Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  CW: Well, I think that even if Douglass had his own good reasons, if he’s acting as an agent of the US government, there is a good chance that the US government does not have the same reasons that he does. And in the end their reasons will prevail in terms of the effects and consequences of the policy.

  CHB: That’s right. But Levine goes into the papers of the president, and there is a “Memorandum” in his personal files, a list that he made for himself of “Reasons why San Domingo should be annexed to the United States.”44 Well, what are his reasons? What are good reasons for the annexation? You’re right, they are economic reasons.

  CW: Absolutely. Resources.

  CHB: Exactly. But the interesting thing is that, in this list, there is also the issue of race and, for example, the reflection that it would be favorable in terms of fighting slavery that still existed in Brazil if the US were less dependent on Brazilian goods.

  CW: That’s interesting. No, that’s true. It’s very true, because we have to keep in mind that Douglass had encountered some very ugly racism within the Abolitionist movement himself, you know, reducing him from person to symbol and spectacle and “stay away from philosophy, you just give the facts,” as John Collins used to tell him all the time.45 Now, it’s true, people like William White saved his life, so that there’s a white brother and a Harvard grad who really sacrificed himself to save Douglass’s life, and Douglass almost got killed in Pendleton, Indiana.46 So he had some white comrades who he knew cared for him. But the racism within the Abolitionist movement was something he was quite sensitive to. And, therefore, you can understand how he would also be sensitive to some of the anti-imperialist arguments that were also racist. It’s true that those kinds of complications always need to be acknowledged, even though in the end, I would want to come down on the anti-imperialist side with good reasons rather than on the US government side with good reasons. See, Douglass situated himself historically on the wrong side. It reminds you of James Weldon Johnson in Nicaragua, who wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.47 Remember, when he is in Central America—that’s where he writes that novel—he’s an agent of US imperialism. He’s pushing, supporting the companies down there, and then still reflecting on various forms of oppression in the metropole, in the US itself. So it’s interesting how you get those kinds of contradictions. But, I guess, we’re all shot through with contradictions.

  CHB: Let us talk about the significance of Douglass in this particular historical moment. In a recent interview with Tavis Smiley on Public Radio International, you talked about Douglass’s attempts to influence President Lincoln, trying to push him toward more forceful action with regard to Emancipation. Discussing the prospects of the Obama presidency, you suggested that we need a Douglass today as well, a Douglass who would put pressure on President Obama as to the recognition of today’s problems of African Americans—and, by extension, Americans of all colors who suffer from the effects of neoliberal politics. Obama refers to Lincoln and to Douglass.

  CW: Yeah, I think my dear brother Barack Obama has got the wrong Lincoln in mind. And Douglass could help him here. And I think by keeping track of Douglass, when Douglass called Lincoln a representative of American racism or when Wendell Phillips famously called Lincoln the “slave hound from Illinois,” you wonder what is going on here. You see what I mean. That’s not the Lincoln that people want to take seriously, but it is the Lincoln who is part of the historical record. So that when I say Obama has got the wrong Lincoln, you know, he thinks that is the Lincoln who is concerned with reaching out to rivals, especially on his Right. So you bring in people from the opposite political party or the opposing political group or constituency, and you don’t recognize that Lincoln was not only a child of his age but that one of his heroes was a slaveholder, Henry Clay, from Kentucky; his best friend is a slave-trader, Joshua Speed, with whom he sleeps in the same bed for four years, visits him over and over again. Lincoln has his own slave that Joshua Speed gives him when he goes and spends time with him in Kentucky.

  That is not to say that Lincoln didn’t hate slavery, but it is to say that he was quite complacent and willing to defer. He doesn’t oppose the Black Codes in the State of Illinois, where Black people had to pay money in order to enter the state. We know his history of voting for the slave trade in Washington, DC, in the House; we know of his strong support of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That was really, one could say, the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Abolitionists. We know that in the first inaugural address he talked about supporting the first proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which was to make slavery permanent in the South as a concession to the South, the unamendable amendment. He said, “Yes, I will accept that.” And Douglass, of course, was ready to go to Haiti because of that. That’s one of the moments when he calls Lincoln the pro-slavery president.

