Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  There are elements of this in some of the anarchists, and that’s why I have a tremendous respect for anarchism, because anarchism has this deep suspicion of hierarchy, be it the state in the public sphere, corporations in the private sphere, or cultural institutions in civil society. We know Baker worked with George Schuyler, who called himself an anarchist in the 1930s. He ended up a reactionary right-wing brother, but he earlier called himself an anarchist.5 We also know Bayard Rustin was an anarchist, called himself an anarchist quite explicitly.6 We know that Dorothy Day called herself an anarchist, quite explicitly, till the day she died.7 This is a great tradition I have great respect for, and I see it among my young brothers and sisters of all colors in the Occupy movement, even though I don’t consider myself an anarchist. I do see similarities between Ella Baker’s position and the council Communist tradition that called for Soviets without Bolsheviks, that called for workers’ councils without a revolutionary vanguard party that served as managerial manipulators of the people in the councils, so that the self-organization of working people was the kind of radical organizing among everyday people without any managers, experts, or party members telling them what to do. And there is some overlap between Herman Gorter and Anton Pannekoek and some of the early council Communists that mean much to someone like myself coming out of a deep democratic tradition.8 And so, ironically, Ella Baker, the very figure who one would think would be marginal vis-à-vis these male-type titans, ends up being the most relevant in light of our present dark times of political breakdown, economic decline, and cultural decay.

  CHB: It is so interesting that the Occupy movement is definitely leaderless, tries to be leaderless and group-centered, which has great advantages. For one thing, you can’t decapitate a movement easily by just killing one of its charismatic leaders. But more than that, as you just explained, it gives the group much more power, a power that it otherwise delegates to a representative. But even if we say today that this is why Ella Baker is more important, when we think back, what is your stance on the fact that after all we also needed a Martin Luther King Jr.? What, then, is to your mind the relation between those two forces, the charismatic leader-figure and the group-centered work that Ella Baker did?

  CW: When Ella Baker says that the movement made Martin, Martin didn’t make the movement, she is absolutely right, and so for me the greatness of Martin King has to do with the ways in which he used his charisma and used his rhetorical genius and used his courage and willingness to die alongside everyday people. The critique of Martin would be that the decision-making process in his organization was so top-down and so male-centered and hierarchical that one could have envisioned a larger and even more effective mass movement, especially when it came to issues of class, empire, gender, and sexual orientation. When he hit economic justice for janitors and the poor, and when he hit issues of American imperialism in Vietnam, he would not have been just dangling all by himself if there had been more political education and cultivation among the people in the organization and the community. And Ella Baker—who was shaped by the South, went to Shaw University in North Carolina, and then straight to New York City, where she runs the West Indian newspaper, and she is working with George Schuyler during his anarchist years, interacting with leftists, interacting with various progressives, but always rooted, always grounded—offered a deep democratic alternative to the model of the lone charismatic leader.

  One of the things about Ella you might recall is that—and Bob Moses was telling me this, it was so striking—right in the middle of the movement, she pulled out to take care of her niece. And people said, “Wait a minute, this is something that you have been waiting for. This is the moment. The cameras are here.” “I got my roots,” you see, “my niece needs to be taken care of. She is, after all, by herself.” And people would say, “Oh, but that’s part of the gender question. She had to think of herself as a carer and nurturer.” But, no, no, she puts things in perspective. Her caring for her niece in those years that her niece needed her was part and parcel of her calling as someone who is of service. But for Ella, her calling embraced both service to her family and service to the movement. For her, humility and service flow across the board, and so I think that her critique of the great Martin Luther King Jr. ought to be integral to any discussion about Martin Luther King Jr. She brings to her critique humility, service, and love; her own willingness to sacrifice. She’s the kind of unassuming character who doesn’t need the limelight at all in order to have a sense of herself. She doesn’t need the camera. You know what happens is that these charismatic leaders become ontologically addicted to the camera. And it’s a very sad thing to behold. You see it in Jesse Jackson, despite his rhetorical genius and great contributions to our struggles. We see it in Al Sharpton, despite his talent for adaptability and service. You saw it in the later years of Huey Newton, as great as he was in his early years. Angela Davis has resisted it. Bob Moses also resisted it. Stokely Carmichael—even given his greatness, incredible love for the people, and the deep influence of Ella Baker—was still much more tied to the charismatic model.9 My dear brother the charismatic Reverend Dr. Jeremiah Wright—largely misunderstood and underappreciated—was demonized by the media and will, in the long run, be vindicated. But, like Ella, prophetic giant Dr. James Forbes Jr. defies these seductions.

  CHB: One wonders, of course, whether there is not a natural relation between the possibility of becoming such a charismatic leader and a certain degree of narcissism, so it is an even greater accomplishment of those figures who do not develop in terms of egocentricity, and yet are great leaders. Baker often criticized the mostly male cofighters she had to put up with. As she recalled, they took it for granted that when there was a meeting she would take care of the people, so that they would have something to eat and drink, that the coffeemaker was running. Thus, there was always that double concern of hers. For she was not at all a person who was content with those everyday services to the movement; she had great foresight. In fact, this to me is another important feature of hers: the way she understood the whole process, namely, as something that would go on for a long time, because nothing would be accomplished in ten years or twenty years, but that nevertheless you would have to bring all your strength to it, even if you did not see much progress. She was looking ahead and willing even to pass on the baton to the next generation, to the next person who was there to serve, and that is one of her great strengths.

