sufficient
distinguishing anthropological, historical, and other commonalities
and similarities that are shared, more or less, by the many
bio-cultural groupings of human beings who have been identified, and
who subsequently generally have come to identify themselves, as, in
part, "African" or "of African descent" to
warrant ordering under a general heading particular instances of
philosophically articulate thought expressed by persons in these
groupings and shared with and debated by others within and beyond the
groupings. These identifications are consequences of the imposition on
the peoples of the continent named "Africa" of an
attempted homogenizing racializing ontology by peoples of
nation-states on another continent that was named "Europe"
in an aspiration for geo-political and anthropological
unification. Many "Europeans" came to believe that beneath
their many formidable differences there was a foundational commonality
through shared raciality and other constitutive virtues that was
definitive of their anthropological and historical superiority as
harbingers of a theologically and philosophically sanctioned destiny
to achieve global predominance. It was out of this toxic mix of
convictions and aspirations that particular Europeans set about
constructing racialized, rank-ordered philosophical anthropologies
through which they construed a continent of diverse peoples as a
single "race" of "Africans" or
"Negroes." The outcomes of the histories of these
inventive forgings through complex, centuries-long struggles against
European imperialist impositions and the adaptive endurances of
colonization and dispersing enslavements by persons and peoples
African and African-descendant provide the warrant for the presumption
of commonalities embraced by the concept *Africana philosophy*
when considering the philosophizings of people African and
African-descended subsequent to their encounters with impositions of
imperialism by people(s) of Europe and European Diasporas.




This first presumption is tempered by a second: namely, that the
bio-cultural groupings of peoples African and of African descent are
not homogeneous, racially or otherwise, neither individually nor
collectively, but are constituted by differences and dissimilarities
as well as by similarities and commonalities. All the more so as
consequences of the various groups having created differing
life-worlds in differing geographical, political, and historical
locations prior to and as a consequence of impositions and disruptions
of their lives fostered by Europeans and others on one hand; and, on
the other, while living interactions and cultural exchanges with other
peoples, European and European-descended peoples included, which have
given rise to differences in individual and group genomes, histories,
cultures, interests, and aspirations. Furthermore, identified shared
similarities and commonalities are understood to be
*contingent*, thus neither necessary nor inherent and fixed and
thus the same for all persons African or of African descent. This
presumption rules out any ahistorical, a priori claims regarding
supposedly definitive "natural" characteristics of
"the" thought of African and African-descended
peoples assumed as non-contingently widely and generally shared across
extended historical times and geo-cultural spaces. *Africana
philosophy* as an ordering concept, then, is neither the promise
of, nor an aspiration for, a unifying philosophy already shared, or to
be shared, by all properly thoughtful persons African and/or of African
descent. Judgments regarding the always-contingent distinguishing
features of philosophizing thought and expression by persons African
and of African descent, and of the extent to which such features are
shared--to what degree, under what circumstances, to what
ends--are to be achieved by way of combined efforts of
philosophical anthropology, sociology of knowledge, and intellectual
histories: that is, by way of *historically and socio-culturally
situated comparative studies* of instances of philosophizing.




A third presumption: *Africana philosophy* should not be
regarded as normatively prescriptive for philosophers identified as
African or of African descent, as setting requirements for what their
philosophizing must have been, or must be, about and to what ends
because of their racial/ethnic identities. Such identities neither
confer nor require particular philosophical commitments or obligations.
Substantive differences among African and African-descended thinkers
have been, and must continue to be, acknowledged and taken into account
in the ordering of the field and setting agendas for Africana
philosophy. There have been, are, and will likely continue to be
persons African and of African descent for whom their identities as
such are of no import for their philosophizing.




Of particular importance, work in Africana philosophy is also
conditioned by the presumption that contributors need not be persons
African or of African descent. This presumption rests on the
understanding that the conditioning circumstances, motivations, modes,
agendas, and importance of the philosophically articulate thought and
aesthetic expressions of persons African and of African descent can be
identified, understood, researched, taught, commented on, and taken up
with respectful competence by persons neither African nor of African
descent. By virtue of their competencies such persons may be identified
appropriately as, for example, "Africanists" or
"Afro-Caribbeanists" or "African
Americanists."




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


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




The metaphilosophical efforts to map out and order a complex
discursive field of articulations and practices as *Africana
philosophy* are, indeed, *emergent* disciplinary ventures of
the late twentieth century. However, many of the instances of
thoughtful articulation and aesthetic expressiveness that are being
identified and explored as instances of philosophizing were neither
produced nor guided by norms and agendas of the discipline of academic
philosophy as institutionalized for centuries in various countries of
Western European and North America. The same is true for the needs,
motivations, objectives, and many of the principal intellectual
resources that motivated and oriented those instances of articulation
and creative expression and the formation of the networks of
idea-spaces and discursive communities that nurtured them. For African
and African-descended peoples were of little or no philosophical or
anthropological significance to those who have been the designators,
historians, practitioners, and mediators of the discipline's
institutionalized canons of issues, figures, agendas, conceptual and
methodological traditions, problem-sets, texts or text-analogs,
organizations, and institutions. The pre-Modern histories of African
and African-descended peoples; the centuries-long colonized, enslaved,
and otherwise utterly dehumanizing unfreedom of Black peoples
throughout the continents of Africa, Europe, the Americas, and the
Caribbean; the rapacious unjust exploitation of their bodies, lands,
resources, and life-opportunities--all of these went mostly
without explicit comment in the discipline of Philosophy, not even as a
focus of protest, notwithstanding all of the vaunted concern within the
discipline for conceptions of *freedom*, *justice*,
*equality*, *human nature*, and *human well-being*
generally. Even as European and European-descended *philosophes*
of the eighteen, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries fashion decidedly
new philosophical anthropologies, socio-political philosophies, and
philosophies of histories into complex Enlightenments to ground and
guide quests to realize the global instantiations of Modernities in
which reason-guided freedom and justice would be foundational to the
spread of the racialized, capitalist civilizational projects of
Eurocentrism (Amin 1989), there was almost total silence about the intended and
unintended consequences for peoples African and of African
descent--except for claims that colonization and enslavement would
bring them much needed "civilizing."




Evolving academic, and subsequently professionalized, Philosophy
thus aided and abetted, and was a substantial institutionalized
beneficiary of, these projects well into the twentieth century when the
various forms and movements of resistance of African and
African-descended peoples to dehumanization were made more challenging
while animated by motivating declarations of their claims to their
humanity and their rights to freedom, justice, and full citizenship. By
the middle of the twentieth century, throughout Africa, the Caribbean,
and the Americas these movements had won major victories of liberation
from the oppressive regimes of Eurocentric racial apartheid and
exploitation. The movements were also contributing to progressive
transformations of these regimes that helped to open them to
substantive measures of real freedom and justice not only for persons
and peoples African and of African descent, but for other persons and
peoples of color and, even, for women of European descent.




These historic movements and developments provided contemporary
pioneers 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 and
strategies and social networks needed for philosophizing in the
interests of people African and of African descent. Hence, the
twentieth-century emergence of Africana philosophy as an international
field of and for discursive intellectual and expressive aesthetic work
with a distinctive mission: to gather up and explore critically
thoughtful articulations and aesthetic expressions by and about persons
and peoples African and of African descent as instances of
philosophizing; and to fashion revised or new articulations and artful
expressions 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 expressive
work in service to the liberation and redemption of Black peoples were
already 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 of
fiercely independent, extraordinarily formally and informally educated
(and in some instances self-taught) socially, politically, and
aesthetically engaged female and male black intellectuals and artists,
who devoted much of their lives to service as uplifters of Black
peoples, had pursued their often very highly productive, and certainly
very influential, intellectual and expressive work without ongoing
affiliations with institutions of higher education, and without the
assistance of sources of support for articulation and expression, that
were dominated and controlled by Europeans and people of European
descent. This independence was crucial to the production of their
seminal reflections, articulations, and artistic creations and
expressions. Many of them helped to found and were affiliated with and
supported by religious and educational institutions, character-building
women's and men's clubs and literary societies;
international missionary ventures; benevolent and political
organizations; publishing and commercial enterprises; and with local,
regional, and international anti-colonial and liberatory organizations
founded and operated by and devoted to the uplift, freedom, and
well-being of African and African-descended peoples. As inspiring role
models, much of their work became resource-reservoirs for new
generations of women and men determined to continue the quests for
liberation and justice for Black peoples. A matter of significant
influence was that many of these important figures had become
internationalists in understanding the similarities and commonalities of
the plights suffered by African and African-descended peoples due to
the shared agendas for racialized oppression and exploitation forged
and fostered by White peoples of various nation-states. Consequently,
more than a few of the new generations of twentieth-century African and
African-descended fighters for freedom and justice cultivated
internationalist, "Pan African" (Geiss 1974) understandings of and
aspirations for what would be needed in the way of intellectual
resources and strategies to assist with claiming and realizing the full
humanity of and just freedom for African and African-descended
peoples.




Many of the contemporary disciplinary pioneers of the
philosophizings that are now being gathered under the umbrella of
Africana philosophy, though participants in institutionalized,
professional philosophy, have also been intellectual and spiritual
members of the new generations of freedom fighters or otherwise
substantially influenced by them. Thus, many have drawn their
motivations, aspirations, and resources for philosophical work from
beyond the canonized motivations and traditions of thought
institutionalized in the discipline. Energized and emboldened by the
legacies of the role models and liberatory movements, they have taken
on the work of challenging the discipline in order to create room
within its intellectual and organizational structures and processes
wherein they could pursue agendas of giving consideration to matters of
philosophical import to persons and peoples African and of African
descent, and of particular import to themselves as persons African and
of African descent engaged in philosophizing formally and
professionally.




Among the challenges was the need, first, to reconsider
long-prevailing defining assumptions regarding the nature of properly
"philosophical" thought: namely, that such thought is
characterized by a loving quest for wisdom pursued by persons who have
the most highly cultivated forms of disciplined thought, and whose
lives are materially conditioned such that they have the leisure to
devote substantial amounts of their time and energy to *reflective
thought* and to working out their thinking for articulate,
systematic expression in *writing*.




It became apparent to many--though by no means to all--of
the contemporary pioneers of Africana philosophy within academic
philosophy that this image of the ideal philosopher was not appropriate
for respectfully identifying or characterizing many of the
philosophically thoughtful and expressive persons African and of
African descent, those, especially, who lived several centuries ago.
Certainly, throughout the centuries of radically disruptive and
dehumanizing encounters between peoples African and of African descent
and peoples of Europe and of the Euro-Americas, and others, the
philosophizing efforts of Black people have, indeed, been "born
of struggle," as the philosopher Leonard Harris has so aptly
noted. The experiences, thus the philosophizing, of many of these
persons--and of generations of millions who were their
contemporaries, millions more who came before them, and millions more
who came after them--were conditioned profoundly by racialized and
gendered exploitative settler-colonialism in their homelands; for
others by racialized and gendered capture, relocation, enslavement, and
oppression in *The New World* thousands of miles from their or
their ancestors' homelands; and in all such cases by racialized
and gendered imperialist encroachments on the very core of their
*being* by which they were forced to become and to be colonized
"natives" and slaves, *ontologically* as well as
socio-economically. Survival and endurance of such conditions by those
who managed to do so required coordinated efforts of recovery and
retention, or the recreation, of the integrity of personhood and
peoplehood, even of basic humaneness, thus required thoughtful
ontological and political work of the most fundamental significance.
So, too, crucial intellectual efforts of the kinds designated moral,
ethical, epistemological, social, religious, theological, and
aesthetic.




Thus, survival and endurance of conditions of racialized and
gendered colonization, enslavement, and oppression--not conditions
of leisured freedom--*compelled* more than a few African
and African-descended persons to philosophize. Almost daily, even on
what seemed the most mundane of occasions, oppressed Black people were
*compelled* to consider the most fundamental existential
questions: Continue life during what would turn out to be
centuries-long colonization and enslavement, of brutal, brutalizing and
humiliating gendered and racialized oppression? Or, seek
"freedom" in death? Suffer despair until mad? Or, find
resources for continued living through surreptitiously nurtured
appreciations of the sacred and beautiful, of irony and tragic comedy,
while cultivating hope and patience aided by discoveries and creations
of beauty and humaneness in the midst of the physical and
soul-distorting psychological brutalities of enforced impoverishments
of 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, on
earth as well as in the afterlife, through creativity and beauty in
speech, dance, and song while at work and rest; in thought and
artistry; in finding and making truth and right; in seeking and doing
justice; in forging and sustaining relations of family and community
when such relations were largely prohibited; in rendering life
sacred?




For centuries, persons African and of African descent, for
themselves as well as for their associates and successors, have
*had* to ponder the most fundamental questions of existence as a
direct consequence of their life-constraining, life-distorting
encounters with various self-racializing and other-racializing peoples
of Europe, the Euro-Americas, and elsewhere. And in choosing to live
and endure, peoples African and of African descent have *had* to
forge, test out with their lives, and then refine and further live out
explicit strategies by which to avoid being broken by brutality and
humiliation and succumbing to fear, despair, or the soul-devouring
obsession with vengeance. They have *had* to share with their
associates, and those succeeding them, their creative and sustaining
legacies for infusing life with spirit-lifting artfulness and their
articulated ponderings and strategies for surviving, living, and
enduring with hope *despite* the circumstances. They have
*had* to philosophize, and to share their philosophizings, in
order to forge the cross-generational bonds of respectful,
extended-family, community-sustaining love and mutuality without which
neither survival nor endurance would have been possible.




Indeed, endurance of gendered and racialized colonization,
enslavement, and oppression that would be continued for centuries
required very compelling, sustaining, persuasive beliefs and nurtured
investments in finding and creating soul-nurturing art and
experience-verified praxis-guiding thoughtfulness. These beliefs and
aesthetic considerations had to be articulated and communicated for
sharing, sometimes surreptitiously, in order that persons and peoples
endure. And enduring required that the brutalities and humiliations had
to be countered that were directed, first and foremost, at the defining
core of their very *being*--that is, at their foundational
notions of themselves as persons and as distinctive, racialized
peoples--so as to bring about their cross-generational living of
*social death* (Patterson 1982). This particular persons did, throughout Africa
and African Diasporas, and without either the guidance or sanction of
academic Philosophy and the discipline's most canonical
practitioners even as some among the latter subjected African and
African-descended peoples to their ontological racism.




It has been instances of such compelled, articulated thoughtfulness
that contemporary proponents of Africana philosophy have brought into
the discipline of academic Philosophy as the initial historic instances
of philosophizing constituting the new field. The identification and
careful exploration of and commentary on the forms and efficacies of
this growing collection of works of thoughtful articulation and
aesthetic expression are now principal forms of endeavor in Africana
philosophy. The creation and expression of new articulations and
expressions of thoughtfulness by persons African and of African
descent, and by other philosophers not African or of African descent,
on these works as well as on old, continuing, or emergent issues
pertinent to Africans and people of African descent make for other
forms of endeavor in Africana philosophy.




These efforts of recovery, exploration, commentary, and critique
constitute an ongoing project-of-projects with several agendas. A first
agenda involves, as just noted, the identification and recovery of
instances and legacies of the 'philosophizings born of
struggles'. Another very important agenda is the identification
and recovery of philosophizings that were engaged in long before the
centuries-long struggles with peoples of Europe began. A third agenda
is to learn from the philosophizings the lessons of the considerations
that governed or substantially conditioned the organization and living
of life in the various circumstances in which peoples of Africa forged
their evolutionary adaptations. Another agenda: to understand and
appreciate fully those philosophizings that nurtured endurance in the
face of brutalizing assaults on peoples' *being* in order
to learn from the life-affirming, very passionate intellectual and
emotional endeavors of those among severely abused peoples who have
been, and continue to be, those who work at gathering themselves, their
peoples, and even those who have abused them into humane integrity,
individually and collectively. It is to learn how and why it was and is
that from among peoples abused and degraded for centuries in conditions
of continuous terrorism there have been steady successions of persons
who have spared substantial portions of the emotional and intellectual
energies they managed to preserve and cultivate, along with nurtured
senses of their sacred humanity, to devote to quests for freedom and
justice, hardly ever to quests for vengeance.




