Table of Contents

Foreword. The One and Only Martin Kilson / Cornel West  ix
Preface  xiii
Acknowledgments  xv
1. Growing Up in a Northern Black Community, 1930s–1940s  1
2. A Helping-Hand Ethos and Black Social Life, 1920s–1960s  12
3. Melting-Pot-Friendly Schools in My Hometown, 1920s–1960s  29
4. Black Youth and Social Mobility, 1920s–1960s  40
5. Ambler: A Twentieth-Century Company Town  58
6. Lincoln University, 1949–1953, Part I  77
7. Lincoln University, 1949–1953, Part II  96
8. Harvard: Graduate School and Teaching  119
9. Maturation: Research and Scholarship  134
Epilogue. The Election of Barack Obama  148
Afterword. Notes on Professor Martin Luther Kilson's Work / Stefano Harney and Fred Moten  161
Selected List of Martin Kilson's Writings  173
Notes  177
Bibliography  187
Index  191

About the Author

Martin Kilson (1931–2019) was Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government Emeritus at Harvard University. He wrote and edited several books, including Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880–2012, which won the 2015 American Book Award. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, a member of the National Council on the Humanities, and a longtime member of the editorial board of Dissent.

Cornel West is Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor at Union Theological Seminary.

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten are two of Martin Kilson’s many students. They are authors of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study and All Incomplete.
 

Reviews

“A challenging, original, and exacting intellectual, Martin Kilson was also a generous, supportive teacher and mentor. His unforgettable voice permeates this memoir, which re-creates the world as he found it and then transformed it. The field of African and African American Studies owes a profound debt to his unyielding demand for scholarly rigor and also to his faith in its centrality to higher education.” - Henry Louis Gates Jr. “As the first African American tenured professor at Harvard, Martin Kilson, marked a symbolic milestone in American higher education as part of a founding generation of Black professors in prestigious white institutions. This status makes him into a figure of historic import, so that how he saw himself becomes not just one man's story, but an indexical way of thinking about one's place in American life in a particular time and place. Intensely personal, A Black Intellectual's Odyssey is an important intellectual text.” - Nell Irvin Painter, Edwards Professor of American History Emerita, Princeton University "Kilson’s Odyssey heightens the contradictions involved in what it means to be successful and Black in America. Indeed, it compels us to ask what success means in the context of a capitalist white supremacist heteronormative society." - Joshua L. Crutchfield (Black Perspectives)