 Accordingly, three principles will guide the discussion to come. First, this study will focus on Africana philosophy as a field. This means that the contributions of individual thinkers, however provocative or insightful, will be relevant here largely insofar as they bear on the networks of intellectual exchange and institutional credentialing that invite description with terms like “discipline” and “tradition.” It also means observing a distinction between the history of Africana philosophy as an enterprise and the history of African-descended philosophers as a cohort. Many members of this cohort have of course made valuable, germinal contributions to the field, beginning with towering figures like Alexander Crummell, whose establishment of the American Negro Academy was an early exercise in building these networks. But many others, as Stephen C. Ferguson II points out, “need not (and have not) exclusively engaged the Africana experience as an area of inquiry” (Ferguson 2009, 23). The former will be part of the story told here; the latter will not.