Yet another agenda is to compare the philosophizings of persons
African and of African descent intra-racially and inter-racially, as it
were--that is, to seek out the similarities and differences in the
various instances and modes of thought and expression of persons
situated in similar and different times and places in order to learn
more about the forms and agendas of human species-being as manifested
in philosophizing. An important consequence of pursuing this agenda
should be significant contributions to inventories of thoughtfulness
and 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 the
discipline.




Still another agenda is to make of Africana philosophy a collection
of resources that inspire philosophizing, now and in the future, and
that guide such philosophizings by the best lessons found in the
collection, among them lessons in how to gain and sustain integrity of
body and soul, of person, of womanhood and manhood, of childhood and
young-adulthood, of family and community, of "racial" and
cultural being, of belief in the sacred sanctity of truth, of justice,
and of *freedom* through the exercise of faith and
hope-sustaining, pragmatically focused *reasoning* and creative
aesthetic *expression* in cross-generational conditions of
dehumanizing brutality. Among the lessons to be relearned: how
*not* to abuse persons and peoples; how *not* to
rationalize abuse; how *not* to live massive lies and
contradictions and lives of hypocrisy.




What follows are brief surveys of several historically contextualized
developments of philosophizing now being explored as instances of the
philosophizing constitutive of the field of "Africana
philosophy." The survey is not meant to be exhaustive, but one
that provides examples and solicits additional contributions in order
to 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 complex
societies of varying scale and scope many generations before fifteenth
century encounters with acquisitive explorers and adventurers from the
varying configurations of polities, regions, cities, and states that
have been identified as Europe and from elsewhere. Several of these
ancient societies--the kingdoms of Mali and Ghana and the royal
dynasties of Kemet (Ancient Egypt), for example--had evolved
complex social strata that included persons of accomplished learning.
Some of these persons were stationed in institutions devoted to the
production and distribution of knowledge and creative expression and to
the preservation of that knowledge and expression in written and
artistic works stored in libraries and other repositories and, in the
case of works of art, incorporated into the ontologically-structured
routines of daily life. Others, in social orders in which advanced
knowledge was produced and mediated via oral literatures and
traditions, were selected and trained to be *griots*: that is,
persons with rigorously structured memories who thus became the living
repositories, guardians, and mediators of a people's and/or a
political community's genealogies and intellectual legacies,
their keepers of wisdom. And in order to preserve shared, adaptive life
across generations in all of the various social orders, it was socially
necessary to construct and maintain interpretive orderings of natural
and social realities, as well of creatively imagined origins and
genealogies and constructed histories, by which to meaningfully order
individual and shared life.




The production of these interpretive and expressive orderings, the
working out of the norms by which to structure, justify, and legitimate
the interpretations so as to order personal and social life, were,
indeed, "philosophical" endeavors: labors devoted
to the production of successful, time-tested, enduring thought-praxis
and aesthetic strategies by which to resolve emergent and recurrent
challenges to transgenerational survival and flourishing. These were
experience-conditioned thoughtful means by which to provide knowledge
to guide the ordering of meaningful individual and shared life
transmitted across generations past, present, and future. Such efforts
are as old as the peoples now routinely referred to as
"Africans." And the efforts were not destroyed by the
holocausts of imperialist colonization and domination, nor by
racialized enslavement and apartheid-oppression, fostered by Europeans
and others. Still, the philosophizing efforts were disrupted and
distorted to various degrees in many instances, were creatively
adaptive in many others.




For example, during twentieth century anti-colonial and decolonizing
struggles to regain freedom from the domination and authoritative
jurisdiction of white racial supremacy over the lives, lands, and
resources of African peoples, the disruptions and distortions would
compel reinvigorated and determined adaptive creativity on the part of
African peoples who endeavored to recover and repair old, and/or to
invent new, agendas and strategies for living in keeping with their will
to endure. There is a long history of efforts by scholars African and
of African descent to reclaim Egypt from the intellectual annexation to
Europe that was urged by Hegel in his *The Philosophy of
History*. It is still the case that many people throughout Europe
and the United States regard Egypt as being in "the Middle
East" rather than as constituting the northern portion of the
African continent. This costly mis-education of popular imaginations
persists, as well, in historical accounts of various areas of thought
(though increasingly less so in historiography related to Africa). The
systematic production of ignorance and distorted, unethical
"knowledge" about the peoples of Continental Africa persists
in academic Philosophy, especially in the training of new
professionals; in the writing of canonical histories of the discipline;
and in the construction of disciplinary curricula though progressive
change has begun. Few in academic Philosophy not engaged in the work of
Africana philosophy are likely to know of a long tradition of
scholarship contesting the claims of the Greco-Roman
"origins" of Philosophy, an example of which is the
controversial work by George G.M. James, *Stolen Legacy* (James 1954), in
which he argues, as the title declares, that Greek thinkers
"stole" Egyptian intellectual legacies that have since been
attributed erroneously to Greek thinkers as their creations.




A provocative and controversial argument, indeed. Still, widespread
disciplinary ignorance regarding the histories of ancient peoples and
civilizations other than those stipulated as being ancestors of
European White peoples is a direct and continuing consequence of racism
in the formation, organization, and practices of communities of
discourse and scholarship and the development of racially segregated
idea-spaces, intellectual traditions and networks, and scholarly
organizations throughout Europe and North America. For example, few
academic philosophers and workers in other disciplines who are neither
African nor of African descent are likely to know of the Association
for the Study of Classical African Civilizations, an international
organization of scholars and intellectuals African and of African
descent who are determined to "rescue and rehabilitate" the
histories, intellectual traditions, and wisdom philosophies of Ancient
Africa. Thus, few academic philosophers are likely to know of the
scholarship of various persons in the Association such as Maulana
Karenga (1986) and Jacob H. Carruthers (1984). Both scholars have contributed
additional research and scholarship to studies devoted to reclaiming
Egyptian thought-traditions as *African* traditions of thought.
These scholars' efforts and works are paradigmatic examples of
the determined production and mediation of new knowledge of African and
African-descended peoples by African and African-descended, and other,
scholars who have deliberately worked independently of the mainstream
organizations of academic professionals in Philosophy and other
disciplines.




With little to no evidence in much of the canonical literature and
curricula of academic Philosophy that Western philosophers have focused
attention on questions of historical relations between Egyptian and
Greco-Roman thinkers, or on African thinkers and traditions of thought,
a number of the pioneers of Africana philosophy have turned to
independent, often controversial figures and scholarly projects outside
of academic, professional Philosophy for their inspiration and for
intellectual resources and strategies in taking on the challenges of
creating intellectual spaces in academic Philosophy for "matters
African." A major resource and intellectual mentor continue to be
works by and the person of Cheikh Anta Diop, the intellectually daring
and pioneering Senegalese scholar who, in *The African Origin of
Civilization: Myth or Reality*, published in the early 1970s,
argued for the reality of the African origin of human civilization. Diop had begun the
challenging work of reclaiming African heritages decades earlier by
arguing in a dissertation submitted for the Ph.D. at the University of
Paris that ancient Egyptian civilization was a black African
civilization. His explorations in support of his claims have enormous
implications for revisions to histories of the origins of Western
Philosophy. Similarly, Martin Bernal's loudly and heatedly
contested multi-volume *Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of
Classical Civilization* is by far the most widely read, and
intensely debated, work in this vein to which many have turned.
However, Bernal's work, which acknowledges a long line of African
and African-descended scholars who are his precursors, Diop included,
has raised hardly a ripple in academic Philosophy. The discipline has
thus long been overdue for a spirited and disciplined critical
reconsideration of the possibilities and realities of informing
Greco-Roman *and* African Egyptian contributions to the
histories of emergence and development of philosophical thought that
has been canonized as foundational to the genealogy of Western
Philosophy. Africana philosophy has been forged as a novel context of
provocations for such critical reconsiderations.




Meanwhile, for several decades academic philosophers in Africa, and
elsewhere, have been involved in intense debates and discussions that
have prompted reconstructions of disciplinary enterprises of Philosophy
(departments in educational institutions as well as national and
international organizations of professional philosophers). The initial
focal question at the center of the debates and discussions was whether
or not there were proper instances of Philosophy in traditional (i.e.,
pre-Modern) Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular. The publication in 1945
of Placide Tempels' *La Philosophie Bantoue* triggered
much of the debate.




The historical context in which the debates and discussions emerged
and in which they were waged was conditioned thoroughly by European
colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples rationalized
through rank-ordering racial characterizations. This rationalizing work
was aided significantly by the intellectual efforts of canonical
European philosophers. David Hume, in a footnote in his "Of
National Characters," philosophized about the "natural
inferiority" of Negroes to White people (Hume 1742) and was supported by
Immanuel Kant (1764), who elaborated his own theory of inferior and superior
racial types in his writings on anthropology (Kant 1798). Since successive
generations of European and Euro-American White people had been
educated into widely-shared common senses of their racial superiority
to inferior Africans by such supposedly philosophically well-reasoned,
science-verified, and theologically sanctioned teachings, the claim
that there were Africans capable of producing thought of the caliber of
Philosophy was regarded by most of them as utterly preposterous.




At the core of the controversy was the pressing question
whether African persons were fully and sufficiently human and capable
intellectually in comparison to the model human par excellence: the
*man* of Europe, the White Man, the avatar for all White people
and for humanity proper, whose defining characteristics were capacities
for reasoning and articulate speech (*logos*). Consequently, the
claim of *Bantu Philosophy* made by Placide Tempels, a Belgium
priest engaged in missionary work in the then-called Belgian Congo,
that Bantu Africans (related ethnic groups identified by the dominant
language group, Bantu, spoken by the related groups) had an indigenous
philosophy was a serious challenge to the racialized philosophical
ontology-cum-anthropology that undergirded colonial domination and
exploitation. However, Tempels tempered the unsettling implications of
his claim by also claiming that Bantu Africans did not have conscious
knowledge of their philosophy. Rather, he claimed, it was he who was
able, using the tools at his disposal by virtue of his training in
Philosophy, to engage in a hermeneutic of the practices and language of
the Bantu and extract the constitutive epistemology and axiology
structuring the operative, behavior-guiding philosophy at work in their
linguistic practices and normative actions.




Nonetheless, the impact of *Bantu Philosophy* was
substantial. Of particular consequence, the debates it prompted helped
to direct the attention of researchers and scholars in several
disciplines (anthropology, ethnology, history, religion, philosophy) to
the identification and exploration of the articulate systems of thought
of various groups of "traditional" Africans. A number of
European scholars and researchers who had spent years studying and
living among various African peoples were pleased to find confirmed in
Tempels' book their own positive assessments of Africans'
thought-systems, social organization, and artistic creativity. Others,
however, disagreed and challenged Tempels' claims, in a
particular case criticizing him for mistaking an "impetus
for" philosophy in the language and behavior of Bantu-speaking
Africans as evidence of a developed capacity for articulating a proper
Philosophy. This critic concluded that Bantu-Africans had not yet
fulfilled the conceptual conditions for "taking off" into
philosophizing properly (Crahay 1965). Other scholars engaged in comparative
explorations of thought-systems of various African peoples countered
the criticism by providing accounts of a number of such systems that
gave clear evidence of their very capable and developed
rationality (Forde 1954; Fortes 1965).




The subsequent decades of debates (mid 1940 through the 1980s)
regarding the possibility of African philosophy and disclosures of the
long-developed rationality and humanity of African peoples were
significant consequences for intellectual agendas and practices of
revolutionary developments in political arenas manifested in
anti-colonial struggles throughout the African continent, and in
efforts to construct new political, economic, social, and cultural
orders after the successes of those struggles. A significant number
among new generations of African intellectuals--many of them
educated in institutions in Africa, many of which were administered by
persons of European descent; and more than a few of them educated
further in the most elite institutions of the colonizing "Mother
Country"--became radicalized in their opposition to
racialized colonial domination and exploitation of African peoples and
resources. A number of these engaged intellectuals regarded Tempels and
similarly oriented European and Euro-American thinkers as allies in
their struggles against the dehumanizing rationalizations that
supported European colonialism. Some regarded *Bantu Philosophy*
as a defense, even a vindication, of Africans as rational human beings
quite capable of managing their own lives and therefore capable of
independence from colonial rule. Others, however, thought
Tempels' claims, and similar offerings by others, were misguided
and misleading candidates for proper instances of philosophical thought
by Africans. For these dissenters such candidates were really more
ethnological studies *of* African peoples than philosophical
articulations *by* them, and that their proponents were more
misguided in seeming to attribute unconscious, unwritten, and widely
shared putative philosophical systems to all of the persons in the
particular groups under discussion. These dissenters disparaged such
accounts as "ethno-philosophy."




African and African-descended intellectuals involved in and
otherwise supporting anti-colonial liberation struggles and
post-colonial efforts to rehabilitate and further development new
African nation-states found in these raging debates intellectual
weapons with which to reclaim, reconstruct, and redefine the histories,
personhood, peoplehood, needs, and future possibilities of African
peoples. Life under exploitative, dehumanizing colonialism compelled
intellectual and artistic engagements with prevailing conditions and
spurred the nurturing of imaginative visions of possibilities of
liberation and of how liberation might be achieved; whether and how
modes and agendas of life before the holocausts might be recovered,
restored, or adapted to new circumstances as thinkers and practitioners
of the religious and theological, creative and expressive artists of
literature, music, sculpture, dance, and painting all grappled with the
profound existential challenges of the loss of personal and communal
integrity through the violent imposition of the conflicts of Tradition
and Modernity and the need for liberation and freedom.
Twentieth-century struggles on the African continent have thus had
significant consequences for, and impacts on, creative intellectual and
expressive work in and with regard to continental Africa, and the
African Diaspora generally, in giving rise to widespread, prolific, and
in many cases especially important articulations of social, political,
ethical, and expressive aesthetic thought and feeling. These
articulations and expressions have become important object-lessons as
well as inspiring resources of agendas and critiques drawn on to forge
distinctive disciplinary enterprises of academic Philosophy. They have
become, as well, the focus of informative critical thought for a number
of philosophers focusing on "matters African."




For example, the Tempels-inspired debates over the possibilities for
and nature of philosophizing by persons African became focused, for a
time, on discussions of the nature and anthropological distributions of
modes of rationality unique to philosophizing, discussions that quickly
prompted 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 persons
African in particular historical and cultural contexts in particular.
Positions taken in these and other focal debates were developed from
the resources of a variety of traditions and schools of academic
Philosophy and other disciplines, including analytic philosophy,
phenomenology, hermeneutical, and existential philosophizings, various
modes of social and political philosophy, and Afrocentrism.




Today there are a significant and still growing number of formally
trained African philosophers throughout the world who draw on and
contribute to the discipline and profession of Philosophy. Explicit
developments of discursive formations, within and beyond the
discipline, that are distinguished as being "African" have
been unfolding through efforts by persons African, African-descended,
and not of African descent to identify, reconstruct, and create
traditions and repositories of literate African thought and artistic
expression--oral, written, and in iconic forms of art--as
forms of philosophizing. An important development has been the taking
on for serious consideration the expressed articulate thought of
particular persons past and present who were and are without formal
training or degrees, in academic Philosophy especially, but who have
engaged in and articulated more or less systematic reflections on
various aspects of life, and the inclusion of instances and traditions
of such expressed articulate thought in revised and new canons of
African philosophical thought. An important leading example of efforts
along these lines has been the groundbreaking work of deceased Kenyan
philosopher H. Odera Oruka on the philosophical thought of traditional
African sages. Engaging in actual field work in Kenya, Oruka
interviewed and conversed with several locally recognized and respected
sages and amassed a substantial body of transcribed, critically edited,
and now published texts that are the focus of critical studies as well
as motivations for more refined work of the same kind in numerous
places on the African continent. Other philosophers, a number of them
from other countries and not of African descent, have taken up
Oruka's lead and continue to explore the articulate thought of
indigenous sages while incorporating the sages' articulations
into their research, scholarship, and course-offerings. "Sage
philosophy" has thus become a subfield of energetic work in
Africana philosophy in continental Africa (Oruka 1990b).




