The Black Intellectual Tradition

Recover the Heritage, Inspire Action.

The powerful legacy of classical education among Black intellectuals and teachers in America is a national treasure with the capacity to bless teachers and students the world over! In The Black Intellectual Tradition, authors Dr. Anika Prather and Dr. Angel Parham introduce us to readers, writers, teachers, artists, and people of action who loved, taught, and put into practice the wisdom and virtue of the great voices who came before. These Black educators and intellectuals, while living with the injustices and hardships that gave them unique insights, mined the tradition, weaving it together with their African and African American heritage to create a new narrative that would aid all people in understanding injustice and was thus integral to the fight for liberation and equality. In the process, they brought to light a wealth of truth, goodness, and beauty from within the great tradition.

With this rich heritage increasingly lost from view, this book restores stories and experiences to us that will inform and inspire ideas for action and application within all classical schools and homeschools. Dr. Prather and Dr. Parham bring to the book two different scholarly perspectives and voices as well as their own personal experiences as classical educators, parents, and organizational leaders.

“Rather than allowing our teaching to be enslaved to a pre-existing list [of classic and canonical writings], we can read traditional Western texts in conversation with great writings by diverse authors who help us to understand dimensions of truth, goodness, and beauty that we simply cannot access without drawing on their unique experiences and ways of being in and seeing the world. In this sense, the writings of Black intellectuals are an essential part of all of our students’ education in truth, goodness, and beauty.”

—Dr. Angel Adams Parham

“When we place a classic text before Black students and then ask them what they feel about the text, we are communicating that we see them, we value them, and we hold high expectations of them to engage in the Great Conversation from which their ancestors had been excluded. We become a living example of God’s universal love for all of humanity. . . . As classical educators we invite all students to share in the feast of the canon and thus communicate to them that all of our students are welcomed to the Promised Land.”

—Dr. Anika Prather