Description
Book SynopsisMartin Kilson—the first tenured African American professor at Harvard—takes readers on a fascinating journey from his upbringing in a small Pennsylvania mill town to his experiences as an undergraduate to pursuing graduate study at Harvard before spending his entire career there as a faculty member.
Trade Review“A challenging, original, and exacting intellectual, Martin Kilson was also a generous, supportive teacher and mentor. His unforgettable voice permeates this memoir, which re-creates the world as he found it and then transformed it. The field of African and African American Studies owes a profound debt to his unyielding demand for scholarly rigor and also to his faith in its centrality to higher education.” -- Henry Louis Gates Jr.
“As the first African American tenured professor at Harvard, Martin Kilson, marked a symbolic milestone in American higher education as part of a founding generation of Black professors in prestigious white institutions. This status makes him into a figure of historic import, so that how he saw himself becomes not just one man's story, but an indexical way of thinking about one's place in American life in a particular time and place. Intensely personal,
A Black Intellectual's Odyssey is an important intellectual text.” -- Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University
"Kilson’s
Odyssey heightens the contradictions involved in what it means to be successful and Black in America. Indeed, it compels us to ask what success means in the context of a capitalist white supremacist heteronormative society." -- Joshua L. Crutchfield * Black Perspectives *
Table of ContentsForeword. The One and Only Martin Kilson / Cornel West ix
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments xv
1. Growing Up in a Northern Black Community, 1930s–1940s 1
2. A Helping-Hand Ethos and Black Social Life, 1920s–1960s 12
3. Melting-Pot-Friendly Schools in My Hometown, 1920s–1960s 29
4. Black Youth and Social Mobility, 1920s–1960s 40
5. Ambler: A Twentieth-Century Company Town 58
6. Lincoln University, 1949–1953, Part I 77
7. Lincoln University, 1949–1953, Part II 96
8. Harvard: Graduate School and Teaching 119
9. Maturation: Research and Scholarship 134
Epilogue. The Election of Barack Obama 148
Afterword. Notes on Professor Martin Luther Kilson's Work / Stefano Harney and Fred Moten 161
Selected List of Martin Kilson's Writings 173
Notes 177
Bibliography 187
Index 191
