With a foreword by the eminent Leonard Harris, Neal’s Philosophy and the Modern African American Freedom Struggle is a dense investigation of the Black intellectual history and social activism of the modern era in the US. Neal gracefully brings together both passion and clarity, leading the reader to a deeper understanding of the complexity of the struggle for freedom and equality within a society that fails to live up to those ideals. Neal’s historical narrative will be useful for students and scholars in African American studies, American studies, history, philosophy, or for any research project that engages civil rights, oppression, freedom, Blackness, and race more generally. Recommended. General readers through faculty.

Choice Reviews

Ranging across nearly a century of Africana intellectual history, Anthony Sean Neal offers an ambitious and sweeping thematization of diverse approaches to the long struggle for freedom. Neal’s articulation of the ‘Freedom Gaze’ provides a crucial tool not only for understanding that history, but our present struggles and possible futures.

Michael J. Monahan, University of Memphis

In Philosophy and the African American Modern Freedom Struggle, Anthony Neal explains and describes what he calls the “modern era of the African American freedom struggle,” an era that lasted from 1896 to the mid-1970s. Neal takes a representative selection of works by modern Africa American activists, intellectuals, and scholars and discloses an ethnic reflective canon for the modern era of African American struggle. Neal ends the book with a provocative claim: Since the 1970s, Black intellectuals and other Black elites have abandoned the African American freedom struggle for the quixotic promise of integrating into an individualist liberal society. Neal leaves readers with the task of imagining what a viable African Americans freedom struggle would look like in our current age of cultural and socioeconomic fragmentation among Black people.

Dwayne Tunstall, Grand Valley State University

Neal presents an excellent body of work that will undoubtedly advance the discourse on black scholars of the modern era.

The Pluralist