by Cornel West
12. Like King, Norman Thomas was very much influenced by Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading voice of the Social Gospel movement. And, like King, Thomas believed in nonviolent activism in the tradition of Gandhi and spoke out fervently against US militarism. Apart from Rauschenbusch’s Christian concept of socialism, it was the extreme poverty and utter despondency of the working class of all colors, which Thomas witnessed as a social worker in lower Manhattan and later as a pastor of the East Harlem Church and which turned him toward a socialist critique of capitalism. In the chapter “The Negro,” in his study Human Exploitation in the United States (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1934), 258–83, he discusses at length the interrelation between Black economic exploitation in the twentieth century and “the plantation psychology”; in emphasizing in particular the economic and psychological factors of lynching, he draws upon the case studies in Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933). He supported major civil rights campaigns, and though physical frailty prevented him from joining the Selma marches in 1965, he was one of the speakers at the March on Washington in August 1963. In 1965, King wrote an article about Thomas entitled “The Bravest Man I Ever Met,” Pageant 20 (June 1965), in which he praised him for his undaunted commitment to the cause of justice and equality. For further details on Thomas’s fight for racial justice and his relations with King, see Harry Fleischman, Norman Thomas: A Biography: 1884–1968, with a new chapter, “The Final Years” (New York: Norton, 1969), 323–24; and Raymond F. Gregory, Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter (New York: Algora, 2008), 250–51, 271–72. West is an honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, the institutional heir of Norman Thomas’s legacy.
13. Walter R. Chivers taught sociology at Morehouse College from 1925 to 1968. For his impact on other Black sociologists, his devotion to teaching, and his activism based on his early experiences as a social worker, see Charles V. Willie, “Walter R. Chivers—An Advocate of Situation Sociology,” Phylon 43, no. 3 (1982): 242–48. John H. Stanfield, who considers King “a public sociologist par excellence,” puts great emphasis on the Morehouse curriculum, with its stress “on thinking sociologically to promote the public good of racial justice,” and maintains that Chivers, “who was the chief black community researcher for Arthur Raper’s (1933) The Tragedy of Lynching” (see above, n. 12) “had a profound influence on King.” Stanfield, s.v. King, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, vol. 5, ed. George Ritzer (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 2465–67.
14. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an essential organizational force in the sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter-registration activities, turned more radical in the mid-1960s and under its new chairman, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), propagated “Black Power.” A seminal text that presented “a political framework and ideology” of this revolutionary faction of the movement was Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (New York: Random House, 1967), vi; an enlarged edition with a new afterword by both authors critically discussing their concepts appeared in 1992. It clearly stated the necessity for a grassroots model: “The power must be that of a community” (ibid., 46). On SNCC’s concept of Black Power, see also Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” New York Review of Books, September 1966; reprinted as “Power and Racism” in Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (1971; Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007), 17–30. For confrontations between Carmichael and King, see Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 481–85; for King’s critique of Black Power politics, see the chap. “Black Power” in Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 23–69.
15. Both Stanley David Levison, a Jewish businessman and member of the Communist Party who had been introduced to King by Bayard Taylor Rustin in the mid-1950s, and Rustin himself were close advisors to King. The FBI’s supposition that Levison was a Communist agent prompted the wiretapping of Levison and King, and led Robert Kennedy to exert great pressure on King. See Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 516–18, 835–38. Rustin, a Quaker, champion of nonviolent struggle, and one of the most important organizers of the movement, withdrew from the front line when his homosexual orientation was used to compromise King. Thus, Brother Outsider (Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, dir. [California Newsreel, 2002]) is an appropriate title for a documentary on Rustin’s life. For a study that analyzes Rustin’s marginal position from the perspective of relational sociology, see Nicole Hirschfelder’s PhD dissertation, “Oppression as Process: A Figurational Analysis of the Case of Bayard Rustin,” University of Tübingen, 2012.
16. Per a May 22, 1967, Harris poll.
17. Carl T. Rowan was a highly successful and influential journalist in the 1960s. His syndicated columns were published in more than a hundred American and international newspapers, and in addition, he had contracts as a weekly radio and TV commentator. In 1964 and 1965, he was director of the US Information Agency and, thus, became the first black man to be present in meetings of the National Security Council. In a Reader’s Digest article published in September 1967, Rowan distanced himself from King, whose civil rights activism he had formerly covered very favorably (“Martin Luther King’s Tragic Decision”). It is interesting to note that in a speech given February 14, 1965, Malcolm X, speaking about tokenism, mentioned Rowan: “Tokenism benefits only a few. It never benefits the masses. [. . .] So that the problem for the masses has gone absolutely unsolved. The only ones for whom it has been solved are people like [. . .] Carl Rowan, who was put over the USIA, and is very skillfully trying to make Africans think that the problem of black men in this country is all solved.” Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1990), 174.
18. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1960s, was an impassioned spokesman for the civil rights movement, yet a staunch critic of militant voices. His friend Whitney Moore Young Jr., who firmly believed in operating within the system, became famous for his successful work as executive director of the National Urban League.
19. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded in early 1957 as an organization that endorsed forms of nonviolent protest. King became its first president, and Ella Baker was its first and—in the beginning—only staff member.
20. On the fear of these and other prominent African Americans that King’s radical criticism of the Vietnam War might harm the civil rights movement, see Henry E. Darby and Margaret N. Rowley, “King on Vietnam and Beyond,” Phylon 47, no. 1 (1986): 49–50.
21. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).
22. On Clarence B. Jones and the plan to put the United States on trial at the UN, see also below, chap. 5, n. 21.
23. There has been an increase in the last decade in scholarly attention toward Black Greek-letter organizations. For an account of the origins and legacy of the Alphas, see Stefan Bradley, “The First and Finest: The Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,” Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Gregory S. Parks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 19–39.
24. Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, was twenty-one years old when he was assassinated in a Chicago police raid in December 1969; Bobby Hutton, treasurer of the Black Panther Party, was not yet eighteen when, on April 6, 1968, he was shot dead by Oakland police.
25. Fannie Lou Hamer began her work in the civil rights movement as a voter registration activist, and although she experienced severe physical abuse by law enforcement officers, she refused to be intimidated and remained committed to the struggle for civil rights, e.g., as a candidate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for Congress in 1965. Like King, she would call America “a sick place,” and like Malcolm X, sh
e insisted on fighting not just for civil rights but for human rights; see, for example, her speeches “America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List” (May 27, 1970) and “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free” (July 10, 1971), in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, ed. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).
26. Tavis Smiley’s well-known PBS television special called Beyond Vietnam is the best treatment of this historic speech. For the speech, see “A Time to Break Silence,” in Testament of Hope, 231–44.
27. Cf. the seminal volume of essays by Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008, rev. ed.), in which he challenges the “amnesia” vis-à-vis the national hero and quotes the poem “Now That He Is Safely Dead,” by Carl Wendell Himes Jr., who, as early as 1977, wrote: “Dead men make / such convenient heroes: They / cannot rise / to challenge the images / we would fashion from their lives” (3).
28. “Eugene Debs was one of the greatest trade unionists as well as the leader of the US Socialist Party. His crusade against vast wealth inequality was legendary, yet despite his own antiracist views, he could not convince his organization to integrate with peoples of color” (West, Democracy Matters, 53). Like Debs, Jim Larkin was a Socialist and a trade union leader who, during his stay in the United States, became a speaker for the Socialist Party of America and supported Debs’s presidential campaign. A famous legend has it that he once “unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a cross, and told his largely atheist [New York] audience: ‘There is no antagonism between the Cross and socialism. [. . .] I stand by the Cross and I stand by Karl Marx.’” See Emmet O’Connor, “James Larkin in the United States, 1914–1923,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 2 (2002): 185.
29. “At that time [in the early seventies], MLK was a grand example of integrity and sacrifice but, in sharp contrast to Malcolm X, not a distinct voice with a credible politics in our Harvard conversations. [. . .] King was for us the Great Man who died for us—but not yet the voice we had to listen to, learn from and build on. This would change in the next decade.” Cornel West, “Introduction: The Making of an American Democratic Socialist of African Descent,” in West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review, 1991), xv–xxxiv; reprinted in The Cornel West Reader, 6–7.
30. In 1966, Huey P. Newton cofounded the Black Panther Party, which he and his combatant Bobby Seale conceptualized under the influence of Malcolm X and on the basis of writings by revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara. Though the Black Panthers established armed self-defense patrols that often led to violent confrontations with the police, they also ran social programs, e.g., the children’s breakfast program and free clinics.
31. Angela Y. Davis has been a radical activist since her youth, an associate of the Black Panther Party and a member of the Communist Party of the United States. For her early years of activism, her trial and acquittal of the charge of first-degree murder in the early 1970s, which had turned her into an internationally known and supported political prisoner, see Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974). In her latest book, The Meaning of Freedom, a collection of unpublished speeches, she emphasizes the interconnectedness of the issues of power, race, gender, class, and mass incarceration, arguing for, among other things, the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. The Meaning of Freedom, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012). See also above chap. 1, n. 2.
