HISTORY OF THE KEMETIC INSTITUTE

By Ifé Carruthers

The Kemetic Institute, presently based in Chicago, Illinois, is a research organization concerned with the restoration and reconstruction of African civilization through scholarly research, African centered education, artistic creativity and spiritual development. The organization takes its name from ancient Egypt. The people who lived along the Nile River in Egypt over five thousand years ago called their country “Kemet,” which means “the black city” or “the black community.” These people who called themselves "Kemites," which means "the black people," developed the world's first civilization.

The Kemetic Institute grew out of the organizational and scholarly efforts of what may be called the “Chicago Group,” this being a group of African centered thinkers which included Dr. Anderson Thompson, Dr. Harold Pates, Lorenzo Martin and Dr. Bobby Wright among others. Prior to the establishment of the Kemetic Institute, this group had launched the Communiversity, the Association of African Historians and the Association of Afro-American Educators. It had also published four issues of the Afrocentric World Review.

The first discrete entity that led directly to the development of the Kemetic Institute was its research component, which was founded by Dr. Jacob Carruthers, Brother A. Josef Ben Levi, Dr. Anderson Thompson and Dr. Conrad Worrill in 1978. Shortly afterwards, Ms. Deidre Wimby, then a Ph.D. candidate in Egyptology at the University of Chicago, joined the group. Dr. Carruthers, a political scientist, historian and Egyptologist, became the founding director. He had long been concerned with the need for a scholarly research organization which would not only revitalize and reconstruct African history and culture but would serve as a reservoir for preserving and continuing the work begun by great black scholars during the 18th and 19th centuries.