Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  CW: I like that. I think you are onto not just something, but you are onto a lot. There is probably a lot more buried in the text that has been overlooked because of the narrow lens of the ideology of self-made men that Douglass has so much contributed to.

  CHB: Douglass was highly critical of “the slaveholding religion of this land,”15 repeatedly castigating the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders. But one also wonders when reading his three autobiographies, how important religion was to his own worldview. It seems to me that he is very much a man of the Enlightenment.

  CW: You know, I just preached at the Mother Zion in Harlem on 138th Street. Its pastor, Gregory Robeson Smith, was a student of mine; he is the grandnephew of the great Paul Robeson. This is the church that Paul Robeson’s brother pastored for thirty years. Talking about the AME Zion Church tradition that produced Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, and John Coltrane, I said, “My God, even as a Baptist, we don’t have anybody who was comparable to all four of them.” But it raises the question of the role of religion in the shaping of Frederick Douglass and whether, in fact, he was much more secular than one would think. I was on a committee for a dissertation at Union Theological Seminary thirty years ago. It was on Douglass and Feuerbach. Douglass fell in love with Ludwig Feuerbach. That was the first set of texts that you saw in his library, both in Rochester as well as in Anacostia in Washington, DC. It’s quite interesting. The first thing he wanted to do when he got to Britain was to meet Marian Evans, who was, of course, the great George Eliot, who translated The Essence of Christianity16 and was also the great author of Middlemarch and other novels. She was obsessed with Feuerbach, too. She and Lewes, George Henry Lewes—a grand journalist—they were living together and really made a difference in the intellectual life of England and Europe. But the thesis was that even though Douglass did speak and preach in AME Zion Church, was deeply shaped by it and would say so quite publicly, that privately he was an agnostic, and that after reading Feuerbach he began to use Christian themes and motifs, narratives and stories, but did not have a cognitive commitment to the claims, and he could never really put this out in public, but he had a lot of private discussions, and so in that sense, one of the points you make, he seems much more a figure of the Enlightenment than he would be if he had remained tied to religious authority.17 I didn’t introduce all of this in my Mother Zion sermon. AME Zion Church, they still have a right to claim him, you know. But of course, Coltrane was not a Christian either; he was ecumenical and spiritual and so forth, but he was shaped by the AME Zion Church. His grandfather was an AME Zion pastor, and Coltrane grew up in the parsonage there in Hamlet, as well as in High Point in North Carolina at the AME Zion Church. This issue of how secular was Frederick Douglass deserves further investigation.

  CHB: He seems to shift his position, but what to me is rather prominent are his references to humanism; as if he wanted to say, you don’t really need religion; it’s enough if you believe in human dignity, the right to freedom, and other values established by the Enlightenment. But as you said, he could not admit as much. He indicates it quite often, but he could not tell the public, “I’m a non-believer.”

  CW: Exactly. When he went to Great Britain, you know, one of the places he wanted to go was the birthplace of Robert Burns, because Burns meant so much to him,18 and then from Burns, he goes on to say, “But my favorite of all favorites is the great Lord Byron.”

  CHB: Oh yes, and he quotes him on freedom.19

  CW: Absolutely. And when you actually look closely at Byron, he really almost worships the imagination as he affirms the eclipse-of-God talk. Which is to say that there is a certain kind of secularization in such a Romantic poetic position, and I do think that Douglass was deeply influenced by Byron in that regard, freedom fighter first and foremost, and it’s about the imagination, it’s about transgression, it’s about transformation, and not God, and yet he couldn’t be explicit in the secular mode. I don’t think that this dissertation on Douglass and Feuerbach was ever published. I know the professor, his name is John Grayson, he teaches at Mount Holyoke.20 But your question about Douglass being a child of the Enlightenment or even a child of secular Romantic thinking is a very important one. Because then the question becomes, well, in the Black intellectual tradition, what legacy does he leave regarding secular thinking? I think the most secular thinker the Black tradition has ever produced is Richard Wright, and it would be interesting to look at Richard Wright’s writings on Douglass.

  CHB: In his famous speech we mentioned before, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass draws a distinct line between his white “fellow-citizens” and himself as someone “identified with the American bondman,” a disparity that culminates in his words: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”21 This statement is connected to the vital question of the possibility of African Americans to identify with the American nation. Even after Emancipation, the sense of belonging to the nation-state has been both a crucial and a controversial issue for African Americans. One answer is the idea of the brotherhood of men, humanity, as a community everybody belongs to and on the basis of which Black people admonish America, the nation, to come up to its promises.22 You find this thought in many Black writers besides Douglass, for example, in Ida B. Wells’s or W. E. B. Du Bois’s autobiographies. What is your position on African American national identity?

  CW: If you have a notion of the potential nation, of a nation that has the potential and possibility of being free, equal, and just; treating other nations with respect; and multilateral in its foreign policies, then I find the idea of African American national identity in part desirable, that’s true.

  CHB: “In part” means what?

