ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the work of scholars in the Black intellectual tradition in the context of the progressive era. Specifically, how does their work exhibit the African worldview and cultural concepts brought here by their ancestors and retained in their heritage knowledge? Adding to the existing scholarship on African retentions, we explore the retention of African democracy in North America. This retention is evident in the historical record and in the ongoing African pursuit of democracy in the Diaspora—a democracy that was/is understood as communal, cooperative, and participatory. To further examine African retentions in Diasporan scholarship, we turn to the work of William Edward Burghardt Du Bois to explain the pre-enslavement African sources of significant Du Boisian themes and how knowledge of African worldview and cultural concepts can locate those sources. The chapter further demonstrates the instructional agency needed to replace eurocratic school knowledge with knowledge that draws upon the history and cultural heritage of all students. It does so by providing numerous examples of the African episteme that is consistently present in several Du Boisian themes and suggesting how to use these themes—and the episteme that informs them—to shape classroom practices.
