From the time that Richard Allen and Absalom Jones led a group of African Americans out of St. George’s Methodist Episcopal Church in 1792, Philadelphia has played an outsized role in the Black intellectual tradition, or the history of Black thought and culture. Philadelphia was the birthplace of what would become the largest Black church in the nineteenth century, the African Methodist Episcopal Church. The city was also the center of American abolitionism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In the 20^th century, Philadelphia was likewise home to some of the nation’s leading Black thinkers and activists, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Sadie Tanner Mossel Alexander. This roundtable discussion will examine Philadelphia’s long and storied position as a center of Black thought and activism from the 1780s to the civil rights era of the 1960s. Richard S. Newman will examine how Richard Allen’s experiences in Philadelphia shaped his ideas and the move toward creating the AME Church. Newman will demonstrate Allen’s centrality to early nineteenth century Black intellectual and political history. Turning to the early 20^th century, Khaleelah Harris will examine the publication of W. E. B. Du Bois’s book The Philadelphia Negro, a book that provided a foundation for the field of Sociology. Hettie Williams will conclude with an examination of the life and thought of Sadie Tanner Mossel Alexander, a member of Philadelphia’s Black elite who was both the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in Economics and the first to earn a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Williams will demonstrate how Alexander’s experiences in Philadelphia shaped her educational opportunities and her ideological and political commitments from the 1920s through the 1960s. Taken together, these papers will demonstrate the centrality of Philadelphia to African American intellectual history from the revolutionary era to the civil rights movement. The panel will have broad appeal for both scholars, teachers, and a lay audience interested in the history of Philadelphia.