Publications 

“When one ventures into even a concise history of the African American past, one discovers that African Americans have always wanted to be considered human, citizens, Americans, and civilized. Further, they have wanted all the rights, responsibilities, and privileges associated with these recognitions.”

“W.E.B. DuBois, the brilliant son of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, the agitator of the nation’s conscience, the citizen of Ghana, still speaks to us, to our condition, and to our humanity. It is critical that we listen.”

“As long as enslaved people of African descent or, later, second-class citizens of African descent journeyed throughout the diaspora, many individuals have waged public and private battles to claim full citizenship rights and have done so by weaving protest and admonitions into powerful autobiographies. One only has to think of the narratives written by Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, or William Wells Brown to understand that there is a long history of claims for full human rights communicated via memoirs.”

“All ideas and institutions are the products of the historical contexts into which they are born. The American system of higher education on both sides of the color line was the offspring of a segregated society. On one side of that line, those attending historically white colleges … learned a version of the ‘science of society’ that endorsed the racial hierarchy of the day.”

“Bunche’s leadership categories resonate because they reflected a gut-level sensibility of different types of black leaders. Readers could identify any number of community, city, state, or national leaders who fit into Bunche’s categories. The slipperiness of the typology is also useful because it underscores the ephemeral nature of leadership itself.”

“In their writings and speeches throughout the 1930s, Harris, Frazier, and Bunche remained true to what one might say for interwar era black intellectuals was the Amenia ideal: that class had to be considered at least as strongly as race as a causative factor in blacks’ degraded position in American life; that social science provided the foundation for developing innovative ideas to solve social problems; and that intellectual activists were the individuals best prepared to uplift black and white laborers alike.”