by Cornel West
CHB: I think this is true of all our prophetic figures: they are more complex than we sometimes can deal with. We have to look at the various aspects, because it’s also true that Malcolm X did have notions of socialism, certainly of anti-capitalism. To come back to nationalism, I think what it achieves is it transcends the individualism once you have group thinking, a we-identity, a we-consciousness that makes you stronger. From your point of view, it is unfortunate when this we-identity is a national one, is a patriotic one. But then again, many of these intellectuals start with a patriotic sense of we-identity, which incorporates a civil rights struggle, and then move on to a fight for human rights. And there is a clear pattern of this shift, certainly in Du Bois; in King, too; and especially in Malcolm X. We can’t stop at civil rights; we have to move on to human rights, and then the struggle becomes international, and that’s another kind of we-identity. It is no longer limiting because it turns into a freedom to unite and identify with ideals that could be shared by all.
CW: Shared by all, the species. And it even—as our animal rights brothers and sisters would say—includes all sentient beings. But because nation-states have been the shells into which most of the democratic possibilities have to filter, you have to deal with nationalisms and nation-states; there is no doubt about that. It’s just that you have to be able to have a we-consciousness that transcends nationalisms, and that is why the transnationalism and internationalism of the progressives and revolutionaries is so fundamental. I used to sit at the feet of Harry Haywood, who wrote a great autobiography called Black Bolshevik.45 He was probably the most famous Black Communist in the twentieth century. He was the first to put forward the Black-nation thesis in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. And here he was, tied to an internationalist movement, Communist movement, that still was trying to get them to see that Black people constituted a nation that required its own self-determination and its own freedom and liberation. So, somehow, he is wrestling with the we-consciousness of Black people as a Black nation and the we-consciousness of being a Communist, which is the human race as a whole. And Harry Haywood and others who come after, such as the Communist Labor Party, led by Nelson Perry, was very important for the Black-nation thesis in the 1970s, which built on Haywood’s early work. We need to go back to some of those discussions given the interdependence and the international struggles today. I used to argue with brother Haywood, and I was very young and he was an old man, but we would go at it. I said that I believed in Black peoplehood, but not Black nationhood; that we were a distinct people who had created ourselves over against the emergence of a US nation-state that didn’t want to treat us with dignity and oftentimes didn’t want us here other than to exploit our labor. That means we are so tied into the emergence of the US nation-state and we are often tied to the nationalism, tied into the patriotism as well as tied into the chauvinism, because every nationalism that I know has been patriarchal, class-ridden, homophobic, and usually xenophobic, so that you have to be profoundly suspicious of all forms of nationalism. Yet nationalism is the very terrain upon which you must work.
And I think part of the problem of the Black prophetic tradition is that some of us are so eager to become flag-wavers that we don’t want to bear the cross of internationalism that highlights the struggles of poor peoples here in our nation and all around the world. And that’s a fundamental question: Are you going to be a flag-waver or a cross-bearer? I use the cross here in a metaphoric sense, not just in a Christian sense. Malcolm was a cross-bearer rather than a flag-waver. In our day, the age of Obama, most Black leaders are flag-wavers; they don’t want to be cross-bearers at all. That’s the last thing they want to be. They want the acceptance of the US nation-state; they want the acceptance of the US mainstream. So they are silent on drones; they are silent on the centrality of the new Jim Crow in terms of Black life; they are silent on the trade union movement being crushed; they are silent on the Wall Street criminality. And this is the challenge of the Black prophetic tradition at its best, with Malcolm the exemplary revolutionary wing. Not every member of the Black prophetic tradition is a revolutionary like Malcolm. He’s a very special kind of brother. He really is. There is no Black prophetic tradition without the Malcolms and others, but he is very distinct in this regard. But at the same time, if we don’t come to terms with this challenge, then we end up being just these deferential flag-wavers, thinking that somehow we are keeping alive the Black prophetic tradition. This self-deception must be shattered—in each and every generation.