The Tempels-inspired debates over whether African or
African-descended peoples have philosophies or can philosophize have
been resolved--or are no longer taken seriously--and given
way to explorations of other concerns. Both the anti-colonial struggles
and the challenges of sustaining post-colonial successes and resolving
setbacks and failures have prompted much academic philosophizing. The
evidence is the development of programs of study leading to advanced
and terminal degrees in Philosophy with strong emphasis, in a number of
instances, on African philosophy in a significant number of
institutions 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 other
published (and unpublished) philosophical writings and other modes of
articulate expression (literary works, especially); the development of
national organizations (in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Egypt, and elsewhere)
and international organizations (the Inter-African Council of
Philosophy and the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association, the latter with
headquarters in Cairo, Egypt, with members from throughout North
Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa, Turkey, Europe, and elsewhere) of
professional philosophers and other knowledge-workers; and the
organization of national, regional, and international conferences
devoted to explorations of topics and issues explicitly characterized
as philosophical.




The continuing maturation of these developments is evident in the
emergence of different philosophical orientations, agendas, and foci
that have, in turn, prompted several thinkers to endeavor to develop
critical, metaphilosophical overviews of developing schools or trends
that account for their emergence and implications, their similarities
and differences. H. Odera Oruka (1990a) provided one such overview and
distinguished what he termed four "currents" in African
philosophy. One of these, already mentioned, he joined others in
labeling and characterizing as *ethno-philosophy*: that is,
second-order works that purport to identify and engage in an exegesis
of the philosophical schemes and significances of articulated thoughts
and expressions, acts, and modes of behavior shared by and thus
characteristic of particular African ethnic groups. Another current,
previously mentioned as having been initiated by Oruka, he termed
*philosophic sagacity* to distinguish what he regarded as the
rigorous and critically reflective thought of independent-minded
indigenous thinkers who were not formally educated in modern schools.
*Nationalist-ideological* philosophy for Oruka was constituted
by the articulations of persons actively engaged in political life,
especially those who led or otherwise contributed substantially to
struggles for African independence and sought to articulate conceptions
by which to create new, liberatory social and political orders. His
designation for a fourth current, *professional*
*philosophy*, was reserved for work by academically trained
professional teachers and scholars of academic Philosophy and their
students.




Other nuanced characterizations and examinations of trends in
philosophizing on the African continent have been developed. O. Nkombe
and Alphonse J. Smet (1978) identified an *ideological* trend, quite
similar in characterization to Oruka's
"nationalist-ideological current," that includes several
very rich lines of articulate socio-political thought devoted to
reconstructing the political and cultural situations of African peoples
that were consequences of European imperialism, enslavement, and
colonization: African personality; Pan-Africanism; Negritude;
African humanism; African socialism; scientific socialism;
Consciencism; and African "authenticity." A second trend,
the *traditionalist*, includes efforts that are quite similar to
Oruka's sage philosophy in that the efforts are focused on
identifying philosophizing practices by traditional Africa thinkers,
exploring the philosophical aspects of manifestations of these
practices, and examining just how these practices resulted in the
development of repositories of wisdom and esoteric knowledge. Nkombe
and Smet identified a third trend: the intellectual orientations and
practices of *critical* thinkers characterized by these
thinkers' critiques of the projects of persons grouped in the
*ideological* and *traditionalist* trends structuring
their critiques by norms and strategies drawn from familiar
Left-critical (Marxist), Liberal Democratic, and creative
appropriations of other traditions of European thought. Thinkers in the
*critical* group applied the label
"ethno-philosophy" to a number of the instances of thought
in the *traditionalist* trend to set apart the latter modes of
thought, as previously noted, as more akin to ethnology than proper
philosophizing. Finally, Nkombe and Smet labeled a fourth grouping the
*synthetic* trend, one characterized by the use of philosophical
hermeneutics to explore issues and to examine new problems emerging in
African contexts.




Still other scholars have attributed somewhat different
characterizations to these and other traditions or modes of
philosophizing in Africa and, importantly, identified newer
developments. An example of the latter is the pathsetting
metaphilosophical and anthologizing work of Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze, the
deceased philosopher from Nigeria who pioneered bringing into several
idea-spaces and discursive communities of academic Philosophy in the
United States and Africa the interdisciplinary writings of contemporary
scholars and artists from across Africa, African Diasporas, and other
countries all of whom are significant contributors to
*postcolonial* philosophizings. These are critical explorations
of the challenges and opportunities facing Africans and people of
African descent in various national and transnational situations
defined by configurations of conditions *after* colonialism in
which political liberation has not ended the suffering of African
peoples, resolved long-running problems of individual and social
identity, or settled questions regarding the most appropriate relations
of individuals to communities; of appropriate roles and
responsibilities 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 political
life (Eze 1997).




The heuristic value of the concept of *postcolonial* is not to
be underappreciated, for the various instances in which the successes
of defeating the classical, directly administered colonial ventures in
Africa of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been compromised
by situations of indirect rule, or neocolonialism, effected through
economic control of the new African nation-states by Western European
and U.S. American transnational capitalist enterprises and
multinational organizations and agencies supposedly providing advice
and aid. These compromises must be fully appreciated in order to
understand the prospects for full national independence and
self-determination in the areas of economic, political, social, and
cultural life generally. Of decisive issue is on what terms, via which
strategies, African countries will contend with emergent challenges,
some of which are of magnitudes and character neither encountered nor
imaginable by "traditional" African thinkers, or, even, by
contemporary thinkers. Foremost are the challenges from the scourge of
HIV AIDS, which is proving to have as much impact demographically,
thus in other areas of life, as were depletions of populations during
the centuries of export enslavement though with consequential
differential impacts on age groups. Likewise challenging are questions
of the priority and efficacy of armed struggle and the terms of
engagement in light of recent and ongoing histories of such ventures
on the African continent, too many of which involve conscripting
children into armies as armed warriors. Still other challenges: the
terms and practices of political governance, at the level of the state
especially, as many African nations struggle against collapse or
debilitating dysfunction due to corruption, crippling economic
exploitation, massive underdevelopment of human capital--of
females especially--scarcities of food and other vital resources,
and due to campaigns of genocide as ethnic affirmations coupled with
ethnic denunciations 'go imperial'.




Scholarly efforts to develop informative and critical
metaphilosophical overviews of African philosophical trends, currents,
and schools of thought, in part to forge new conceptions through which
to take up these and other pressing challenges, are confirmation of
the rich diversity of formal philosophizing by academic philosophers
and other intellectuals and artists that emerged on the African
continent during recent decades, and of the continuing maturation of
their efforts. A significant number of these intellectual workers,
philosophers among them, have cultivated international relationships
with other scholars and artists and their organizations; and some of
them have spent several years in, or even relocated to, the United
States, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, and other countries
for both formal education and to work in institutions of higher
education. In the process of doing so many have also developed the
professional relations, practices, and levels of accomplishment and
recognition that have led to the publication of works that are
continuing to attract wider critical attention in various discursive
communities and are being added to course and seminar readings. These
movements, relocations, cultivations of transnational relationships,
and expansion of the literature of published works have enriched the
development of new idea-spaces, the circulation of ideas, the
formation of new discursive communities, and thereby contributed
substantially to the development of Africana philosophy. There are now
histories of African philosophy and major collections of writings in
the subfield by professional African, African-descended, and other
philosophers published by major, transnational publishing firms
covering a still-expanding list of subject-matters organized, in many
instances, by themes long established in academic Philosophy:
historical studies; issues of methodology, logic, epistemology,
metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics; philosophy of religion; political
and social philosophy (Hallen 2009; Kwame 1995; Mosley 1995; Wiredu
2004). In several noteworthy instances, these philosophizings are
conducted by way of deliberate explorations of articulations of the
settled thought structuring the life-worlds of particular ethnic
groups. Such explorations are being conducted in increasing numbers
and, in the process, are rehabilitating and giving new meaning and
heuristic direction to the once disparaged notion of
"ethno-philosophy" by establishing the legitimacy and
resourcefulness of culturally and ethnologically contextualized
studies of articulated thought. As well, such studies will prove
important for comparative studies of philosophizing (Bell
2002). Hopefully, these efforts will motivate similar studies in other
parts of the world, contribute to comparative studies that will
enhance our understandings of philosophizing globally, and curtail
practices of making false generalizations in some modes of
philosophical discourse, as, for example, characterizing the
thought-endeavors of canonical Greek and European thinkers as being
"universal" in their defining features or salience while
being silent about the racial/ethnic, cultural, and gendered
characteristics of the endeavors on the pretext that such matters are
of no consequence for the thinkers'
"philosophy."


## 4. African Philosophy: Contributions




As an ongoing project-of-projects, it would be unwise to attempt a
comprehensive and definitive catalog and assessment of the thematic
foci across the full range of articulations and discussions still being
gathered and explored under the heading of "African
philosophy" even as new discussions are emerging. Still, a number
of developments are worth noting.




Several canonical subfields of academic philosophical discourses
stand to be enriched by the inclusion of explorations of
subject-matters within African contexts. As already noted, historical
accounts of "Philosophy," in the so-called
"West" especially, are being reconsidered in light of
critical explorations of more recently disclosed relations between and
among peoples and places in Africa and "the West" or
Europe--among Greece, Rome, and Egypt definitely--and in light of
further explorations of the impact of such relations on even canonical
thinkers in Europe. In general, the discussion of "*the*
origin of philosophy" in Ancient Greece must be replaced by
comparative explorations of the emergence of philosophizing in various
settings around planet earth, including pre-colonial North Africa,
Ethiopia (home of Zera Yacob and Walda Heyat, two seventeenth century
philosophers (Sumner 1976-78)), and places on the continent in which Arabic was a
principal language.




As well, new questions should be posed and explored, among these the
following: How are canonical figures and subject-matters of the
European Enlightenments to be understood in light of the extensive
involvements of European nation-states--and of canonical
figures--in colonial imperialism and the enslavement of African
peoples? How did the centuries-long institutionalization of enslavement
affect the philosophizing of various European thinkers with regard to
notions of *freedom*, the *person*, the *citizen*,
*justice*, of manhood and womanhood? What was the impact on
canonical European thinkers of the presence among them of the
articulated thought and the persons of such figures as Anton Wilhelm
Amo (*c*. 1703-1758), a native of Ghana who, at age three, was
transported to the Netherlands to be educated and baptized in keeping
with colonial Dutch efforts to Christianize Africans? Amo settled in
Germany and became a highly educated and influential
teacher-philosopher. As more research and scholarship on such figures
are completed, understandings of eighteenth century intellectual
communities in Germany and elsewhere in Europe will have to be revised;
so, too, notions of the meanings and influences of notions of
*race* and their impacts on intellectual productions as well as
on social life.




Work in Africana philosophy in general, and African philosophy in
particular, compels comparative studies. No longer can it be presumed,
certainly not taken for granted, that many canonical notions, even
so-called "perennial" or "universal" issues,
have the salience or global significance these issues have long been
assumed to have. Conceptions of personhood in several indigenous
African schemes of thought (of Akan and Yoruba peoples, for example)
invite comparisons and rethinking of notions of personhood long
sanctioned in some legacies of Western European and North American
philosophizing. For example, Kwasi Wiredu (1987) of Ghana has argued
persuasively that in the indigenous conceptual-ontological schemes of
the Akan it would not be possible, in the normal course of matters, to
generate the "mind-body problem" so central to the
philosophizing of Rene Descartes. Explorations of matters of
logic, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics in Akan and
other schemes of thought will illuminate the extent to which Western
European and North American inventories of philosophical
"problems" will have to be revised. Likewise for
explorations in the areas of religion, aesthetics, politics, and the
meaning of social life.




While there are near daunting challenges being faced by African
peoples and other citizens of the continent's nation-states that
compel problem-solving philosophizing for enhanced living, there are,
too, example-lessons of such engaged philosophizing that warrant close
and appreciative study. One such example is the transformation under
way in South Africa from the White Racial Supremacy of racial
apartheid to a multiracial, multiethnic democracy. A crucial factor
conditioning the transformation has been the soul-wrenching work of
the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which sponsored public
hearings during which victims of the evils of apartheid, and
perpetrators of the evils, disclosed the truths of their suffering and
of their dehumanizing aggression, respectively. Grounding premises of
the TRC project were that disclosures of the *truths* of
suffering and of abuse were necessary in order to
achieve *restorative* justice, not just compensatory or
retributive justice; and that restorative justice is in keeping with
philosophical notions such as *ubuntu*--love, generosity,
forgiveness--that are foundational to communal life at its best,
thus are essential to the rehabilitative healing that must be lived
through in forging new persons for a new and democratic South Africa
(Bell 2002, Chapter 5, "African Moral Philosophy II: Truth and
Reconciliation," pp. 85-107). Here, then, a case-study in
the articulation and testing out of a new conception of justice, of
ethics more generally, in an African context, a case-study that should
already be substantively instructive. Such comparative work in
academic Philosophy that engages seriously and respectfully
philosophical articulations of African and African-descendant thinking
has only just begun...


## 5. Africana Philosophy: The African Diaspora




The centuries of enslaving-relocations of millions of African
peoples to the New Worlds of colonies-*cum*-nation-states
created by European and Euro-American settler-colonists beginning in
the sixteenth century, and the subsequent centuries-long continuations
of descendants of these African peoples in, and migrations of others
to, these locales, occasioned the formation of *new peoples* of
African descent in the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe, and elsewhere.
Individuals and groupings of these peoples developed and perpetuated
shared creative responses to the impositions of various forms of
systematized racialized oppression and class exploitation motivated and
rationalized by notions of White Racial Supremacy, and further complicated by
considerations of sexuality and gender. In the New Worlds, as had
become the case in Africa after the colonizing and enslaving incursions
of acquisitive peoples from Europe and the Arabian peninsula, the
recurrent and decisive foci of life in the racialized crucibles were
the struggles to endure while resolving mind- and soul-rending tensions
that threatened and otherwise conditioned self- and community-formation
and living.




There were several major sources of these tensions. One, the traumas
of the *radical* dislocations experienced by the
*millions* of persons kidnapped and purchased into relocation to
enslavement through terrifying transport across thousands of miles of
ocean during which many thousands died. Another, the soul and
psyche-taxing ambiguities and ambivalences of being compelled to become
and 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 of
the prevailing meanings and practical realizations of the defining
identities of the most highly valued anthropological categorizations
and social positions in the socio-political orders of the new states
and locales as well as to the material resources crucial for realizing
lives of well-being *and* denied full retention of and access to
the self-and community-defining resources of their natal cultures.




How the various African-descendant persons and communities resolved
these tensions conditioned the formation of new identities,
life-agendas, and praxes for living. Fundamental were the recurrent and
varied quests to *survive* and *endure*. With whatever
success there followed other fundamental recurrent and varied
endeavors. Among the *most* compelling were quests to define and
secure *freedom*, quests that were profoundly affected by the
absence of any recourse to protections of law and by severe limitations
imposed on Black peoples' participation in what has come to be
called "the public sphere." Participation in this sphere
with protection of laws--for example, to articulate one's
case for impartial and fair recognition and respect as a human being,
particularly as a woman or man of a despised race--was hardly ever
allowed in slave-holding polities, and very infrequently even in
locales where slavery had been abolished as invidious discrimination
against persons of African descent continued. When speaking out or
otherwise expressing oneself on one's or one's
people's behalf was prohibited or strenuously circumscribed and
could be punished by beatings, imprisonment, or death with no legal
protection, the tensions were indeed wretched.




