Since stepping down as the 100th President of the American Sociological Association, Patricia Hill Collins has been lecturing extensively at universities and at private and public organizations about the role of the intellectual in public culture and how well intellectuals communicate questions about contemporary social issues to the larger public. This book is a collection of those lectures, along with new and (a few) previously-published essays. -- Product details.

Learning Activism is designed to encourage a deeper engagement with the intellectual life of activists who organize for social, political, and ecological justice.

This study examines the narrated life experiences of 11 African American intellectual-activists. An intellectual-activist is defined as a person whose education has provided him or her with a body of knowledge to which he/she is continually adding (intellectual self) and who works daily for, or has a career dedicated to, the betterment of African American people (activist self). The voices of the subjects focus on the events in their lives that contributed to their development as intellectuals and activists. Discussions of the individuals' backgrounds illuminate the forces that influenced their life experiences and guided their actions toward involvement with the struggle to improve the lives of the African American community. The overarching theme in these life stories is the possession of a positive African American self-concept. The study explores the ways in which the subjects developed this positive self-concept, how this self-concept influenced the goals of their activism, and how they define progress toward these goals.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

Without Destroying Ourselves is an intellectual history of Native activism seeking greater access to and control of higher education in the twentieth century. John A. Goodwin traces themes of Henry Roe Cloud’s (Ho-Chunk) vision for Native intellectual leadership and empowerment in the early 1900s to the later missions of tribal colleges and universities (TCUs) and education-based, self-determination movements of the 1960s onward. Vital to Cloud’s work was the idea of how to build from Native identity and adapt without destroying that identity. As the central themes of the movement for Native control in higher education developed over the course of several decades, a variety of Native activists carried Cloud’s vision forward. Goodwin explores how Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Ojibwe), D’Arcy McNickle (Salish Kootenai), Jack Forbes (Powhatan-Renapé, Delaware Lenape), and others built on and contributed to this common thread of Native intellectual activism. Goodwin demonstrates that Native activism for self-determination was never snuffed out by the swing of the federal government’s pendulum away from tribal governance and toward termination. Moreover, efforts for Native control in education remained a vital aspect of that activism. Without Destroying Ourselves documents this period through the full accreditation of TCUs in the late 1970s and reinforces TCUs’ continuing relevance in confronting the unique needs and challenges of Native communities today.

The rise of black radicalism in the 1960s was a result of both the successes and the failures of the civil rights movement. The movement's victories were inspirational, but its failures to bring about structural political and economic change pushed many to look elsewhere for new strategies. During this era of intellectual ferment, the writers, editors, and activists behind the monthly magazine Liberator (1960–71) were essential contributors to the debate. In the first full-length history of the organization that produced the magazine, Christopher M. Tinson locates the Liberator as a touchstone of U.S.-based black radical thought and organizing in the 1960s. Combining radical journalism with on-the-ground activism, the magazine was dedicated to the dissemination of a range of cultural criticism aimed at spurring political activism, and became the publishing home to many notable radical intellectual-activists of the period, such as Larry Neal, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, Harold Cruse, and Askia Toure. By mapping the history and intellectual trajectory of the Liberator and its thinkers, Tinson traces black intellectual history beyond black power and black nationalism into an internationalism that would shape radical thought for decades to come.

Despite recent advances in the study of black thought, black women intellectuals remain often neglected. This collection of essays by fifteen scholars of history and literature establishes black women's places in intellectual history by engaging the work of writers, educators, activists, religious leaders, and social reformers in the United States, Africa, and the Caribbean. Dedicated to recovering the contributions of thinkers marginalized by both their race and their gender, these essays uncover the work of unconventional intellectuals, both formally educated and self-taught, and explore the broad community of ideas in which their work participated. The end result is a field-defining and innovative volume that addresses topics ranging from religion and slavery to the politicized and gendered reappraisal of the black female body in contemporary culture. Contributors are Mia E. Bay, Judith Byfield, Alexandra Cornelius, Thadious Davis, Corinne T. Field, Arlette Frund, Kaiama L. Glover, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Natasha Lightfoot, Sherie Randolph, Barbara D. Savage, Jon Sensbach, Maboula Soumahoro, and Cheryl Wall.