  Most historians don’t deal with that Lincoln. They don’t want to deal with that Lincoln. Well, Obama needs to recognize that that is an integral part of the Lincoln that he is crazy about, and that the Lincoln Douglass calls pro-slavery goes on from that: he is the Lincoln of colonization; he supports not just either going to Liberia or Cow Island—where he provides the money and over three hundred Black folk die—or to Columbia, which is now Panama, the isthmus there; Lincoln supports colonization. The Lincoln that most of us really cherish is the Lincoln of just the last two and a half years of his life, and that’s because of the Abolitionist movement; it’s because of Harriet Beecher Stowe; it’s because of Wendell Phillips; it’s because of Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass at the top. So that you say to President Obama, “Now, wait a minute, you not only support the Republican ambassador to China, you got him in your Cabinet. You feel like you got your team of rivals in this little truncated, domesticated, tamed version of Lincoln.” You say, “No, there is no great Lincoln without the social movement,” and Barack Obama is very, very suspicious of social movement people. He is mesmerized by the establishment. He wants to reassure especially the financial establishment; he is mesmerized by Wall Street; he is seduced by these neoliberal economists, by the economists who have been rationalizing elite interests for the last fifteen or twenty years. And, you see, the great Lincoln was not mesmerized by these kinds of people; he really wasn’t. The great Lincoln would say: “Frederick, you got a point. Harriet, you are the one who got us into this mess. Sooner or later I’ve got to take you all seriously, you know. I’m not an Abolitionist, but I do hate slavery. I didn’t believe that we could overcome white supremacy and create a multiracial body politic until the last few days of my life, but I am influenced by the social movement.” And you say, “OK, but which social movements influence Barack Obama?” The green movement, that’s the one movement. I think, he is very good on green issues; he really is.48 But when it comes to the Black freedom movement, he is trying to neutralize if not tame it, you see. He’s got a very, very ambivalent relation to it, he really does.

  CHB: And you think it is more than just strategy, because you might realize as an American politician, and especially as a president, that your means are limited, that if you go too far, especially too far to the left, that that’s the end of you. So how do you steer in-between?

  CW: I think, in the end, it’s fundamentally a question of style, and here, as Frantz Fanon used to say, style does help to define who you are and help to define your being. Barack Obama is someone who likes to be liked by everyone, and he likes to be able to create some kind of middle-ground synthesis that brings people together without really coming to terms with the deep conflicts. Here he could learn a lot from Douglass. He might quote Douglass all day and all night about power conceding and so forth, but Douglass understood the depth of it, that you don’t find truth in the middle of the road; you find truth beneath the superficial, mediocre, mainstream dialogue, and the truth is buried, is hidden beneath that, and when you connect with that truth, you have to take a stand. When you take a stand, you’re not going to be liked by everybody; people will try t
o crush you, people will try to lie on you, people will try to kill you. Now, Obama still gets assaults in the media all the time, but I think he really doesn’t want to be someone who just takes a principled stand and risk and is able to withstand all those bows and arrows. That’s not his personality. I would argue that the Black freedom movement has produced a lot of different styles and strategies, but the great figures in the Black freedom movement, like Douglass, know they can’t be liked by everybody. When you think of figures like Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, that’s not the strand that Barack Obama is comfortable with at all.

  CHB: There is this great statement by Douglass you just alluded to from which Obama takes these famous lines: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”49 But in the same speech Douglass also says: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing of the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

  CW: That’s powerful. So Douglass understood.

  CHB: And he goes on to say, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” If that’s not powerful . . . But Obama doesn’t quote it.

  CW: He didn’t go that far. No. Well, you see, some of those particular words are not part of the soul of Barack Obama. And, you know, everybody is who they are and not somebody else.

  CHB: But you could say that he wouldn’t be where he is if they hadn’t been who they were.

  CW: That’s right. Absolutely. He wouldn’t be head of the American empire as a Black man if he followed the fiery Douglass. That’s absolutely right. And that’s both the strength as well as the severe limitation of Barack Obama.

  CHB: And the system wouldn’t allow it either.

  CW: That’s exactly right. In fact, that’s probably the most important thing: the system that wouldn’t allow and concede his ascendency, which is still historic, and that’s the reason why I supported him. But we ought to be honest, the truth that led many of us to support him is the same truth that lead many of us to criticize him and the system, and I think that’s something that the early Douglass would understand, though, later, Douglass could be appropriated by Obama and would be very consistent. In a certain sense, he’s heading the very system that was appointing Douglass.

  CHB: Maybe one more thing. In his autobiography Douglass emphasizes the moment when he fights against the slave breaker Edward Covey, and he says one of the preconditions was that he was ready to give up his life. He refers back to Revolutionary times and that famous phrase “Give me liberty or death.”50 So to be ready to give up your life for freedom is also a thought that Douglass cherishes, and it is like a red thread in his work, at least its first part.

  CW: A deep commitment.

  CHB: Yes, and I thought it was interesting because you refer to something like that yourself.

  CW: Absolutely. But this sense of giving up one’s life was the ultimate cause, but there’s also a penultimate cause in the life you live before you die, and that to me is just as important a question, you know. How do you use your time and your energy? And the time and energy that you have available to you before death puts an end to the whole thing, and there again you got this creative tension between truth and power and a commitment to telling the truth, bearing witness to the truth and yet easily being marginalized versus trying to gain access to political power, economic power, cultural power, and oftentimes easily being absorbed and incorporated, and how do you deal with that to and fro, moving back and forth. It is like the early Ralph Bunche, you know—Marxist, leftist, powerful critic of US capitalism—and the later Ralph Bunche, who is one of the Black bourgeoisie to the core, Nobel Peace Prize winner hanging out in the upper-middle-class circles in Black and white DC, caught up in the establishment. We see a similar shift in Douglass: Shakespeare Society on the fifteen-acre Cedar Hill that looks like the White House in Anacostia, all of the different teas there, having the very genteel dialogues about a variety of delicate subjects while Jim Crow is raining terror on Black folk.