CHB: What do you think about the legacy of Malcolm X? For a long time there was no strong legacy, but it picked up again in the nineties, when, as critics would claim, he entered popular culture. What becomes of him in being appropriated by popular culture? Is it really a genuine Malcolm, in your sense, that is evolving there, or is it just an icon that is about memory, maybe even nostalgia about a dead man, rather than evoking a revolutionary struggle?
CW: On the one hand, the centrality of memory of the revolutionary wing of the Black prophetic tradition—Malcolm is a grand example of that—the memory of him and the others is very important. That’s why, in a certain sense, I thank Spike Lee, Denzel Washington, and the others who forced us to talk about Malcolm.46 Now, in a highly commodified country, Malcolm will become commodified.47 In a country obsessed with patriotism, they will designate a stamp for him. That’s the last thing he wanted. “I want a free people. I don’t want a stamp.”
CHB: As to the stamp, to me it exemplifies the demonized Malcolm. The photograph chosen is quite unbecoming, showing a strained, almost sinister facial expression that is highlighted by the unnatural twist of his eyes. This image enforces the marginalization from the point of view of the mainstream.
CW: The fact that the establishment authorizes the stamp with that image is part of the paradox; that’s part of the contradiction. But to keep alive the memory, even when you have the stereotype, you have the occasion to call it into question and therefore constitute a continuation of the conversation, because to wipe him completely out of memory, that’s the sad thing. You go to a group of young people—Let’s say I would go to Newark and talk and write on the board “Malcolm X,” they would say: “Malcolm the tenth, who was he?” That’s to wipe out his memory, you see what I mean. Whereas when you say “Malcolm X,” “Yeah, didn’t brother Spike make a movie about that Negro”—they wouldn’t say “Negro”; they use the n-word—“make a movie about that nigger? Yeah, I don’t know too much about him, but Spike was getting it on, Spike was getting it on.” At least you have a hook to say, “Well, let’s see who Spike was talking about.” Now, granted, you get the critiques of Spike’s film from brother Amiri Baraka, brother Maulana Karenga, and the others.48 And that’s wonderful, because they are veteran revolutionaries themselves, and they want to preserve the integrity of the memory of Malcolm. And Spike is the younger generation, and Spike is not a revolutionary. He is a courageous and gifted artist and a towering figure in a deeply racist Hollywood trying to make movies about Black people as full-fledged human beings. And he is close to Obama, too. He has his critique of Obama, I think, but he is very close to Obama, raised big money for Obama. But I do thank Spike for having the courage to take Malcolm’s greatness on. And no one can do full justice to Malcolm in a film, book, or interview. It’s just a fact. Even James Baldwin’s script, which, I am sure, was powerful—I never read it—but he couldn’t do justice to Malcolm, no way.49 And even, for example, the New Black Panthers—and of course, you know Bobby Seale and the others have criticized them and in some ways condemned them: “This is not a continuation of what we were doing; they are too anti-white; they are too xenophobic”—and brother Bobby Seale has got some very good points to make, but I still have a certain love for the New Black Panther Party. They can learn; they can grow; but they have a certain fearlessness like Malcolm. Why? Because they talk about his courage, and you can be courageous and still xenophobic—you need to call it xenophobia—but they are at least willi
ng to stand up and at least keep certain organizations going, and they can mature the way Malcolm himself matured.
