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Kilson argues that while America has had persons thought of as "public intellectuals" since the 1830s, for black people, the "public" in the title has always meant the black public almost exclusively until fairly recently.

Early black public intellectuals, Kilson says, can be divided into several categories.

Most were either university-based figures ^{such as} like W. E. B. DuBois, St. Clair Drake, Ralph Bunche, John Aubrey Davis and E. Franklin Frazier, journalists, ^including like Monroe Trotter and Ida Wells-Barnett, historian Carter G. Woodson, attorneys Charles Houston and William Hastie.

The black press was their forum; the black college campus was their (platform,)--? and mainstream organizations like^{such as} the National Urban League ^{and black professional, and fraternal and sororal organizations} were outlets for their brand of intellectual activism.

Others directed their activism through Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association and similar cultural separatist organizations.

For all, their "public market" was composed almost exclusively of African-Americans. Indeed, due to the small number of black college graduates until the 1960s - only 18,000 out of a population of more than 12 million in 1920 - only a fraction of African-Americans were trained to exercise an intellectual function.

Today the numbers are much greater and the faces familiar to a large body of the general public - Henry Louis Gates; Cornell West; Stephen Carter; Amiri Baraka ^{Lani Guinier} and many, many others.

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