New Black Intellectual Histories

“Like many African Americanists,” the Vanderbilt University historian Brandon Byrd says, “I consider myself a generalist. It wasn’t till the past five years or so, when I joined the African American Intellectual History Society, that I really started to think about what this thing we’re calling African American intellectual history could be.” Recently, Byrd, the author of The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), published “The Rise of African American Intellectual History” in the journal Modern Intellectual History. The article offers a rich overview of a field Byrd says has been “marginalized for too long.”

African American intellectual history, in Byrd’s view, crystallizes and clarifies some of the constitutive problems of history-writing: the tension between literate elites and unlettered masses as sources and subjects of history; the inevitable emotional investments of the scholar vis-à-vis his or her material; the inextricability of advocacy and historiography; the limitations of the archive.

I talked with Byrd about the relationship between intellectual history and social history, the neglected African American historian Earl Thorpe, the question of neutrality in historiography, and the global protests over police killings of African Americans.

“African American intellectual history,” you write, “is a distinctive field with its own origins, objectives, and methods.” How does it differ from, or overlap with, American intellectual history as such?

Generally speaking, African American intellectual history as an enterprise is less interested in saying, This is what U.S. intellectual history does, this is what European intellectual history does, and this is what we do instead. Even doing that holds those other things up as the standard, right?

As normative.

Yes. One of the things that strikes me most about African American intellectual history — and this is true also of African intellectual history or Caribbean intellectual history or Indigenous intellectual histories — is that these histories are produced from the margins — both the margins of “history” and the margins of historiography. So these projects and the organizations that facilitate them are necessarily innovative. Many scholars doing African American intellectual history are dealing with enslaved populations, or folks after the period of enslavement who are Jim Crowed and excluded from forms of literacy — which is what has traditionally been defined as the act of the intellectual. But if “thinking” doesn’t necessarily look like the written word, and certainly not like the grand magnum opus, then what does thinking look like? There’s a necessary creativity in meeting these actors — who were certainly thinkers — on their own terms.

An old-guard intellectual historian like Perry Miller depended almost exclusively on the writings of clergymen and philosophers. But a lot of intellectual history since then has tried to reconcile a focus on the elite production of ideas with the intellectual commitments of regular people. How does that play out in African American intellectual history?

It would be a mistake to represent all African American intellectual history as being a sort of non-elite, counterhegemonic project. A lot of scholars of African American history are writing about professional thinkers. So that’s not really that far afield from what a lot of intellectual history traditionally has looked like.

Right. And you mention that Earl Thorpe, one of the heroes of your Modern Intellectual History essay — we’ll get to him later — worried that his work was compromised for that reason.

By a middle-class bias.

So that’s a risk of all intellectual history, including African American intellectual history.

Absolutely. And there’s a patriarchal bent to it, too. Privileging elite subjects, literate subjects, formally educated subjects — a lot of those are men. So in that, there has traditionally been an overlap between African American intellectual history and intellectual history writ large.

But practitioners of African American intellectual history were certainly at the vanguard of the “social turn,” of history from below. Of really thinking about what history looks like for the vast majority of the population — of workers, of laborers, of enslaved people. I’m thinking of scholars like Herbert Gutman and John Blassingame.

At the same time, some intellectual historians — white intellectual historians in Europe and the United States, primarily — felt that social history was an aggressive field challenging their dominance: Chicano history, African American history, women’s history. But the practitioners of those histories are not making that cleavage. They’re showing the synergies between social history, intellectual history, and cultural history.

The history of enslaved people, for example, is not just a social history. It’s also an intellectual history, because it’s about how enslaved people are thinking about their lived experiences.

If one project in intellectual history in more recent decades has been to ask, What are ideas doing for a larger group of people than elites, then what does history take from anthropology, or sociology, or related fields?

I think this is where the influence of Black studies and Black women’s studies and other ethnic studies really comes into play — or should come into play. Some of the most compelling and important work on African American thought has been done by philosophers, by political scientists, by folks from outside the discipline of history. I began by mentioning Black studies and women’s studies because those are interdisciplinary disciplines.

