Curated Collection

African American Thought

Thinkers and essays gathered around this school of thought.

11Thinkers
1Thoughts
31Major Works
22Archive Entries
Contemporary · ModernTime Period
Featured Thinker

W.E.B. Du Bois

Analyzes race, double consciousness, democracy, education, history, culture, and the struggle for equal dignity.

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.”
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Across time

A history of African American Thought

Voices

Thinkers

1959–present

Kimberlé Crenshaw

Shows how law and politics can miss people whose lives sit at overlapping forms of exclusion.

African American Thought · Feminist Thought · Law
1948–present

Patricia Hill Collins

Explains how knowledge, identity, and oppression are shaped by intersecting power relations.

African American Thought · Ethics · Feminist Thought
1818–1895

Frederick Douglass

Turns personal testimony and political argument into a powerful defense of freedom and citizenship.

African American Thought · Ethics · Literature
c. 1797–1883

Sojourner Truth

Speaks from lived authority about freedom, gender, faith, and the demand to be recognized as human.

African American Thought · Ethics · Feminist Thought
1931–2019

Toni Morrison

Makes literature a way to confront memory, race, beauty, inheritance, and unspeakable trauma.

African American Thought · Ethics · Language & Meaning
1924–1987

James Baldwin

Forces America and the individual soul to face race, love, fear, and moral evasion.

African American Thought · Ethics · Literature
1925–1965

Malcolm X

Examines dignity, rage, discipline, religion, self-defense, and the evolution of political consciousness.

African American Thought · Anti-Colonial Thought · Political Philosophy
1929–1968

Martin Luther King Jr.

Connects nonviolence, Christian ethics, democratic justice, economic dignity, and moral urgency.

African American Thought · Ethics · Political Philosophy
1944–present

Angela Davis

Analyzes prisons, abolition, race, capitalism, feminism, solidarity, music, and freedom beyond punishment.

African American Thought · Feminist Thought · Political Philosophy
1868–1963

W.E.B. Du Bois

Analyzes race, double consciousness, democracy, education, history, culture, and the struggle for equal dignity.

African American Thought · Ethics · Political Philosophy
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intersectionalitycritical race theorylawrace and genderstructural inequalityBlack feminist thoughtmatrix of dominationcontrolling imagesstandpointself-definition
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