Okafor, Victor Oguejifor

Professor Victor Oguejiofor Okafor is Head of the Department of Africology and African American Studies at Eastern Michigan University, Ypsilanti, Michigan. He holds a Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University. A certified online course designer and instructor, Dr. Okafor is also a trained community mediator, a consultant on multicultural/diversity issues, an expert court witness on cases related to African cultural questions and issues, and a national language interpreter on legal, corporate, medical, and other matters requiring communications and translations between English and Igbo languages.

Studies in African American Leadership. Individuals, Movements, and Committees

2006 0-7734-5688-0
This anthology presents a variety of essays dealing with heroic contributions made by a select group of African American men, women and organizations to the intergenerational struggles of New World Africans for social equality and racial justice. The essays are refined and updated versions of a set of papers delivered by scholars of African American life and culture at the 2001 convention of the Southern Convention on African American Studies, Inc. Teachers and students of African American history and politics will find the work exceedingly useful.

As a contribution to scholarship, the anthology documents the visions, thoughts, and actions of African American leaders and organizations that had not either received judicious attention within academe or has been misinterpreted. Examples include the understated role of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) as a champion of African policy interests in the United States Congress, the counter-hegemonic role of black feminist scholarship, the influence of Afro-Atlantic religion on slave resistance and rebellion in the Americas, and a comparison of the life cycle political socialization of African American and white radicals. An apt example of the kind of new historiography that this work represents is its chapter on the role of one of the icons of African American history, Martin R. Delany (1812-1885). This chapter discusses Delany in the context of a new interpretation of his philosophical and strategic outlook – one that deviates markedly from popular portrayals of his role in African American historiography. In it, Dr. Tunde Adeleke argues that much of the literature on Delany’s contribution to the African American community’s struggles of his time has been tainted by an “instrumentalist or applied historiography.”