FAMU training set alum on path to Harvard

Tommie Shelby is a big name on the Harvard University’s campus.

Back in 2000, the FAMU alumnus was hired to join the Harvard Department of African and African American Studies while that program was building its academic “Dream Team.” His colleagues included Professors Henry “Skip” Gates, Cornel West, and K. Anthony Appiah.

Shelby quickly established himself as one of Harvard’s rising stars by earning tenure and “full professor” rank in 2007. At age 40, he's one of the younger members of the university’s permanent faculty.

He also authored the groundbreaking We Who Are Dark: The Philosophical Foundations of Black Solidarity, a book that re-envisions the role of black solidarity as a tool for fighting racism in the post-Civil Rights Movement era.

Even though he is modest and low-key, he’s recently received close attention from the Harvard’s on-campus publications.

From the Harvard Crimson article “Living to Learn:”

“I went to Florida A&M by chance,” [Shelby] says. “I’m a first generation college student, so no one in my family had really gone and knew the ropes.”

Like many students at Florida A&M, Shelby spent his freshman year focused on business aspirations. He says that it was not until his second year of college that he realized business administration was not to be his vocation.

“It kind of dawned on me that...um...its boring,” he says with a burst of laughter. “And I started thinking about having to spend 45 years or so of my life working on these sorts of things and it just didn’t appeal.”

At Florida A&M, Shelby was certainly not the norm. Most students, he says, sought to gain admission to the School of Business Administration, a program that was successful in landing students business school positions and jobs after college.

Shelby, on the other hand, embarked on a period of discovery that would eventually lead him to his calling: philosophy. He began flitting through departments—first psychology, then sociology. Finally, in a course on religion, one of his professors pointed him in the direction of philosophy.

“They thought that I...” Shelby pauses to rephrase. “Religion wasn’t really for me—the way my mind works. But, they thought that philosophy might better suit my temperament and my intellectual interests and I took a course and fell in love immediately.” 

He graduated as Florida A&M’s only philosophy concentrator in 1990.

Continue reading here.

Another recent profile of Shelby, “Looking at race, racism from a philosophical lens” was published by the Harvard Gazette.