by Cornel West
You can just see how badly we need Du Bois today in the midst of our catastrophic circumstances. There is no doubt about it. We need the rigor of his structural and institutional analysis, the religiously musical sensitivity to the things that religion is wrestling with as opposed to simply the truth claims of the God belief or the truth claims of the faith appropriated by religious people, and, probably more than anything else, his acknowledgement of subaltern peoples and voices, and just how crucial those voices are in helping us come to terms with our crisis. There is a sense in which Du Bois’s witness is such a thoroughgoing indictment of the transatlantic intelligentsia. It really is. If you were to examine much of the intellectual work of the transatlantic intelligentsia—from Europe and the US—there is not just a relative silence around Du Bois’s work but a relative silence about the issues and problematic that Du Bois is coming to terms with. It’s a very sad state of affairs when you look at the kind of pre–Du Boisian condition of much of the transatlantic intelligentsia. And it says much about how far we have not come; how cowardly, how deferential, how careerist, how narrow so many of our beloved colleagues in the academy can be.
CHB: Well, you pay for it. And he paid for it.
CW: Absolutely. There is a cost to be paid. But I love Martin Luther King Jr.’s remarks in his “Honoring Dr. Du Bois” address.42 I recall talking with John Hope Franklin before he died about his decision to attend this event, because when they had the celebration of Du Bois’s birthday at Carnegie Hall, most of the intelligentsia, including Black intellectuals, would not come within a mile or two miles of the gathering; they were just scared. They were afraid; they didn’t want to be tainted with the Communist brush during the anti-Communist hysteria and frenzy that was then taking place. But, thank God, Martin Luther King Jr., along with John Hope Franklin and a few others, had the courage to attend. This is when brother Martin laid out his statement:
We cannot talk of Dr. Du Bois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life. Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years. It is worth noting that Abraham Lincoln warmly welcomed the support of Karl Marx during the Civil War and corresponded with him freely. In contemporary life, the English-speaking world has no difficulty with the fact that Sean O’Casey was a literary giant of the twentieth century and a Communist or that Pablo Neruda is generally considered the greatest living poet though he also served in the Chilean Senate as a Communist. It is time to cease muting the fact that Dr. Du Bois was a genius and chose to be a Communist. Our irrational obsessive anti-Communism has led us into too many quagmires to be retained as if it were a mode of scientific thinking. [. . .] Dr. Du Bois’s greatest virtue was his committed empathy with all the oppressed and his divine dissatisfaction with all forms of injustice.43
This is powerful stuff. This is very, very powerful stuff. King is right. Martin King is absolutely right. Good God Almighty.
Martin Luther King Jr., 1964
CHAPTER THREE
Moral Fire
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
After having spoken about the two towering male figures of the Black tradition of activists and intellectuals in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, we decided to focus next on Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois died aged ninety-five on August 27, 1963, that is, on the eve of the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, passing on the baton, as it were, to King, who delivered his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech before the Lincoln Memorial.
Though our exchange had been motivated by politics from the very beginning, the dramatic political events of 2011—with the anti-government protests in Spain, the Arab Spring, and the emerging Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States—brought an urgency to our transatlantic conversations. We knew that if we wanted to bring the precious Black prophetic voices into the current debates and struggles for freedom, justice, and economic equality, we would have to wrest them from a collective memory that had reduced their radical messages to inoffensive sound bites. The most evident example of a sanitized national icon was Martin Luther King Jr., a fact that strengthened our decision to select him for the subject of our next talk, which took place in August 2011. Our project gained further momentum when the dialogue on King was accepted for publication in the German journal Amerikastudien/American Studies.1 The idea of a book took shape—and we sped up.
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: You consider Martin Luther King Jr. the “most significant and successful organic intellectual in American history.”2 Your claim that “never before in our past has a figure outside of elected public office linked the life of the mind to social change with such moral persuasiveness and political effectiveness” seems to be based on the following interconnected assumptions: first, that the vocation of the intellectual is to “let suffering speak, let victims be visible, and let social misery be put on the agenda of those in power,”3 and, second, that “moral action is based on a broad, robust prophetism that highlights systemic social analysis of the circumstances under which tragic persons struggle.”4
The following quotation by Martin Luther King Jr. is particularly pertinent in view of the present global crisis of capitalism, which drives more and more people into poverty:
I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to identify with the poor, I choose to give my life for the hungry, I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. [. . .] This is the way I’m going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice saying, “Do something for others.”5
“Let us march on poverty,” King suggested in 1965.6 To highlight the increasing plight of the poor in the United States almost half a century later, Tavis Smiley and you recently undertook the “Poverty Tour” through eighteen cities, talking to Americans of all colors who struggle to make ends meet.7 In his mission statement, Tavis Smiley quotes from King’s declaration, thus it seems to be particularly apt to speak about Martin Luther King Jr. at this very moment—his historical significance to America and his relevance in the present.
