The news of the passing of Martin Kilson is a loss for both the fields of African American Studies and African American intellectual history. Dr. Kilson, the first African American to be awarded the position of full professor at Harvard University, left his mark on intellectual history in a variety of ways. One, he was a driving force behind the creation of an African American Studies department at Harvard University in the 1970s. This came just at the time as African American Studies programs were on the rise across the nation. For his institution building alone, Dr. Kilson deserves special mention.
Second, Dr. Kilson’s essays in places such as Dissent magazine in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s helped shape contemporary debates about the meaning and substance of African American intellectual thought in the latter half of the twentieth century. His summer 1969 essay, “The New Black Intellectuals,” published in Dissent helps to put into focus the challenges facing African American intellectuals at the height of the Black Power era. Such work also informed the lectures that were the focus of his 2014 book, The Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880-2012.
Dr. Kilson occupied an interesting space in African American Intellectual History. He came of age during the twilight of the life of W.E.B. Du Bois and wrote for a public audience just as Kwame Ture and Angela Davis set the intellectual world on fire. And at the end of his life, Dr. Kilson observed the rise of a Ta-Nehisi Coates. When we think of African American public intellectuals, Dr. Kilson’s life and career bring into stark focus how important it is for such intellectuals to not only write for a public audience, but to also work on the critical task of building institutions—such as he did at Harvard University.
Martin Kilson will be greatly missed. We, as intellectual historians, should take time to savor his works and wrestle with them once again—as Josh Myers did at this very blog in 2016 in the footnotes for an essay in tribute to Cedric Robinson.
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Just learning of Kilson’s passing from this post, so thanks for that. Haven’t had a chance to read the obits yet. In the first part of his career at least, Kilson was mainly a scholar of African (not African-American) politics. He clearly had a long-standing interest in African-American intellectuals and their debates etc., but that was not what he wrote his dissertation on (I think the subject was politics and political parties in post-independence Ghana) or what he got tenure in the Harvard Government Department for. (By disciplinary affiliation, he was a political scientist.) I happen to have a book that he edited (_New States in the Modern World_, 1975) in which he has an essay on politics in Ghana. This is just by way of adding, briefly, to what’s in the post. (And much more could be said, and I’m sure has been said somewhere, about the early history of the African American Studies Dept. at Harvard, but I’ll leave that to others with deeper knowledge of the details.)
Thanks for this, Robert. We stand on the shoulders of great people, advancing the torch of knowledge as far as we can, when we can. – TL