The variety of reasons for and means of coping in such
circumstances, and the variety of conceptions of life to be lived and
of freedom to be achieved in the various New World locales, were
approached differently by activist thinkers of African descent,
conditioned by adaptive continuations--more or less--of some
Old World African cultural agendas and practices. The efforts gave rise to
developments of different traditions of thought guiding the formation
and pursuit of what would become, over time, a variety of agendas,
foci, objectives, and strategies of intellectual and practical
engagement. It is these variegated, historically conditioned, socially
grounded, imperatives-driven thought and praxis complexes, immersed in
and growing out of concerns and struggles for survival, endurance, and
human dignity in freedom, that are being recovered and studied as the
earliest instances of philosophizing by diasporic persons of African
descent and form the bases of the unfolding of several subfields of
Africana philosophy.


## 6. African American Philosophizings Born of Struggles




The United States of America is one of several New World diasporic
contexts of focus for these recovery and study efforts that are being
conducted under the heading of "African American
philosophy." What follows is a historically contextualized
discussion of several instances of the emergence of *philosophizings
born of struggles*. However, it would be an ethical travesty and a
case of epistemological presentist imperialism to require that
thoughtful, critically reflective articulations by African Americans
considered as instances of philosophizing worthy of the critical
attention of professional philosophers first meet rigorous, formal
standards for "right reasoning" settled on by professionals
in the discipline during the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries. For the contexts in which folks of African descent were
compelled to reflect on and reason about their first-order lived
experiences were substantially conditioned by the agendas and social
logics of projects of White Racial Supremacy and constitutive invidious
anthropologies of raciality, ethnicity, and gender, not agendas
governed by the academic logics of abstract formal reasoning. The
pressing exigencies of daily, cross-generation life under racialized
enslavement and oppression were what compelled reflective
thoughtfulness, not leisured, abstractive speculation. Again, what has
to be witnessed and appreciated across the historical and hermeneutical
distances of centuries of history and life-world experiences structured
by contemporary personal and social freedoms are the natures of the
lived experiences and situations of those whose articulations, whose
philosophizings, are considered as having been *born of
struggles*.




Much psychic energy had to be expended by New World African and
African-descended peoples contending with the institutionalization of
their enslavement and oppression otherwise that was racialized,
thereby naturalized, and thoroughly sanctioned and justified by every
enterprise of deliberate, normative thought and aesthetic
expression--law, science, theology, religion, philosophy,
aesthetics, and secular "common sense." (For a historical
account of African-American life in the United States see Franklin and
Moss, Jr. 2000.) In each case a primary resource was the foundational
metaphysical and ontological "unit idea" of a hierarchical
Great Chain of Being (Lovejoy 1964) on which each race was believed to
have a fixed and determining place. Accordingly, as
living *property* it was encumbered on enslaved Africans and
their descendants to live so as to make good on the investments in
their purchase and maintenance by engaging in productive labor,
without compensation, and to endure and reproduce
as *ontological* slaves in order to sustain and justify the
institution of their imprisonment. According to this supposedly
divinely sanctioned philosophical anthropology, African and
African-descended children, women, and men were defined as
constituting a category of being to which none of the normative moral
and ethical notions and principles governing civilized life
applied. Pressed into an ethically null category, they were compelled
to live lives of
*social death* stripped of defining webs of ennobling meaning
constituted by narratives of previous histories, renewing presents, and
imagined and anticipated futures of flourishing, cross-generational
continuation.




On the whole, they did not succumb to the requirement to become
socially 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 preservation
of senses of themselves and of their peoples, of their
"race," as having worth beyond the definitions and
valuations set on them by rationalizations of institutionalized
enslavement and oppression. *Always* there were those who, in
the cracks, crevices, and severely limited spaces of slave life and
constricted freedom, preserved and shared fading memories of lives of
beauty and integrity before the holocaust; who found, created, and
renewed nurturings of imaginings of better life to come through
music-making, dancing, and creative expression in the artful fashioning
and use of items of material culture, and in the communal and personal
relations, secular and spiritual, that the slaves formed, sustained,
and passed on.




Nurtured by these efforts, they resisted the imposition of
ontological death and nurtured others in resisting. They reflected on
their existence and the conditions thereof; conceived of and put into
practice ways to endure without succumbing, ways to struggle against
enslavement and the curtailment otherwise of their lives and
aspirations; and conceived and acted on ways to escape. They studied
carefully their enslavers and oppressors and assessed the moral
significance of all aspects of the lives enslavers and oppressors led
and determined how they, though enslaved and despised, must live
differently so as not to follow their oppressors and enslavers on paths
to moral depravity. They conceived of other matters, including the
terms and conditions of freedom and justice; of better terms and
conditions of existence and of personal and social identities; of how
to resist and endure while creating things of beauty; how to love in
spite of their situations; conceived of their very nature as living
beings ...


## 7. 1600-1860




These considerations took various forms within and across the
centuries. More than a few African and African-descendant persons
would engage in concerted intellectual and practical actions directed against
the enterprise of enslavement in all of its forms. Their considerations
and articulations can be found in various repositories of
philosophizings: in the lyrics and rhythmic structures and timings of
various genres of music-making; in newspaper writings and pamphlets;
in poetry and other modes of creative writing; in letters; in slave
narratives and autobiographies; in the legacies and documentary
histories of institutions, those of Black churches and church
denominations especially; in those of women's and men's
service organizations; in the documentary histories of conventions and
convention movements; etc. For from the earliest instances of the
enslavement of Africans in the colonies in the 1600s and continuing
through the 1800-1865 Civil War between forces of the Union of
North and East and forces of the Confederacy of the South, militant
agitation for the abolition of slavery was a prominent endeavor among
persons of color both "free" and enslaved, as were efforts
to achieve greater respect and freedom for Black women from male
domination and oppression and from sexual exploitation as well as from
racism. Phillis Wheatley (1753?-1784), a young, lettered house-slave
in Boston, Massachusetts, wrote poems "on various subjects,
religious and moral," in one of which she expounded on the
significance of "Being Brought from Africa to America" and
extolled Christians to remember that though Negroes be "black as
Cain," they, too, can be "refin'd and join th'
angelic train" (Wheatley [1773] 1997). Aside from
Wheatley's highly polished and thoughtfully probing poetry,
the *fact* that she had penned the verses prompted such
disbelief that her master, and a prominent group of White men of the
city, including the governor and lieutenant governor of the state,
felt compelled to write letters to the publisher and the reading
public to attest that Wheatley had mastered the English language and
was, indeed, the author of the verses. Lettered articulation, in high
verse no less, was a significant counter to claims of Negro
inferiority, hence the need for legitimation of Wheatley's
writings by White persons of significant standing in order for those
writings to enter a race- and gender-constricted literary public
sphere.




Wheatley was the first in what would become a long and continuing
line of enslaved persons of African descent in the United States who
took up creative and other genres of writing as a means for engaging in
resisting oppression and for reclaiming and exercising their humanity
through thoughtful articulation. Slaves' narrations of the
stories of their lives and of the conditions of enslavement and of their
aspirations and quests for freedom, constitute an extraordinarily rich
body of literature to be studied for *philosophizings born of
struggles*. Olaudah Equiano's *The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written
by Himself* (1789) is but one example of such narratives. Consider
carefully Equiano's recounting having to wrestle with and reclaim
his sense of self, even his name, after having been stolen into slavery
as a child, transported to the New World, and being renamed
"Gustavus Vassa." A profound and consequential instance of
existential philosophizing, Equiano's *Narrative*, one that discloses the significance of a
compelled struggle to reclaim and exercise a person's right, and
power, of identification of self and social being...




For a Negro, slave or free, to indulge in the articulation of
critical reflections on the nature of their being and the conditions of
their life was a bold contradiction of prevailing characterizations of
African peoples and their descendants in the racialized ontologies of
White Racial Supremacy, and a dangerous threat to the enterprise. David
Walker (1785-1830) exemplified the threat. He sent shockwaves of fear
across the slaveholding South, especially, with the publication and
wide distribution of his *Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a
Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and
Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America* (1829) in
which he advocated forcefully that Coloured people rise up in armed
struggle against their oppressors. Moreover, in articulating his
provocative appeal in a written document, Walker employed with great
skill and impact a strategic use of rhetoric to gain leverage in the
public sphere: while ostensibly directing the *Appeal* to an
audience of "Coloured Citizens" almost none of whom were
regarded as citizens and very few of whom, among those enslaved
certainly, could read and, if they could, would have been prohibited
from getting their hands and minds on such an appeal, in truth was also
directed at White slaveowners and oppressors. This strategy would
become a staple in the arsenal of discursive strategies Black folks would
use to engage in the work of articulating their considerations and
advocating for life-enhancing changes.




Frederick Douglass (1817-1895), a passionate and indefatigable
opponent of enslavement, the institution of slavery, and of the
subordination of women ("What Are the Colored People Doing for
Themselves?" 1848; "Prejudice Not Natural," 1849;
"The Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered,"
1854), would use the strategy with superbly nuanced skill. An
especially brilliant thinker and prolific writer, he was also
brilliant in his oppositional eristic engagements over the
constitutional, biblical, and ethnological justifications of Negro
inferiority and enslavement and over a wide range of other subjects,
including the compelling need for appropriate education (directed at
preparing the formerly enslaved for productive, economically
self-sustaining labor), good character, and political equality.
Douglass was an astute critical thinker and speech-maker, and was a
foremost thinker with regard to such matters as the constitutionality
of slavery, of the meanings of *freedom* and *justice*,
and of the implications of both for enslaved, free, and freed Negroes
(Douglass 1845). Maria Stewart (1803-1879), likewise committed
to freedom and justice for Black people, was a pioneering feminist in
speaking out publicly ("Religion and the Pure Principles of
Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build," 1831) and
thus took advantage of cracks in the public sphere to advance the
cause for abolition and the liberation of women (Stewart
1831). Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree, 1797-1883) was a
legendary unlettered but unnervingly bodacious itinerant intellectual
provocateur who agitated for ending enslavement and the subordination
of women ("Woman's Rights," 1851). On one celebrated
occasion, Truth walked uninvited into a Women's Rights
Convention of assembled White people, sat down on the edge of the
speakers' stage until she simply had to be recognized, and then
delivered her now famous "Ar'n't I a Woman?"
speech (Truth 1851).




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




For some it would or should involve *assimilation*, that is,
processes by which one racial and/or ethnic group is absorbed by
another, for some physically as well as socio-culturally, with one
group relinquishing its own racial and/or ethnic cultural
distinctiveness to take on the defining life-world character and
practices of another. For early African American assimilationists this
would have meant accepting as appropriate and sufficient goals for
African American life the country's pronounced cultural, social,
political, and economic ideals--though generally without
endorsements of the superiority of the White race--as proof of
their humaneness and of their having "risen" from a
condition of "savagery" to having become
"civilized," particularly by having become
Christianized.




However, particular care must be taken in characterizing an engaged
thinker's commitments and aspirations as
"assimilationist." While appropriate and useful in some
instances, in others the label is often misused or misplaced, for
various thinkers were quite nuanced in articulating their positions on
various matters: for example, in advocating assimilation of prevailing
economic ideas, principles, and practices while advocating social,
cultural, and political independence for Black people. Douglass, one
of the most well-known of African American cultural and political
assimilationists, is an instructive example. He was not an advocate of
the assimilation of the Negro race into the White race; rather, he
preferred, at the extreme, the assimilation of all distinct races into
a single, blended race, so to speak, so that there would no longer be
distinct races in which aspirations for super-ordination and
subordination could be invested. Similar views on cultural and
economic assimilation were articulated by T. Thomas Fortune
(1856-1928), the journalist and advocate of Black unionizing and
political independence ("Political Independence of the
Negro," 1884), and by the radical abolitionist Henry Highland
Garnet (1815-1881), who at one point was convinced that
"*This western world is destined to be filled with a mixed
race*" ("The Past and the Present Condition and the
Destiny of the Colored Race," (1848; 1996, p. 200), emphasis in
the original).




On the other hand, there were Negro women and men of the
seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of enslavement for
whom the prospect of assimilating with White people in any fashion or
on any terms was to be firmly rejected. Such sentiments were especially
prominent during the decades leading up to the Civil War as conditions
became even more constraining for supposedly free-born and freedpersons
with the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law that stripped away
any legal protection for escaped and former slaves who made it to free
states by declaring it legal for any White person to apprehend any
Negro who could not document their free status and return the person to
enslavement. Garnet, responding to the circumstances the law created,
is representative of those Black folks who became advocates of the
emigration of Negro people to Africa. He was the founder of the African
Civilization Society, an organization that promoted emigration of
American Negroes to Africa in keeping with a more positive agenda than
was the case with the American Colonization Society, which was
organized by White people to foster the relocation of troublesome
abolitionist free Negro people to Liberia, the colony founded with
federal support by White Americans intent on preserving the institution
of slavery and White Racial Supremacy.



*Emigrationist* considerations and projects thus became
prominent ventures during this period, advocated with persuasive force
by other very able activist thinkers, among them Edward Blyden
(1832-1912), James T. Holly (1829-1911), and Martin Delany
(1812-1883). Delany's *The Condition, Elevation,
Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United
States* (1852) was an especially well-reasoned critique of notions
of *citizen* prevailing in the United States and a detailing of
conditions affecting Colored people, including, in his estimation,
their overreliance on "moral theorizing" and not enough on
pragmatic political reasoning informed by comparative studies of the
histories of oppression of other "nations" within
nation-states dominated by an antagonistic national (i.e., racial)
group (Delany 1852; 2004). Based on his analysis, Delany was convinced
that people of color could not enjoy lives as full citizens with full
respect and rights in the United States. Hence, he reasoned, people of
color should leave the country for South America--though later he
would advocate emigrating to Africa--to establish their own
independent nation-state. (However, when the Civil War erupted, Delany
was persuaded by Frederick Douglass, his former colleague in
publishing *The North Star* newspaper, to join other Black men
in forming a regiment to aid the Union forces in defeating the
Confederate Army and the South's agenda for the continuation of
the enslavement and oppression of Black people.)




It is important to note, however, that emigrationists were often
motivated not only by desires to escape the various modes and
intensities of disrespect for their racial being and humanity by
relocating to Africa, in particular, but also in order to fulfill
aspirations to engage in missionary work among native peoples on that
continent in order to "raise" them from
"savagery" to "civilization" through education
and Christianization. Edward Blyden, for example, spent a large portion
of his life engaged in educational and missionary work in Liberia.
James T. Holly, who advocated emigration to, and himself subsequently
settled in, Haiti and authored a lengthy work devoted to
"defending the inherent capabilities of the Negro race, for
self-government and civilized progress" (*A Vindication of the
Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government and Civilized
Progress*, 1857), was a clergyman. So, too, was the indomitable
Queen's College of Cambridge University-educated Alexander
Crummell (1819-1898), who devoted twenty years of his life to
educational and missionary work in Liberia and Sierra Leone followed by
years of pastoral work in the United States. Crummell ("The
Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa,"
1860; "The Race Problem in America," 1888) was a formidable
and very articulate thinker, author, speechmaker, and organizer with
commanding presence. He was a principal founder of the American Negro
Academy (1897-1924), a gathering of astute minds and engaged Negro men
devoted to analyzing the conditions of life of Negroes in the United
States, to determining how best to protect them from the continuing
ravages of centuries of enslavement, and to determining how best to
develop the race to achieve political and social equality and economic
justice.




