Notes Introduction 1. Perry A. Hall, In the Vineyard: Working in African American Studies (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999), 17. 2. Naomi Schaefer Riley, “The Most Persuasive Case for Eliminating Black Studies? Just Read the Dissertations,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (April 30, 2012). http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-most-persuasive-case -for-eliminating-black-studies-just-read-the-dissertations/46346 (last accessed December 7, 2014). 3. William R. Jones, “The Legitimacy and Necessity of Black Philosophy: Some Preliminary Considerations,” The Philosophical Forum 9(2–3) (Winter–Spring 1977–1978), 149. 4. Ibid., 149. 5. Joseph Neff and Dan Kane, “UNC Scandal Ranks Among the Worst, Experts Say,” Raleigh News and Observer (Raleigh, NC) (October 25, 2014). http:// www.newsobserver.com/2014/10/25/4263755/unc-scandal-ranks-among -the-worst.html?sp=/99/102/110/112/973/. This is just one of many recent instances of “academic fraud” and sports that include Florida State University, University of Minnesota, University of Georgia and Purdue University. 6. Robert L. Allen, “Politics of the Attack on Black Studies,” in African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2007), 594. 7. See Shawn Carrie, Isabelle Nastasia and StudentNation, “CUNY Dismantles Community Center, Students Fight Back,” The Nation (October 25, 2013). http://www.thenation.com/blog/176832/cuny-dismantles-community - center-students-fight-back# (last accessed February 17, 2014). Both Morales and Shakur were former CCNY students who became political exiles. Morales was involved with the Puerto Rican independence movement. He was one of the many students who organized the historic 1969 strike by 250 Black and Puerto Rican students at CCNY that forced CUNY to implement Open Admissions and establish Ethnic Studies departments and programs in all CUNY colleges. Shakur was a member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army. For more information about Assata Shakur, see Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1987). 194 Notes See also, Joy James, “Framing the Panther: Assata Shakur and Black Female Agency,” in Want to Start a Revolution?: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo F. Gore, Jeanne Theoharis, and Komozi Woodard (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 138–160. 8. Revolutionary Student Coordinating Committee, “Defend the Guillermo Morales/Assata Shakur Community Center,” (October 28, 2013) http:// revolutionarystudents.wordpress.com/2013/10/28/defend-the-guillermo- morales-assata-shakur-community-center/ (last accessed December 7, 2014). 9. African American philosophers like John McClendon and Charles Frye have done groundbreaking work on the philosophy of AAS. See Charles Frye, Towards a Philosophy of Black Studies (San Francisco, CA: R and E Research Associates, 1978); Charles Frye, “The Role of Philosophy in Black Studies,” Contributions in Black Studies 4 (1980), 65–74; John H. McClendon III, “Materialist Philosophical Inquiry and African American Studies,” Socialism and Democracy 25(1) (2011), 71–92; John H. McClendon III, “On the Dialectical Relationship of Philosophy to African-American Studies: A Materialist Assessment on The Black Scholar and Its Intellectual Legacy,” The Black Scholar 43(4) (2013), 108–116; John H. McClendon III, “The Afro-American Philosopher and the Philosophy of the Black Experience: A Bibliographical Essay on a Neglected Topic in Both Philosophy and Black Studies,” Sage Race Relations Abstracts 7 (1982), 1–51. 10. For a materialist examination of Blackness, see John H. McClendon, “Act Your Age and Not Your Color, Blackness as Material Conditions, Presumptive Context, and Social Category,” in White on White/Black on Black, ed. George Yancy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005), 275–295. 11. Molefi K. Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Revised and Expanded) (Chicago, IL: African American Images, 2003), 55. All citations will be from this edition unless otherwise stated. 12. McClendon, in White on White, Black on Black, 284. 13. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 223. 14. Jennifer Jordan, “Cultural Nationalism in the 1960s: Politics and Poetry,” in Race, Politics, and Culture: Critical Essays on the Radicalism of the 1960s, ed. Adolph Reed (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 34. 15. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Germany Ideology in Collected Works, Vol. 5 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1976), 31. 16. This is important to understand. Religion and mythology accept what is habitual or traditional based on the principle of authority. The tribunal of reason is sacrificed on the basis of the authority of the gods. In the specific instance of religion, the authority of a given individual (e.g., Jesus, Buddha or Muhammad), institution (e.g., the Roman Catholic Church) or religious text (e.g., the Qur’an or the bible(s)) gives authority to our claims, which we then accept primarily on the basis of faith, or unjustified belief. So, while religion and mythology are forms of social consciousness, however, all forms of social consciousness are not philosophical consciousness. 