CORNEL WEST: One of the great prophetic voices of the twentieth century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, said that the future of America depends on the American response to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.8 Martin himself had said that the major issues in the America that he would soon die in—what he called a “sick country”—were militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty. Those four, for him, were going to be the fundamental challenges. And I think he was prophetic in this sense: when we look at the role of the military-industrial complex—the role of the Pentagon, the share of the national budget, the ways in which militarism has been routinized and institutionalized and recently outsourced; then the materialism, which is really very much tied to corporate media in the various ways in which it produces its weapons of mass distraction that try to pacify and to render the citizens sleepwalking by means of stimulation and titillation; then when you look at racisms, beginning with the “new Jim Crow” that Michelle Alexander talks about9—with the prison-industrial complex in ways in which legacies of white supremacy are still very much operative, even though in some ways more covert than before; and then the last one—poverty—which is very much tied to the Wall Street oligarchic and plutocratic complex—so, when you think about the military-industrial complex, the corporate-media multiplex, the prison-industrial complex, and the Wall Street oligarchic and plutocratic complex, those four complexes have really squeezed most of the juices or sucked most of the life out of the democratic experiment. And this was what Martin was talking about.
So, I think, in fact, when brother Tavis and I were on that Poverty Tour and said, “Look, we are trying to make the world safe for the legacy of Martin Luther King,” that it was really responding to Heschel and saying, “You know, since 1968, what has been the response of the c
ountry to Martin on all four issues?” When we look at wealth inequality increasing, hyper-incarceration; when we use brother Loïc Wacquant’s language, from his brilliant book Punishing the Poor10—the kind of emptying of souls given the debased and decayed culture that is produced day-in and day-out by the corporate media, Martin’s characterization of America as a sick country really makes more and more sense, and I think more and more people are seeing that. Part of the problem is, I think, the death of Martin in some sense signified that America was in deep need of a revolution. He used the language of revolution, the need of a revolution in priorities, revolution in values, the need for a transfer of power from oligarchs to the people. America was deeply in need of a revolution, but he wondered whether America was only capable of a counter-revolution, and therefore all he could do was just bear witness and be willing to live and die for what he understood at the end of his life as democratic socialism or kind of a radical redistribution of power and wealth, as he put it. He used to say, over and over, every day he would put on his cemetery clothes. That was all he could do. And in some ways I think he was right; you just have to be coffin-ready for this bearing of witness and struggle in the midst of a very sick country run by greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats whose interest is very entrenching, whose power is mighty. It’s not almighty. Rebellion could make a difference; civil disobedience could have some impact. But the kind of fundamental rise of a revolutionary social movement is very, very unlikely given the powers that be.
CHB: It was a long process for him, too, to discover what you were just talking about: the power of these forces.
CW: But it’s funny, though, because it’s two things about Martin people tend to overlook. Coretta Scott King told me one time that when she went out with Martin on their first date, it was the first time in her life she ever met a Socialist, that Martin was already calling himself a Socialist and was part of the intercollegiate Socialist movement.11 The other interesting thing is that when Martin was called by the Nobel Prize committee and told that he had won, he said that he didn’t deserve to win if Norman Thomas had not yet won. Norman Thomas, of course: Princeton undergraduate, Union Theological Seminary grad, left the church, became head of the Socialist Party, ran for president six times—three times against Franklin Roosevelt—and actually was supported by John Dewey.12 So that even as a very young man, especially under Chivers—there was a professor named Walter Chivers at Morehouse who was a Socialist—13
CHB: And sociologist—
CW: And sociologist too, absolutely. So they read a lot of Marx, and Martin was very influenced by this brother. So that in an interesting kind of way—even though a lot of people think that Martin really began as a liberal and was radicalized as a result of the movement and the pressures of Stokely Carmichael and the pressures of those in SNCC14 and, of course, Stanley Levison, who had been a Communist, and Bayard Rustin, who was a Socialist15—in fact, as Coretta has suggested, he actually began early on as a Socialist but knew that he could never use that language in the Jim Crow South or even America. And so it became a matter of a kind of confirmation of what Norman Thomas and others had been talking about in the thirties and forties. Even in the early sixties, Norman Thomas was one of his great heroes. Martin is a very fascinating figure in that regard. He really is.
CHB: But don’t you think there was a change in him, after all? At least I think he talks about that himself—that once he went to Chicago and lived there among the poor, that this was yet another dimension to him. Or was it just that when he was confronted with that situation in the ghetto, he thought he had to speak out, that he had to be more explicit, that he had to drop his careful distance in rhetoric to socialist or Marxist phrases in order to get his message across. Or is it both?