Worthy of critical exploration in the case of these figures: the
extent to which, and on what terms, each of them embraced (assimilated)
prevailing European and Euro-American conceptions of
*civilization* and the processes and conditions, states of
character in particular, by which a person or people could be said to
be "civilized." It is apparent in their writings and the
logic of their missionary work, in other lands as well as within the
United States, that neither figure accepted the long-prevailing
arguments that the Negro race was *inherently* and ineradicably
inferior. To the contrary, close scrutiny of their articulations will
reveal that each was convinced that the civilizational inferiority of
continental Africans, and of the ignorant, brutally constrained Negroes
of deficient character in the United States, was due to conditions of
deprivation fostered by the enslavement and racism perpetrated by White
people. At the core of the missionary work of these men, and of many of
their female and male contemporaries and successors, including persons
who worked at "uplifting" enslaved and freedpersons in the
United States, was a principled and dedicated commitment to
well-reasoned and forcefully articulated belief in the God-given
humanity and inherent worth of persons of the Negro race, and fervent
and equally dedicated belief in the ameliorative and progressive
benefits of education and racial independence. And each of these
seminal figures took himself or herself as a living example of the
actualization of the potentiality for substantial, qualitative
development and advancement by Negroes, contrary to the
characterizations of the race by those who rationalized and otherwise
sought to justify enslavement and constrictions of the range of
possibilities for Negro development. The articulations of a significant
number of such persons have been preserved in the vast body of writings
contending with enslavement, with aspirations and quests for freedom
and justice, with what a constitutionally democratic and multiracial
United States of America *ought* to be in order to include
Coloured 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 of
history for people of African descent in the United States of America
was that of the half-decade of civil war (1860-1865) continued through
ensuing years of Reconstruction-struggles between White proponents of a
culture of aspiring aristocratic genteel racial supremacy and a
political economy devoted to developing industrial and finance
capitalism in the North and East of the country who also wanted to preserve
the federated union of states, and White proponents of a regional
civilization devoted to a decidedly pronounced and violently
aristocratic Southern hegemonic White Racial Supremacy based on a
political economy of agrarian capitalism supported by enslaved Negro
labor, proponents who forged a Confederacy out of states that seceded
from the Union in order to preserve their distinctive civilizational
project. For a great many Black people, the hope was that the Union
forces would prevail in the war, the institution of slavery would be
abolished, and they would be freed and free to enjoy lives of full
citizenship. More than a few devoted themselves, in various ways, to
aiding the Union efforts, some even as fighting soldiers. Frederick
Douglass played a major role in persuading President Abraham Lincoln to
allow Negro men to join the Union army as fighting soldiers and in
persuading many men to join. With President Lincoln's
issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 freeing the slaves in
the Confederate states and Union victory in the Civil War two years
later, the day of *Jubilation!* for Black people and other
opponents of the institution of slavery appeared to be at hand.




And so it seemed. There followed a brief, euphoric period of statutory
freedom during which Black people held elective and appointive offices
in many states that had been part of the Confederacy and otherwise
made initial significant gains in other areas of life. However, a
post-war (1877) so-called compromise between Republican economic and
political forces in the North and East and those of Democrats in the
South settled a disputed presidential election (a contest Republican
Rutherford B. Hayes and Democrat Samuel J. Tilden) and allowed a South
not completely vanquished by the lost war to regain power in its
region in exchange for Republican hegemony in the federal
government.




Violent terrorism and brutal repression of Negroes followed
immediately, in the South especially, which spawned two decades (mid
1860s-1880s) of post-Reconstruction struggles by newly-emancipated
Black people to survive conditions in which they had been set adrift by
many former allies in the North and East and were being pressed back
into near-slavery by forces in the South. A Great Migration ensued as
hundreds of thousands of Negroes left the South for hoped-for better
opportunities without racial violence in the East, North, Southwest,
and West of the United States, in some cases in response to persuasive
articulations by various spokespersons (Edward W. Blyden, James T.
Holly, and Alexander Crummell, among others) who renewed calls for
various programs of emigration or what some scholars have termed
*separatist Black Nationalism*: migrations within and out of the
country to sites on which all-Black communities and towns would be
formed (away from the United States in Africa; within the country in
Kansas and Oklahoma, for example).




Migrations within the United States were by far the most significant
of the relocations. And the movements greatly accelerated over the
decades as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth and the
U.S. American economy was undergoing transformation into an industrial
giant and international power as a consequence of meeting the needs of
production to support the country's participation in the First
World War and other developments. In the North, Northeast, and West of
the country this industrialization created historic demands for workers
and, subsequently, historic opportunities for work. Meanwhile, in the
South rapidly increasing mechanization in agriculture and subsequent
decreasing reliance on the labor of nearly-enslaved, hyper-exploited
Negro tenant farmers and workers, and increasing industrialization in
the region, left the greater majority of Black people in dire straits.
These developments, combined with hopes for life unrestricted by racial
segregation enforced by brutal violence, by lynchings especially,
exerted additional pull-and-push forces that prompted hundreds of
thousands to join in the migrations to the country's industrial
centers.




In settling in the new locales, the migrants and their subsequent
generations began to undergo what, with hindsight, became a historic
and wrenching transformation of what had been, for the most part, a
brutally oppressed, illiterate, yet resolute agrarian peasantry into an
ethno-racial urban working class, and the transformation of a
significant few of them into a modern middle class. With the
transformations came vexing challenges and opportunities. Among the
most compelling needs were for forms of life appropriate to the new
urban circumstances--as well as for those who remained in the
rebuilding South--that would sustain the person and a people and
promote flourishing life in conditions of intense competition with
other ethno-racial class groups, and high risks of social
disintegration and failure as invidious racism, unchecked by federal
restraints, became ever more intense and widespread. There were, then,
compelling needs for social and cultural as well as economic support as
nuclear and extended family units were disrupted in being stretched
across long miles of migration and crucial forms of communal and
organizational support that helped to sustain life in the South were in
very short supply in the new urban centers. Once again, in the context
of demanding needs to be met in the struggle to survive and endure,
particularly thoughtful and articulate Black persons took up the
challenges of conceiving what was best to be done for the well-being of
the race, and how best to achieve well-being.




African American women were especially prominent in endeavoring to
attend thoughtfully and pragmatically to the well-being of the race,
but also in endeavoring to make good for Black women on the promises
of Emancipation for social, political, and economic freedom. An
exemplary figure in this regard is Anna Julia Cooper (1859?-1964), who
graduated from Oberlin College in 1884 and, at age sixty-five,
completed a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne on *Slavery and
the French Revolutionists, 1788-1805* (Cooper 1925). A
career educator before earning her doctorate, Cooper was a pioneering
feminist who set out a provocative view of what she regarded as the
superior capacity of women to lead the reformation of the human race
in her book *A Voice from South* (1892). Poet, journalist,
novelist, and essayist Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911)
weighed in with a forceful argument that the "spiritual
aid" that women can provide is crucial for moral development and
the social advancement of the human race ("Woman's
Political Future," 1893). Memphis, Tennessee-born and Oberlin
College-educated Mary Church Terrell (1863-1954) lived a stellar
life of articulate leadership in uplift and advocacy organizations
devoted to the development and well-being of Colored women (Colored
Women's League, the National Association of Colored Women),
commitments articulated in "The Progress of Colored Women"
(1898, published 1904) and other writings. Fluent in several
languages, Terrell forged relations with Negro and other women in
several countries who worked for reforms on behalf of women. And
particular note must be taken of the audacious, pistol-totting Ida
B. Wells-Barnett (1862-1931), an investigative journalist and
newspaperwoman who took it upon herself, as an anti-lynching crusader,
to investigate cases of lynching across the country to document the
facts of each case, which she published in 1895 as *The Red Record:
Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United
States* with an introductory letter from Frederick Douglass, with
whom she collaborated in many endeavors. During an especially violent
and trying period, courageous, thoughtful, and articulate activist
Black women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell, and others
initiated what would become a long and varied tradition of feminist
philosophizing and work by women of African descent devoted to the
enhancing development of Negro persons, families, organizations, and
communities.




Few of these thoughtful feminists, it should be noted, were energetic
advocates of Nationalist emigration during this turbulent
period. Perhaps because many Nationalist agendas and articulations
were soon eclipsed (though by no means completely silenced) during the
years of 1880-1915 that came to be largely dominated by the
persuasive ameliorative leadership of Booker T. Washington
(1856-1915), an educator and strategic power-broker who focused
his considerable efforts on uplifting a Black southern peasantry into
educated literacy for economic self-reliance and on the nation-wide
organization of Negro businesses for the pursuit of predominance in
certain sectors of the economy. After delivering a poignant and crafty
invited "Atlanta Exposition Address" to resounding praise
during an 1895 international industrial exposition, Washington,
already well on his way as a leader recognized as such by Negro
people, was elevated by certain powerful and influential White people
to the vaunted position as *their* leader and spokesman for
"the Negro" to whom they would turn to broker matters in
race relations. The key to this positioning was the reaction of many
White people, concerned about post-war transformations under way in
race relations, to the following declaration in Washington's
Exposition address: "In all things that are purely social we can
be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things
essential to mutual progress" (Washington 1895; 1992, p. 358).
Concentrating on the first part of his statement, anxious White people
interpreted his public endorsement of the "purely social"
separation of the races as an endorsement by Washington of the
hegemony of White people in all areas.




It was not. In fact, Washington was explicit in the address in
declaring that it was "important and right that all privileges
of the law be ours..." He went further in articulating a
vision of "that higher good, that, let us pray God, will come in
a blotting out of sectional differences and racial animosities and
suspicions, in a determination to administer absolute justice, in a
willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law"
(Washington 1895; 1992, p. 359). Hearing, apparently,
what *they* wanted to hear, not the fullness of
what *Washington* wanted them to hear, anxious White people of
power and influence certified him a 'good and safe' Negro
and promptly made him their go-to Negro designated by them as
"*the* Leader of the Negro people." Washington
accommodated them, in service to his own ego as well as in service to
the benefit of the Negro race (by his own reasoning, of course). He
was brilliantly skillful in executing a nuanced, pragmatic strategy of
wearing a mask of *seeming* accommodation to White hegemony as
he promoted Negro empowerment and self-sufficiency through education
that stressed disciplined comportment, thrift, industrial and
agricultural work, and ownership of property (and while clandestinely
supporting securing political equality for Negroes). As an enlarged
figure who brokered the largesse and influence of White people flowing
to Negroes throughout the nation, and as the founding administrative
and educational leader of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama that continues
to provide education to persons of African descent, Booker T.
Washington's philosophizings, political engagements, and
practical endeavors would have widespread, profound, and lasting
impact.




Washington was challenged, publicly and on several fronts, by, among
other thinker-activist Black persons, the astute and irrepressible
thinker-scholar (and more) William Edward Burghardt Du Bois (1868-1963)
whose philosophical stances and strategies for transforming the
conditions of existence for Black people were *substantially*
different from Washington's *seeming* public accommodation
to White social hegemony. In the view of some, Washington might be
better described as a social separatist and economic and political
conservative committed to Black economic independence made even
stronger by the predominance of Negroes in some sectors of the national
economy resulting in the dependence of White folks on the productivity
of Black folks. To this end, for Washington and similar conservative
accommodationists, the economic and political hegemony of White people
was to be finessed by strategies of *seeming* acceptance by
Black people that masked surreptitious opposition as Colored people
pursued economic self-reliance, full political citizenship, and
eventual social acceptance that was to be "earned" by
forming and exercising good character and responsibility through
education for, and the practice of, honest, socially productive, and
economically rewarding work.




Du Bois, however, argued for *immediate* recognition of and
respect for Negro people with full civil and political rights (though
he supported qualifications for exercising the franchise for
*all* voters), social equality, and economic justice. He became
an outspoken critic of Washington's leadership ("Of Mr.
Booker T. Washington and Others," 1903) having become impatient
with the latter's accommodating gradualism and the
spirit-sapping impact he (Du Bois) thought this was having on those
Black folks who were ready, even overdue, for full equality and
respect (Du Bois 1903; 1992). In contrast to Washington, Du Bois might
best be described as a *cultural nationalist*
advocating *pluralist integration*: pursuit of a racially
integrated socially and politically democratic socio-political
order--and, later in his long life, a democratic socialist
economic order--in which diverse racial and ethnic groups
cultivate and share, and benefit mutually from sharing, the products
of their cultural distinctiveness to the extent that doing so does not
threaten the integration and justness of the social whole.




The two men were from profoundly different backgrounds. Washington had
been born into slavery, but with the aid of education and character
development at Hampton Institute he was able to advance to national
and international prominence as an educator and figure of
unprecedented influence, which he recounted in his widely read and
inspiring autobiography *Up From Slavery* (Washington 1901;
1963). Du Bois, on the other hand, never had living experience with
slavery, nor, even, with much in the way of invidious racial
discrimination before entering college in the South. With
undergraduate degrees from Fisk University and Harvard University,
studies at the University of Berlin, and a Ph.D. in History from
Harvard, Du Bois was one of a very few exceptionally highly educated
persons in the United States. Drawing on his learning and with
arrogant confidence in his education-enhanced, penetrating, creative,
and critical intellect, varied, frequent, and penetrating scholarly
and creative explorations of the history, conditions, and future
prospects of the Negro and other oppressed races, as well as of
Western Civilization, became his passionate and committed life's
work.




Du Bois far outstripped Washington in the range of his (Du Bois's) concerns, the
depths of his explorations, and the extent of his seminal involvements
in and contributions to international organizations and movements
pressing for independence for colonized African and other peoples, his
contributions 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 James
and others while a student at Harvard, and, for a moment, considered
pursuing a career in the discipline. Though he chose otherwise, his
vast and rich articulations are frequently philosophically novel and
astute and thus all the more engaging for researchers, scholars,
teachers, artists, and millions of readers in various educated publics.
His *The Souls of Black Folk* (1903), for example, has been a
seminal text for generations of African Americans, and others, who were
coming of age intellectually. Many were aided, especially, by his
poignant characterization and exploration of the vexing tensions of the
experience of "double consciousness"--of the
"twoness" of being both Negro and American--and by his
promising 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, motivated
by the compelling needs of a racialized people subjected to
ontological as well as social, political, economic, and cultural
degradation. In particular, during the turbulent decades of the
orchestrated failure of post-Civil War Reconstruction, when real
possibilities for racial and economic democracy were being killed at
birth by the proponents and guardians of capitalism and White Racial
Supremacy, Du Bois initially worked out his affirmative *cultural
nationalist* position on the raciality of the Negro, and of other
races, in "The Conservation of Races" (1897; 1992). This
was an effort at conceptionalization to which Du Bois would return and
rework several times, even near the end of his extraordinarily long
and productive life, as in "Whither Now and Why" (1960;
1973). Throughout his life Du Bois remained convinced that people of
African descent should articulate and appropriate a racial identity
based on shared history and culture and continue to invest in their
historical legacies and cultural creativity while holding open to all,
"on the principle of universal brotherhood," the
organizations, institutions, and cultural riches in and through which
the life-worlds of Negro peoples are forged, sustained, and
shared.




