AFRICAN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS 2

AFRICAN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS Philosophy is overarching insight, inspired by God. “Overarching” means all inclusive cosmic, infinite, infinitesimal, life & death. God is true philosophy’s inspiration, calculation, originator, destination invigorating force, repository, end. Philosophy is “nature” explicated in the life of mankind; seminal matter endued with latent-patent purpose. Philosophy also endues all else: life, non-life; conceptions, perceptions, time space matter energy intuition. Philosophy insinuates beings with a sense of self; a power of discerning; innate mathematics, imagination, mental frameworks, templates with values. Given the foregoing definition of philosophy, I deduce that the following persons were African American philosophers: Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for a human rights practice and philosophy of massive nonviolent civil disobedience against segregation in the South; Honorable Elijah Muhammad for a conceptual creation of black Islam that he implemented in the Nation of Islam, that taught self-pride, self-determination, black history and strong moral disciplines; Dr. William E. B. DuBois for renown black scholarship and for promulgation of the social integration paradigm for African Americans, through the NAACP, Atlanta University and independently ; Dr. Booker Taliaferro Washington for the founding of Tuskegee University in 1881, home of his “hand head and heart” philosophy of racial self-help, race-personal pride, working, industriousness, perspicuity, love. Washington also wrote 12 books explaining this natural philosophy as applied in practical conditions of life. To this above twentieth century list, I would add iconic Frederick Douglass for a capacity to peer through surfaces into essences in his variegated life as: a slave, fugitive slave, abolitionist , editor, publisher, orator , diplomat, bank president, government official in Haiti, Washington DC; author sans pareil , self-taught autobiographer. Harriet Tubman was also a philosopher based upon a faith in Jesus Christ that not only sustained her with $40,000 reward for her life; but her natural faith in God enabled her to liberate directly or indirectly over 1,000 slaves in 19 journeys from North to South and back; including one military journey as a leader of a river expedition in two gunships in South Carolina that netted a rescue of 700+ slaves alone in the Civil War and destruction of rebels’ provisions; she had previously scouted-out target plantations. She did this despite her unpredictable, but spiritually renewing fainting spells. Leaving the nineteenth century , I would lift up Bishop Richard Allen as a philosopher, for this former slave not only founded the world-wide African Methodist Episcopal Church, but had co-founded the Free African Society earlier. He bought his own freedom and that of his brother by chopping wood, hauling salt , while preaching the gospel of Jesus Christ to colored people, with noted white Methodists along the eastern seaboard . He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad from Mother Bethel A.M.E. Church on Sixth and Lombard Streets. Bishop Allen had bought the lot on which the church sat, and had hauled a blacksmith shop to the lot as the first church. He did this on cobbler earnings in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bethel served as a respite, a place of rest and refreshment for slave-refugees; while doubling as a Masonic Lodge (the third in the country for blacks) where he was Senior Warden and Rev. Absalom Jones, founder of the black Episcopal denomination, was Master. Bethel was a community resource in addition to being a school and a church. Richard Allen helped banish the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793: by tending the sick, burying the dead; organizing the blacks to nurse , to help out the dying whites, who had promised legal equality to blacks for their healthful kindnesses. (Some blacks had been as children immunized against the viral disease in Africa, resulting in a false belief that all blacks were immune to the disease! Wrong! Immunized only the ones who were immune). The federal government officials (then located in Philadelphia) fled en masse. But when the peril had passed, most whites not only reneged on that “legal equality,” but scoffed at the blacks’ indispensable help as being merely benevolently opportunistic for fees. This list is by no means exhaustive of the full number of black philosophers in African American history. Add to the list ones who befit this short criterion.