Ben Keppel – författare

Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century explores the development of American social science by highlighting the contributions of those scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated society. The book asks how segregation has influenced, and continues to influence, the development of American social thought and social science scholarship.Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben Keppel present the work of thirty-one black social scientists whose work was published between the rise of the Tuskegee model of higher education and the end of the Black Power Era. Even though they had to fashion their careers outside of their respective fields' mainstream, the intellectuals featured here produced scholarship that helped define the contours of the social sciences as they evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Theirs was the work of pioneers, now for the first time gathered in one anthology.After a comprehensive introduction and survey of the selections to follow, Holloway and Keppel present the founding parents of African American social science, including excerpts from Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper, and others. They then examine contributions from the first real generation of professionally trained black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois. The interactions between cultural production and social scientific knowledge are examined through the work of various scholars, including Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston. The volume then explores the scholarship produced by the leading progressive social scientists of the day on issues of race and class and examines social scientific scholarship that put African American struggles in an international context. The book concludes by presenting the scholarship of, among others, Hylan Lewis, Joyce Ladner, and William Julius Wilson, which most effectively highlights the complex state of "raced" social science thought during the age of desegregation in academia.

Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the Twentieth Century explores the development of American social science by highlighting the contributions of those scholars who were both students and objects of a segregated society. The book asks how segregation has influenced, and continues to influence, the development of American social thought and social science scholarship.Jonathan Scott Holloway and Ben Keppel present the work of thirty-one black social scientists whose work was published between the rise of the Tuskegee model of higher education and the end of the Black Power Era. Even though they had to fashion their careers outside of their respective fields' mainstream, the intellectuals featured here produced scholarship that helped define the contours of the social sciences as they evolved over the course of the twentieth century. Theirs was the work of pioneers, now for the first time gathered in one anthology.After a comprehensive introduction and survey of the selections to follow, Holloway and Keppel present the founding parents of African American social science, including excerpts from Alexander Crummell, Anna Julia Cooper, and others. They then examine contributions from the first real generation of professionally trained black scholars such as W. E. B. Du Bois. The interactions between cultural production and social scientific knowledge are examined through the work of various scholars, including Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston. The volume then explores the scholarship produced by the leading progressive social scientists of the day on issues of race and class and examines social scientific scholarship that put African American struggles in an international context. The book concludes by presenting the scholarship of, among others, Hylan Lewis, Joyce Ladner, and William Julius Wilson, which most effectively highlights the complex state of "raced" social science thought during the age of desegregation in academia.

Thirty years after the greatest legislative triumphs of the civil rights movement, overcoming racism remains what Martin Luther King, Jr., once called America’s unfinished “work of democracy.” Why this remains true is the subject of Ben Keppel’s The Work of Democracy. By carefully tracing the public lives of Ralph Bunche, Kenneth B. Clark, and Lorraine Hansberry, Keppel illuminates how the mainstream media selectively appropriated the most challenging themes, ideas, and goals of the struggle for racial equality so that difficult questions about the relationship between racism and American democracy could be softened, if not entirely evaded.Keppel traces the circumstances and cultural politics that transformed each individual into a participant-symbol of the postwar struggle for equality. Here we see how United Nations ambassador Ralph Bunche, the first African American to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, came to symbolize the American Dream while Bunche’s opposition to McCarthyism was ignored. The emergence of psychologist and educator Kenneth B. Clark marked the ascendancy of the child and the public school as the leading symbols of the civil rights movement. Yet Keppel details how Clark’s blueprint for “community action” was thwarted by machine politics. Finally, the author chronicles the process by which the “American Negro” became an “African American” by considering the career of playwright Lorraine Hansberry. Keppel reveals how both the journalistic and the academic establishment rewrote the theme of her prizewinning play A Raisin in the Sun to conform to certain well-worn cultural conventions and the steps Hansberry took to reclaim the message of her classic.The Work of Democracy uses biography in innovative ways to reflect on how certain underlying cultural assumptions and values of American culture simultaneously advanced and undermined the postwar struggle for racial equality.