Reference no: EM132887079

Question 1: What were some basic elements of this ideological rigidity? First, militant advocates of black studies preferred that this field be organized mainly in terms of their strongly held ideological preferences. Among these preferences, for instance, was a tendency toward the glorification of the black American experience and of African history in a manner that would serve contemporary endeavors at political activism among black Americans. My own inclination, however, was to follow the lead of that firstgeneration cohort of black scholars (some white ones too) who pioneered the field of black studies when it was still called Negro studies. Scholars, that is, like W. E. B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, Charles Spurgeon Johnson, Allison Davis, Horace Mann Bond, Ralph Bunche, Rayford Logan, Melville Herskovitz, E. Franklin Frazier, John Hope Franklin, Kelley Miller, Ira de Augustine Reid, to name just a few. What many militants among black studies advocates in the formative phase failed to recognize is that the first-generation cohort of black studies intellectuals balanced within their persona both a progressive ideological commitment to black realities-to freeing those realities from oppressive white supremacist patterns worldwide and advancing their modern development-on the one hand, and a nonethnocentric or pluralistic scholarly orientation toward black realities.