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Books by Wilson Jeremiah
Moses
Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850-1925
(1988) /
The Wings of Ethiopia
(1990)
Alexander
Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (1992)
/
Destiny & Race: Selected Writings, 1840-1898 (1992)
Black
Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a
Religious Myth (1993)
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from
the 1850s /
Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular
History
(2002)
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004)
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Creative Conflict in African American Thought
Frederick
Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington
W.E.B. Du
Bois, and Marcus Garvey
By Wilson Jeremiah Moses
Reviews
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, 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.
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With
the provocative insight and erudition that we have come to
expect from him, Wilson Moses analyzes contradiction in the
thought of such prominent black intellectuals as Frederick
Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois in relation
to the fundamental conflicts in American political culture and
the human condition, including racism versus egalitarianism,
Jeffersonian democracy versus Hamiltonian federalism, Idealism
versus materialism, and free will versus determinism.—Kevin
Gaines, University of Michigan
Twenty-five years ago, Wilson Moses set the bar for African
American intellectual history with The Golden Age of Black
Nationalism. Creative Conflict in African American
Thought is an analytical masterpiece of comparable originality.
This complex yet always lucid meditation on the social and
political thought of five men of ideas and action whose racial
prescriptions profoundly informed the course of 19th and early
20th-century American history sets a new bar for African
American intellectual history.—David
Levering Lewis, New York University
Wilson
Jeremiah Moses is one of America's finest historians. He stands
four-square on scholarship that is solid and thorough-going,
always finding fine tidbits of information that move us forward in
our evaluation of America's historical past and present. A
mainstream historian, Moses is nevertheless iconoclastic and
irreverent in his historical criticism and narration.
For
those who desire/dare a fresh, balanced, and intriguing read of
five "representative black" men, namely, Douglass,
Crummell, Washington, Du Bois, and Garvey, then
Creative Conflict in African American Thought (2004) is a necessary
read.
The book is indeed five
mini-biographies. But the subjects that Moses tackles are much
larger than the sum of the individuals, such as how should we
separate the political from the personal in evaluating the thought
and action of our leaders. How leaders in African American thought
resolve conflicting ideals as collectivism and individualism,
separatism and melting pot, bourgeois and proletarian, elitism and
the mass culture. Jefferson versus Hamilton. The contradictory
values of work, sacrifice, and the purposes of education.
What we get from Moses are informative
and realistic accounts of real men living in the real world, a
Western world, racially white, with all its and their
contradictions, idiosyncrasies, and brilliance.
Moses
attempts successfully to get at what drives the thought and
actions of ingenious men who try to change their lives and the
circumstances that boxed them in and those of their fellows who
suffered America's racial oppression, a condition they found near
inescapable.
Like all his writings,
Creative Conflict,
though a charming intellectual history of American and Western
elites, has depth, and exhibit a broad
learning and understanding of how the world works. This
masterpiece of scholarship is a keeper -- a beautiful, lively, fragrant wine to
be savored, to be studied if we ever wish to escape the rehashing
of worn-out ideals that bind us.—Rudy Lewis, Editor of
ChickenBones: A Journal
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Contents
Part I. Introduction:
Reality and
Contradictions
Part II. Frederick Douglass:
The
Individualist as Race Man
2. Frederick Douglass: Superstar and Public Intellectual
3. Where Honor Is Due: Frederick Douglass, as Representative man
4. Writing Freely? Frederick Douglass amd the Constraints of
Racialized Writing
Part III. Alexander Crummell:
The Anglophile as Afrocentrist
5. Alexander Crummell and stoic African Elitism
6. Alexander Crummell and the Southern Reconstruction
7. Crummell, Hero Worship, Du Bois, and Presentism
Part IV. Booker Taliafero Washington:
The Idealist as Materialist
8. Booker T. Washington and the Meanings of Progress
9. Protestant Ethic versus Conspicuous Consumption
Part V. Burghardt Du Bois:
The
Democrat as Authoritarian
10. Du Bois on Religion and Art: Dynamic Contradictions and
Multiple Consciousness
11. Angel of Light and Darkness: Du Bois and the Meaning of
Democracy
12. Du Bois and Progressivism: The Anticapitalist as Elitist
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:
Rescuing Heroes
from their Admirers
15. Rescuing Heroes
from their Admirers: Heroic Proportions Imply Brobdingnagian
Blemishes Cambridge University Press Published
April 2004, 320 pages, paper
Creative Conflict in African American Thought |
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Tananarive Due and Wilson Moses
My ideas
are perhaps interesting and creative, but I doubt that
they contain the seeds for solving very many of the
world's ills. Peace,
Wilson
My object is not to
flatter Wilson Moses but rather to show my appreciation
of what he has amazingly accomplished. It is the
thoroughness of his historical approach, his
understanding of the "material context" in which
individuals and leaders wrote, spoke, and lived that I
find impressive. And I find him rather
gentle, even-handed, and even amused when he comes up
against opposition. In such discourse I often fail. If
that were a way of life, performed in a manner in our
daily intercourse, the world indeed would be a better
world.