In our time, the spirit of Malcolm X is most clearly expressed in the revolutionary politics of Black Agenda Report, led by my dear brother Glen Ford and brother Bruce Dixon and sister Nellie Bailey, sister Margaret Kimberley, brother Anthony Monteiro, and sister Leutisha Stills.50 I also discern his spirit in the courageous work of my dear brother Carl Dix of the Revolutionary Communist Party, led by brother Bob Avakian,51 as well as the prophetic witness of Chris Hedges, Glenn Greenwald, and Larry Hamm.52 Needless to say, the lives and work of the great Harry Belafonte and renowned James Cone still speak loudly.53 The dramatic art of brother Wren Troy Brown’s great Ebony Repertory Theatre is a sign of hope, as are the scholarly works of Robin D. G. Kelley, Imani Perry, Katie Geneva Cannon, Emilie Townes, Matthew Briones, Andre Willis, Michael Hanchard, Leonard Harris, Eddie Glaude, Gerald Horne, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Lucius Outlaw, and others. And the musical artistry of Dead Prez, KRS-One, Immortal Technique, Brother Ali, Jasiri X, Javon Jackson, Ravi Coltrane, Rah Digga, Mos Def, E-40, Erykah Badu, Jill Scott, India.Arie, the Last Poets, James Mtume, Lupe Fiasco, and others keep the memory of Malcolm X’s legacy alive. But the issue of memory in a commodified society is always difficult; it’s very hard, and that’s part of our challenge. Malcolm’s revolutionary parrhesia—that unintimidated, fearless, frank, plain speech and putting your body on the line—is the core of our challenge. This kind of prophetic witness can never fully and thoroughly be crushed. Even when you kill the body, the words still linger in the air, and it touches people. People take it and run and do with it what they will, and that’s part of breaking that cycle of hatred and domination that we talked about in relation to Ella Baker. But you and I know it is impossible to even think about the Black prophetic tradition without making Malcolm X a central figure in it, regardless of what the mainstream thought then, thinks now, or will think in the future.
Ida B. Wells, 1893
CHAPTER SIX
Prophetic Fire
IDA B. WELLS
We wanted to end our conversation on a high note full of the prophetic fire we started with. Thus in January 2013, we met on two consecutive days to discuss first Malcolm X and then Ida B. Wells. As far apart as they are in time and as different as they are in social background, they share an uncompromising radical spirit that is expressed in fearless speech. Yet such boldness is the more extraordinary in a woman, let alone a woman in the nineteenth century. As a female voice in the Black prophetic tradition, Wells, like Ella Baker, has often been a victim of public amnesia. We want to honor her outstanding example of prophetic witness by giving her the last word.
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: With Ida B. Wells, we go back to the nineteenth century, where we started. Historically speaking, she stands between Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, and she knew both men personally. Wells was the pioneering figure in the anti-lynching campaigns of her day, and the way in which she courageously and undauntedly took up a difficult and dangerous struggle against prejudices about the “beastly nature” of the Black man, certainly renders her a worthy candidate in our series of long-distance freedom fighters in the Black prophetic tradition. Like Du Bois, she was shaped by Victorian America, and her bourgeois background means that evaluating her from today’s point of view is difficult. We have to contextualize her, and so we will try to get at her core by doing just that. So could you start by assessing Ida B. Wells’s importance in the tradition of the Black struggle for freedom?
CORNEL WEST: Ida B. Wells is not only unique, but she is the exemplary figure full of prophetic fire in the face of American terrorism, which is American Jim Crow and Jane Crow, when lynching occurred every two and a half days for over fifty years in America. And this is very important, because Black people in the New World, in the Diaspora, Brazil, Jamaica, Barbados, were all enslaved, but no group of Black people were Jim Crowed other than US Negroes. And what I mean by Jim Crow is not just terrorized, not just stigmatized, not just traumatized, but, what we talked about before, niggerized. Black people were first reaching citizenship after the most barbaric of all civil wars in modern times—750,000 dead, we are told now.1 Black people are made slaves, then citizens, then are remade into subjects who are subjected to an American terrorist order—despite Black resistance. They are no longer slaves in the old sense, yet not citizens, but sub-citizens, namely subjects, namely Negroes, namely niggers who are wrestling with this terror.
