Creative Conflict in African American Thought

Building upon his previous work and using Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition as a model, Professor Moses has revised and brought together in this book essays that focus on the complexity of, and contradictions in, the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus M. Garvey. In doing so, he challenges both popular and scholarly conceptions of them as villains or heroes. In analyzing the intellectual struggles and contradictions of these five dominant personalities with regard to individual morality and collective reform, Professor Moses shows how they contributed to strategies for black improvement and puts them within the context of other currents of American thought, including Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, Social Darwinism, and progressivism.

'With the provocative insight and erudition that we have come to expect from him, Wilson Moses analyzes contradiction in the thought of such prominent black intellectuals as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois in relation to the fundamental conflicts of American political culture and the human condition.' Kevin Gaines, University of Michigan, 'Creative Conflict is an analytical masterpiece of comparable originality.' David Levering Lewis, New York University, '… intellectually rigorous and combative study …' Journal of American Studies