17. Oftentimes, philosophy is seen as any activity in which we engage in intro- spection, contemplation and speculation. I want to submit that this is not Notes 195 necessary philosophy. Philosophers do engage in such activities; however, these activities are not a necessary and sufficient condition for being classified as a philosopher. In folklore, proverbs and wives tales, we find, for example, gems of wisdom, but this does not necessarily constitute philosophical labor. See Paul Gomberg, What Should I Believe? Philosophical Essays for Critical Thinking (Buffalo, New York: Broadview Press, 2011). 18. T. Oizerman, Problems of the History of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1973), 148. See also, T. I. Oizerman, The Main Trends in Philosophy: A Theoretical Analysis of the History of Philosophy (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1988). 19. Paulin Hountondji, “What Can Philosophy Do,” Quest: An International African Journal of Philosophy 1(2) (1987), 18. 20. Holmes’ three articles are: “The Main Considerations of Space and Time,” American Journal of Physics 18(9) (1950), 560–570; “The Kantian Views of Time and Space Reevaluated,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (1955), 240–244; and “Philosophical Problems of Space and Time,” Science and Society 24(3) (1960), 207–227. See John H. McClendon, “Eugene C. Holmes: A Commentary on a Black Marxist Philosopher,” in Philosophy Born of Struggle, ed. Leonard Harris (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1983), 36–50. 21. A. J. Kershaw, “Evolution: Its Darwinian and Jordanic Theories Compared,” The A.M.E. Church Review 14(4), (April 1898), 495–502; Edward A. Clarke, “Evolution: God’s Method of Work in His World,” The A.M.E. Church Review 15 (January 1899), 729–733. See also, Lawrence S. Little, “The African Methodist Episcopal Church Media and Racial Discourse, 1880–1900,” The North Star: Journal of African American Religious History 2(1) (Fall 1998), 1–14. 22. Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists & Other Essays (New York: Verso, 2011), 88. 23. John H. McClendon, Phone Interview with Author, March 27, 2015. See “Earl E. Thorpe to Mr. William C. Turner, January 14, 1976,” Department of African and African American Studies Records, Duke University Archives, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Duke University. 24. For a penetrating critique of the “underclass thesis” and the value assump- tions that undergird it, see Adolph Reed, Stirrings in the Jug: Black Politics in the Post-Segregation Era (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 179–196. 25. See John Arena, “Bringing In the Black Working Class: The Black Urban Regime Strategy,” Science & Society 75(2) (April 2011), 153–179. 26. Robert L. Allen, “Politics of the Attack on Black Studies,” in The African American Studies Reader, ed. Nathaniel Norment (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001), 496. This article originally appeared in The Black Scholar September 6(1) (1974), 2–7. 27. In Hegel’s Logic, he makes a point about a “presuppositionless” starting point for philosophy. Hegel confronted a paradox of sorts. Philosophy, unlike other sciences, is not entitled to make assumptions or presuppositions. And, yet, it seems inevitable to assume certain concepts, propositions, or methods of procedure. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 196 Notes with the Zusätze: Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Translated by Théodore F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991). See also Paul Ashton, “The Beginning before the Beginning: Hegel and the Activation of Philosophy,” Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 3(2–3) (2007), 328–356. 28. C. L. R. James, “Black Studies and the Contemporary Student” in At the Rendezvous of Victory, ed. C. L. R. James (London: Allison & Busby, 1984), 191–192. 29. C. L. R. James, “Revolution and the Negro” in C. L. R. James and Revolutionary Marxism: Selected Writings of C. L. R. James 1939–1949, ed. Scott McLemee and Paul Le Blanc (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1994), 77; ital- ics added. Also in the same collection read, “The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in the United States,” originally written in 1948. Also see Glenn Richards, “C.L.R. James on Black Self-Determination in the United States and the Caribbean,” in C. L. R. James: His Intellectual Legacies, ed. Selwyn R. Cudjoe and William E. Cain (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), 320–326. 30. See C. L. R. James, A History of Pan-African Revolt (Washington, DC: Drum and Spear Press). 31. See, “THE BLACK SCHOLAR Interviews: C.L.R. James,” The Black Scholar 2(1) (1970), 35–43; C. L. R. James, “Presence of Blacks in the Caribbean and Its Impact on Culture,” in At the Rendezvous of Victory (London: Allison & Busby, 1985). 32. See Alex Dupuy, “Toussaint-Louverture and the Haitian Revolution: A Reassessment of C.L.R.