Booker T. Washington died in 1915, W.E.B. Du Bois nearly half a
century later (...on the evening before the historic 1963 March on
Washington for Jobs and Freedom as hundred of thousands of Negroes and
other supporters converged on the nation's capital to press for
full civil and economic rights). The deaths of both brought to a close
their long reigns of Black male leadership prominence, and
predominance, in various arenas. Still, they were far from being the
only leaders of their people. For as the nineteenth century gave way to
the twentieth, Black women were again substantial contributors to the
intellectual explorations, organizational work, and local, national,
and international movements seeking freedom and enhanced existence for
African and African-descendant peoples. They were, as well, influential
on Black male leadership. In 1897, for example, Du Bois accepted an
invitation from Alexander Crummell to become a member of the American
Negro Academy to share in the critical work of developing
understandings of the deteriorating situation of Black people in the
nation, made worse by widespread racially-motivated violence, in order
to develop and implement strategies to protect and advance the race.
(Du Bois offered his proposal in "The Conservation of
Races," the second Occasional Paper delivered to the group.) Due
largely to Crummell's objections, Black women were not initially
allowed to become members of the Academy. However, while Crummell was a
substantial influence on Du Bois, he (Du Bois) was also influenced by
Ana Julia Cooper who advised his thinking on a number of matters
regarding which he conversed with his male colleagues in the Academy.
Other women--Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, Jane
Adams--also exerted critical influence on Du Bois through their
ideas, their organizational work, and their personal relations with
him.




These and other thoughtful, articulate, and engaged Black women did
not allow themselves to be limited to subordinate roles of influence on
male leaders. Rather, as was true for many of their foresisters, they
had important matters of concern about which they thought seriously,
discussed in their women's clubs and other organizations, wrote
and spoke, and worked with determination to effect progressive
transformations in the lives of women and their families as well as for
the racial group and the society as a whole. From the especially
violent and trying decades of Reconstruction on into the early decades
of the twentieth century, women such as Wells-Barnett, Cooper, Terrell,
and others contributed substantially to what has become a long and
varied tradition of woman-focused philosophizing and artistic
expression by women of African descent in the United States.




Continuing the tradition, Elise Johnson McDougald, for example, wrote
of "The Struggle of Negro Women for Sex and Race
Emancipation" (1924-25; 1995); Alice Dunbar-Nelson
(1875-1935) of "The Negro Woman and the Ballot"
(1927; 1995); Sadie Tanner Mosell Alexander of "Negro Women in
Our Economic Life" (1930; 1995); and Florence "Flo"
Kennedy produced "A Comparative Study: Accentuating the
Similarities 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's
clubs and organizations, these and other Negro women gave defining
shape to legacies of feminist and womanist engagement and leadership
that are now being reclaimed and studied for inspiration and
guidance. And the efforts and contributions of several of these women
would be joined to those of later generations who would become major
contributors, in thought and in other ways, to developments that would
unfold as history-making movements devoted to cultural expressiveness,
gaining more in the way of civil and economic rights, to gaining
power, *Black Power*!, and to gaining more freedom, rights, and
respect for women of all ethno-racial groups and socio-economic
classes.


## 9. 1915-2000




The historical context for the subsequent and more recent
developments and movements was set by transformative dislocations and
reconfigurations that intensified competitions within and among
ethno-racial groups and socio-economic classes that affected
significantly relations between White and Black races, in particular,
as the country went through unprecedented industrial and economic
growth and increasing predominance in the Western hemisphere as a
consequence of the Great Depression (1929 through the late 1930s and
into the early 1940s) and attendant disruptions, recovery from which
was spurred significantly by involvements in the Second World War
(1939-1945) and the Korean War (1950-1953). There followed several
decades 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 benefitted
from the industrial intensifications and thus expanded significantly
the growing modern, educated, increasingly economically viable,
church-going, community-sustaining, psychologically secure and
increasingly self-confident aspiring Black working and middle classes
that were determined to provide successive generations with greater
freedom, respect, and economic security bolstered by high expectations
for even greater successes and achievements. Spread across both classes
were the tens of thousands of Black men who returned to civilian life
from the country's recently racially integrated Armed Forces
after serving at home and overseas to help "make the world save
for democracy." A great many of these veterans, supported by
Negro women and men who kept the home-front while enduring the
difficulties of wartime sacrifices as they worked the nation's
fields and factories though still denied the fullness of citizenship,
were unwilling to acquiesce to the subordination to racial apartheid
and invidious racial discrimination required by the doctrines and
programs of White Racial Supremacy that still held sway.




This context became the nurturing soil in which various forms of Black
Nationalism flowered once again as the influence of Washington's
philosophy and strategies declined. Caribbean-born immigrant Marcus
Garvey ("Race Assimilation," 1922; 1992; "The True
Solution of the Negro Problem," 1922; 1992; "An Appeal to the
Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself," 1923; 1992), proponent of
a militant Black Nationalist philosophy of independence and
self-reliance for Black peoples world-wide, and of the emigration of
people of African descent from the U.S. and elsewhere "back to
Africa," rose to prominence from his base in New York City as
the most successful mass organizer of Black people in the history of
the U.S. with the founding and internationalization of his United
Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) (Garvey 1925; 1986; Martin
1986). Garvey's organizational and socio-political movement,
fueled by his "Philosophy and Opinions" carried by his
organization's newspapers and other publications with
international reach, along with the eruption of the Harlem
Renaissance, likewise in New York, an eruption of literary and
artistic productions motivated by very thoughtful and passionate
affirmations of African ancestry and of the positive, creative
importance of the cultural and aesthetic significance of African
American life, were two of the most significant emigrationist and
cultural nationalist developments of the period. Both were articulated
through and otherwise spawned new, profoundly influential modes of
creative, reflective thought and expression.




The Harlem Renaissance was an extraordinary eruption of heightened,
critical, and creative self-conscious affirmative racial identification
by thoughtful Negroes bent on expressing their affirmations of their
raciality through all of the creative arts and modalities of
articulation, a development unprecedented in the history of the
presence of peoples of African descent in the United States (Huggins 2007). The
cultural significance of the productions and articulations; of the
engagements, practices, and creations of the bold and talented
participant-contributors; of the organizations, institutions, and
publications 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 even
today, most especially in terms of the novel ideas and idea-spaces and
discursive communities that were created and articulated through the
bodies of literature and works of art, music, and dance that are still
being mined productively by contemporary artists and scholars. The
producers and carriers of the Renaissance were natives of the whole of
the African Diaspora, across the Atlantic World especially, as well as
from across the African continent, and they drew on the cultural and
historical legacies of both (and on those from other parts of the world)
for inspiration and content for their philosophizing artistic
creativity in defining and giving expression to The *New*
Negro.




Alain Leroy Locke (1886-1954), the first African American to
earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy, from Harvard (having already earned a
degree from Oxford and having studied philosophy at the University of
Berlin), and the first to be named a Rhodes Scholar, was one of the
significant intellectual and facilitating midwives to the production
and publication of much creative work during the Renaissance (as was
Du Bois). As the guest editor for a special March 1925 issue
of *Survey Graphic* devoted to explorations of *race*
and the New York of people of African descent, Locke, titling the
issue *Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro*, brought together for
the issue writings of fiction and poetry; articles on music, drama,
the Negro's past, "Negro Pioneers," "The New
Scene," "The Negro and the American Tradition"; and
much else by a racially mixed large group of authors with expertise in
a wide variety of fields. Among these: Du Bois ("The Negro Mind
Reaches Out"); Elise Johnson McDougald ("The Task of Negro
Womanhood"); pioneering Africanist anthropologist Melville J.
Herskovits ("The Negro's Americanism"); sociologist
E. Franklin Frazier ("Durham: Capital of the Black Middle
Class"); the young poet and creative writer Countee
Cullen ("Heritage"); Howard University-based educator and
scholar Kelly Miller ("Howard: The National Negro
University"); poetess Gwendolyn B. Bennett and creative writer
Langston Hughes writing on music; poems by Angelina Grimke; and a
large number of others. After the great success of the special issue,
Locke edited and published an anthology, *The New Negro*, that
included revised versions of most of the material from the *Survey
Graphic* special issue, but with much new material and artwork by
Winold Reiss, a very accomplished artist from Bavaria (Locke
1925).




In the judgment of many scholars of the Renaissance, *The New
Negro* became, in the words of one, "virtually the central
text of the Harlem Renaissance." The title was taken from the
collection's lead essay, "The New Negro," which was
written by Locke. In the essay Locke endeavored to characterize the
"New" Negro, the circumstances of the emergence of this
character-type, the nature of its shared pride-of-race character, its
psychology and mission and relation to the Negro masses, and the
consequences of the emergence of the New Negro for race relations in
the United States and for developments in Africa and the African
Diaspora for which this new group-figure would serve as the *avant
garde*. The anthology, then, is a gateway to an important
selection of articulations by figures who were seminal contributors to,
as well as beneficiaries of, the Harlem Renaissance, and to the vast
and still growing multidisciplinary body of works that explore various
aspects, figures, contributions, and consequences of the
Renaissance. And Locke's lead essay is a poignant gateway into
his career of philosophizing as well as an adept example of an attempt
to simultaneously characterize and give agenda-setting character and
guidance to an extraordinary praxis-guiding artistic and intellectual
revolution the focal points of which were determined efforts of
racial-group self-affirmation and self-determination, beginning with
the radical ontological work of redefining and revaluing on
progressive terms the meaning of *the Negro*, then setting the
tasks by which the *New* Negro--the "thinking
Negro," as Locke characterized the group in his
essay--would lead through decidedly Negro Africanist-inspired,
philosophically-minded cultural creativity and articulate expressions
of *philosophizings born of struggles...*




And lead they did, as a number of the persons, organizations, and
institutions participating in and contributing to the Renaissance, the
Garvey and other movements, and others in the social classes that were
inspired by and fed them all became prominent figures in the Civil
Rights/Freedom Movement of the 1950s-mid 1960s during which
"civil rights" and "integration" were major
objectives of struggle. The National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People (NAACP), the NAACP Legal and Educational Defense
Fund (which became formally independent from the NAACP in 1957), and
the National Urban League were but three of several organizations that
would lead the continuing, but substantially reenergized,
organizationally strengthened, and philosophically prepared and focused
struggles to secure legally sanctioned and guaranteed democratic
freedom, social and political equality, economic justice, and human
dignity for Negroes in the United States of America. Publications and
statements from these and other organizations; member correspondences;
legal briefs and papers from court cases; the creative and scholarly
works from members and descendants of the Renaissance, Garvey, and
other movements; Black newspapers of the period--all are rich
repositories of the philosophizings fueling and guiding the new phase
of struggle.




Studies of these philosophizings are likely to reveal that while
there definitely were persons and organizations advocating radical,
even revolutionary, transformations of the political economy and social
orders of the United States, overwhelmingly the pursuit of
desegregation and racial integration as important manifestations of the
achievement of democratic freedom, social and political equality,
economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes using moderate but
progressive strategies of legal and civil-disobedience struggles were
dominant means and agendas of social and political effort exerted by
people of African descent in the United States over the last
half-century and more. These commitments were manifested most
profoundly in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement.



"The Movement," as it was experienced and known by many
of those intimately involved, proved to be a *phenomenally*
historic, personally and socially transformative, national movement with
profound international ramifications in Africa--South Africa
especially--and other countries. Initially, the attack on racial
apartheid in the quest for racial integration was pursued through legal
challenges to *de jure* racial segregation. A major victory was
achieved with the unanimous 1954 rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court in
*Brown v. Board of Education I* and *II* that declared
racial segregation in public schools unconstitutional, thereby
overturning the Court's 1896 *Plessey v. Ferguson*
decision that declared that government-sanctioned racial segregation
was constitutional as long as "separate but equal"
resources and facilities were provided. The team of engaged and
creative Black (and White) legal warriors from the NAACP Legal Defense
and Education Fund and other thinker-scholars (historians,
sociologists, social psychologists) were successful in persuading the
Justices on the Court that the invidious discrimination suffered by
Black folks within the schemes of White-dominated racial segregation
was manifested not only in decidedly unequal resources and facilities,
but, through "inferior" education in Negro schools, in
debilitating damage to the psychic souls and self-concepts of Negroes,
the children especially, which severely impaired their capacity to
develop into and be the kind of persons who could meet the full
responsibilities and enjoy the full benefits of citizenship. In short,
the legal team forged a legal strategy that rested on the construction
and successful articulation of a sophisticated philosophical
anthropology, aided by empirical psychological, sociological, and
historical studies, in support of an argument regarding the vital
linkage between the integrity of personhood and democratic citizenship,
thus between the enabling of democratic citizenry and the education of
the person free of resource-impoverishment and the distortions of the
soul that were consequences of hierarchic, invidious racial
discrimination that was being imposed on Negro children in racially
segregated schools. The Court was persuaded...




However, this historic victory through persuasive philosophizing was
initially stymied by recalcitrant, segregationist local governments and
an overwhelming majority of White citizens in the Confederate South and
by much foot-dragging by local governments and White citizens in other
regions of the country. White opponents of racial integration who were
determined to preserve segregation and White Supremacy unleashed yet
another wave of violent terrorism. Nonetheless, the advocates of
desegregation and integration were determined to secure full rights and
human dignity for Negro Americans. A new philosophy and strategy of
struggle was adopted that, through the leadership of Mahatma Gandhi,
had proven successful in defeating Great Britain as the colonial power
dominating India: non-violent direct action in the pursuit of justice
grounded in an explicit *philosophical* commitment to the
sanctity of human life, including *love* for opponents, and to
the redeeming and restorative powers, personally and socially, of
principled commitment to engagement in nonviolent struggle.




Gandhi's philosophy, the history and intricacies of the
movement he led in India, and his leadership were studied closely by a
young Negro missionary to India from the United States, James Morris
Lawson, Jr., who, due to his commitments to nonviolence, had already
been imprisoned for refusing induction into the military during the
Korean War. Noting from news accounts that reached him in India that
the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement in the United States was gathering force,
Lawson returned to the country determined to find ways to become
involved and contribute. While studying theology at Oberlin College in
preparation for a career as a minister in service to the Movement for
social justice, he was introduced to Martin Luther King, Jr., who came
to Oberlin to deliver a speech. Lawson was persuaded by King that he (Lawson)
should "not wait, come now" to the South to aid the
Movement by, among other things, providing instruction in the
philosophy of nonviolence. Lawson transferred to the Divinity School of
Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and was soon deeply
engaged in providing intellectual and spiritual guidance and inspiration
to the educational, psychological, philosophical, and practical
preparation of legions of mostly young college students in the city who
were committed to engaging in nonviolent struggle to end the
indignities suffered by Black people as a consequence of *de
jure* White Supremacy and racial segregation. The campaign they
waged, led by Fisk University co-ed Diane Nash and with the support of
increasing numbers of Nashville's Black citizens, White college
students, and that of more than a few very principled and dedicated
anti-segregation White citizens, was eventually successful in bringing
about the formal desegregation of the city's public facilities
and commercial establishments. Many of the Nashville Movement's
leaders and stalwart participants, Lawson included, would become major
contributors to the national Movement while other student-participants
helped to bring about further historic transformations in the city and
elsewhere in the South, through their courageous participation in the
Freedom Rides, especially. (A critical, full-length biography and
philosophical study of James M. Lawson, Jr. and his philosophical
commitments and engagements have yet to be undertaken and completed...)




A philosophy of nonviolence grounded in Christian love motivated and
guided determined Black people, and allied White and other people, in
achieving *unprecedented* progressive transformations of
centuries-hardened, intellectually well-supported social, political,
and, to notable extents, economic life in a United States of America
ordered since its founding by philosophies of White Racial Supremacy
and Black racial inferiority and subordination. Martin Luther King,
Jr. ("Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience," 1961;
"The Ethical Demands for Integration," 1963) has become
the signature figure among several of the leaders of this Movement,
marked distinctively by his profoundly thoughtful Christian
theological and philosophical commitments to nonviolence as the
grounding for personal and shared social life as well as for engaging
in struggles for freedom and justice (Washington, J.M. 1986). However,
the groundwork for the Movement he would be called to lead had been
laid and further developed by many other organizationally-supported
Negro women and men of articulate thought and disciplined action from
labor and other constituencies: among these A. Philip Randolph (who
served as a founding organizer and president of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, president of the Negro American Labor Council,
and vice president of the AFL-CIO) and Bayard Rustin (a veteran of
struggles for civil and other rights for Negroes and workers of all
colors), who were the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington for
Jobs and Freedom during which King delivered the speech ("I Have
a Dream...") in which he invoked a vision for America that became
his hallmark and a guiding theme of the Movement.




