Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual

The coining of the term "intellectuals" in 1898 coincided with W.E.B. Du Bois's effort to disseminate values and ideals unbounded by the colour line. Du Bois's ideal of a "higher and broader and more varied human culture" is at the heart of a cosmopolitan tradition that this text identifies as a missing chapter in American literary and cultural history. This text offers an historical perspective on "black intellectuals" as a social category, ranging over a century - from Frederick Douglass to Patricia Williams, from Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chestnutt to Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke. These writers challenge two durable assumptions: that high culture is "white culture"; and that racial uplift is the sole concern of the black intellectual.