| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.2

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| Book Reviews | The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 133.2 | The History Cooperative

BOOK REVIEWS

Black Philosopher, White Academy: The Career of William Fontaine. By Bruce Kuklick. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. 192 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography of the writings of William Fontaine, sources, index. $30.)
Historian Bruce Kuklick's unsentimental account of the life of William Fontaine—the University of Pennsylvania's first African American philosophy professor—should be read by anyone intending to pursue a doctorate and teaching career in philosophy. It is a vivid, surprisingly gripping account (given the subject matter) of the life of someone who paid a price for almost making the big time in a lily white corner of the Ivy League.	1
Born in 1909, William Fontaine grew up in an ordinary family in Chester, Pennsylvania. He attended Lincoln University, a school near Philadelphia founded on the Princeton model, but with the aim of educating an elite corps of black intellectuals to uplift the race and shepherd them back to Africa. Fontaine excelled in philosophy and Latin, wrote poems and stories, and graduated first in his class in 1930. He became Lincoln's first full-time black instructor, helping to educate African and African American leaders like Ghana's Kwame Nkrumah and civil rights lawyer Robert Carter.	. . .

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