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This question is limited as there are so many excellent contemporary black academics and theorists who teach other subjects, for example, literary theory, critical thought, and jurisprudence which are omitted by the categories you have listed. You might want to expand this question and include the others such as Henry L. Gates, Jr., Mary Frances Berry. and Toni Morrison.Here is my list of contemporary black philosophers or political scientists1. Martin Luther King, Jr.Perhaps one of the most influential voices of the Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr. has played a significant role in shaping Black consciousness today. The iconic activist, humanitarian and pastor is credited for much of the advancement of the Civil Rights Movement and remembered for his dedication to combating racism through nonviolent civil disobedience that extended from his Christian beliefs.2. bell hooksBorn as Gloria Jean Watkins, bell hooks is best known by her pen name. She authored a vast collection of notable works focused on race, capitalism, sexuality, and feminism through a postmodern perspective. The types of ideas and social concepts that hooks explored in her works remain popular today and have sparked a higher level of thinking among many women, particularly Black women, all across the globe.3. Angela Davis (a documentary on her called, “Free Angela and All Political Prisoners” worth watching)Davis was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1944. After spending a year at the Sorbonne in Paris, she earned her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude in French in 1965 from Brandeis University. While at Brandeis, Davis came into contact with the émigré German Marxist philosopher, Herbert Marcuse. Following two years of graduate work at the University of Frankfurt, where she studied with Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno, she entered the doctoral program in philosophy at the University of California San Diego, where Marcuse had moved in the meantime. She received her master’s degree in philosophy in 1968 from UC-San Diego. She passed the qualifying exams for her Ph.D. that same year and began writing her dissertation under the supervision of Marcuse, but due to unforeseen events (see below) was unable to complete it. Davis has taught philosophy, Africana studies, and feminist studies at several universities over the years, including UCLA, San Francisco State University, Rutgers University, and Syracuse University. She is currently Distinguished Professor Emerita, with a joint appointment in the History of Consciousness Department and the Feminist Studies Department, at the University of California Santa Cruz.Davis is undoubtedly best known for her involvement in two events that occurred when she was still in graduate school, which received national, and even international, publicity: (1) her expulsion in 1969 from her job as an assistant professor of philosophy at UCLA on the grounds of her CPUSA membership; and (2) her arrest in 1970 as an accomplice in the violent takeover and hostage-taking at the Marin County Courthouse in San Rafael, California, by Jonathan Jackson, younger brother of Black Panther Party leader George Jackson. Aided by three other Panthers being held in cells inside the courthouse, the younger Jackson took the judge and four other whites as hostages, to demand the release of George Jackson. During their getaway in a van, there was a shootout from both outside and inside the vehicle, at the end of which the judge, Jonathan Jackson, and two other Black Panthers were dead, and two other white hostages were wounded. Davis was accused of supplying firearms to the younger Jackson. Although three of the weapons he used were shown to have been purchased by her, due to insufficient evidence that she was aware of the purpose he intended to put them to, at her trial Davis was found innocent of all charges.As a philosopher and critical theorist, Davis has consistently applied the theoretical prism of Marxism to the analysis of the oppression of both people of color and women more generally by imperialist-capitalist society. She has continued to be politically committed, frequently lending her support to those she feels have been unjustly accused or condemned. Indeed, in more recent years she has turned her attention, especially to the injustice of what she calls the “prison-industrial complex.” She has stated that she sees radical prison reform as the great abolition movement of the twenty-first century. To this end, Davis co-founded the national grassroots prison-abolition organization, Critical Resistance.4. Cornel WestCornel West earned a Ph.D. from Princeton in 1980, making him the first African-American to graduate from Princeton with a Ph.D. He was Professor of African-American Studies at Princeton until 2011 and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City. West has stated that he found as much influence in Malcolm X and the Black Panther movement as he did in his studies at Harvard and Princeton, but as a Christian, he did not join the party on religious grounds. In addition to being a philosopher and academic, West is a very prominent and influential social activist, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, author, and public intellectual. West's work focuses on the intersections of race, gender, and class in society. West has sparked controversy because of his outspokenness on these issues in the U.S., and his criticism of the country as continuing to be defined by white supremacist and patriarchal attitudes and institutional structures.5. Stephen L. CarterCarter was born in Washington, DC, in 1954. He received his bachelor’s degree in history in 1976 from Stanford University, where he was Managing Editor of the student newspaper. He earned his JD in 1979 from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the *Yale Law Journal*. After law school, he first clerked for Judge Spottswood W. Robinson III of the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, and afterward, during the 1980–1981 session, for US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Since 1982 Carter has taught at Yale Law School, where he is currently the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Law. His areas of expertise include contracts, evidence, intellectual property, professional ethics, ethics in literature, law and the ethics of war, and law and religion.In addition to numerous scholarly articles published in the *Harvard Law Review*, the *Yale Law and Policy Review*, and elsewhere, Carter has become known far beyond the confines of the academic world through his writings for a modern audience. Beginning with a memoir and meditation on the role that affirmative action played in his own life, *Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby*, published in 1991, he has gone on to release seven other non-fiction works. These books have dealt with topics as diverse as the Academy’s intolerance of religious belief (*The Culture of Disbelief*; *The Dissent of the Governed*; *God’s Name in Vain*), the federal judicial appointment process (*The Confirmation Mess*), the loss of civility from our social and political life (*Civility*), and the ethics of war (*The Violence of Peace*).6. Edmond J. KellerKeller was born in St. John the Baptist Parish, just west of New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1942. He received his bachelor’s degree in government in 1969 from Louisiana State University in New Orleans. He earned his master’s degree in political science in 1970 from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and his Ph.D. in political science in 1974, also from Wisconsin. Until his retirement in 2013, Keller was Chair of the Department of Political Science, Director of the Globalization Research Center-Africa, and Director of the James S. Coleman African Studies Center at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). He is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Political Science at UCLA. In addition to UCLA, he has taught at Indiana University, Dartmouth College, the University of Wisconsin, Xavier University (New Orleans), and the University of California Santa Barbara.Keller specializes in comparative politics; his area of particular interest is in Africa. He has been a visiting research scholar at the Institute for Development Studies in Nairobi, Kenya, the Bureau of Educational Research (also in Nairobi), the UN Economic Commission for Africa, the Africa Institute of South Africa, and the UC-Berkeley Institute for International Studies. Also, he has done public policy work with the UN and consulted on African Development, regional security issues, public policy, and the process of political transitions in Africa. In 1990, Keller gave testimony before the US Congress Joint Committee on Hunger and Foreign Affairs on the “Politics of War, Drought, and Famine in Ethiopia.”Keller is the author or co-author of more than 50 peer-reviewed articles in edited volumes and journals and is the author or co-editor of some ten books (see below). During a long career of distinguished service, he has sat on the editorial boards of around a dozen academic journals and on the boards of directors and advisory committees of a significant number of educational and governmental bodies, both US and international. In 2008, Keller received the Distinguished Africanist Award bestowed by the African Studies Association.