Independent since 2002 Issue No. 1102 Week of November 7, 2026 Get the free email dispatch →

Editorial Board

Dr. Martin Kilson, PhD

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Martin Kilson, PhD hails from an African Methodist backgound and clergy: From a great-great grandfather who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in the 1840s; from a great-grandfather AME clergyman; from a Civil War veteran great-grandfather who founded an African Union Methodist Protestant church in Pennsylvania in 1885; and from an African Methodist clergyman father who pastored in an Eastern Pennsylvania milltown--Ambler, PA. He attended Lincoln University (PA), 1949-1953, and Harvard graduate school. Appointed in 1962 as the first African American to teach in Harvard College and in 1969 he was the first African American tenured at Harvard. He retired in 2003 as Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government, Emeritus. His publications include: Political Change in a West African State (Harvard University Press, 1966); Key Issues in the Afro-American Experience (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970); New States in the Modern World (Harvard University Press, 1975); The African Diaspora: Interpretive Essays (Harvard University Press, 1976); The Making of Black Intellectuals: Studies on the African American Intelligentsia (Forthcoming. University of MIssouri Press); and The Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1900-2008 (Forthcoming). Click here to contact Dr. Kilson.

10 pieces

Cover Story

The Role of the Black Elite in Outreaching to the Black Lower Class

By Dr. Martin Kilson, PhD Editorial Board

Black America’s Two-Tier Class System: A Crisis Fault-Line What the foregoing discussion of the new social class capabilities available to the middle-class and professional sector of African-Americans reveals is that today’s Black America is defined by a two-tier class system. This two-tier class system comprises two main class categories. The lower-tier can be called a…

Black America’s Two-Tier Class System: A Crisis Fault-Line What the foregoing discussion of the new social class capabilities available to the middle-class and professional sector of…

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