Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  CHB: But it was easier for Malcolm X to see through the deception because of his upbringing that left him no—or hardly any—illusions to begin with, whereas King rose in the academy and had a successful career, and so it’s the upbringing that very much shaped him.

  CW: That’s exactly right. Even in fraternity—Martin King was an Alpha like myself, as were W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and Duke Ellington, Jesse Owens, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Donny Hathaway, John Hope Franklin.23 All of these were Alphas—and we Alphas do tend to move in patriotic ways. But you look at Du Bois: he swerves from US patriotism; Robeson: swerves; and Martin at the very end: swerves. That’s what’s fascinating. That’s a very difficult thing to do, to break like that. Someone like myself, I had the privilege of building on their breaks, you know, with the Black Panther Party and others. I had already learned lessons as a young lad that America didn’t have this special providential role in the history of the world, ordained by God to embody democracy, given its history of what it did to indigenous peoples and crushing the workers, enslaving Black folk, and so on. But there is something about that Black middle-class incorporation and formation in the South as a “PK,” as a preacher’s kid, that made it much more difficult for Martin to break and made his break more heroic. Very much so. Martin—there simply is no one like him in the history of the American experience because he really is an intellectual, but he never really has a lot of time to meditate and reflect. But he has a deep tie to the life of the mind, and his calling is rooted in his Christian faith, unlike Douglass and unlike Du Bois.

  CHB: How did he talk about the possibilities of combining religious faith and socialism? It was not really a problem for him, or was it?

  CW: I think that because he was part of the Black prophetic tradition, he always connected religious faith with social change, and socialism just became one particular end and aim of social change that he began to take very seriously. Black prophetic tradition has always rooted spirituality and religiosity with social transformation. And this is where you can show that present-day America is so profoundly decadent, especially in the age of Obama—it is demeaning, devaluing, and marginalizing the Black prophetic tradition, which has been the primary tradition that has contributed to the renewal and regeneration of American democracy.

  CHB: Could it be that this moral change is based on a change of social conditions that people are confronted with, so that something like the hope that is embodied in Christian prophetic faith is hard to maintain, hard to sustain, when in your social conditions you see hardly any future for your kids, for yourself?

  CW: Yes, but you think through 244 years of slavery, that kind of American terrorizing and traumatizing and stigmatizing of Black folk, and we still kept the Black prophetic tradition alive. You are right. I think the social conditions that you are talking about have as much to do with the changes in the culture, with market forces so fundamentally undermining family and community, with corporate media filling the void with narcissism and materialism and individualism and those distractions. So that during slavery we could keep the Black prophetic tradition alive by lifting our voices—music was fundamental in sustaining Black dignity and sanity—and families still had networks, even given that the slaveholders attempted to destroy the Black family. Whereas in contemporary late-capitalist culture, there is such a distraction from empathy and compassion and community and non-market values as a whole, and you cannot have the Black prophetic tradition without non-market values. I mean, one of the problems since Martin’s death is when it comes to leadership. You have either the fear of being killed because the FBI, the CIA, and the repressive apparatus of the nation-state might kill you quickly—as was the case in the 1960s—not just Martin but Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton,24 and a lot of others—or the other alternative is just buying people, so that you end up with Black leaders today, most of whom are just up for sale. All you got to do is just give them a bit of money, give them access to corporate position, give them access to the White House, give them access to whatever status they want and they are paid off. So you either get killed or bought. And Martin, I mean, one of the reasons why he stands out so is that there was no price that he was ever willing to accept to be bought—and in that he was like Malcolm and like Fannie Lou Hamer.25 He was not up for sale, and that’s just so rare. It’s almost alien to us, really; it’s alien to us that corporate America couldn’t buy off everybody. The White House couldn’t incorporate him. He supported Lyndon Johnson intensely when LBJ helped to break the back of US apartheid, and then two and a half years later, LBJ was calling him a nigger preacher he wished would go away because of Martin’s opposition to the war. And Martin refused to support him in ’68, and LBJ decided to withdraw from the race. You see, that’s something. Even among the Black intelligentsia, Black leadership, and the Black community as a whole, many were talking about Martin like a dog. Here he is willing to die for folk, and they are still talking about him so bad. He refuses to be bought, you know. He doesn’t want to be popular in the community if he can’t have integrity. It’s a very rare thing.

  CHB: And now he is no longer able to defend himself, because in public memory he has not been turned into a radical leader, but as you always say, he has been sanitized, and it’s that sanitized King that has survived, and it is the radical King that has disappeared. Or maybe, due to the increasing suffering and the increasing crisis of capitalism, he is being rediscovered. One instance I noticed recently was when Tavis Smiley talked on National Public Radio about King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam,” which is not very well known.26 It is interesting to juxtapose the “I Have a Dream” speech with the “Beyond Vietnam” speech, but the latter is the forgotten or repressed Martin. I wonder how you see it, whether the more radical Martin has a chance to be rediscovered now.

