AFRICAN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS

AFRICAN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHERS Philosophy is overarching insight, inspired by God. “Overarching” means all inclusive cosmic, infinite, infinitesimal, life & death. God is the 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, 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 philosophy of disobedience; Honorable Elijah Muhammad for a conceptual creation of black Islam that he implemented in the Nation of Islam; Dr. William E. B. DuBois for scholarship and for promulgation of the social integration paradigm for African Americans; Dr. Booker Taliaferro Washington for the “hand head and heart” philosophy of self-help, race-personal pride, working, industriousness, perspicuity, love. 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 a philosopher based upon a faith in Jesus Christ that enabled her to liberate directly or indirectly over 1,000 slaves in 19 journeys from North to South and back; including one as a leader of a river expedition in two gunships in South Carolina that netted 700+ slaves alone in the Civil War that she had previously scouted. 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 chopping wood, hauling salt , while preaching the gospel with noted white Methodists along the eastern seaboard . He was a conductor on the Underground Railroad, Mother Bethel A.M.E. on Sixth and Lombard Streets sat on land he had bought as a cobbler in Philadelphia. Bethel served as a place of rest for slave-refugees; doubling as a Masonic Lodge for blacks of which he was Secretary. He helped banish the Yellow Fever Epidemic of 1793: tending the sick, burying the dead; organizing the blacks to help out the dying whites, who had promised equality for their kindness, as federal government officials fled en masse. But when the peril had passed, whites not only reneged on equality but scoffed at the blacks help as being merely benevolently opportunistic. This list by no means exhaust the number of black philosophers in African American history. Add the ones who befit this short criterion.