Lawrence Reddick’s Intellectual Crusade

The basic function of African American intellectual history is two-fold. One, it serves as a intellectual space in which to excavate the thoughts, theories, and actions of African American intellectuals, scholars, and scholar-activists often ignored by the wider intellectual history field. Second, however, is that as subfield, it also pushes all historians to look deeper—beyond the usual places or suspects—to find ideas that are valuable to understanding our world. David Varel has done both in the book The Scholar and the Struggle: Lawrence Reddick’s Crusade for Black History and Black Power.

Varel’s book has a basic, but vital mission: “His career,” writes Varel about Reddick, “also underscores how black thinkers recognized the political nature of scholarship and worked tirelessly to refashion it for black liberation. For them, scholarship and political struggle were two sides of the same coin” (3). Varel’s previous book, The Lost Black Scholar: Resurrecting Allison Davis in American Social Thought (2018) did much the same with the oft-ignored sociologist. Here, Varel centers a historian who is often overshadowed by Carter G. Woodson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles Wesley, John Hope Franklin, and other titans of the field of Black history. Yet Reddick’s career and work offers much to think about—in terms of how we think about the tensions many Black activists and scholars experienced navigating both worlds of desegregation and Black nationalism, and indeed, where we look for such scholars and their ideas.

When one reads about the life and legacy of Reddick, you cannot help but think about how he was a pioneer in so many debates that currently engage American intellectuals. Early in his career, Reddick wrote about the insidious nature of American history textbooks. Those books often downplayed any contributions made by African Americans to American and world history. “Alongside lynching, disenfranchisement, and the rise of Jim Crow, the nation’s account of its recent history—from professional history to popular culture—fell victim to vitriolic racism and distortion,” writes Varel. (34) Debates about both representation in popular culture and in the halls of academia are nothing new. But noting Reddick’s involvement in it from a young age—he was only 24 years old when he wrote his landmark article “Racial Attitudes in American History Textbooks of the South” for the Journal of Negro Education—showcases how, from the beginning of his academic career, Reddick recognized the need to get involved in the kinds of debates that most Black intellectuals knew they had to engage in during the twentieth century.

One of the strengths of The Scholar and the Struggle is how much it showcases Reddick’s involvement in numerous movements to build Black institutions. Reddick was one of several important figures in the growth of the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, or ASNLH (today ASALH) during the perilous time of the Great Depression. He took Harlem’s Schomburg Library in 1939 after its founder, Arturo Schomburg, had died the previous year. Reddick’s time at the library pushed him in new directions. “Even as the curatorship placed Reddick in increasingly elite social circles,” Varel points out, “his work became ever more public-facing” (67). Readers of The Scholar and the Struggle should keep this in mind. While Reddick did not have the time many of his white counterparts had to write numerous books, he did make significant contributions to American thought in other ways—ways that might not always be so apparent or obvious to intellectual historians.

Reddick was also tied deeply to the larger national, and international, struggles going on around him. Reflecting once more on his time at the Schomburg Library, Varel highlights Reddick’s use of the Library as a space for public debate during both World War II and the rising Double V campaign in the United States, and the decolonization campaigns abroad. For him and numerous other African Americans, of course, these were all part of a global fight for freedom. During this time, Reddick also taught as a lecturer at the City College of New York, only the second Black professor to ever teach there. Reddick’s own career was a showcase of the limited inroads African American scholars were making into the white-dominated, mainstream academy of mid-20^th century America.

Reddick had a knack for being in the right place at the right time, as it comes to being a scholar-activist. He would eventually find himself at historically Black Alabama State College in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955—just as the Montgomery Bus Boycott began. This would lead to a lifelong friendship with Martin Luther King, Jr. and Ralph Abernathy, and Reddick would have a front-row seat to some of the critical moments of the Southern Civil Rights Movement. This led to Reddick playing a key role in King’s first book, Stride Toward Freedom, and in his own biography of the reverend, Crusader Without Violence. Later, Reddick would be a participant in the early days of the Institute of the Black World in Atlanta and would later struggle to make a place for Black history at Temple University.

Lawrence Reddick serves as a lens into the complexities of the Black freedom struggle during the twentieth century. It would be a disservice to pin Reddick down as merely a “civil rights” or “black nationalist” advocate—instead, like so many others before and since, Reddick had feet planted firmly in both broad ideological camps. In short, Reddick fought for Black freedom, and a space for Black people to have within the broader world of arts and letters. Varel’s book does not let us forget that. We should all be thankful for such a work as The Scholar and the Struggle.