Certainly, Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of the most prolific and
profoundly influential, even historic, figures of African descent whose
articulations continue to compel widespread, intensive study as
especially rich instances of religious, moral, theological, and
socio-political philosophizing. Still, King's articulations, as
well as the sacrificial life he lived and gave in leadership service,
firmly and uncompromisingly grounded in *especially* thoughtful
commitments to Gandhi-inspired nonviolence ("Nonviolence and
Racial Justice," 1957; "The Power of Nonviolence,"
1958) and Jesus-inspired *agape* love ("Love, Law, and
Civil Disobediance," 1961; "A Gift of Love," 1966)
await full and widespread appreciation as the truly phenomenal gifts of
inspiration, commitment, and guidance to a social movement that they
were. 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 inspired
others 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 of
the presence of persons of African descent in this country, these
particular philosophical gifts were neither forged and developed in,
nor mediated to others from, the contexts of academic Philosophy, but
were, indeed, *philosophizings born of struggles*, gifts that
changed a country for the better that, it is feared, has yet to
recognize and embrace fully the confirmed lessons the gifts
embody...




Overwhelmingly, the pursuit of desegregation and racial integration
as goals of movements for democratic freedom, social and political
equality, economic justice, and human dignity for Negroes has been
a dominant item on the agendas of social and political philosophies
motivating and guiding struggles exerted by people of African descent
in the United States over the last half-century and more, manifested
most profoundly in the Civil Rights/Freedom Movement. However, the
Movement's integrationist agenda, moral-persuasionist strategies,
commitment to nonviolence, and explicit commitment to a theologically and
religiously grounded notion of love for the Movement's opponents
was strongly challenged by other organizational forces (mid-1960s to
the early 1970s), especially by "Young Turks" in the
Movement's Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an
influential number of whom were inspired by the revolutionary
philosophies conveyed in the speeches, writings, and organizational
activities of Malcolm X and the anti-colonial engagements and writings
of Frantz Fanon as well as by major figures in decolonizing liberation
movements in Africa and elsewhere that were being waged through armed
struggle. These Young Turks, and others in a variety of decidedly
Left-Nationalist organizations and proto-movements who were inspired by
various notions of revolutionary transformation, initiated yet another
resurgence of Black Nationalist aspirations and movements that came to
be referred to collectively as the Black Power Movement. The period was
also complicated by competitive conflicts with a cacophony of persons
and organizations espousing commitments to anti-Nationalist
multi-racial, multi-ethnic socialist and communist agendas.




This was a period of unprecedented tumult, complicated by violent
rebellions by Black people in urban centers across the country, and by the
nation's involvement in a gone-badly-wrong and increasingly
unpopular war in Vietnam that was highlighted all the more by national and
international movements against the War led principally by young,
college-age people, many of whom had come of age politically through
their involvements in or educative witnessing of the Civil Rights and
Black Power Movements. Of particular note, a significant number of
young White women who had been intimately involved in the Civil Rights,
Black Power, and Anti-War Movements had become increasingly poignantly
aware of the disrespect for, misuse, and underutilization of women by
many men in the Movements and became radicalized into forging a
movement to address their concerns, which was subsequently
characterized as the Second Wave Feminist Movement.




All of these developments were fueled by and fostered intense
intellectual adventures, some of which were also fertilized by
practical engagements of various kinds. The Black Power Movement, in
particular, overlapped with and both fueled and was fueled by
philosophizings and engagements that were definitive of more expansive
and consequential Black Consciousness and Black Arts Movements that, as
had the Harlem Renaissance of several decades earlier, spurred an
intensive and extensive renaissance of aggressively radical and
expressive creativity in the arts that was centered, once again, on
reclaiming for self-definition and self-determination the ontological
being of persons and peoples of African descent, with influences, in
many instances, from various Leftist ventures, nationalist and
internationalist as well as socialist and communist. This was an
unstable and volatile mixture that cried out for a clarifying
philosophy to provide guidance through the thicket of ideological
possibilities and the agendas for personal and communal
identity-formation and life-praxes that each proffered with greater or
less coherence and veracity.




More than a few spokesmen and spokeswomen came forward to
philosophize on behalf of their group's or organization's
(or their own) vision for 'what was to be done' to insure
*liberation* for *Black* people, people of
*African* descent. ("Liberation" was the watchword
for the new agenda; "Negro" and "Colored" were
denigrated and cast aside, no longer acceptable as terms of racial
identification). Politics--and all aspects and dimensions of
individual and social life were explicitly politicized--became
defined by and focused through the lenses of the substantive symbolics
of racialized and enculturated *Blackness*, even as the
intellectual warriors waging the conceptual and other battles on behalf
of *Blackness* struggled to find adequate terms and strategies
with which to forge satisfactory and effective articulations of the
passionately sought and urgently needed new identities as articulations
of long standing identities and life-agendas were discredited and thus
rendered inadequate for a significant and influential few. For still a
great many other "Negro?", "Black?",
"Colored?", "African- American?",
"African-descended?", and "American?" persons there
was more than a bit of psychic turmoil and tension, no less of
consternation and confusion. And hardly any of these persons, nor even
many of the most ardent warriors calling for and/or purveying new
notions and definitions of "Black consciousness" and
"Black" agendas for individual and shared lives, knew of
and had recourse to Alain Locke's sober and sobering
well-reasoned "The New Negro," nor the rich resources that
had been created by the producers and carriers of the Harlem
Renaissance. And so the intensified ontologizing philosophizing
proceeded at near breakneck speed driven largely by a generation of
young adults few of whom had, nor would accept, much in the way of
intellectual or practical guidance from the experienced and wise of
previous generations for whom many of the young and arrogant had too little
respect...




The reason, Harold Cruse, a wise and very experienced elder of Left
and Nationalist organizations and struggles and a formidable thinker in
his own right, was careful to point out, was due to a severe and
consequential disruption of the passing-on of experience-tested and
verified knowledge from one generation to another by the ravages of the
witch-hunting and persecuting of any and all accused of being a
Communist or Communist sympathizer during the crusading campaign led by
Senator Joseph McCarthy during the 1950s. Many lives and careers were
destroyed as a result of McCarthy's campaign, and many persons
and organizations with Leftist commitments were either destroyed or
driven underground, or otherwise left severely tainted and thus made an
"untouchable" bereft of employment, even for one-time
friends and close associates. (W.E.B. Du Bois was one who suffered this
fate, which is largely why he made the momentous decision to renounce
his citizenship and leave the United States for residence in Ghana, where
he died...) The radical Young Turks, then, not short of courage or
passion, set out on a mission all but impoverished, in many cases, of
much needed historical and intellectual capital, thus were sometimes poorly
armed for the battles they sought to wage. Still, the
trans-generational disruption that Cruse pointed out was not complete.
There were those who filled the gap between the Harlem Renaissance and
the rise of the new *Black* renaissance who would be of
significant influence and guidance, and would serve some in the new movements as personal as well as
intellectual mentors and role models: Richard Wright, Robert Hayden, Ralph Ellison,
Margaret Walker, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and James
Baldwin, among several others.




There would be much *philosophizing born of struggles* by the
new generation. Much credit has to be given to those who had the
wherewithal of discipline and fortitude, and good fortune, to survive
and leave legacies of accomplishment that continue to enrich Black
folks, and others. The Black Arts Movement, for example, had profound
impacts through the productions and articulations that gave new
directions and meanings to artistic creativity, to the agendas guiding
creativity and expression and the mission of service to various
audiences. A manifesto, "Towards a Black Aesthetic," by
Hoyt Fuller (1923-1981; Fuller 1994) and his work as editor of
the journal *Negro Digest*, which later was renamed *Black
World* and was followed by *First World* when the publisher
of the latter was pressured to discontinue publication of a journal
serving Black radicals, were path-setting ventures during a period
much in need of clear paths. Likewise "The Black
Aesthetic" by the essayist and theorist Addison Gayle,
Jr. (1932-1991), his introduction to an anthology that he edited
and published bearing the same title (Gayle, Jr. 1972). A collection
of writings on theory, drama, music, and fiction by many of the
leading artistic minds in the new Black generation, *The Black
Aesthetic* has come to be regarded by scholars as "the
theoretical bible of the Black Arts Movement" and thus did for
the makers of this Movement what Locke's *The New Negro*
had done for the makers of the Harlem Renaissance. Both Fuller and
Gayle would play roles similar to Locke's in serving as midwives
to the creative and critically-minded development of a sizable portion
of a generation of seriously radicalized *Black*
thinkers-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 as
productive, formidable, and widely influential as were the *New*
Negroes of the 1920s and 1930s, even more so as they exploited the
advantages of access to the enabling resources of the media of radio,
television, and recordings in addition to print media, and to the human
resources that became available through lecture-circuits on college and
university campuses. Many of these Black warriors of the intellect and
arts took up positions, some settling into them for the long term, on
the faculties of colleges and universities and helped to development
the guiding philosophies and wage the political battles that ushered in
new programs in Black and African Studies. In so doing they magnified
the forcefulness and range of their intellectual and artistic powers
and contributions, and helped to alter cultural and intellectual scenes
in 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 descent
who were professionals in the discipline of Philosophy. As already noted, W.E.B. Du
Bois was one of a very few to study Philosophy formally while a student
at Harvard but decided against pursuing it professionally. Alain Leroy
Locke was one of the first persons of African descent in America to
earn a doctoral degree in Philosophy (Harvard University, 1918). A few
more followed decades later (1950s), among them Broadus N. Butler, Max
Wilson, Berkeley Eddins, and, still later, Joyce Mitchell Cook, the
first African American female to earn a Ph. D. in Philosophy. These
were some of the pioneering persons of African descent in the United
States who entered the profession of academic Philosophy with the
certification of a terminal degree in the discipline.




More recently (late 1960s through the 1970s) successive generations of
persons of African descent have entered the profession as cohorts of
new generations of young Black women and men entered the academy with
the expansion of opportunities for higher education that came as a
result of the successes of the desegregation-integration and Civil
Rights Movements. More than a few of these persons were influenced by
the Black Power, Black Consciousness, and Black Arts Movements, as
well, and in some cases by independence and decolonization movements
on the African continent and in the African Diaspora in the
Caribbean. The emergence of and pursuit of distinctive agendas within
academic Philosophy to articulate and study philosophizings by persons
African and of African descent were initiated by several of the new
entrants, agendas that grew out of and were motivated by these
movements. Thus, the new entrants were determined to contribute as
educators, sometimes as engaged intellectuals involved in movement
organizations, by identifying and contributing to, or by helping to
forge anew, philosophical traditions, literatures, and practices
intended, in many instances, to be distinctive of the thought- and
life-agendas of Black peoples. Here, then, the wellspring of concerns
and aspirations that gave rise to calls for, and efforts to set out,
"Black" philosophy, then "Afro-American," and
later "African American" philosophy, precursive efforts
leading to what is now the more or less settled *name*, but
still developing *concept*, of
*Africana* philosophy.




Formal, professional recognition and sanctioning of these efforts,
which had been pursued, with significant impact, through presentations
of papers on and discussions of various topics in sessions during
annual meetings of divisions of the American Philosophical Association
(APA) and other organizations of professional philosophers and other organizations of
teacher-scholars such as the Radical Philosophers Association (RPA) and
the Society for Phenomenological and Existential Philosophy (SPEP),
were achieved when, in 1987, the APA recognized the efforts as
having established a legitimate sub-field of Philosophy and made
"Africana philosophy" an officially listed specialty in the
discipline. Across the years, the APA's Committee on
Blacks in Philosophy has been instrumental in organizing a number of
these important sessions, though, of no less importance, many such
sessions were hosted by other sympathetic and supportive committees of
the APA as well as by other organizations of professional
philosophers that held meetings concurrent with those of divisions of
the Association. Thus, the recognition and sanction have come, to
significant degrees, as results of long efforts led by philosophers
Robert C. Williams (deceased), William Jones, Howard McGary, Jr., and
La Verne Shelton, among others, each of whom gave years of service as
chairpersons of the APA's Committee on Blacks in
Philosophy. Each also contributed early articulations that initiated
the work of forging the sub-field.




Also of special importance to this long development towards
recognition and legitimation, and to the production of much of the
early writings, presentations, and critical networking collegiality
that have been foundational to the development of Africana philosophy,
were a series of conferences devoted to explorations of "Black
Philosophy" or of "Philosophy and the Black
Experience" that were held during the 1970s, most of them
organized and hosted at Historically Black Colleges and Universities
(HCBUs: notably, Tuskegee University, Morgan State University, and
Howard University) though important gatherings were also held at the
University of Illinois-Chicago Circle (*ca* 1970, another thirty
years later), Haverford College (an international gathering in the
summer of 1982 of African and African American philosophers and
teacher-scholars from other disciplines), and, more recently, at the
University of Memphis. Particularly noteworthy in this regard is the
Philosophy Born of Struggle Conference, which has been hosted annually
for fifteen years primarily through the indefatigable efforts of J.
Everet Green and Leonard Harris, and the Alain Locke Conference
organized and hosted biannually by the Department of Philosophy of
Howard University (Washington, DC).




The development and institutionalization of African American
philosophy, of Africana philosophy more generally, with recognition by
the American Philosophical Association--though not by all, or
even most, departments of Philosophy in academic
institutions--have also been facilitated by the noteworthy
success of many of the pioneers in securing and retaining positions in
academic departments (of Philosophy, of Philosophy and Religion, of
Philosophy and other disciplines) in various institutions of higher
education across the country. A substantial few of these persons have
earned tenure and promotions, several to the rank of Professor, while
several have even been appointed to endowed
professorships. Consequently, a slowly increasing number of
philosophers who are African or of African descent now hold positions
in departments and programs that serve graduate and professional
students. Of importance, then, have been the growing number of
lectures and seminars in colleges and universities across the country
given and directed by philosophers of African descent in response to
invitations, and as part of regular curricular offerings,
respectively, of departments of Philosophy, often with the cooperation
and co-sponsorship of other departments and programs. These invited
presentations and regularized curricular offerings reconfirm and
strengthen the intellectual legitimacy of much work in Africana
philosophy while doing much the same for the invited and teaching
philosophers.




One especially significant consequence of these important developments
is that several of these persons now have built legacies of teaching
and scholarship that span decades with significant influences on
generations of students. Practitioners of Africana philosophy are even
producing new generations of practitioners. And practitioners of all
generations are contributing to the literature of articulate
expression of what is now a substantial and growing body of works
supporting teaching, research, and scholarship in Africana philosophy
while, in the process of doing so, also initiating, and otherwise
contributing to, substantial changes to discursive agendas. Certainly,
the example beyond debate continues to be critical explorations
of *race* and of "racism," matters that have
distorted the basic institutions, virtually all considerations and
practices, and all lives across the entirety of the history of the
United States of America, and that of much of the world. However, it
was not until philosophers of African descent focused their
philosophizing on critical engagements with the racial conditionings
of the profession and of life generally that discussions, teaching,
and scholarship within professional Philosophy were opened to and
conditioned by new critical discursive agendas affecting numerous
subfields within the discipline and the organization of the
profession, evident in the surge of writings by philosophers African
and of African descent published in mainstream journals and by
mainstream publishers.