  Did you see this new book called Slavery by Another Name?51 It’s a hell of a text. The author is actually the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, and he is a white Southern brother and his name is Blackmon. Fascinating ironies of life. But he is a kind of centrist guy who follows the white and Black members of the family of Green Cottenham in a book of about five hundred pages that won all these awards. I couldn’t put it down because this guy really concludes that Jim Crow was a form of slavery, a view confirmed by many Black and progressive scholars years ago, for instance, Leon Litwack’s book Trouble in Mind, which is still the best thing ever written on Jim Crow.52 People were saying nothing has been written since Litwack—that’s not true—but this guy says something like, “This is slavery by another name, this is the most vicious form of terrorism I could conceive alongside slavery,” and he’s telling a story beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century of the white and Black members of the Cottenham family, how their lives are intertwined. The Black members of the family get caught in this Jim Crow system, and it is quite ugly. The book focuses on the human dimension to it. It is not an analysis solely, but Blackmon is telling the archetypal story of what happened generation after generation. And you say to yourself, Douglass is dead in 1895, but by the 1870s, it is beginning to take shape, crystallizing in the 1880s, legalized in the 1890s, and was in place until the 1960s, and you say, well, where is the voice of that early Douglass in the nation as Jim Crow is developing in the 1870s and ’80s?

  CHB: But even so, someone like Ida B. Wells speaks out for Douglass and acknowledges him in this respect. I don’t know whether she idealized him, but she takes him seriously as a fighter for the cause, even in the later years.

  CW: Yes, that’s true. And you couldn’t get a grander crusader for justice than Ida in the face of American terrorism as manifested in Jim Crow.

  CHB: And she was the person who convinced him that the reasons given for lynching were not the true ones. As you know, she studied the statistics and specific cases, and she told him, and that made him aware that he should not stick to the propaganda, and he changed his mind, and then he gave this speech, which you mentioned earlier.

  CW: I mean the last speech that he gave, “Lessons of the Hour,” 1894, that’s a great speech. A powerful speech, there’s no doubt about that. I remember when I first read it. He is looking back; it is almost a self-critique too. He is looking back saying, “Don’t be duped by this kind of false bread of freedom given to emancipated slaves. We got new challenges. America, you either have to come to terms with this or you are going under.” But what I think Ida B. Wells has in mind and what Du Bois has in mind—and you pointed out that on the cover of Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn,53 he is standing before a portrait of Douglass—is that it is inconceivable to be a freedom fighter in the United States and not have Frederick Douglass’s spirit as integral to what you are doing. That is part of the grand achievement of those twenty-three years. And that is just there. He could have gone off and played golf after Emancipation like William Lloyd Garrison and a lot of the others. For them it was over.

  CHB: And that is what, for a moment, he had thought about. Why not go to a farm and lead a quieter life?54 Haven’t I done enough—

  CW: —Enough in one lifetime. You can understand that. Absolutely right. Even though you can’t ever conceive of Martin or Malcolm doing that in their later lives. You just get the impression that they were so on fire that they would have just burned till the end, no matter what, till sixty-five, seventy, and Du Bois was like that too. At ninety-five he is still on fire, you know. There’s no doubt about it. Very much so. It’s a beautiful thing to be on fire, though. It really is.

&
nbsp; W. E. B. Du Bois, 1918

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Black Flame

  W. E. B. DU BOIS

  With a Black president in the White House, the question arose as to what this meant for the Black prophetic tradition. Was it possible that Black people would mistake this symbolic achievement for a wholesale victory? Could it be that, overjoyed by the iconic recognition of Blackness, they would ignore—notwithstanding the undeniable effects of the financial crisis—the continuing or rather growing inequality between whites and Blacks, rich and poor in terms of decent income, housing, education, health care, jobs? In this situation, the incorruptible voices of the Black prophetic tradition needed to be heard. We decided to continue our dialogue, and W. E. B. Du Bois, as undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century, was the obvious choice. We agreed to explore the more radical facets of his thinking and expose his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has often been considered too painful to become part of the American (or even African American) collective memory. The title of this chapter, “The Black Flame,” refers to Du Bois’s little-known trilogy of historical novels, which he wrote in the last decade of his life.1

  CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: Given W. E. B. Du Bois’s long and eminent career, his versatility and productivity, any assessment of his life work is a challenging, if not daunting, undertaking. It seems to be appropriate to start out by evoking some of the points you have made in your own writings on Du Bois. You have written extensively on Du Bois. In your study on American pragmatism, you characterized Du Bois as “the Jamesian organic intellectual,”2 and in your essay “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” you called him “the towering black scholar of the twentieth century”3 and “the brook of fire through which we all must pass in order to gain access to the intellectual and political weaponry needed to sustain the radical democratic tradition in our time.”4 In addition, you put forth an extended critique of some of Du Bois’s basic tenets.