Creative Conflict in African American Thought
Cambridge University Press, 7/1/2004
EAN 9780521535373, ISBN10: 0521535379
Paperback, 328 pages, 22.9 x 15.1 x 2 cm
Language: English
Building upon his previous work and using Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition as a model, Professor Moses has revised and brought together in this book essays that focus on the complexity of, and contradictions in, the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus M. Garvey. In doing so, he challenges both popular and scholarly conceptions of them as villains or heroes. In analyzing the intellectual struggles and contradictions of these five dominant personalities with regard to individual morality and collective reform, Professor Moses shows how they contributed to strategies for black improvement and puts them within the context of other currents of American thought, including Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, Social Darwinism, and progressivism.
Part I. Introduction
Consistency … the Hobgoblin of Little Minds
1. The meaning of struggle
Part II. Frederick Douglass
The Individualist as Race Man
2. Where honor is due
Frederick Douglass and representative man
3. Writing freely? Douglass's racialization, and desexualization
4. Frederick Douglass, superstar
Part III. Alexander Crummell
the Anglophile as Afrocentrist
5. Africa, Christianity, and civilization
6. Crummell and the new south
7. Crummell, Du Bois, and presentism
Part IV. Booker Taliafero Washington
The Idealist as Materialist
8. Booker T. Washington and the meaning of progress
9. Protestant ethic versus conspicuous consumption
Part V. Burghardt Du Bois
The Democrat as Authoritarian
10. Du Bois on religion and art
11. Du Bois and democracy
a tragic realism
12. Du Bois protestant perfectionism and progressive pragmatism
Part VI. Marcus Moziah Garvey
The Realist as Romantic
13. The birth of tragedy
Garvey's heroic struggles
14. Becoming history
Garvey and the genius of his age
Part VII. Conclusion
Saving Heroes from their Admirers
15. Reality, contradiction and the meaning of progress.