  CW: The radical Martin is highlighted in what brother Tavis Smiley has done in the National Public Radio show on the “Beyond Vietnam” speech. And that Martin cannot but come back. So that the kind of, as you say, sanitized, sterilized Martin, the deodorized Martin, the Martin that has been Santaclausified,27 so that the Santa Claus that he now becomes, jolly old man with a smile giving out toys to everybody from right-wing Republicans to centrists to progressives, is opposed to the version of King who took a stand on the side of a class war and of an imperial battle, which is actually closer to the truth. He really did take a fundamental stand: “I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to identify with the poor.” That sounds like Eugene Debs; that sounds like Jim Larkin of the Dublin working-class 1913 strike; it sounds like all of the great freedom fighters of the last hundred and fifty years in modern times.28 Now that Martin is so scary; that Martin requires so much courage; that Martin requires all of us to pay such a price, that that Martin will live and come back, precisely how is the open question.

  I have the feeling that that Martin, in some ways, is going to be much more in the possession of people outside of the United States, in Brazil, in Africa, in Asia, than in America, since that Martin is really a prophetic figure for the world more than he is for America. I think he is too much for America. He is too honest; he is too truthful; he is too loving for a culture that is fearful of the truth and is fearful of a genuine love especially of poor people. There will be voices in America that will try to hold on to that later Martin, but I think the kind of hysteria—let’s use the wonderful word of Tennessee Williams—the hysteria of America doesn’t allow it to really come to terms with the deep truth of its history, and in that sense that Martin is repressed. That’s why all this notion of people walking around with the juxtaposition on the same shirt—Malcolm, Martin, Obama—is such a joke. And in people’s minds, they really think all three are identical, and you say, “What? Wait a minute. Do you understand?” I mean, you got Obama, who is the friendly face of the American empire, with drone-dropped bombs killing innocent people, at home crushing the poor with policies that are pro–Wall Street and pro-oligarchy and pro-plutocracy. And you got Mar
tin, who is with the poor folk who Obama is crushing, and Malcolm with the poor folk who Obama is crushing, especially the later Malcolm, who is a revolutionary even more so than Martin in some way. And you see all three of those and you can see the level of confusion and obfuscation that is taking place in America, which reinforces why the counter-revolution of the deeply conservative reactionary forces is triumphing.

  CHB: But it’s so easy because the media play into it. I read that you thought that the radical King in your own time, early as a young man at Harvard, was not yet the voice you listened to.29 This would change in the next decade; that’s what you said. And I wondered about that: Did it change in the eighties? Did you then read “Beyond Vietnam”? Did it resonate with the Left at that time?

  CW: You know, I had already read the radical Martin and had great respect for the radical Martin, and as a Christian I have very deep ideological affinities with him in terms of religious sensibility. But what was lacking in Martin—and I continue to say it is lacking in Martin—was his refusal to identify or immerse himself in youth culture.

  See, what Malcolm had was a style that resonated more with young people. Martin’s style had difficulties, and even as a young person and as a young Christian, I could identify much more with Malcolm the way I could identify with Huey Newton,30 Angela Davis,31 and Stokely Carmichael.32 It had something to do with church and the church leadership styles that Martin as a preacher tended to. And as a Southern preacher, too, a Black Southern preacher, his style was more distant from northern California rhythm and blues, funk orientation. Now, Malcolm himself was very conservative in some ways, especially as a member of the Nation of Islam, where they don’t even have music in their rituals, you see, but you could just tell in his style that he was closer to the styles in youth culture. There was a certain swagger; there was a certain sincerity in keeping it real, which is what the funk is all about. So there were elements of James Brown, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Lakeside, Ohio Players. You could feel it in Malcolm, whereas in Martin, you couldn’t feel that.

  CHB: That’s the same with the Du Bois we talked about. And it’s again the upbringing. It would have been quite difficult for them to step beyond certain limits that are produced by a bourgeois upbringing and bourgeois values and the emphasis on turning children into “civilized” human beings.

  CW: That’s true, but part of it is choices. Habitus is fundamental, but there is still choice. You can think of figures who come out of this same context as Du Bois who fundamentally chose to identify with the blues the way Du Bois did not, see what I mean? Duke Ellington, bourgeois to the core, but that Negro genius that he was—you could see him identifying with Biggie and Tupac. He had that kind of capacious personality. Louis Armstrong—Negro genius that he was—of course, from the street, so he is a little different. You could see Louis sit down with Ice Cube and probably kicking and having a good time, you know what I mean, whereas with Du Bois that’s not going to take place. You cannot see him sitting down with Billie Holiday; Billie Holiday would scare him to death. And I think that there is a sense in which George Clinton would scare Martin King to death: “George, what is all that hell, man? You know, I love you, but damn man, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” “Come on Martin, get into the groove!” That’s not his style, and that’s just something missing in Martin from my own point of view, just in terms of my own orientation. And it’s not a major thing, but I do think that the appropriation of Martin by young people is ongoing here and around the world—because I mean youth culture has been Afro-Americanized around the globe now—so there is a sense in which any appropriation of Martin is going to be effected by the Afro-Americanization that is already taking place among young people in Asia, Africa, Europe, Central America. He comes out of a different habitus that has its own specificity and distinctiveness. There is no doubt about that.