A work of African American intellectual history may not look that distinct from a work from name-your-discipline outside of history. African American intellectual history is driven by an ethics of freedom: freedom of exploring new methodologies, of exploring new sources, of exploring what intellectual histories can look like.

One of the figures in your paper was new to me. That’s Earl Thorpe, a Black historian who in 1961 wrote The Mind of the Negro: an intellectual history of Afro-Americans. Does that book have the reputation it ought to have, or has it been forgotten?

I know Thorpe’s work through some important scholarship on African American historians by folks like Pero Dagbovie and Stephen Hall, who have recovered the histories of these earliest “Negro” historians practicing “Negro” history. Before Thorpe, there was Carter G. Woodson. Before Carter G. Woodson, there was George Washington Williams.

But it’s absolutely true that in the history and historiography of African American intellectual history, August Meier stands out as the founding father. So placing Thorpe is important, because not doing so suggests that the ideas of this Black scholar matter less than a subsequent generation of scholarship produced at a time when Meier wielded a great deal of control over African American history.

On a more meta level, it speaks to the question: Who do we think of as thinkers? Who does our mind go to? In the canon, it’s not Thorpe. It’s not Woodson. Honestly, it’s not even du Bois. They may be activists, they may be founders of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. But they’re not scholars whom we go to and engage with for their scholarship.

On Meier and Thorpe: You discuss Meier’s dismissive 1961 review of The Mind of the Negro in The Journal of Negro Education.

It’s like three sentences.

And among its three sentences is one in which Meier, who had written a not-yet-published dissertation on the topic, kvetches that Thorpe failed to cite some important doctoral dissertations! You wryly note that this “presumably included Meier’s own work.” When Meier did publish his dissertation, in 1963, he didn’t cite Thorpe at all.

So there’s an ugly story about the way a white scholar writes a Black one out of existence. But there’s also, more trivially, this nasty piece of academic pettiness. I found that entertaining and a little depressing at the same time.

It’s clear that Meier is caught up in his feelings, for sure. And in retrospect, it just looks uglier. And not only in retrospect, because Thorpe is very aware of this. He says in response to another white reviewer that white scholars tell other white scholars they owe nothing to the Black scholars who have written on the same topics before them.

At the same time, Meier reflected a great deal on how his whiteness influenced his work as a scholar of African American history. He was very involved in the activist organizations and the Black freedom struggle of his time. So I didn’t want to read too much into what was happening there, while also acknowledging its implications.

On activism and history: You quote the historian Thomas A. Bailey, in 1968, deriding African American history as “pressure-group history.” Is there such a thing as pressure-group history, in Bailey’s pejorative sense? And if there is, how do you distinguish that from history like Thorpe’s, or like Meier’s, with a salutary activist orientation?

If African American history, to Bailey’s mind, was pressure-group history, then what were the histories that had completely excluded all nonwhite populations in the U. S.? That’s still pressure! That’s downward pressure, that’s oppressive pressure. But it’s packaged as objective history.

So for scholars of African American history, who positioned themselves as activist scholars and continue to do so, activism does not diminish scholarship; it enhances scholarship. I firmly stand behind that.

This is something that Ida B. Wells would say about her journalism — it has to be passionate, it has to come from a deep well of caring. How can you write the scholarship of slavery without caring about enslaved people? How can you write a scholarship about the struggle for desegregation and decolonization without caring about the fates of the decolonial world and postsegregation America? So if we take the idea of pressure-group history as speaking to a bigger question about the role of scholarship vis-à-vis activism, I think we miss the inherent nature of the work.

The historian Hayden White said, “I tell my students never work on anything you don’t love. Failing that, work on something you hate.”

I like that quote a lot. I’m not sure how you could write Black intellectual history without grappling with these foundations. Someone like Immanuel Kant saying, “The fellow was quite Black from head to toe, and therefore I knew everything he said was stupid.” That’s where we’re working from! To write Black intellectual history is to describe a reality of racist thought and then to prescribe, from the perspectives of Black people themselves, new modes of thinking, their modes of thinking — right? This isn’t a project that can be neutral, because it was never neutral.