But more, he allows
and emphasizes "the necessity to develop a body of
scholarship based on complicated historical memory and a
strict analysis of African American prose writing," as a
means to prove "our own regard for the depth and
complexity of African American thought" (Preface, 18).
Well, that indeed is an extraordinary commitment. How
cannot one but love a man who places that kind of burden
on his shoulders when he sets out to produce a piece of
historical writing.
I've seen the
success of his approach in
Alexander Crummell, a most excellent piece of
biographical scholarship I have ever read. I see the
same mind at work in
Creative Conflict.
Building monuments
and museums to our heroes, in a manner, move us in
another direction toward hero worship or sainthood and
I'm not sure that the world's problems are solved in
that manner—often ignorance is frozen in bronze, mortar,
and steel. I've gotten through joyfully several chapters
of Moses writing Douglass. There are several passages on
Douglass' oratorical powers that I find of especial
interest revealing Moses ability to turn a phrase and a
perspective that becomes exceedingly refreshing and
insightful. He wrote
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Douglass' animal
magnetism and strong character—not to
mention his powerful intellect and
astounding courage—usually gave him a
psychological advantages in dealing with
challengers. But he had a tendency to be
carried away in the sweep of his own
rhetoric, and brilliant though he was,
Douglass did not stand head and shoulders
above every other African American
contemporary. Some thought his ego
obnoxiously overblown, and noticed in him a
penchant for making generalizations on the
African American condition that were little
more than solipsistic projections of his own
atypical career. His perpetual
self-magnification led to prickly relations
with Henry Highland Garnet and occasional
friction with Alexander Crummell. John
Mercer Langston found him difficult to work
with as the two traveled together on the
antislavery circuit. There were no question
regarding Douglass' moral or physical
courage, and his intellectual endowment
could not be overlooked, but neither could
his enormous egotism" (CC, 21, 22). |
And then later on
he wrote,
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Douglass' oratory was
like 'the awful rush of ocean waters', to
use one of his famous metaphors, but the
forcefulness with which he expressed his
opinion sometimes overpowered the fact that
he had not really got things right. One
suspects that Douglass was frequently more
interested in exercising his theatrical
skills than in responding to a valid point.
In extemporaneous debate, even before
hostile audiences, he almost always carried
the day (CC, 28). |
Undoubtedly, Moses
is an admirer of Douglass. “Frederick Douglass’ status
as the greatest African American abolitionist and orator
of the nineteenth century seems unshakable.” But Moses
holds Douglass’ feet to the fire. “He was certainly the
most accomplished master of self-projection.”
Of course, there
are other types of writing one can admire and appreciate
as well. I’ve just published Tananarive Due’s “History
in the Making: Barack Obama's Speech at First AME Church
of Los Angeles.”
Ms. Due is a poet
and novelist, not a historian. Her response to Obama's
speech is that of a committed follower: "One way or
another, we are in the midst of history in the making.
It's not every day you go to church and feel like you're
witnessing a miracle." But Douglass and Obama indeed
may have qualities in common, such as what Moses calls,
"animal magnetism," the power to move men as well as
women. You know the "goosebump effect," which some
enthusiasts imagine the Holy Spirit moving in their
hearts.
In any case, I
think we can enjoy the artistry of Tananarive Due and
well as that of Wilson Moses.—Rudy
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The New Jim Crow
Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness
By Michele Alexander
Contrary to the
rosy picture of race embodied in Barack
Obama's political success and Oprah
Winfrey's financial success, legal
scholar Alexander argues vigorously and
persuasively that [w]e have not ended
racial caste in America; we have merely
redesigned it. Jim Crow and legal racial
segregation has been replaced by mass
incarceration as a system of social
control (More African Americans are
under correctional control today... than
were enslaved in 1850). Alexander
reviews American racial history from the
colonies to the Clinton administration,
delineating its transformation into the
war on drugs. She offers an acute
analysis of the effect of this mass
incarceration upon former inmates who
will be discriminated against, legally,
for the rest of their lives, denied
employment, housing, education, and
public benefits. Most provocatively, she
reveals how both the move toward
colorblindness and affirmative action
may blur our vision of injustice: most
Americans know and don't know the truth
about mass incarceration—but her
carefully researched, deeply engaging,
and thoroughly readable book should
change that.—Publishers
Weekly |
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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