African American Thought

African American thought has been uniquely influenced by the African love of nature, cruelties of aggression, and an increasing need to adapt to hostile environments and to contribute creatively to overcome the challenges of new worlds, civilizations, and lifestyles tremendously different from the African ancestral heritage. The resistance of Africans to the hardships of life in the new world, including enslavement, sexual exploitation, and cultural genocide was strongly articulated in the works of the succeeding generations of the African American thinkers who purposefully aimed to ensure constructive participation of the black people in community affairs, sciences, and technological advancement by the full enjoyment of civil liberties and the other constitutional rights.

The early writings of Frederick Douglass, Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Anna Julia Copper, Booker T. Washington,Marcus Garvey, and William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B) DuBois, among many others, revealed consistent striving for the observance of social justice, with persistent emphasis on the cause of liberation, unity, and the perseverance of human dignity in the American society. Rooted in the centuries' spirituality of Africa, the African American thought was largely influenced by spiritual leaders. The use of spiritual principles to uplift the social status of blacks was forcibly applied by Marcus Garvey, a founder of pan-African and a self-sufficiency doctrine for blacks in the diaspora, as well as Elijah Muhammed, the founder of the Nation of Islam, who taught his disciples blacks had been the chosen children of God. The civil rights movement marked the leadership of the Nobel Laureate Martin Luther King Jr., of the southern Christian churches, who taught millions of demonstrators in the civil rights movement era that “character, not color” was the determining criterion for human merits, and the Muslim leader El-Haj Malik El-Shabazz (Minister Malcolm X) of the Nation of Islam, whose teachings impacted the concern of African Americans with the ethics of power.

The African American contemporary thought has been developed by generations of the African American thinkers who continued to develop the centuries-old intellectual-activist tradition in modern times. This included the liberation schools of black thought that adopted both liberal and socialist philosophies in the pursuit for citizenship rights and privileges of the good life within American democracy. Anne Walker Bethune, Na'im Akbar, Angela Davis, Nyara Sudarkasa, Manning Marable, Maulana Karenga, Frances Cress Welsing, and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison introduced new scholarly concepts to strengthen the blacks' social movement for personal integrity, political activity, and economic prosperity. Toward this end, the African American thought drew heavily from the history of the continent of Africa, the contributions of Africans in the American and Caribbean diaspora, and the need to emulate cultural heritage to reconstruct the image of blacks “in their own interests.” Stressing the deep concerns of African [Page 26]value systems with justice, discipline, and productive behavior, the Kawanza doctrine exemplified the African American concern for unity, self-determination, collective work and responsibility, cooperative economics, purpose, creativity, and faith.

Faced by the challenges of adaptability in the new world, the need for effective social equality and women's rights occupied a central part of the African American thinking, which further impacted the international literature on social equality and the striving for women's rights. Early endeavors were greatly initiated by Sojourner Truth and Ida Wells, who called for the eradication of enslavement and all racist attitudes from society with direct public speech and community-based activism. Wells-Barnett (b. 1862) developed a reputation for intelligence, eloquence, and public persona, since she was the first black person to initiate a legal challenge to the Supreme Court's nullification of the 1875 Civil Rights Bill, regarding Wells's appeal versus the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad train in May 1884. Wells encouraged the establishment of the national black women's club movement to advance women's status, and helped to revive the Afro-American League national organization to promote black unity. She became editor of the Evening Star and another black weekly, called Living Way, as well as editor and part owner of the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight. Her early journalistic emphasis was on children and education, but that changed dramatically in1892 to a strong campaign against lynching, in which she wrote a powerful exposé entitled “Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases,” and toured the country and eventually Europe to speak against this terrorism, probably in the most radical statements made by an African American leader of the time.

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