Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  28. The English journalist William Cobbett (1763–1835) investigated the difficult living conditions of the English rural population on the basis of first-hand observations published under the title Rural Rides in 1830.

  29. There seems to be no evidence that Douglass read the liberal political journalist and literary critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), who is considered one of the greatest essayists in the English language.

  30. Douglass possessed several volumes of the works of John Ruskin, who was not only the major art historian of the Victorian era but also an early critic of modern industrial capitalism whose utopian vision of human society was to inspire many Socialists. It is interesting to note that Douglass owned not only studies in art history, e.g., Lectures on Architecture, but also three famous Ruskin lectures, “Work,” “War,” and “Traffic,” collected in The Crown of Wild Olive (New York, n.d. [1866]); see Bibliography of the Douglass Library, s.v. Ruskin.

  31. An avid disciple of Ruskin, the prolific writer of poetry and fiction and staunch Socialist William Morris applied Ruskin’s concept of the revival of craftsmanship to the art of textile design and in 1861 founded a decorative arts firm together with the artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. But as with Hazlitt, there is no evidence of Douglass’s reception of Morris.

  32. The Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist Thomas Carlyle published Sartor Resartus in 1831, followed by The French Revolution (1837) and On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). For Carlyle’s 1849 “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” see Collected Works, vol. 11, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished in Six Volumes, vol. VI (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870), 169–210.

  33. James McCune Smith, “Introduction,” in Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 132.

  34. On Douglass’s reading of Emerson, see Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning,” 205. In addition, there are references to Emerson in Douglass’s published papers. In his early years in the North he regularly attended popular lectures, and among the lecturers he heard was Emerson; see Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 1: 1841-46, xxiii; and in a manuscript (ca. 1865), he “discusses Emerson’s comments on producers and poets” (Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, vol. 3: 1855-63, 620).

  35. Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).

  36. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Referring to Emerson’s address on British emancipation, Buell states: “Never before had he so firmly associated himself in public with any social reform movement, on the same platform with noted activists like Frederick Douglass” (251). Buell also presents evidence from Emerson’s papers that Douglass knew Emerson’s Representative Men: soon after its publication, on February 5, 1850, Douglass had written Emerson to ask for a copy (368, n. 14).

  37. Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

  38. See Sterling Stuckey’s article “Cheer and Gloom: Douglass and Melville on Slave Dance and Music,” in ibid.: “Melville’s evocation of the music described by Douglass is so faithful to its tragic joy-sorrow quality that, as we shall see, blues form and feeling shape and suffuse his writing style at critical junctures in the novel” (71).

  39. See also William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

  40. William V. Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling: Fiction After Moby-Dick, 1851–1857 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); and William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Meanwhile Spanos has published the third volume “in a trilogy whose essential aim is to retrieve Herman Melville’s subversion of the myth of American exceptionalism”: The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), xi.

  41. In the last and programmatic chapter of The American Evasion of Philosophy, “Prophetic Pragmatism,” West explains that he defines his conception of pragmatism as “prophetic” because “it harks back to the Jewish and Christian tradition of prophets who brought urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day. The mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage—come what may” (233).

  42. Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

  43. Charles Sumner served as US senator from Massachusetts from 1851 to 1874. A staunch and eloquent spokesman for the abolition of slavery and a harsh critic of Lincoln’s moderate politics toward “slave power,” he remained a strong advocate for civil and voting rights for the freedmen after the Civil War. One of Sumner’s colleagues and friends was the German American Carl Schurz, who, as a student, had fought in the German Revolution of 1848, and after his emigration to the United States in 1852 brought his belief in democratic principles to the fight for the emancipation of slaves. Schurz served as a brigadier general in the Union army, held political posts under Presidents Lincoln and Hayes, and became the first German American to be elected to the US Senate (Missouri), in 1869.

  44. See Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation, 209.

  45. For Collins’s remark, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy,” see Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 367.

  46. See John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008), 87–88.

  47. The novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published anonymously in 1912 because Johnson was afraid it might harm his reputation as a diplomat; it appeared under his name in 1927 (by Knopf) with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1933).

  48. This was prior to Obama’s retreat on green issues such as the Keystone Pipeline.

  49. Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation,” speech delivered at Canandaigua, NY, August 3, 1857, in Selected Speeches, 367. In this speech Douglass again quotes Byron: “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow” (366); see also above n. 19.

  50. “I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die.” In Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 286. Douglass cites Patrick Henry in connection with his first attempt at escape and points out that “incomparably more sublime” is “the same sentiment, when practically asserted by men accustomed to the lash and chain—men whose sensibilities must have become more or less deadened by their bondage” (312).

  51. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Random House, 2008).

  52. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998). See also Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).

  53. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The nineteen-volume edition of Du Bois’s works is dedicated to Cornel West.

  54. “The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed. [. . .] A man in the situation in which I found myself has not only to divest himself of the old, which is never easily done, but to adjust himself to the new, which is still more difficult. [. . .] But what should I do, was the question. I had a few thousand dollars [. . .] saved from the sale of ‘My Bondage and My Freedom,’ and the proceeds of my lectures at home and abroad, and with this sum I thought [. . .] [to] purchase a little farm and settle myself down to earn an honest living by tilling the soil.” Douglass, My Bondage,
in Autobiographies, 811, 812.

  Chapter Two: The Black Flame

  1. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2010 and was first published under the title ‘“A Figure of Our Times’: An Interview with Cornel West on W. E. B. Du Bois,” in the Du Bois Review 10, no. 1 (2013): 261–78.

  2. Cornel West, “W. E. B. Du Bois: The Jamesian Organic Intellectual,” in West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 138–50.

  3. Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” in The Future of the Race, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West (New York: Vintage, 1997), 53–112, 180–96, 55; reprinted in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Civitas, 1999), 87–118, 571–79.