Why is this important? Because, I would argue, Jim Crow in some ways is as important as slavery in understanding the mentality, understanding the institutions, and understanding the destiny of Black folk. A lot of people want to jump from slavery into the civil rights movement. But, no, right when the American social order was providing opportunities for white immigrants all around the world between 1881— Let’s begin with the pogroms that escalate in Russia at the time with the death of the tsar2 and the waves of white immigrants who come to the United States and who begin to gain access to some of the opportunities afforded here—that is precisely the time in which Jim Crow emerged. It consolidates in the 1890s, along with the American imperial order in the Philippines and Cuba, Guam, and other territories. So you get six million people of color outside the United States, and you get the terrorized, traumatized, stigmatized order, which is a Jim Crow order, in the United States. That’s the context for Ida.
Why is she so unique? Well, the textbook version of Black history is the following. You get W. E. B. Du Bois versus Booker T. Washington: The nice little deodorized discourse of Booker T., who is tied to the white elites, who has access to tremendous amounts of money, who has his own political machine, moving in to take over Black newspapers and pulling Black civic organizations under his control while refusing to say a mumbling word publicly about lynching, which was the raw face of American terrorism against Black people. Then you get Du Bois, who did want to talk about civil rights, who did want to talk about political rights, but in no way targeted the lynching face of American terrorism the way Ida B. Wells did. Ida B. Wells, in so many ways, teaches us something that we rarely want to acknowledge: that the Black freedom movement has always been an anti-terrorist movement, that Black people in America had a choice between creating a Black al-Qaeda or a movement like Ida B. Wells’s, which was going to call into question the bestiality and barbarity and brutality of Jim Crow and American terrorism and lynching, but would do it in the name of something that provided a higher moral ground and a higher spiritual ground given her Christian faith, not opting for a Black al-Qaeda that says, “You terrorize us; we terrorize you. You kill our children; we kill your children.” No, not an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, where we end up both blind and toothless. She said: “We want a higher moral ground, but I’m going to hit this issue head-on.”
And that is in so many ways relevant today, because we live in an age in which people are talking about terrorism, about terror, all the time. Here we have much to learn from an Ida B. Wells, who was born a slave, orphaned young—both her parents die of yellow fever in Hollis Springs, Mississippi. She makes her way with two of her sisters to Memphis, is run out of Memphis, even as she begins to emerge as a prophetic voice in Free Speech and Headlight, a newspaper that she begins to edit, and then with the lynching of three men in Memphis, brother Tom and brother Calvin and brother Will, on March 9, 1892,3 the white elite puts a bounty on her head, because she wants to tell the truth—like Malcolm X, parrhesia again, the fearless speech. Thank God for T. Thomas Fortune, who welcomed her to New York and invited her to write for his newspaper, the New York Age.4 And this was where she published the two classics, Southern Horrors, in 1892, and A Red Record, in 1895.
And it is important to use the language of American terrorism, because we live in an age where, when people think of terrorism, they usually think of a very small group of Islamic brothers and sisters, whereas, of course, terrorism has been integral to the emergence and the susten
ance of the American democratic experiment, beginning with indigenous peoples and slavery. But after the Civil War, we get a new form of terrorism—crimes against humanity—that sits at the center of American life, and Ida B. Wells forces us to come to terms with that.
CHB: Maybe we should mention the interim of Reconstruction, because right after the Civil War the situation was improving in terms of political power of Blacks. And what Ida B. Wells reveals then—in contrast to the understanding of most people, including Black people, including Douglass—what she reveals is that it is in reaction to the very success of Black people, their rising on the social ladder, their becoming respectable, learned, and a political power, too, that terrorism sets in. And she saw through the story that was fabricated at the time that this was all about Black men wanting white women; she saw that it was a pretext; that, in fact, what this was all about was a reaction to a change of the hierarchical order, and, of course, especially in the South, where white people did not want Black people to rise. And I think that is the truth she told in all fearlessness, a truth that was very important even for Blacks to understand.5