Dr. Martin Kilson

The development of the 20th century African-American intelligentsia occurred in the unique historical context of a White supremacist defined status for Black American citizens. The 20th century African-American intelligentsia also developed in the historical context of two generic types of Black leadership that evolved among African-Americans from the end of Reconstruction in the late 1890s…

The following is an address by Harvard political scientist Martin Kilson to the Fifth Annual Martin Luther King Day Community Breakfast, Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, on January 16, 2006. Let me try to say something of interest to you on the topic of my address. When that great mid-20th Century American leadership personality Rev. Martin Luther…

Dr. Kilson delivered the following remarks at Temple University’s conference on Black Civil Society in American Life, September 22. Let me reflect briefly on what might be called “Black civil society’s 21st century leadership burden.” As participants in today’s conference have pointed out from a variety of historical perspectives, the leadership sector of African-American society…

Click to view larger and printer friendly table Source: U.S. Black Engineer & Information Technology Magazine (2005) Reprinted in The Washington Afro-American (January 15,2005). Black Enterprise (February 2005). It should also be mentioned that Black Enterprise (February 2005) presented career biographies, in the words of its publisher Earl Graves, of “75 [African-American] men and women…

”The black-white earnings gap narrowed considerably throughout the 1960s and 1970s. The earnings gap has [however] remained relatively stable since then, with inequality rising again in the 1980s and closing once more during tight labor markets in the 1990s. The average black family earned 55 cents for every dollar earned by the average white family…

This is the first of a three-part series from Dr. Kilson, the first Black tenured professor at Harvard University. Writing a century ago in the quintessential African-American text, The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the great W.E.B. DuBois committed himself to and charged the then fledgling Negro elite – the “Talented Tenth” as DuBois called…

According to the Washington Post columnist David Broder’s analysis of exit polls in the 2004 Presidential Elections, “about 22 percent of voters were white evangelical or born-again Christians, three-quarters of whom went for Bush.” This kind of White conservative Christian voting for the Republican party’s presidential candidate translated into 30% of Bush’s total national vote.…

At the age of 71, I am a member of the progressive sector of African-American intellectuals, the post-World War II civil rights generation. The civil rights organizations I identified with were the NAACP, the National Council of Negro Women, the Congress of Racial Equality, the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the National Urban League, the Southern…