  4. Ibid., 55.

  5. West alludes to the main work of the eminent eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in six volumes (1776–88).

  6. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois carefully registers his intellectual development from both conformity with the Puritan work ethic (“My general attitude toward property and income was that all who were willing to work could easily earn a living; that those who had property had earned it and deserved it and could use it as they wished; that poverty was the shadow of crime and connoted lack of thrift and shiftlessness. These were the current patterns of economic thought of the town of my boyhood” [9]) and consent to the ideology of the “White man’s burden” (“French, English and Germans pushed on in Africa, but I did not question the interpretation which pictured this as the advance of civilization and the benevolent tutelage of barbarians” [21]) to insights into the international scope of the problem of labor and property, which he first gained during his studies at the University of Berlin in 1892–1894, when he “began to see the race problem in America, the problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political development in Europe as one [23].”

  7. The Negro covers African history and cultures and contains one chapter each on the slave trade and on “The Negro in the United States” (New York: Holt, 1915). Cf. Du Bois on the sequence of his writings on Africa in the foreword to The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1946; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007): “Twice before I have essayed to write on the history of Africa: once in 1915 when the editors of the Home University Library asked me to attempt such a work. The result was the little volume called The Negro. [. . .] Naturally I wished to enlarge upon this earlier work after World War I and at the beginning of what I thought was a new era. So I wrote Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), with some new material and a more logical arrangement. But it happened that I was writing at the end of an age which marked the final catastrophe of the old era of European world dominance. [. . .] I deemed it, therefore, not only fitting but necessary in 1946 to essay again not so much a history of the Negroid peoples as a statement of their integral role in human history from prehistoric to modern times” (xxxi). By 1946, Du Bois views the history of European colonialism from a Marxian perspective: “I have also made bold to repeat the testimony of Karl Marx, whom I regard as the greatest of modern philosophers, and I have not been deterred by the witch-hunting which always follows mention of his name” (xxxii).

  8. Studies on Du Bois as “sociological pioneer” have increased considerably in the past decade. On Du Bois’s exclusion from the canon of sociology in the past and the increasing recognition of his work in the social sciences, see the introduction to The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). See also Robert A. Wortham’s numerous publications on Du Bois’s sociology, especially on the sociology of religion: “Du Bois and the Sociology of Religion: Rediscovering a Founding Figure,” Sociological Inquiry 75, no. 4 (2005): 433–52; “W. E. B. Du Bois, the Black Church, and the Sociological Study of Religion,” Sociological Spectrum 29:2 (2009), 144–72; “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Scientific Study of Society: 1897–1914,” in W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociological Imagination: A Reader, 1897–1914, ed. Robert A. Wortham (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 1–20. For the neglect of Du Bois within the discipline of sociology on the one hand, and his achievements in the fields of urban and rural sociology, the sociology of race, gender, religion, as well as education and crime on the other hand, see W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Reiland Rabaka (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010). Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s theories, Rabaka has written extensively on Du Bois; most relevant with regard to Du Bois’s innovative transdisciplinary method is his monograph Against Epistemic Apartheid: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology (Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2010). For a broader approach that situates Du Bois and other Black sociologists in the field of US-American sociology, see the seminal study by Pierre Saint-Arnaud, African American Pioneers of Sociology: A Critical History, trans. Peter Feldstein (Toronto: University Press, 2009 [French original, 2003]. Saint-Arnaud summarizes Du Bois’s significance as follows: “[G]iven the enormous scope of the task Du Bois had assigned himself—that of rehistoricizing the Negro ‘problem,’ which the Anglo-American paradigm viewed through an ahistorical lens—he had to invent sociohistorical analysis as such. He had to revolutionize his field in order to make room for black sociology” (143).

  9. To be more precise, no review of The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1899) appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, at the time the only American journal in that field; moreover, as Saint-Arnaud puts it, “As for the possibility that Du Bois might actually publish a paper in the Journal, it was completely out of the question” (African American Pioneers, 155). Cf. Du Bois’s comment on the academic neglect of the Atlanta University studies on the social condition of African Americans he and his team of social scientists undertook between 1896 and 1914: “Our reports were widely read and commented upon. On the other hand, so far as the American world of science and letters was concerned, we never ‘belonged’; we remained unrecognized in learned societies and academic groups. We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes, and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?” Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 145.

  10. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 67.

  11. See Du Bois: “Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not.” “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290.

  12. “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 257–58.

  13. “I did not understand at all, nor had my history courses led me to understand, anything of current European intrigue, of the expansion of European power into Africa, of the Industrial Revolution built on slave trade and now turning into Colonial Imperialism; of the fierce rivalry among white nations for controlling the profits from colonial raw material and labor—of all this I had no clear conception. I was blithely European and imperialist in outlook; democratic as democracy was conceived in America” (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 16–17).

  14. See Du Bois on his earlier faith in the power of enlighte
nment: “The Negro Problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation” (Dusk of Dawn, 30). By 1940, Du Bois had developed a more differentiated view: “Admitting widespread ignorance concerning the guilt of American whites for the plight of the Negroes; and the undoubted existence of sheer malevolence, the present attitude of the whites is much more the result of inherited customs and of those irrational and partly subconscious actions of men which control so large a proportion of their deeds. Attitudes and habits thus built up cannot be changed by sudden assault” (ibid., 98). In hindsight, Du Bois himself names the theoretical munitions that allowed him to transform his position: “My long-term remedy was Truth: carefully gathered scientific proof that neither color nor race determined the limits of a man’s capacity or desert. I was not at the time [in 1906] sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason; nor did I know Karl Marx well enough to appreciate the economic foundations of human history” (ibid., 145).