  CW: Absolutely. There is a fundamental sense in which the age of Occupy is the age of Ella Baker. Even given the deep contributions of the legacies of Douglass and King—we could add Malcolm; we certainly would add Du Bois as well—for Ella Baker, you know, when you radically call into question the distinction between mental and manual labor, then that frees you up to engage in forms of activities in the movement that allow for a natural flow, from caring for the homeless, cooking food for the elderly, and reading Gramsci on what it means to be an organic intellectual all in the same afternoon, because these are all just functions of a freedom fighter, functions of an organic, catalytic figure, where the intellectual is not somehow either isolated or elevated and therefore distinct from the manual, tactile, touch, hands-on-activity.

  You know, when I talked about Ella’s democratic existentialism, it is relevant to me in terms of your point on narcissism and charismatic leaders, because anyone who is a long-distance freedom fighter has to have a tremendous sense of self-confidence, and the real challenge is how do you have this tremendous sense of self-confidence when you are being targeted by assassination attempts or threats; when you are rebuked, scorned, lied about, or misunderstood. You need self-confidence in order to keep going in a community and a network, but how do you hold on to self-confidence without sliding into self-indulgence? The only weapon against narcissism is a belief in self and a greater cause than the self that is severed from an obsession with self as some grand messianic gift to the world. And I think you could see elements of this in the other figures that we talk
ed about: Douglass and King and Du Bois had unbelievable self-confidence, and at their best, they are Ella Baker–like; at their worst, they are narcissists. And of course, this is a struggle in the human soul in each and every one of us. But the major weapon against narcissism for me is a kind of spirituality or a spiritual strength that accents, on the one hand, gratitude—what it means to be part of a long tradition that has produced you and allowed you to have the self-confidence—because self-confidence doesn’t drop down from the sky; it is cultivated over many, many years owing to earlier people, antecedent figures who had the same kind of self-confidence—so gratitude on the one hand, as a kind of democratic piety in that sense, if piety is understood as the debts you owe to those who came before tied to the tradition and community and legacy of struggle, and on the other hand, there is an indescribable joy in serving others. This joy in serving others is qualitatively different than pleasure in leading others.

  CHB: And a third factor in combatting narcissism may be the belief in the cause, or do you take that for granted?

  CW: That’s true, the depth of your commitment to the cause. And that is, I think, very important, because when you really get at the complicated core or the mediated essence of Ella Baker, it really has so much to do with this kind of democratic gratitude of being in a tradition of struggle, of being an agent of change and transmitter to the younger generation, which allows you to make a Pascalian leap in belief in the capacities of everyday people, because it’s a kind of leap of faith that you are having in their capacity to cultivate themselves. You don’t need messianic leadership; you don’t need a revolutionary party; you don’t need professionals and experts coming in from the academy and telling you x, y, and z. You are in conversation with them, but they don’t need to have an elevated status. But it’s that democratic gratitude on the one hand, and it is that deep spirituality that actually I think was rooted initially in Baker’s early Black Baptist experiences and the model of her blessed mother, and then the depth of her belief, in the cause, what she calls the cause of humanity.

  CHB: Indeed, it wasn’t just a particular cause, as important as the civil rights movement she had actually worked for was to her—she was in the NAACP for some twenty years. She said explicitly that she worked for so many organizations and campaigns, more than thirty, I think, but in truth, she said, she worked for a movement that is greater than all these particular struggles.10

  CW: It would be wonderful if one were to meet members of a progressive organization and you asked them who do you work for and they would say not the organization, whatever it is, but I’m working for the freedom of human beings around the world; I’m working for the cause; I’m working for justice, and this organization is a means toward that end, this organization is a vehicle or conduit through which my commitment to the cause for humanity, the cause for social justice, the cause for human dignity, beginning with poor and working people and those Frantz Fanon called the wretched of the earth. She always kept that in mind. So even when it comes to the kind of organizational chauvinism—organizations clash because they are trying to gain access to a certain kind of turf on a terrain—she would look at that and say, “Oh, you are missing the point.” SCLC people wanted to know how she could make that move from interim executive director of SCLC—before Wyatt Tee Walker was to take it over in 1960—how she could make that move so smoothly from SCLC to SNCC, when the tension between SCLC and SNCC was so intense. She is the only one who carries over and becomes a hero for the young people. She’s already an older person; the young people trusted her.

  CHB: She never attempted to tell them to do it her way, but she listened and engaged in what you would call, I assume, a Socratic dialogue.

