Do we think of Frederick Douglass as a founding father of the modern social democratic tradition in the United States? Or is he taken as proof in our textbooks that a slave could indeed become a “great American”—proof that, for all their flaws, our slave-holding founders were right after all: “all men are created equal”? Is Martin Luther King Jr.—a public philosopher of international reputation and esteem, and one recognized today in his homeland by a federal holiday—understood as a significant social thinker on the same plane as Thoreau, Jefferson, or Lincoln? Despite the ample textual evidence provided in the published papers of Douglass and King, they remain for most Americans (including some scholars among us) evidence that those who were once the “other” have successfully negotiated the incorporation of “their people” into a pre-existing revolution.

That this inequality of influence and esteem should exist reflects on what Martin Kilson correctly identifies as a “generic cultural flaw” (p. 131) in our culture: the deep process by which racial hierarchy continues to structure the varying ways in which different groups both perceive and rank priorities, ideas, and entire groups of people. Even as our demography becomes more ethnically, racially, and culturally diverse, fundamental divisions fall upon a familiar axis of “white” and “black.”

The books under review here are welcome and provocative reminders of the ways in which, in the United States as in other societies, historical precedents, patterns, and memories, continue to act decisively upon the present. Although political scientist Martin Kilson and historian Daniel Matlin are deeply read in the scholarship produced on both sides of the gender line, they invite us to look back with special care to a time when, as Matlin points out, “in the eyes of the media, an authentic or representative black perspective was necessarily a male one” (p. 11). Acknowledging the weight of this precondition to participation is the first step toward facing an even larger fact: how racial categorizations continue to exert a durably structural influence on who is seen as an important generalized contributor to understanding American civilization, rather than as someone whose words are treated, at best, as friendly amendments to someone else’s national “establishment” and liberation narrative.

My maternal great grandfather—a Civil War veteran . . . organized an African-American Protestant church in a small Pennsylvania factory town in 1885, and my father, the Reverend Martin Luther Kilson, Sr., pastored that church during my youth in the 1930s and 1940s. My maternal paternal great-great-grandfather, Isaac Lee, was a boot maker and he organized an African-American Methodist church . . . before the Civil War . . . for a Free Negro community in Kent County, Maryland. [pp. 6–7]

This is a strong reminder that “intellectual history” is made by people in all stations of life, not just those of us fortunate enough to receive a college education. To these prized and essential ingredients, Kilson adds his own experience as a college student at Lincoln University, where he and the 600 other freshmen in the class of 1950 were provided with a “rigorous intellectual identity” (p. 7). Kilson left Lincoln committed to following in the footsteps of his hero, W. E. B. DuBois, who, by Kilson’s graduation day in 1954, had become an ideologically marginalized figure, harassed by the federal government for being both “red” [communist] and “black.” In a fine tribute to DuBois’ fearless scholarship, Kilson reconstructs the deadly circumstances in which African Americans were forced to live and work even after the nation had, at least officially, declared itself as constitutionally opposed to chattel slavery. Chattel slavery was replaced by circumstances that were scarcely less confining: “a legalized racist oligarchy in the south, and veritable authoritarian governance vis-a-vis black folks” (p. 2).

Until fairly late in the last...