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

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