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Memoirs of a Black Philosopher is a chronicle of the life and times of Richard A. Jones.In these memoirs, Jones relates the dislocations and disillusionments of Black people in the great migration of Southern Blacks to Northern cities. He recalls the educational trauma brought on by Brown v Board, and his education in the inner-city public schools of Washington DC and Detroit Michigan. Beginning his higher education in the HCBUs at Fisk and Howard Universities, after serving in the US Air Force, Jones begins his educational diaspora in Midwestern universities. His struggles to attain an education culminates in a bachelor's degree in mathematics from Minot State University in 1970. After working as a federal Head Start director, Marketing representative at IBM, and college Minority Affairs Director, Jones begins a new career as a high school mathematics teacher. Never satisfied with his “education,” he begins a new direction in academic philosophy. After completing an MA in philosophy at the University of Denver, he enrolls in a PhD program at the University of Colorado at the age of forty-nine. After completing the degree, Jones teaches philosophy at Kansas State University, followed by returning to Howard University, where he finished his teaching career. At Howard, Jones realizes that “philosophy is more” than teaching and writing. He becomes the Co-coordinator of the Radical Philosophy Association (RPA). His political activity with RPA culminates in conferences in Cuba and South Africa, where he sees the people's struggles with global capitalism. Jones left Howard in 2013 and continues his “philosophical praxes” in contemplation and writing. His story is one of the unending struggles for human dignity.

Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for Biography Winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro -- the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man. Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became -- in the process -- a New Negro himself.

Alain L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology TheNew Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited first biography of this extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century America's cultural and intellectual life. Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke's Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke's heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. Harris and Molesworth show that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities. The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this engaging account effectively reclaims Locke's rightful place in the pantheon of America's most important minds.