ABSTRACT
During a recent interview about his role in the game of baseball, Henry Aaron remarked that “White folks think of us as entertainers, that we are born to entertain them.… It was all right for me to hit home runs because I entertained them. It wasn’t all right for my kids to go to school with their children.” The great Hank Aaron’s dilemmas are not unlike the controversies surrounding the handful of forty-something black academics who have been defined as “public intellectuals.” His recognition of the ironies in his role as a public figure underscores the paradoxes of black people whose commentary and insights exceed the boundaries of their celebrity. With neither political offices nor constituencies to hold them responsible, they utilize their highly visible positions within the academy, arts, and letters to engage in public debate. The fact that the most significant figures within U.S. African-American communities—from Fannie Lou Hamer to Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Muhammed Ali, and even Booker T. Washington—have never held public office speaks volumes about the ability of marginalized groups to make the best of the interstices of civic life when formal channels for debate in civil and political society are barred to them.