  CW: In part. It means that you are still a bit too tied to the most powerful ideology of modernity, which is nationalism. And I am so suspicious of nationalisms, be they potential or actual. If internationalism tied to the “wretched of the earth”23 had become much more powerful in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the twentieth century would have been less barbaric, less fascistic, less chauvinistic, you see. And even these days, when globalism and internationalism are much more popular, more buzzwords, they tend to still be easily colonized by capitalism and a lot of other more mainstream ways of looking at the world.

  CHB: But isn’t the notion of humankind, humanity, the counternotion to what you are criticizing? Or what would you say? What is your solution if you want to avoid the nationalisms?

  CW: Well, for me, the three major counter-voices against the nationalisms, be they potential or actual, would be Marxism, radical democratic movements and views, or a prophetic religious view. So, in the Marxist tradition, you have at the center an internationalism and a globalism that are always tied to working-class movements and so on. That is one of the reasons why I resonate so deeply with that tradition. And the second, the radical democratic one, you’re still concerned with everyday people, no matter where they are, no matter what the national context, no matter what boundaries they find themselves in terms of land and space. And in terms of prophetic religion—but for me, especially, prophetic Christianity—you’ve got the symbol of a Cross, which is the catastrophic, the mutilated body of this particular Jew in the face of the Roman Empire, that is tied to a love, connected to a concern for the least of these, and every flag is subordinate to that Cross; every nationalism, every ideology, even, is subordinate to that Cross; and that Cross is nothing but the scandalous, the calamitous, the horrendous, the catastrophic in the human condition, which is suffering. And how do you transfigure that suffering into some voice, some vocation, some vision to empower the least of these (as in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew)?24 So, for me, all three are intertwined; so the Marxism is indispensable, and the radical democracy is indispensable.

  CHB: But I wonder why you do not include the Enlightenment ideas of human brotherhood, of universalism. Is it because they are too optimistic in that the belief in progress c
omes with that particular historic movement of Enlightenment and the rationality that is also part of it, and that you would consider too one-sided?

  CW: Well, it depends on which particular figures. When you’re thinking of Voltaire’s Candide, you don’t get a deeper critique of optimism, Pangloss and so forth. It would also be true of Rameau’s Nephew, of Diderot. I think that the greatness of the European Enlightenment was precisely the shattering of the tribalism and clannishness, the nationalism, to turn instead to grand visions of justice, and I see that in Voltaire; I see it in Diderot; I see it in Kant, in his own very complicated conceptions of autonomy and rationality; I see it in Lessing.25

  CHB: But what is your apprehension, why don’t you include it in your list—except if you claim that it is in Marx anyway?

  CW: Yeah, I think, Marx, for me, would be one of the grand fruits of the Enlightenment but also of a certain Romanticism. I don’t want to downplay Romantic thinkers; I think the Byrons and Shelleys are magnificent. Shelley died for Greek independence, but it was an independence of Greeks that was tied to the call for the independence of all peoples who are under forms of the yoke of oppression. So I don’t really want in any way to disparage the best of the Enlightenment or the best of Romanticism. Of course, I don’t know enough about the East, Islam. I’m sure they have great humanist traditions too. So, I’m with you on that.

  CHB: In an essay on Douglass, John Stauffer comments on Douglass as an intellectual as follows:

  Throughout the book, Douglass quotes or paraphrases famous white writers: Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Aristotle, Milton, Martin Luther, William Cowper, Longfellow, and Whittier; and there are at least thirty-five separate biblical references. These references reveal not only Douglass’s growing intellectual powers, they highlight his efforts to break down the color line. He anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois, who declared in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.” Like Du Bois, the Douglass of My Bondage seeks to become a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture,” dwell above the veil of race, and merge his double self—a black man and an American—into a better and truer self.26

  But there are others who would think of Douglass more as an activist than an intellectual. You have written on the predicaments of Black intellectuals. What kind of an intellectual was Douglass? You have propagated the Gramscian concept of the “organic intellectual.”27 Would you call him one?

  CW: He is definitely an intellectual. He is not an academic, but he is certainly an intellectual. Douglass, I think, represents the height of modern eloquence, what Cicero and Quintilian call “wisdom speaking,” or a memorable and moving utterance that touches not just mind but also heart and soul, both to think and act, and I can’t think of someone who is able to do that and not be an intellectual in a certain sort. Absolutely. I think he is also an organic intellectual. He is an intellectual who was shaped by a movement, the Abolitionist movement, one of the greatest social movements in the history of America, maybe even of modern times, the nineteenth century certainly. To have someone who was molded, shaped, and formed in that movement—you can just see it over time, the intellectual exposure, the readings of a variety of different thinkers as he is trying to promote the cause of the movement, the cause of freedom and justice. I mean, it’s very rare that you have a kind of Gramscian-like organic intellectual who does not go to school, who learns how to read and write and think in a serious way in the context of a movement. That’s a rare thing, you know. It’s not even true for Marx himself. When he is writing his dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” he’s not part of a movement at all, not as of yet.

