Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century.

Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century. Edited by Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben Keppel. African American Intellectual Heritage Series. (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, c. 2007. Pp. x, 507. Paper, $40.00, ISBN 978-0-268-03080-3; cloth, $85.00, ISBN 978-0-268-03079-7.)

Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century showcases the insightful ideologies, relevant strategies, and unique philosophies of twenty-eight leading African American intellectuals, mainly social scientists, active during the era of Jim Crow segregation. These scholars were "brilliant analysts of American culture and political economy," "either graduated from or had sustained careers at historically black colleges and universities," and published relevant, pragmatic, and enduring scholarship, think pieces, and broadsides (pp. 2, 3). While the scholars featured in this volume addressed a range of important topics and espoused varied worldviews, in offering this anthology Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben Keppel are primarily concerned with highlighting the larger issues of, first, "how segregation has influenced, and continues to influence, the development of American social thought and social science scholarship" and, second, how African American "academics who were trained or worked behind the veil of segregation at one point in their careers brought to their scholarship a special perspective on the distance between the rhetoric of an equal society and the reality of something quite different" (pp. 1, 24).

Though five of the essays were first published after 1965, the others were written between the late nineteenth century and the Brown v. Board of Education (1954) decision. Holloway and Keppel provide a brief yet illuminating introductory discussion, which outlines how African American academics during the era of Jim Crow were excluded from and mistreated by the white mainstream academy and how they encountered the monumental challenge of balancing the interconnected responsibilities of teaching, researching, publishing, and racial uplift. At the same time, Holloway and Keppel suggest, early African American social scientists shared with their white colleagues a "belief in the superiority of Western culture and the corresponding immaturity of African peoples" (p. 11). Explaining this complex set of thought patterns is a challenging endeavor that warrants further elaboration and requires historians to delve into what Earl E. Thorpe viewed as psychohistory.

In charting the evolution of the African American social scientist, Holloway and Keppel discuss the significance of the black church, the American Negro Academy, the African American uplift tradition, blacks in Robert Park's "Chicago School," Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York, 1944) and Rayford W. Logan's edited anthology What the Negro Wants (Chapel Hill, 1944), the Brown decision, the 1965 Moynihan Report, the varied implications of Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark's "doll studies," the modern civil rights movement, desegregation's complex impact on blacks' higher education, and black studies social scientists who operated "behind the color line of higher education" (p. 25).

Black Scholars" on the Line is divided into six coherent and interrelated parts. Each part contains the writings of African American social scientists with a brief introduction that provides useful short biographies of the scholars. Part 1 presents the works of leading African American intellectuals shaped by the Civil War, Reconstruction, and the "nadir" who founded the study of social science in black communities: Alexander Crummell, George Washington Williams, Anna Julia Cooper, Mary Church Terrell, and Carter G. Woodson. Inheriting much from their predecessors, the scholars featured in Part 2 represented "[t]he first African American practitioners of social science" who "worked from an institutional base and perspective that were decidedly distinct from succeeding generations" (p. 102). Armed with their training from leading mainstream institutions, their modern scholarly methodologies and approaches, their abilities to pinpoint the multifaceted problems facing black America, and their leadership strategies, Charles H. Wesley, W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, Charles S. Johnson, Horace Mann Bond, and Allison Davis "developed new programs in the social sciences at their home institutions and, by leadership, scholarship, and mere example, paved the way for future generation[s] of black social scientists" (p. 106).

The "fully 'modern'" black scholars in Part 3, Main Locke, Zora Neale Hurston, Sterling A. Brown, and James Weldon Johnson, "remind us that the modern social sciences emerged at almost the same moment as black cultural forms and production became popularized" (pp. 210, 213). Molded by the Great Depression and the interwar period and disregarding intellectual romanticism, the scholars of Part 4, Abram L. Harris, Frazier, Du Bois, Ralph J. Bunche, and Emmett E. Dorsey, probed "the foundations of America's social order" while critiquing their predecessors' approaches (p. 270). In Part 5 Holloway and Keppel expose readers to the ideas of "citizen-scholars"--Kelly Miller, Bunche, Mary McLeod Bethune, Du Bois, and Logan--who, influenced by World War II, embraced an internationalist perspective and offered "broadsides in a public debate rather than a specialized discussion" (pp. 332, 331). The seven scholars of Part 6--the Clarks, Hylan Lewis, Ronald W. Waiters, Joyce A. Ladner, Mae C. King, and William Julius Wilson--may have hailed from different generations, yet they were shaped by their forerunners' observations as well as the different phases of the civil rights movement and the "social science wars of the 1960s" (p. 410).

Logically organized, well contextualized, and insightfully theorized, Holloway and Keppel's anthology enriches our knowledge of African American social scientists who operated during the era of segregation. In providing important primary documents that complement the numerous available biographies and studies of black scholars, this collection should be useful to any student of twentieth-century African American intellectual history.

PERO GAGLO DAGBOVIE

Michigan State University