Learning Is an All-Black Thing

This chapter situates Ebony’s evolving black history content within the broader struggle for black-centred education and the ‘Black Revolution’ on campus during the late 1960s and early 1970s. During this period, Ebony’s historical content presented a militant and, at times, heavily gendered interpretation of the African American past. On an individual level, Bennett’s developing relationship with organisations such as Northwestern University and the Institute of the Black World underscored the uniqueness of his role as Ebony’s in-house historian, and the complexity of his position as both a magazine editor and a black public intellectual.

Make Revolution Irresistible: The Role of the Cultural Worker in the Twenty-First Century

I was introduced to the term public intellectual almost twenty years ago when I was an undergraduate in a literary course on African American music taught by the cultural critic Farah Jasmine Griffin. The class conversations began with readings of jazz and hip-hop artists as “organic intellectuals” in the sense developed by Antonio Gramsci. We quickly moved to the debates sparked by Edward Said's Representations of the Intellectual (1993) and to the rise of the black public intellectual as demonstrated by the formation by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., of an academic “dream team” in African American studies at Harvard, Cornel West's publication of Race Matters (1994), and Robert Boynton's March 1995 article in the Atlantic entitled “The New Intellectuals,” which added Toni Morrison, Stanley Crouch, Patricia Williams, Michael Eric Dyson, Derrick Bell, June Jordan, and many others to that category. By the time I arrived at Harvard in 1999, for graduate study in African American literature, the idea of the black public intellectual served as a backdrop and a blueprint for how my generation of scholars could live inside and beyond the campus walls. As beneficiaries of that era, my peers and I did not necessarily have to prove that our work belonged in the public; instead, we had to wrestle with newer questions of format and forum in the digital age.