32. For Stokely Carmichael, see above, n. 14.
33. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, recognized for his elegant rhetorical style, is yet another prominent example of spiritual leadership and social activism.
34. Thomas Dexter Jakes maintains the television ministry of the Dallas-based Potter’s House, which he founded in 1996.
35. Glen A. Staples is pastor of the Temple of Praise in Washington, DC.
36. “Under the dynamic leadership of Rev. Herbert Daughtry, the National Black United Front (composed of black Christians, Marxists, nationalists, and left-liberals) has established itself as the leading voice of progressive black America. Far beyond liberalism and indifferent to social democracy, this Christian headed-group is staunchly anti-US imperialist and vaguely pro-Socialist with a black nationalist twist. With the founding of the African Peoples’ Christian Organization in March 1983, Rev. Daughtry has extended his vision by supplementing the National Black United Front with an exclusively Christian organization, especially for those prophetic black Christians demoralized and debilitated by the secular ideological battles in NBUF: Rev. Daughtry continues to head both organizations” (West, Prophetic Fragments, 71). Daughtry’s most well-known book is No Monopoly on Suffering (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997), with an introduction by Cornel West. The well-respected Father Pfleger is the John Brown of contemporary America—a white leader profoundly committed to Black freedom. West has preached annually in his church for fifteen years. See Robert McClory, Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight for Social Justice (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010).
37. J. Alfred Smith Sr., pastor emeritus of Allen Temple Baptist Church, in Oakland, clearly reveals his commitment to the tradition of prophetic Christianity in the title of his 2004 autobiography: On the Jericho Road: A Memoir of Racial Justice, Social Action, and Prophetic Ministry, with Harry Louis Williams II (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). Frederick Douglas Haynes III is senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church, Dallas. Rev. Dr. Carolyn Ann Knight studied under Cornel West at Union Theological Seminary, where she received a master’s of divinity and a master’s of sacred theology; she earned a doctor of ministry from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. She founded “Can Do” Ministries, devoted to the spiritual and intellectual advancement of youth, and she was professor of preaching at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta for many years. She is one of the great preachers of her generation. Rev. Dr. Bernard Richardson is the dean of Howard University’s historic Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel and professor at Howard University’s Divinity School. West has preached in this chapel annually for the past twenty years. Rev. Toby Sanders is pastor of the Beloved Community, former president of the Trenton Board of Education, and “dean” of the New Jersey STEP prison/college program (directed by Margaret Atkins), in which West teaches philosophy with 140 brothers/students in Rahway. Rev. Dr. Barbara King is the founder/minister of the Hillside Chapel and Truth Center in Atlanta. Rev. Dr. M. William Howard Jr. is the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, and was the first Black president of the National Council of Churches. Rev. Dr. William Barber is one of the grand King-like figures in our time.
38. For statistics on housing and wealth distribution quoted in this passage and the next, see the Pew Research Center analysis based on 2009 government data: Rakesh Kochhar et al., Twenty to One: Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics (Washington, DC: Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, July 26, 2011), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics.
39. West refers to the period between December 2010 and August 2011.
40. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957).
41. Kochhar, Twenty to One. For soaring corporate profits based largely on layoffs, see, for example, Floyd Norris, “As Corporate Profits Rise, Workers’ Income Declines,” New York Times, August 5, 2011. The figure of $2.1 trillion is based on Federal Reserve statistics released in 2011 and discussed widely, e.g., by Jacob Goldstein on National Public Radio, September 20, 2011.
42. Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights attorney, graduate of Yale University Law School, the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, and promoter of the Poor People’s Campaign, is best known for her indefatigable work on behalf of poor children, e.g., with the Children’s Defense Fund.
43. Wolin defines democracy as a “project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them.” Consequently, democracy “seems destined to be a moment rather than a form.” Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 11, 19.
44. Though Bourdieu argues that “there is an inertia [. . .] of habitus” (Pascalian Meditations, 160), he also emphasizes that habitus can be “practically transformed” and even “controlled through awakening consciousness and socioanalysis.” Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994), 116.
45. Howard Zinn on Race, introduction by Cornel West (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).
46. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto, 1961).
47. This was also a favorite word of Fannie Lou Hamer’s, who would say in many of her speeches that to be born Black in America is to be born in a mess.
48. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 562.
49. On King’s support for Carl Stokes’s 1967 election campaign for mayor of Cleveland, see ibid., 580.
50. For Huey Newton and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), see also chap. 5. Baraka passed away on January 9, 2014.