Cornel West

about

Cornel Ronald West (born June 2, 1953 in Tulsa, Oklahoma) is a prominent African-American scholar and public intellectual. Formerly at Harvard University, West is currently a professor of Religion at Princeton. West says his intellectual contributions draw from such diverse traditions as the African American Baptist Church, socialism, pragmatism, and transcendentalism. The grandson of a preacher, West marched as a young man in civil rights demonstrations and organized protests demanding black studies courses at his high school. West later wrote that, in his youth, he admired "the sincere black militancy of Malcolm X, the defiant rage of the Black Panther Party [...] and the livid black theology of James Cone". After graduating from John F. Kennedy High School in Sacramento, California, where he served as president of his high-school class, he enrolled at Harvard University at age 17. He took classes from philosophers Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell and graduated in three years, magna cum laude in Near Eastern languages and civilization in 1973. He was determined, as he informs us, to press the university and its intellectual traditions into the service of his political agendas and not the other way around: to have its educational agendas imposed on him. "Owing to my family, church, and the black social movements of the 1960s," he says, "I arrived at Harvard unashamed of my African, Christian, and militant de-colonized outlooks. More pointedly, I acknowledged and accented th

top songs

albums

Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations

Street Knowledge

▥

The Aurora Forum at Stanford University

▥

Sketches Of My Culture

▥

Tribe of Fire

▥

Democracy Matters

▥

Call+Response

▥

Call+Response (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

▥

Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations (feat. BMWMB)

▥

Call and Response (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

▥

Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (Unabridged)

▥

Hope on a Tightrope

similar artists