Following the Black Power irruptions of the 1960s, the Harvard community was influenced by many outspoken Black Nationalist leaders and organizations, and West was introduced to the thought of Amiri Baraka of the Congress of African People, the writings of Maulana Karenga, the politics of the Republic of New Africa movement, and the teachings of the Nation of Islam. As an undergraduate, however, West kept his distance from these movements, partly because of his Christian upbringing but principally because he perceived in them a narrowness of focus and philosophy. He began to read voraciously the works of radical independence thinkers such as Kwame Nkrumah and Frantz Fanon, while absorbing the ideas of such other left-wing thinkers as Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, C. L. R. James, Perry Anderson, Kwame Nkrumah, and Frantz Fanon. Yet, the intellectual figures who impressed him most were Reinhold Niebuhr, author of
Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (1932), R. H. Tawney, author of
The Acquisitive Society (1920), Julius Nyerere, author of
Ujamaa: Essays on Socialism (1968), the Polish exile Leszek Kolakowski, author of
Toward a Marxist Humanism: Essays on the Left Today (1968), the dissenting Eastern European Marxist humanists Mihailo Markovic and Svetozar Stojanovic, and Harold Cruse, author of
Rebellion or Revolution (1969).
This is a free page. This page contains 187 words. This
biography contains 10,211 words (approx. 34 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Cornel (Ronald) West Access Pass.