  As to Douglass, one wonders whether he is reading William Cobbett, one of the great cultural social critics who was tied to working-class, populist concerns.28 I don’t know if he’s reading Hazlitt.29 I don’t know if he’s reading Ruskin.30 Did he read William Morris?31 One wonders. We know he loved Carlyle. This is very interesting. Carlyle’s book On Heroes and Hero Worship meant a lot to Douglass, and the Carlyle between Sartor Resartus up unto maybe The French Revolution does have some very important things to say in terms of his critique of society. He later became much more conservative, and by the time we get to the pamphlet on niggers, Carlyle is really degenerated.32 I’m telling you, sometimes it is best just to die early.

  CHB: Well, there is a link to Emerson, I would think, because Emerson liked Carlyle, too.

  CW: Absolutely, absolutely. Do we have evidence, though, of Douglass reading Emerson?

  CHB: Yes, yes.

  CW: Widely, though?

  CHB: Oh, I can’t tell you. For example, there is the idea of representative men, which James McCune Smith takes up in his introduction to the second autobiography. He explicitly alludes to Emerson’s Representative Men by claiming that Douglass himself is “a Representative American man—a type of his country men.”33 I remember Douglass read English Traits, but that was later in his life, in 1886.34

  CW: I wonder how widely, how deeply. But I know that they were on platforms together for the celebration of British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies; I remember they are mentioned in the Gay Allen biography.35 Historians make much of that, as my dear friend at Harvard, Lawrence Buell, who wrote that wonderful biography of Emerson, did.36 You can see the overlap there with Douglass, but it’s not tight; it’s not close. Emerson wasn’t close to anybody, including his wife. But it would be interesting, if they had spent more time together. But, you know, this recent work37 that you note between Douglass and Melville . . .

  CHB: Yes, it is quite fascinating to see how many scholars have considered comparing the two.

  CW: Well, I haven’t read the new collection; I know Sterling Stuckey and others had talked about the Black elements in, as well as Black influences on, Melville in Moby-Dick and other texts, but Douglass and Melville, wow, I’d be quite interested.38 There is nobody like Melville in American literature, I’m telling you. There is this new book by William Spanos on Melville. That is powerful. On Melville’s critique of American imperialism. He’s got a Heideggerian reading, too, and a critique of the metaphysical tradition and the openness to concrete, lived experience not being subsumable under any kind of philosophical system. But William Spanos, my dear brother, he was a teacher of Edward Said at Mount Hermon, when Said was a prep school student,39 and, you know, Spanos founded Boundary 2, the first postmodern journal. I was blessed to be on the board together with Paul Bové, Jonathan Arac, Donald Pease, and the others. But Spanos has got two huge volumes out on Melville, one just on Moby-Dick, and the recent one is on the later fiction. It is called Herman Melville and the American Calling,40 and it is about Melville’s resistance to the American call for nationalist, chauvinist, exceptionalist discourse. It’s a fascinating read. But Melville is just so profound, and to juxtapose him with Douglass, who has his own kinds of profundities but is very, very different, is a complicated matter.

  CHB: One possible aspect of comparison would be their concepts of power, how they describe power relations, and I think in that respect they would be equal.

  CW: That’s interesting.

  CHB: Of course, the other reference would be their ways of being prophets.

  CW: Oh yes, that’s true. That’s very true.

  CHB: As you defined it, to be a prophet is not about predicting an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils, and both did.41

  CW: Absolutely, in that sense both would be deeply prophetic. And yet, Douglass was such an activist, and Melville was hardly an activist at all, or not a political activist. You could say he was an activist in language, and, my God, identifying those concrete evils was a form of activism. I’m quite intrigued by how these folk are connecting Melville and Douglass.

  CHB: But to come back to the question of nationalism, there is another interesting recent study on Douglass, a chapter in a book by one of the editors of the collection of essays on Douglass and Melvil
le, Robert Levine: Dislocating Race and Nation.42 Levine investigates the critique of Douglass that you share as to his commitment to the nation in the later years, to American patriotism and so on. One of the issues usually mentioned in this context is the annexation of Santo Domingo, later known as the Dominican Republic. Douglass was involved in exploring the possibilities of an annexation, that is, he was a member of a government committee that went there and interviewed the people, and he is always criticized in that he seemed to encourage the annexation in dialogue with President Grant. Levine takes a close look at the contemporary debate and shows that those people, for example, Charles Sumner or Carl Schurz, who were against the annexation, were against it partly for the wrong reasons from Douglass’s point of view.43 Their arguments based on climate theory were racist in fearing that annexation would add “tropical” Blacks, who allegedly were unfit for civilization to the US nation. According to them, certain regions of the earth were preserved for specific races and one should not mix them.

  So, their anti-imperialist arguments seem to be progressive, but they were racist as well. In contrast, Douglass argued for the annexation, granted that the Blacks of Santo Domingo would consent to it, and he believed they would. As you know, it never came about, but it was a very concrete plan at the time, and Levine tells a much more complex story than most historians who complain about Douglass, asking, “How could he ever be in favor of the annexation?”