Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880– 2012 The W. E. B. Du Bois Lectures T RA N S F O R M AT I O N O F T H E A F R I C A N A M E R I C A N I N T E L L I G E N T S I A , 1880– 2012 Martin Kilson Cambridge, Massachusetts London, En gland 2014 Copyright © 2014 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-i n-P ublication Data Kilson, Martin. Transformation of the African American intelligentsia, 1880–2012 / Martin Kilson. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-674-28354-1 (alk. paper) 1. African Americans—Intellectual life—19th century. 2. African Americans—Intellectual life—20th century. 3. African American intellectuals. 4. African American leadership. 5. African Americans—Race identity. 6. Elite (Social sciences)— United States. I. Title. E185.89.I56K55 2014 305.896'073—dc23 2013039891 This book is dedicated to my wife, children, grandchildren, and sons- in- law Marion Dusser de Barenne Kilson Jennifer Kilson- Page Peter D. de B. Kilson Hannah Laws Kilson Jacob Kilson Page Rhiana Kilson Page Maya Kilson Page Caila Marion Kilson- Kuchtic Zuri Helen Kilson- Kuchtic Ciaran Martin Kilson- Kuchtic John Kuchtic Phillip Page CONTENTS Foreword by Henry Louis Gates Jr. ix Prologue: The Origins of the Black Intelligentsia 1 1. The Rise and Fall of Color Elitism among African Americans 9 2. Black Intelligentsia Leadership Patterns 44 3. Ideological Dynamics and the Making of the Intelligentsia 86 4. Black Elite Patterns in the Twenty-F irst Century 115 Appendix: Class Attributes of Elite Strata 157 Notes 165 Analytical Bibliography 191 Ac know ledg ments 211 Index 215 FOREWORD Henry Louis Gates Jr. The Alphonse Fletcher University Professor Harvard University In 1969, almost seventy- five years after W. E. B. Du Bois be- came the fi rst African American to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard, Martin Kilson also made history by becoming the fi rst black to be promoted to a tenured professorship and to teach in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, to many the heart and soul of the university. Now, thanks to Harvard University Press, both men of letters are joined in print with the release of Professor Kilson’s seminal Du Bois Lectures, Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2 012, delivered at Harvard over three days in the spring of 2010 as part of an annual series initially funded by the Ford Foundation and now sustained by the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research. Like his hero W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Kilson received his A.M. and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard, in po liti cal science in 1958 and 1959, re- spectively (Du Bois had taken his degrees in history). But, as he recalls in the pages that follow, it was at another institution, Lincoln Univer- sity in Pennsylvania, one of the nation’s outstanding historically black universities, that he and Du Bois fi rst breathed the same air. Kilson, a native of Ambler, Pennsylvania, a small mill town just north of Phila- delphia, was a freshman there in 1950 and Du Bois, by then chair- man of the Peace Information Center in New York, had come to cam- pus on a mission to inspire the next generation of “The Talented Tenth” to embrace community- minded leadership with an emphasis ix