Asante, Molefi Kete (Arthur Lee Smith Jr.)

Impact on the world

Founded the first PhD-granting program in African American Studies anywhere in the United States at Temple University in 1988, a full decade ahead of the next such program established at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and developed Afrocentricity, a theoretical framework arguing that African and African American history, culture, and experience should be studied and understood from an African-centered perspective rather than always filtered through European frameworks; he has since directed more than 140 PhD dissertations, making him the most prolific producer of doctorates among African American scholars, while Afrocentricity itself has drawn both wide adoption in school curricula and think tanks and significant criticism from scholars across the political spectrum who have challenged some of its historical claims and methodology.

Life & background

Born Arthur Lee Smith Jr. in Valdosta, Georgia, one of sixteen children, Asante graduated from Oklahoma Christian College in 1964 and earned his master's degree from Pepperdine before completing his PhD at UCLA in 1968 at age 26, becoming a full professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo just two years later at 30; during his UCLA years he served as president of the campus chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He co-founded the Journal of Black Studies in 1969, serving as its editor for over five decades, and became the first director of UCLA's Center for Afro-American Studies that same year, establishing its interdisciplinary master's program and library before chairing the communications department at SUNY-Buffalo through the 1970s. Adopting the name Molefi Kete Asante and drawing directly on the work of Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop, already profiled in this collection, he developed and popularized the theory of Afrocentricity through influential books including 'Afrocentricity' and 'The Afrocentric Idea,' work the Utne Reader cited in naming him one of the 100 leading thinkers in America; he later founded and continues to organize the Cheikh Anta Diop Conference in his honor. In 1986 he proposed the first doctoral program in African American Studies at Temple University, which received more than 500 applicants for its inaugural 1988 cohort and established Temple as the field's leading doctoral training ground for a decade before any comparable program existed elsewhere in the country. He has authored more than 90 books and 500 articles, received an honorary chieftaincy title in Ghana in 1996, founded the Molefi Kete Asante Institute for Afrocentric Studies with his wife in 2010, and in 2021 conceptualized Temple's Center for Antiracism Research; he remains an active professor in Temple's Department of Africology and African American Studies, the field he was instrumental in establishing as a legitimate doctoral discipline.

Sources

1. Temple University College of Liberal Arts; The HistoryMakers; Corredor Afro; Molefi Kete Asante official biography