The question of neutrality brings me back to Thorpe. You describe some of the categories laid out in his book: accommodation thought and attack thought.

Thorpe conceptualized Black thought as being reflective of dominant debates. There’s protest thought on the one hand, and, on the other, working within hegemonic structures and systems, including Jim Crow. That categorization reflected the actors being studied, dominant Black male leaders — W.E.B. du Bois on the one hand, Booker T. Washington on the other. The Tuskegee Machine on the one hand, the Niagara Movement and the NAACP on the other.

So those categories are a function of Thorpe’s focus on elite thinkers.

Elite, male thinkers. Meier will do a similar sort of work. It persists throughout the ‘70s and ‘80s.

You describe Thorpe as a “vindicationist” historian. What do you mean by that?

In many ways, Thorpe’s work functions like earlyish works of African American history that were vindicationist — that is, they were defenses of the race. African American history itself was a project of showing that African Americans have a history. This dates back to those foundations, to folks like Hegel saying Africa exists outside of history. Black historians are saying, there is a history in Africa, and it carries forward into the Americas.

Even in the era of the mainstreaming of African American history, when there is a move away from the need to vindicate the race to more critical analysis — this is something John Hope Franklin celebrates — African American intellectual history was still in the mode of showing that, yes, African Americans have an intellectual history. So there’s still a vindicationist element in that regard. For Thorpe and the historians of his era, part of that vindicationist element is that intellectual history could serve a broader political project: to write the intellectual history of African American thinkers was to take a step toward a biracial democracy, to show that African Americans were part and parcel of this modern society.

Are there recent scholars or monographs that you want our readers to know about?

I’m on sabbatical this coming year, but if I were teaching an intellectual-history course, I would love to teach Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I’m not sure if she would describe it as a work of intellectual history, and I don’t want to impose a definition on her work. But it is a book that encourages us to think about what it means to write about marginal Black subjects as thinkers. Poor Black women in urban turn-of-the-century Philadelphia, who did not produce the written texts that figure most prominently in intellectual history.

To grapple with this is to explore new methodologies created from the margins of history and historiography. Hartman has engaged with this in other works: her idea of “critical fabulation” — looking beyond, and through, the archive, into the interiority of her subjects.

Hartman was originally a literary critic and theorist. And her “critical fabulation” is a kind of fiction-adjacent practice. Except for Ralph Ellison, you didn’t mention many fiction writers or creative artists in your MIH article. But it occurs to me that a more expansive version of your project would discuss fiction at more length, because, maybe more so than their white counterparts, mid-century Black American writers were called upon to function as public intellectuals, to both Black and white publics.

Absolutely. In a more capacious essay, fiction writers would have a special place. Black creative writers and Black memoirists have been most attuned to both the limitations of the traditional archive and, perhaps, to the imagining of new archives. James Baldwin, in his letter to his nephew, is writing an intellectual history of Black subjectivity in the era of racial violence and Jim Crow: “My father was an angry man.” These writers are theorists, some of our best theorists. They help us as historians capture the truths of our subjects.

How does African American intellectual history speak to political developments right now — to the nationwide and global protests over police violence against Black Americans?

It speaks directly to them. For instance, there’s been a very pronounced turn to thinking about the transnational contours of Black thought, and that’s something we see right now — what began as an uprising in Minneapolis has produced solidarity movements in dozens of countries across the world. Why? We know that Black thinkers, both in the U.S. but also in the diaspora and in Africa, have needed to understand systems of policing, of anti-Black violence and racism, as global phenomena.

A lot of these histories have focused on women thinkers. That’s another way of helping us to understand this moment. The seeds for the current uprisings were planted long ago, but the Movement for Black Lives is a Black-feminist led movement. So we need those genealogies.

There’s no doubt in my mind that this moment will produce new Black intellectual histories. That’s not because Black intellectual history just responds to crisis; it’s because this moment is conducive to thinking in fresh ways about things like the Black radical tradition. What is abolitionism? What do we understand about how that idea has moved in the world — and how it should move in the world?

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.