*Race Matters* by Cornel West (1994) became the national and
international best-seller that propelled West into prominence as an
academic philosopher and preacher-become-public intellectual who
contributed to reinvigorated public critiques of racism with
professionally attuned philosophical acumen. Yet, his earlier
publication *Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary
Christianity* (1982) had even greater impacts on discourses within
the academic disciplines of Philosophy, Theology, and
Religion/Religious Studies, in particular. Of especially notable
influence were his genealogy of racism and his sketching out of four
distinctive traditions of responsive thought generated by Black
thinkers. West's genealogical critique drew on several canonical
figures (Nietzsche, Michel Foucault) and was thus emblematic of his
expansive learnedness and creative ingenuity in drawing on canonical
figures to redirect critical thought back upon the social orders and
history-making practices of those subjecting folks of African descent,
and others, to dehumanization.




Others contributing to and shaping such critiques include Howard
McGary, whose *Race and Social Justice* (1999) brought together
a number of seminal essays in which he explored moral and political
questions regarding race and racism in a new and distinctive (and
distinctively embodied) voice among practitioners of Analytic
Philosophy, a voice concerned with social justice, with issues of
equity and inclusion especially, while drawing on and highlighting
lived experiences of African Americans conditioned unjustly and
immorally. For McGary, philosophical work was no longer to be confined
to analysis restricted to 'getting the terms
right'. Rather, having lived experiences of invidious racial
discrimination and impediments to accessing and exploiting conditions
of possibility by which Black persons might forge individual and
group-shared flourishing lives, across generations, McGary has
remained committed to disciplined, well-argued clarifications and
revisions of key notions by which to pursue and secure social justice,
most especially for those "least well off": the
Black *underclass*.




Continuing such efforts, in a different register, with substantial and
innovative contributions is Paul Taylor (who studied with McGary at
Rutgers University). His *Race: A Philosophical Introduction*
stands out as an especially clearly-articulated, nuanced, clarifying
navigation of many of the complexities of conceptualizations
of *race* firmly situated in reconstructions of historical
practices guided by political and other agendas. Yet, it is
Taylor's *Black is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black
Aesthetics* that is especially noteworthy. It is, perhaps, the
first-in-decades book-length "assembling" (Taylor's
own characterization of his effort) of a
deliberately *philosophical* theory of Black aesthetics: that
is, a critical theoretical exploration of the roles expressive
practices and objects play when taken up by Black folks in the
creation and maintenance of their lifeworlds. (The philosopher Alain
Leroy Locke, midwife to the New Negroes of the Harlem Renaissance,
preceded Taylor by half-a-century in taking seriously Black expressive
life, as did W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, James
Baldwin, Toni Morrison, and numerous others.) Taylor's efforts
are doubly innovative in his endeavor to bridge two discursive
communities heretofore not in communication: professional
philosophers, and others, concerned with aesthetics who have had
little to no concern with aesthetics in Black life; Black artists and
critics fully immersed in the productions of and engagements with
expressive practices and objects in Black life with little to no
engagements with resources drawn from academic, professional
Philosophy. As did Alain Locke, Taylor aims to contribute to a new
generation of articulate thinkers who are focusing their critical
acumen on the expressivity and performativity in productions of self,
and of self in relations with others, of those who have been
racialized as *Black*.




But, how have folks African and of African descent been figured in the
expressive practices and products, and in the theorizings of such
aesthetic ventures, produced, in both cases, by folks not Black?
Robert Gooding-Williams is but one of several philosophers of African
descent who probes these questions in his *Look, A Negro!
Philosophical Essays on Race, Culture and Politics* (2006), a
collection of essays connected, he notes, by his persistent effort to
explore whether it is possible to interpret *race* in ways that
would be in keeping with what is required in political and cultural
life if the United States as a polity were to become actually
structured by democratic principles and practices while adult citizens
fully acknowledge the history and continuing legacies of White racial
supremacy that have structured the polity from its inception. In the
chapter on "Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell,
and Astaire," for example, Gooding-Williams rehearses accounts
of aesthetic experiences by the canonic figures Kant (re:
"aesthetic judgment") and Nietzsche (re: embodied
sensibilities) in preparation for a critical reading and assessment of
the philosopher Stanley Cavell's aesthetic reading of how the
dancer Fred Astaire is rendered in a particular movie in which he
stars (*The Band Wagon*) as the focal character who is
able/enabled to reclaim himself (i.e., make a "comeback")
as a star dancer. What Gooding-Williams lifts up is Cavell's
failure to *see* that the Astaire-character is enabled by a
Black male character who, in shining Astaire's shoes, transfers
to Astaire and his feet a restoration of rhythmic capabilities by way
of the rhythms the Black shoeshine-man articulates while brushing the
Astaire-character's shoes and polishing them with his
shine-rag. All of which presumes something (on the part of the
film-maker; so, too, Cavell, though differently...) about the
embodiment of enabling aesthetic capabilities of particular kinds in
the being of the Black character representative of the
culturally-inflected raciality of Black people.




There are centuries-long, quite rich traditions of thought
articulated, and political praxis engaged in, by Black folks for whom
it is the case that the constitutive racially of Black folks is such
that it sets the terms not only of identity, but, as well, of the
ethical imperatives of intra- and interracial mutualities, that is, of
various modes and instances of solidarity. And, as well, for
compelling pragmatic reasons: to contend with, ultimately to overcome,
invidious racial discrimination and oppression. No small matters for
persons and peoples suffering racialized dehumanization and
exploitation thus in need of shared motivating and guiding notions of
how to gain and sustain freedom and justice. Many concerned to forge
freedom in just conditions have sought morally compelling guiding
understandings in shared raciality, in being, by particular
understandings of raciality, a distinctive *people,* a
distinctive *nation* of Black people. Hence, traditions of
"Black Nationalism," waxing and waning across the
centuries, 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 professional
philosopher after the resurgent Black nationalisms of the Black Power
and Black Arts movements, while deeply committed to philosophical
engagements with and out of contexts of lived experiences of Black
folks in which much of his life has been conditioned, has, in
his *We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black
Solidarity*, endeavored to work out a philosophically clarified
and justified account of the terms and agenda of solidarity as a basis
for organized and coordinated struggles for justice. The account is
intended to be both motivating and welcoming of the solidaristic
cooperation of persons Black and non-Black without needing to resort
to what he reasons to be the philosophically indefensible racial
essentialism of various construals of Black nationalism. Yet, the
account is intended to be in keeping with important conceptual and
normative groundings of Black political cultural life that are, as
well, compatible with a notion of political liberalism worked out by
John Rawls. With Shelby's efforts, too, there is the hard work
of extending decidedly prominent mainstream philosophical thought
(that of of Rawls in this particular case) to a creatively critical
engagement with unjust limiting conditions on the lives of Black folks
in conjunction with efforts of philosophical reconstruction and
defense of principles of Black solidarity that embrace a notion
of *Blackness* suitable for emancipatory work.


## 11. Publishing and Professional Africana Philosophy




Leonard Harris has been a pioneer of published works on African
American philosophy and continues to be a major contributor in many
ways, not least as an editor of collections that have made widely
available important texts that otherwise would not have gotten the
attention of researchers and scholars concerned with the
philosophizings of Black folks. Of particular note, his edited
collection *The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and
Beyond* (Harris 1989) provides ready access to philosophical
essays from among Locke's more than three hundred published and
unpublished essays and book reviews. And his
*Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American Philosophy
from 1917* (Harris 1983) was for many years the only widely
available, somewhat historically organized collection of writings by
African American professional philosophers and other philosophizing
Black scholars. (An important earlier collection is Percy
E. Johnston's *Afro-American Philosophers*. (Johnston
1970)) More recently new collections devoted to African American
Philosophy have been organized and published by Tommy L. Lott (Lott
2002); by Lott and John P. Pittman (Lott and Pittman 2003); and by
James A. Montmarquet and William H. Hardy (Montmarquet and Hardy
2000).




This publishing is an important part of the story of Africana
philosophy, and helps to make and legitimate the case that persons
African and of African-descent, on the African continent and in the
African Diaspora in the Americas and elsewhere, are creators and
custodians of Africana philosophy. A number of publishers have
recognized and accepted these developments and, after substantial,
long-standing resistance and outright refusal by many to recognize
historic writings by persons of African descent and contemporary
scholarship by philosophers African and of African descent as proper
instances of philosophical work, have made a priority of adding works
of Africana philosophy to their lists of published works.




Of particular publishing significance is the continuing, regular
appearance of issues of *Philosophia Africana: Analysis of
Philosophy and Issues in Africa and the Black Diaspora*, a journal
for which Emmanuel Chukwudi Eze of DePaul University was founding
editor until his unexpected death in 2007. *Philosophia
Africana* remains the only scholarly journal in the United States
that is devoted to Africana philosophy, though increasingly other
philosophy journals are accepting and publishing writings that fall
within the subfield. None, however, have been as generous as
*Philosophical Forum*, which, under the editorial directorship
of Max Wartofsky (deceased), devoted two entire special issues to
explorations of philosophical matters of particular concern to Black
philosophers. Noteworthy, too, has been the continuing midwifing of New
York-based publisher and scholar Alfred Prettyman, who has devoted
time, energy, and other resources to nurturing The Society for the
Study of Africana philosophy (originally the New York Society for the
Study of Black Philosophy), an organization of philosophers and other
engaged thinkers of African descent, and persons not of African
descent, who come together in his home to present and discuss ideas and
works on the way to publication or recently published. For a brief
period Prettyman was editor and publisher of the now dormant *The
Journal* of the New York Society for the Study of Black
Philosophy.




The professional recognition and legitimation of Africana philosophy
generally, of African, African American, and Afro-Caribbean philosophy
as sub-foci of the field; the notable success enjoyed by a slowly
increasing number of persons African and of African descent in being
hired, retained, and promoted by departments and programs in
institutions of higher education; more publishing opportunities; a
continuing vigorous schedule of regular conferences and conference
sessions devoted to explorations of matters pertinent to the
field--all of these continue to be crucial to building and
enhancing the literature-base of the field and to facilitating
teaching, research, scholarship, and other collegial engagements and
practices that are essential to forming and sustaining nurturing
discursive communities devoted to engaging philosophizing productive of
Africana philosophy. And the enterprise is being enriched by the
participation and contributions of an increasing number of persons,
students and professionals, who are neither African nor of African
descent.


## 12. Africana Philosophy: Contributions




Substantial progress has thus been made in mitigating some of the
impediments that had long hampered recognition of and attending to the
philosophizing efforts of persons African and of African descent.
Nonetheless, still more mitigating work remains. There is the need, for
example, to bring to consideration for better appreciation the writings
of several generations of especially thoughtful and insightful Black
essayists and novelists, poets and musicians, artists and dancers,
preachers and theologians, and other public-speaking Black
intellectuals who, through their means of expression, have
philosophized about the conditions and prospects of Black folks and, in
many cases, have helped to sustain the will and determination to
*endure* the assaults on the humanity, on the *being*, of
persons and peoples African and of African descent. In this regard, too
little attention has been given, for example, to the philosophical
writer-novelist Charles Johnson who, before he became a distinguished
novelist, was a graduate student in Philosophy. The articulated thought
of many other Black writers, some of them novelists, also compel close,
appreciative readings by philosophers for what these articulations
disclose of the writers coming to terms thoughtfully and creatively
with the exigencies of existence for Black folks as the writers
imagined or re-imagined them in the locales and historical moments of
their writerly creations. Likewise in many sermons, speeches, letters,
songs, and dances created and expressed, creatively very often, by
thoughtful Black persons. *Of necessity*, then, Africana
philosophy must be an even more intensive and extensive
interdisciplinary enterprise.




A principal impediment to the recognition and appreciation of the
philosophizings of Black folks have been the thorough investments in
Eurocentrism and White Racial Supremacy that have grounded and
structured so much of the historiography within the discipline of
Philosophy for so very many decades. Resolving these misconstruals of
the discipline's history will require substantial revisions,
ones inclusive of the philosophizings of persons of many excluded
groupings. In so doing, careful work must be done to reclaim for
wider distribution and careful study as many as possible of the
earliest articulations--many of which were never
published--that helped pave the way to the development of African
American philosophy, of Africana philosophy more generally, as fields
of discourse (Kuklick 2001; Kuklick 2008).




With hindsight, an especially crippling factor in the development of
Africana 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 of
present practitioners, has been devoted to issues that are of
significance to women African and of African descent even though, as
has been indicated through the narration of the history of
*philosophizing born of struggles*, the contributions of Black
women have been significant though seldom with the prominence of
attention they should have had outside of women's circles. As
was shown, in the New Worlds in which African peoples were being
re-made/were remaking themselves into new persons and peoples of
African descent, numerous Black women across the generations were
challenged to think hard and long about the assaults on their
communities, their families, their very bodies and souls. Here, then,
a *compelling* need to foster and support the philosophizing
efforts of Black women who direct our attention to the lives and
philosophizing of Black women, historically and
contemporarily. Noteworthy in this regard are the groundbreaking,
inspiring efforts of philosopher Kathryn Gines in founding the
Collegium of Black Women Philosophers. The Collegium is bringing
together women from across the country in conferences devoted to
recovering and recognizing the contributions of pioneering women
philosophers of African descent while exploring present issues and
forging agendas of further work to be done.


## 13. Future Developments




The possible futures of developments in Africana philosophy in
African and the African Diaspora are open. The initial work of making
the case for and legitimacy of African American, African, and Africana
philosophy and its subfields has been accomplished with significant
success even without universal acceptance and respect. That is to be
expected, for no intellectual movement or disciplinary sub-field ever
wins acceptance by all. Still, there is more to be done by way of
consolidating the gains while forging new developments as minds are
turned to challenging issues, many of them novel. To note, for two
decades much of the effort of practitioners of Africana philosophy has
been devoted to explorations of *race*, a foundational and
pervasive complex of forceful factors shaping virtually all aspects and
dimensions of life in the formation of Modernity in Europe and the
Americas, and in every instance in which Europeans encroached on the
lands and lives of peoples around the globe. Achieving justice without
racism in polities bequeathed by Modernity is hardly finished business.
So, the need to rethink *race* will be with us for a while
yet.




However, the need will be generated by resolutions of old
difficulties and challenges. Success will bring new challenges. Among
these, settling such questions as whether there can and should be
norms, practices, and agendas that are definitive of philosophizing
identified 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 and
African-descended peoples, without injustice to non-Black peoples, and
thereby provide those philosophizing with normative guidance while
conforming to norms that ensure propriety and truthfulness in
discursive practices on conditions of warrant that are open to and can
be confirmed by persons who are neither African nor African-descended?
Should such concerns continue to be appropriate conditioners of
philosophical effort? The praxes and supportive discursive communities
constitutive of Africana philosophy will have to meet certain
institutionalized rules governing scholarly practices even as those of
us committed to the development of the enterprise contribute to
critiques and refinements of these institutionalized rules while
devising and proposing others.




The work constituting Africana philosophy, on the African continent
and throughout the African Diaspora, has helped to change the agendas
and rules of discourse and praxis in Philosophy and other disciplines
and discursive communities in contemporary academic institutions and
organizations. The enterprise has been a significant contributor to the
emergent recognition of the need to give greater respectful attention
to 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 invalidating
reconstructed notions of proper reasoning. As well, practitioners of
Africana philosophy have aided the development of much wider and deeper
recognition and acknowledgment of inadequacies in basic notions and
agendas in the legacies of Western Philosophy thereby helping to open
us all to challenging new needs and possibilities for further revising
philosophical traditions and practices. The expansion of academic
Philosophy to include Africana philosophy is indicative of efforts to
achieve greater intellectual democracy in multi-ethnic, multi-racial
societies. These developments should be continued, aided by
philosophizing persons who are neither African nor of African descent,
nor, even, professional academic philosophers, and continued as part of
a larger, ongoing effort to appreciate and learn from the many
life-enriching creations of *all* peoples as contributions to
the treasure-houses of human civilization.