His wife, Marion (Dusser de Barenne) Kilson, said the cause was congestive heart failure.
A son of a Methodist minister, Kilson was a prolific writer, an expert on ethnic politics in Africa and the United States, and a mentor to generations of students, among them writer, teacher and philosopher Cornel West.
He also found vigorous public debate irresistible during his nearly 40 years as a professor of government at Harvard.
“Lord, oh, Lord, Brother Kilson loved combat,” West said in a telephone interview.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., the Harvard professor, writer and filmmaker, wrote of Kilson in an email, “He prided himself on the role of the gadfly, challenging hierarchies, speaking truth to power and arguing against the grain, all in the name of the pursuit of veritas.”
Kilson, an avowed integrationist, was already teaching courses in African politics in the 1960s when black students were starting to assert themselves on predominantly white campuses like Harvard.
“Naturally, the Negro wants to lay down the conditions and call the shots, something done for him by the white liberal in an earlier day,” Kilson told The Harvard Crimson in 1964. “His friendship is not spurned but merely held in abeyance, giving us both time to think over what is going on inside and outside of us.”
Kilson was a faculty sponsor of the Harvard-Radcliffe Association of African and Afro-American Students. But after the university’s Afro-American studies department was established in 1969, he became disenchanted with its governance, criticizing it as lacking academic rigor and maintaining that it had become an enclave for radical black students.
“Black solidarity forces are distinctly anti-intellectual and anti-achievement in orientation,” he wrote in a provocative essay about Harvard in The New York Times Magazine in 1973. “They indulge in the ‘black magic’ of nationalism, believing that miracles are possible if Negroes display fidelity to black nationalism or separatism and its anti-white attitudes, rituals and symbols.”
Kilson argued that the radical politics of separatists was an academic dead end.
“It took extraordinary courage in 1969 to challenge Black Panther and black power rhetoric,” the Rev. Eugene Rivers III, a former student of Kilson’s, said in a telephone interview. “And he was right.”
But critics of the professor — including Ewart Guinier, the founding chairman of the Afro-American studies department — disagreed with both his methodologies and his conclusions.
During a debate broadcast by a New York City television station in late 1973, Guinier was scornful of Kilson, saying he “shouts loudly about rigorous thought, standards and superior white universities, all the while encouraging people to think of him as a major scholar.”
Kilson responded, “I am certainly not as much of an ideologue as Ewart Guinier.”
Decades later, in “A Companion to African American Studies” (2016), edited by Lewis Gordon and Jane Ann Gordon, Kilson wrote that Harvard’s Afro-American studies department did not flower until the 1990s, when Gates became its chairman.
He described Gates as a “top-rank academic-entrepreneurial black scholar.”
Martin Luther Kilson Jr. was born Feb. 14, 1931, in East Rutherford, New Jersey, and grew up in Ambler, Pennsylvania, a factory town north of Philadelphia. His mother, Louisa (Laws) Kilson, was a homemaker. Martin Sr. was not the only minister in the family; there were preachers on both sides, including young Martin’s great-great-grandfather, Isaac Lee, a freed black who founded an African Methodist Episcopal church in Maryland in 1848.
Kilson encountered Du Bois, the pioneering urban sociologist who was a founder of the NAACP, as a freshman at Lincoln University, a historically black college in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Du Bois had come to the campus to encourage its students to become part of the educated, community-based black leadership he called “The Talented Tenth,” calling on them to help improve the lives of needy black people.
Du Bois remained an influence throughout Kilson’s career. In his book “Transformation of the African American Intelligentsia, 1880-2012” (2014), he wrote that it is “a moral imperative for today’s variant of Du Bois’ ‘Talented Tenth’ to mobilize its new socioeconomic and political resources to help ameliorate some of the social crises that now plague about 40 percent of African American families.”
After receiving his master’s degree and Ph.D. in political science from Harvard, he did field work in Sierra Leone under a Ford Foundation fellowship, studying the political system in that country as it shifted from British control to independence in 1961.
When he returned to the United States that year, he became a research associate at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, where he started turning his Sierra Leone research into a book, “Political Change in a West African State,” published in 1966.
Harvard hired him as a lecturer in government in 1962. He was named an assistant professor two years later and granted tenure in 1968.
“He took a lot of pride in that accomplishment,” his daughter Hannah Kilson said in a telephone interview. “But it isn’t what made him a decent person. He was a decent man with a strong moral compass that guided and informed us, and a sharp tongue and a sharp pen.”
Kilson used that sharp pen in 2002 when he challenged Randall Kennedy, a distinguished African-American professor at Harvard Law School, over the title of Kennedy’s book “Nigger: The Strange Career of a Troublesome Word.”
Writing in Black Commentator, an online journal, Kilson called the use of the epithet an insult to black people and to former Harvard teachers like Du Bois, Ralph Bunche and John Hope Franklin.
He suggested that Kennedy’s goal was to “assist white Americans in feeling comfortable” in their use of the epithet.
Kennedy responded angrily. “Martin Kilson seems to think that all of America has the same view of this term,” he told The Crimson. “This view is palpably incorrect. How does he know what my motive is?”
The two men did not speak for a long time, but “a couple of years ago, I saw him at a gathering and we embraced,” Kennedy said in an email. “I was glad to see him, and I’d like to think he was glad to see me.”
He added that “being castigated by Kilson was a rite of passage.”
Kilson cut a distinctive figure on the Harvard campus, wearing used tweed jackets and fedoras or cowboy hats and carrying armfuls of out-of-town newspapers.
“He dressed and talked like a cross between a preacher and an Oxford don,” Mark Whitaker, a former Newsweek editor and another former student of Kilson’s, wrote in a memoir, “My Long Trip Home” (2011).
But Kilson ran into trouble in 1979, when he was accused of sexual harassment after trying to kiss a freshman woman during his office hours. He was reprimanded by Henry Rosovsky, a Harvard dean, and required to write the woman a letter of apology.
“I did commit an act of impropriety,” he told The Harvard Crimson. But he added that “my general affectionate air could be misinterpreted.”
Kilson served as the Frank G. Thomson professor of government at Harvard from 1988 to 1999, when he retired from teaching.
In addition to his wife, a social anthropologist and college administrator, and his daughter Hannah, he is survived by another daughter, Jennifer Kilson-Page; a son, Peter; six grandchildren; one great-grandchild; and a sister, Gwendolyn Coleman.
West and Rivers recalled Kilson as a curmudgeonly mentor who nurtured scholars like them over long conversations, often at dinner at his house near Harvard or at his summer home in New Hampshire.
“So many of us wouldn’t exist without him,” West said. Acolytes, he added, were drawn to his “joy in the life of the mind, his discipline, his rigor, his unbelievable devotion and his sharing of that with young people.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.