| Summary: | "Political scientist Martin Kilson combines studies of the developmental dynamics of the twentieth-century Black intelligentsia in aggregate with studies of the intellectual odyssey (career and discourse) of representative African American intellectuals in particular. After Reconstruction, African Americans found themselves free, yet largely excluded from politics, higher education, and the professions. Drawing on his professional research into political leadership and intellectual development in African American society, Kilson explores how a modern Black intelligentsia developed in the face of institutionalized racism. In his profiles of Horace Mann Bond, John Aubrey Davis, Ralph Bunche, Harold Cruise, E. Franklin Frazier, Adelaide M. Cromwell (the one chapter in the book written by the author's wife, Marion Kilson), Ishmael Reed, and Cornel West, Kilson argues for the ongoing necessity of Black leaders in the tradition of W. E. B. Du Bois, who summoned the "Talented Tenth" to champion Black progress. Among the many dynamics that have shaped African American advancement, Kilson focuses on the damage--and eventual decline--of color elitism among the Black professional class, the contrasting approaches of Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and the consolidation of an ethos of self-conscious racial leadership. Black leaders who assumed this obligation helped usher in the civil rights movement. But mingled among the fruits of victory are the persistent challenges of poverty and inequality. Kilson takes the reader on an analytical journey through the historical thickets of American racism out of which the multifaceted modern dynamics that defined the African American intelligentsia in aggregate and many thousands of African American intellectuals' formation-identity-in particular evolved. He considers the professional careers and discourse of members of the intelligentsia influenced by the Du Boisian leadership legacy, the varying intellectual styles represented among the African American intelligentsia, and the ideological and political patterns that have vied for prominence among the evolving twentieth-century African American intelligentsia in the development for the life chances of African Americans in general"--
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