  CHB: What about the space, the social space of the church today? You talked about the moral decline, and the church was always the institution that would provide a space for self-assertion, even in those much worse times such as slavery and militant Jim Crow in the South. What about young people and the church today? Is it only for the middle class, something you do on Sunday because it’s proper to do? Or is there still real power in the churches?

  CW: I was blessed to be at the Progressive Baptist Convention just a few weeks ago, which is the convention that Martin helped found when he was booted out of the National Baptist Convention in 1961, with Gardner Taylor,33 who was the mentor of Martin King. He is now ninety-five years old. Brother Tavis Smiley and I were blessed to interview Reverend Taylor in front of the Progressive Baptist Convention, and it was something, because you look out, you see only about twenty-five hundred people there. Twenty years ago you would have seen ten thousand. That’s the result of the decline of the denominations. So, two basic phenomena are taking place: First, the impact of market culture on the Black church is the decline of denominations, so you get the rise of nondenominational churches, so many of the members of Progressive Baptists joined the nondenominational churches. And the second phenomenon is the Pentacostalization of the nondenominational churches, you see. So that here you get Pentacostals, which is, of course, a denomination founded by Black Baptists, the fastest-growing denomination in the whole world, which places stress on the third person in the Trinity, on the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit and highly individualist salvation. Most Pentacostal churches shy away from direct political involvement or action. In addition, you get nondenominational churches growing. You end up with a towering figure like Bishop T. D. Jakes,34 who is a spiritual genius, a great preacher, but doesn’t have a whole lot of political courage. I could go on and on. Another towering figure is Bishop Glen Staples,35 my dear brother, nondenominational and very much tied to working and poor people and politically active. Pentacostalism is still, in style, too funky for the well-to-do, the Black elites, you see, so that what happens is you get the breakdown of denominations, the Pentacostal styles becoming hegemonic.

  But the prophetic element associated with the old denominations, like progressive Baptists, is lost. So that you have some prophetic folk, like Bishop Staples—and there are few like him—but for the most part, it really is a matter of spiritual stimulation and titillation that has market parallels and market stimulation and titillation, and these nondenominational churches really don’t have the rich prophetic substance of courage, compassion, sacrifice, and risk. For example, there is the story that Wacquant and others tell about the $300 billion invested in the prison-industrial complex, the Marshall Plan for jails and prisons, so you get these escalating, exponentially increasing numbers of prisons, but most churches don’t have prison ministers. So you get a sense how far removed they are from the suffering of the people. Now, the preachers probably have one or two Bentleys, some have Lamborghinis, but they don’t have prison ministers, whereas the Progressive Baptist Convention in the 1950s, they are so attuned to the suffering of the people that wherever the people were being dominated, in whatever form they were dominated, they had a ministry that’s somehow connected. And so in that sense, the market-driven religiosity of much of the Black church these days is counter to the prophetic sensibility of Martin—what Martin King was all about—and that’s one of the major, major things missing in contemporary America. The two outstanding exceptions are my mentor, Reverend Herbert Daughtry, pastor of the House of the Lord Pentacostal Church, in Brooklyn, founder of the National Black United Front, an exemplary Black freedom fighter, and my dear brother Father Michael Pfleger, pastor at historic Saint Sabina, in Chicago, whose prophetic leadership is deeply grounded in King’s witness and legacy.36

  CHB: You associated the liberal Black church with social analysis, with an insight that goes with the preaching of how you can cope with these conditions, but you’re saying that this element is basically lost these days?

  CW: For the most part. I mean you get a J. Alfred Smith in Oakland, one of the great prophetic figures;
Freddy Haynes or Carolyn Knight, major prophetic figures, or Reverend Dr. Bernard Richardson, Reverend Toby Sanders, Dr. Barbara King, or Reverend Dr. M. William Howard Jr., Reverend Dr. William Barber.37 Of course, the great Vincent Harding—scholar, activist, teacher—is the reigning dean of King-like prophetic witness. So you have some exceptions, but generally speaking it’s lost, and it’s exacerbated in the age of Obama, because identification with Obama could easily become—in the eyes of Black leaders—an identification with the Black prophetic tradition. So that Obama displaces the Black prophetic tradition; people think they are doing something progressive and prophetic by supporting our Black president given the history of white supremacy in America, counter-hegemonic, countervailing and so forth, you see. And given the trauma of overcoming blatant legalized racism, Obama is counter-hegemonic, but it’s overshadowed by his identification with the oligarchs, with his identification with the imperial killing machine and so forth. But that small sliver gives these Black leaders the sense of “I’m very progressive. I’m with the Black president. The right wing hate him, right wing want to kill him, right wing tell lies about him, but we are taking a stand,” you see. And so it’s very deceiving, very confusing, and very obfuscating in terms of any clear social analysis of the relations of domination and of power in American society.