In the spring of 1947 the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia appointed William Fontaine to a one-year visiting lectureship in its Department of Philosophy for the academic year 1947–48. The black man at once took leave of Morgan State College, an African American school in Maryland that had hired him after World War II as a professor and the chairman of its Philosophy Department. Pennsylvania repeated the arrangement for 1948–49. As part of his entrée into the white academic world, in the summer of 1948, Fontaine applied to take a place in the American Philosophical Association, a prestigious...

Fontaine’s family hailed from Chester, Pennsylvania, an industrial town on the Delaware River, just southwest of Philadelphia. Europeans first settled the area in the seventeenth century. When the Quaker William Penn arrived in 1682 to oversee his “Holy Experiment” in the English colony of Penn’s Woods (Pennsylvania), he had hoped to make Chester the capital. But Penn moved thirteen miles upstream to Philadelphia, and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the hamlet of Chester grew very slowly. It nonetheless remained important to the Quaker farmers who spread into the Delaware Valley. The Society of Friends gave a special character to...

Fontaine took his degree from Lincoln in the spring of 1930, just as the United States was entering the Great Depression. Over the next six years he earned his living as an instructor there, one of several part-timers. He just preceded the first black professors whom the institution hired as standing faculty. Fontaine taught Latin, and from elementary Latin—the learning of the grammar of the language and the reading of Caesar’s Gallic Wars—he moved to classes in authors traditionally considered more advanced, Cicero, Vergil, and Livy. He shared teaching duties with Azikiwe, whom Lincoln had appointed to a...

Southern Louisiana had a French (Cajun) and Spanish heritage reflected in mixed European and African American (Creole) cultures. These cultures were centered in New Orleans, a large and thriving metropolis with a permissive flavor. Black Catholics abounded. The one Roman Catholic black college, Xavier, was located in the city. Up and down the Mississippi, on which New Orleans sat, oil refineries made Louisiana a wealthy southern state. It also had more people living in cities, although the exotic New Orleans did not represent more conventional southern towns such as Baton Rouge, Shreveport, and Alexandria.

Northern Louisiana and the eastern counties,...

Eager to leave Southern, Fontaine still knew that Louisiana’s social setting had jelled inchoate ideas about he what wanted from life. Disliking the South, he was motivated to write, to make a reputation as a thinker, and to publish his way out of Scotlandville. In any case, the period brought his most sustained intellectual success, a time in which he thought most coherently about the problems of race in America. Over these years he wrote four essays about such questions.¹ In them, of greatest significance, he explicated his intricate sense of how individuals understood their social world. He put together...

Fontaine had left Louisiana in the middle of a war. In 1940 and again in 1941 he applied to the Julius Rosenwald Fund for support of a project called “The Mind and Thought of the Negro,” the title that he gave to his 1942 essay. An illustrious Jewish philanthropist, Rosenwald had made a fortune in retailing at Sears, Roebuck and Company. In the 1920s he had symbolized the rapprochement between American Jewry and African Americans in the struggle against prejudice. Rosenwald had spent considerable sums of money constructing schoolhouses for rural blacks in the South. Shortly before his death in...

The low-level appointment at the University of Pennsylvania held momentous long-term prospects should Fontaine thrive. When African American scholars taught at the college level at all, they had careers at black institutions, all of which were economically constrained. The white scholar now rarely taught at them and left when he could. Howard University and its tradition of African American research epitomized the desires of most blacks. Academics at Howard (and Fisk and Atlanta) found it impossible to move into any other major research university—white segregated schools—where a few, by dint of perseverance, had gotten graduate degrees. Nonetheless, the...

As a Pennsylvania faculty member, Fontaine oversaw instruction in the beginning course in philosophy. His ability became more apparent when his health improved. “Fontaine and staff” stamped this first course, Philosophy 1, “Intro to Phil,” with his own wide-ranging and learned vision of the history of ideas in the West from the time of the Greeks. He made this initial experience famous at Pennsylvania among undergraduates. Quiet and soft-spoken, Fontaine had yet a personal magnetism and a sense of his office at Penn. Elegantly dressed by Belle, he would arrive slightly late for the first class of a new semester,...

In the twenty years of the Cold War that Fontaine witnessed, the U.S. government displayed almost no independent interest in Africa, or its connection to American citizens of African descent. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, however, when the European powers gave independence to many of their African colonies, the United States adjusted its view of what was called the developing world, the third world, or the southern world. American diplomats rightly worried that the new nations might find anti-Western revolutionary politics attractive and that the Soviet Union might take advantage of such events. In Africa, U.S. policymakers engaged...

From the late 1950s politics had a claim on Fontaine’s life. Ferment at home and overseas drew his attention. He felt most comfortable in the early 1960s when exhortation and political pressure combined to move the Kennedy administration in the correct direction, both in foreign and domestic affairs. Kennedy’s intellect sided with progressives in racial matters. Black activism, including the work of Fontaine’s former acquaintance Martin Luther King, was edging the United States toward desegregation. The administration would propose a more potent civil rights bill than that of 1957. Anti-Communism was complementing the quest for African independence overseas. After Kennedy’s...

Almost every scholar in the last quarter century who has written about race in America has adopted a similar narrative stance, and I am no exception. Especially in biographies, the story recounts the toil of African Americans—sometimes successful, sometimes not, but always never ending—for a measure of equality. By now convention utterly drives the story. But even though simplified, overly heroic, and less ambiguous than truth, the story forces itself upon the mind and has a sure accuracy in framing the life of William Fontaine.

He came to maturity at the critical transitional time in American race relations....