Gaines, Uplifting The Race - Black Leadership, Politicism And Culture In The Twentieth Century

Abstract

Intellectual history, by its nature, tends to be filled with paradox. When intellectual history attempts to untangle ideology, paradox becomes layered with irony. When the ideology arises from the dilemma of race in American culture, particularly as expressed by those struggling against racial oppression, paradox and irony are confounded by conundrums. Nowhere is that more true than in the ideology of "uplift" as articulated by middle-class African American intellectuals from the late nineteenth-century into the 1950s.