  CW: Oh, absolutely, a Socratic dialogue in the deepest sense. I’ll never forget Bob Moses recalling one of the meetings where it was clear that SNCC was collapsing. It was right near the end, very intense conversations, and Ella Baker was sitting there. You could just see the internal pain, and more and more, the young people were looking toward her to intervene to save and rescue the organization. And she just sat there and listened, and afterward people were saying like, “Damn, if Martin and the others had been there, they would have come to our rescue. Can’t you see this is the only way? We need this almost Hobbesian sovereign, you know what I mean, to help impose some order, so we can sustain an organization that we worked so hard for. We don’t understand your silence.” And she said, “It’s up to you. It’s up to you all. You all got to work it out. I am just one voice.” And of course, someone said, “We want to hear that one voice!” Sometimes, you know—Bob Moses is like this, too—sometimes you just wonder whether they could be too reticent and too reluctant to speak. Their democratic humility is never false, but their democratic receptivity could be more balanced with bold democratic voicing.

  CHB: She was convinced that if a movement cannot find a way from within the group to go on, then it is no longer relevant. It has to be replaced. It might have had its time, done its work. And when she moved from SCLC to SNCC, it was in part, I think, because she was frustrated, owing to what you talked about earlier about hierarchy and the male chauvinism, which, for example, never allowed her to have this post of executive director fully. It was always interim. She showed that she could do it, but she was a woman, so it was not acceptable to the male-dominated group at that time. So she moved, because she had more confidence in the radical thinking of the young, and she thought it was needed at that moment. Now, within SNCC, there were different developments, and I think at one point—it may have been earlier in their development than the moment you talked about—two groups within SNCC fought each other, and at that point she tried to reach a compromise with this idea: let’s have two strains; let’s have two subgroups that follow their agenda, and let’s see how far this takes us. And it was accepted at the time, but that was probably already foreshadowing a conflict within the group, and she would have been the last one to fight for something that she thought, “Well, if it can’t sustain itself, it is not worth fighting for. It has to be replaced. This is what a revolutionary process is about.”

  CW: And she understood it so very, very well. Again, that has something to do with the kind of revolutionary patience that she had which I am associating also with this radical democratic receptivity that Romand Coles has talked about with such insight. You know, we do have to pay tribute in so many ways to Joanne Grant and Barbara Ransby and Romand Coles and others who really have not just thought through and theorized but thrown their hearts and minds and souls into the radical democratic praxis of Ella Baker.11 Because on the one hand, she seemed to be rather reluctant to write a book about what she was doing, or write a memoir about her life, all of those things, in some ways mitigating against her commitment to radical democratic praxis, and yet we know there was always a theoretical dimension to it,12 because she was just so brilliant; she was so reflective, introspective, and spiritual all at the same time.

  CHB: To come back to one of your points as to education and how it might work when you try to educate a group not by preaching, not by lecturing from top to bottom, but by engaging in a dialogue—it takes a long time to begin with.

  CW: Absolutely. I think that the major limitation of Ella Baker’s global historical work and witness is the tremendous clash between democratic time and market time. With the commodification of cultures around the world, most of us, if not all of us, live in market time, even if we are on the margins of the larger imperial system of our day. And market time is fast; it’s quick; it’s push-button; it’s 24/7 cycles of media. Whereas democratic time, which has to do with the kind of organizing and mobilizing Baker was doing, requires a long revolution, in the language of the great Raymond Williams.13 And it’s a long memory, in the language of Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame, who wrote that wonderful book together, Long Memory.14 So, you get a long revolution, a long memory, a long struggle within democratic time; in market time: quick, quick, quick, quick, quick. And the ch
arismatic leadership is very much tied to market time. It’s fast, you see. You want to get the cameras to see those precious kids get mistreated in Birmingham, boom, flash. It’s all around the world, quick, quick, quick. Congress has to do something; the president has responded, telephone calls. And Martin knew that he had to live in some way between times, right on the thin edge between democratic and market time. But that slow, bottom-up, democratic organizing that Ella talked about has always been associated with some of the best social movements.

  For example, Saul Alinsky, who in some ways we associate these days with the Industrial Areas Foundation of my dear brother Ernesto Cortés15—they have been at this form of organizing in democratic time for thirty years, and you end up with some elected officials and local groups,16 two elected city councilmen, and people say, “Damn, a whole generation and you got a union in place.” And of course, they have done amazing things in terms of raising consciousness, because it’s not just reflected in the electoral process. But from a market perspective, of course, you might say, “Eh, that’s all you come up with in twenty-five years? When we got all these babies who die, we got all these struggles going on, and that’s the best we can do?” And I think that’s the challenge, maybe limitation is too strong a word, but it’s a real challenge for the genius of Ella Baker.

  CHB: And even more so today than in her time, because of the speed.

  CW: Yes, hyper-capitalism, absolutely.

  CHB: So the question is, how can change be brought about with the powers that be? Should we, like anarchists, work locally and change the system on the level of the local community and go on from there, and change it radically at a particular place and in a particular moment and thus make at least a small difference, rather than battling and struggling in market time and being shot dead or defeated? The question becomes the more urgent when we look at what we are fighting for and against right now and compare it to the past, when Ella Baker—just as you and many others still do in the present—talked about poverty and civil rights.