CW: I think there were two things going on when he moved to 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in Chicago. I was just there at the apartments with brother Tavis in the very room where he and Coretta lived, and then when we met Bernice and Martin Luther King III and laid the wreath a couple of days later, they talked about living in Chicago—because he brought the kids with him to Chicago—that, on the one hand, Martin had little experience in the North. Boston and Philadelphia had been the only places where he had spent time, and Boston in some ways was an aberration as opposed to Chicago and Detroit, as opposed to even Los Angeles or New York, with high concentration of Black folk, even Washington, DC. To move to Chicago was to recognize that the ways in which Jim Crow Jr. in the North operated, as opposed to Jim Crow Sr. in the South. The dynamics were different. It was more entrenched in the North in terms of getting at some of the economic causes, but it was much more visible in the South, because the apartheid was right in your face, you know, and the violence was right in your face. And so he knew he had to come to terms with class issues in the North in a way that he just didn’t in the South. But in addition, I think—and here, of course, it goes beyond Norman Thomas—that when Martin became a critic of American imperialism—because that happened roughly at the same time: he moves to Chicago in ’66; he is already being pushed by SNCC to come out against the war; then he reads Ramparts magazine and sees the bodies of those precious Vietnamese children, and decides he must speak out: he can’t be against violence in Mississippi and not also be against violence in Vietnam—that being forced to come to terms with class in Chicago and forced to come to terms with empire in Vietnam does in fact change him and sharpen his analysis, even given his earlier socialist sensibilities and sentiment. It really does. But it’s in the heat of battle, it’s in the context of intense struggle that Martin begins to have this clarity, and, ironically, it’s the clarity that intensifies his dance with mortality.
CHB: And toward the end it becomes a battle not just against all these forces you mentioned but against his own activist groups, because they become anxious that he is going too far. And he is very isolated.
CW: Absolutely. At the time he is shot dead, 72 percent of Americans disapprove of him and 55 percent of Black Americans disapprove of him.16 He is isolated. He is alienated. He is down and out. He is wrestling with despair. He is smoking constantly; he is drinking incessantly. He is, in many ways, more and more—not so much distant but having more difficulties with Coretta, who was heroic in her own ways. His relations with the various women and so forth are increasing as a way of what he called dealing with his anxiety, getting relief from the deep anxiety of living under the threat of death and all of the vicious attacks and assaults on his character by Black writers like Carl Rowan17 and leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young18 and within his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,19 people seeing him becoming more radical.20 And that too is something that’s not talked about as much as it should: that Martin King started very much as a patriot, that he was part of that generation of the Black bourgeois formation, where the Declaration of Independence had nearly the same status as the Bible, not as much, but it nearly did.
CHB: The American civil religion.
CW: Exactly. It’s just so tied into his own Christianity.
CHB: But the interesting question here is, to me, is it patriotism or is it some kind of universalism? Because what he appeals to when he refers to the Declaration of Independence is the declaration of equality of people. So often in the past, as we have seen in Douglass and Du Bois, there was a conscious reference to those values that, at the same time, are values of the United States of America, and thus there is an interrelation between universalist values and patriotism, because you might be proud of your country if you believe that it represents those values.
CW: That’s true. But I think—maybe I could be wrong because I am fundamentally opposed to any version of American exceptionalism—American exceptionalism is not just self-justifying but one of the most self-deceiving concepts in the history of the nation. There is a distinctiveness to the American democratic experiment, but America is in no way a nation as chosen, in no way a nation that God smiles at and winks at and shuns others. I thin
k Martin King, early in his career, did subscribe to a form of American exceptionalism, and in that sense, there still is an interplay between universal values and the fact that America enacts or embodies those values at their best.
But I believe at the end of his life he felt that American exceptionalism was a major impediment for the struggle for justice in America and around the world; he had discovered that it was Gandhi that had influence; he had discovered that South African struggles for democracy were as inspiring as anything Thomas Jefferson had to offer. Maybe it was a matter of growing and maturing and recognizing that internationalism was the only way to go. I recall listening to a sermon of his in ’68, ’67/’68, where he says that he has to recognize now more than ever that his commitment is fundamentally to a struggle for justice that doesn’t just transcend the US context but views the US context alongside of the international context. You see, when he began in ’55, ’56, ’57, that’s not his language. Now, you would think as a Christian preacher—which is his fundamental vocation—every flag would be beneath the Cross. And Martin did always believe that the Cross was about unarmed truth and unconditional love. Those are the two pillars that he always talked about: unarmed truth and unconditional love, across the board. And that is an internationalism; every flag is beneath that. But that American exceptionalism, you see, sneaks back in again, and lo and behold, the United States becomes that very special case that embodies it more than anybody else. And the next thing you know—going back to American civil religion—it’s providential. And even if America somehow died out, it would undoubtedly bounce back, rooted as it was in that heroic errand into the wilderness—an American jeremiad that our dear brother Sacvan Bercovitch talked about with such an insight.21 And Martin was a part of that for much of his calling and career. But I think at the end he was beginning to let that go. Malcolm X had already let it go a long time before, though we must not forget Martin reaching out through his personal lawyer Jones22 to Malcolm, joining him in his efforts to put the United States on trial at the UN for the violation of the human rights of Blacks.