UNDERSTANDING DIVERSITY IN AFRICAN AMERICAN POLITICAL THOUGHT: COMPARING DU BOIS, WASHINGTON, GARVEY AND ELIJAH MUHAMMAD

This study provides a systematic and comparative treatment of four African‐American political thinkers. Previous works on African‐American political thought have been mostly biographical and idiographic treatments. This study uses the comparative method to systematically evaluate the political philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Elijah Muhammad, and Marcus Garvey. Although the study does not claim that the thinker's political thought is causally related to his activist position, it is expected that there is a logical connection between them. The study introduces a framework which combines two dimensions into four categories. The four thinkers are hypothesized to each fit a different category. The findings support the hypothesized categorization.