A 1911 copy of the NAACP journal The Crisis depicting "Ra-Maat-Neb, one of the black kings of the Upper Nile."

The origins of Afrocentrism can be found in the work of African-American and Caribbean intellectuals early in the twentieth century. Publications such as The Crisis and the Journal of Negro History sought to counter the prevailing view in the West that Africa had contributed nothing of value to human history that was not the result of incursions by Europeans and Arabs.^[1] These journals asserted the fundamental blackness of ancient Egypt and investigated the history of black Africa. Editor of The Crisis W.E.B. DuBois researched West African culture and attempted to construct a pan-Africanist value system based on West African traditions. DuBois later envisioned and received funding from then Ghanaian president Kwame Nkrumah to produce an Encyclopedia Africana that would chronicle the history and cultures of black Africa, but he died before the work could be completed. Some aspects of DuBois's approach are evident in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop, who claimed to have identified a pan-African protolanguage and to have proven that ancient Egyptians were, indeed, black Africans.

Diop also drew from the ideas of George M. James, ^{[citation needed]}a follower of black nationalist leader Marcus Garvey, who emphasized the importance of Ethiopia as a great, black civilization, and who argued that black peoples should develop pride in African history. James' book, Stolen Legacy (1954) is often cited as one of the foundational texts of Afrocentrism. James claimed that Greek philosophy was "stolen" from ancient Egyptian traditions and that these had developed from distinctively African cultural roots. For James, the works of Aristotle and other Greek thinkers were, in fact, poor synopses of aspects of ancient Egyptian wisdom. According to James, the Greeks were a violent and quarrelsome people, unlike the Egyptians, and were not naturally capable of philosophy. James famously claimed in his book that Aristotle had physically "stolen" his ideas and works from a "black African" Library of Alexandria, when, in fact, the Library of Alexandria was built by Greeks, during the Hellenistic period of Egypt, and after Aristotle's death.

These ideas were not wholly new. 18th-century Masonic texts referenced ancient writings that claimed Greek philosophers had studied in Egypt. The poet William Blake had also attacked "the stolen and perverted writings of Homer and Ovid, of Plato and Cicero," asserting that they were copies of more ancient Semitic texts. Such views were associated with radical and Romantic thought that rejected classical Greco-Roman culture as the model for civilization. James' distinct contribution was to tie these claims to an opposition between white European and black African identity, associating these alleged ancient appropriations of black wisdom with white, imperialist exploitation of black peoples and the theft of artifacts from black African cultures. By claiming that the Greeks were barbaric and innately incapable of philosophy, he inverted normative imperialist racial hierarchies, which made the same claims about black Africans.

Other writers copied James' approach, which led to claims that black Africans originated intellectual or technological achievements that later were claimed by whites. Today, most of these writings are not considered serious scholarship, and modern Afrocentricity writers have abandoned James' more extreme claims to concentrate on the notion that modern black peoples should center their understanding of culture and history on Africa. Molefi Kete Asante's book Afrocentricity (1988) argues that African-Americans should look to African cultures "as a critical corrective to a displaced agency among Africans."

Other authors have adapted James' assertion that Egyptian culture's influence on the Greeks has been underestimated. Among such scholars, the most influential is Martin Bernal, whose book Black Athena stressed influence of Afro-Asiatic and Semitic civilizations on Classical Greece. Other writers simply have focused on the study of indigenous African civilizations and peoples, with the aim of counteracting the emphasis placed on European and Arab influence on the continent. These Afrocentric scholars believe that historians must shift their attention away from European accomplishments and Europe-derived racist assumptions and, instead, emphasize the black origins of mankind and black contributions to world history. They maintain that such a paradigm shift would result in significant attitudinal shifts in the West and elsewhere. Indeed, many claim that a dramatic shift already has occurred. As educational opportunities have broadened for peoples of color over the years, non-white scholars from many cultures increasingly have begun to examine anew the historical and archaeological record. Some of their findings challenge the Eurocentric view of world history which for so many centuries devalued and appropriated, or simply ignored achievements by blacks and other non-Europeans.