Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  8. William Faulkner, Light in August, opening of chap. 6 (New York: Modern Library, 1012), 110.

  9. One instance in which Malcolm X highlighted the importance of history and memory for a people was, again, the speech at the founding rally of the OAAU. In it, he quotes from and expounds upon the propositions in the “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” written by a committee. The OAAU demands “a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people”: “This cultural revolution will be the journey to our rediscovery of ourselves. History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the level of the lower animals.” “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensible weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.” Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, 54–56.

  10. This is Malcolm X’s answer to Black reporter Claude Lewis’s question about how he wanted to be remembered, in an interview that took place in New York in the last months of his life. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (1973; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 238. See also Malcolm X’s statement on March 12, 1964: “I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field—but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials” (Malcolm X Speaks, 20).

  11. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in The Collected Poetry, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 71.

  12. On Robert Williams, see chap. 6, n. 19.

  13. None of these debates with the long-time leader of the Nation of Islam exists in print. Though West does not ignore “the disagreeable views of Farrakhan,” he insists on the minister’s “deep love and service for his people. [. . .] He bravely stood up against white supremacy at a time in our history when to do so required courage and character” (West, Brother West, 186). “We agree on highlighting black suffering,” West wrote in a statement justifying his participation in Farrakhan’s Million Man March in 1995 (“Why I Am Marching in Washington,” Million Man March/Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology, ed. Haki R. Madhubuti and Maulana Karenga (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1996), 37.

  14. In three seminal studies James Hal Cone developed a Black theology of liberation that addressed the questions of what it meant to be a Black Christian during the Black Power movement and what the example of the life of Jesus could contribute to the liberation of oppressed Black people suffering from the legacy of white supremacy: Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), followed by A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990) and The Spirituals and the Blues (1972; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991). See also Cornel West’s homage to Cone, “Black Theology and Human Identity,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 11–19.

  15. “No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me” (1964), quoted in West, Race Matters, 35.

  16. See Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, 14.

  17. For a vivid portrait of his father, see Huey P. Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide (1973), especially chap. 4, “Changing,” in which he states, for example: “When I say that my father was unusual, I mean that he had a dignity and pride seldom seen in southern Black men. Although many other Black men in the South had a similar strength, they never let it show around whites. To do so was to take your life in your hands. My father never kept his strength from anybody.” Huey P. Newton, with J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin, 2009), 29.

  18. See also chap. 3, n. 30. On the famous murder trial of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, which ended in acquittal on all charges, see the detailed account by Donald Freed, Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). See also Seale’s presentation of the major years of the party’s history, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970), as well as his autobiography, A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: Times Books, 1978).

  19. It is significant that although Ericka Huggins was a high-ranking Black Panther Party leader, at first in the Los Angeles chapter and then as a founder and leader of the New Haven chapter of the BPP, she and so many other female revolutionary activists are far less known than the party’s male leaders, just as the party’s multifaceted community services have been downplayed. For a long time, scholarship focused almost exclusively on the militant male image of the party, as it had in part been encouraged by male members themselves and certainly enforced by the media. For a revisionist reading of the BPP history, see Ericka Huggins and Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, “Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School,” in Want to Start a Revolution?, 161–84, with further references to the neglected women’s contributions to the revolutionary work of the BPP. For a highly balanced and differentiated assessment of the crucial role of women in the BPP, and the difficulties both male and female members of the party had with gendered power relations, see “A Woman’s Party,” in Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 159–84; on Abu-Jamal, see below, n. 26. Interestingly, Abu-Jamal draws attention to Ella Baker’s “collectivist model of leadership”: “In essence, Baker was arguing against civil rights organizations mirroring the Black church model—a predominantly female membership with a predominantly male clergy—and for the inclusion of women in the leadership of these organizations. Baker was also questioning the hierarchical nature of these groups’ leadership” (ibid., 159). For an emphasis on BPP community services, see The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, ed. David Hilliard (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). In the foreword, West, who as a student participated in the BPP Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program, highlights the avant-garde character of the party’s political vision: “The Black Panther Party [. . .] was the highest form of deniggerization in niggerized America. The Black Panther Party was the greatest threat to American apartheid because it was indigenous in composition, interracial in strategies and tactics, and international in vision and analysis. It was indigenous in that it spoke to the needs and hopes of the local community. [. . .] It combined bread-and-butter issues of everyday people with deep democratic empowerment in the face of an oppressive status quo. It was interracial in that it remained open to strategic alliances and tactical coalitions with progressive brown, red, yellow, and white activists. And it was international in that it understood American apartheid in light of anti-imperial struggles around the world” (x).

  20. For the great impact Malcolm X had on Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), see, for example, “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation,” in Baraka’s collection of “Social Essays” entitled Home (1966; New York: Akashi Classics, 2009), 266–79, as well as the new introduction to the reprint, in which he highlights the significance of Malcolm X for the development that Baraka defines as “the open dialectic of the Afro-American national movement, splitting one into two, because my generation—though clearly we had to love and respect Dr. King—rejected that call [‘If any blood be shed, let it be ours!’] with our whole-ass selves. Why? Because Malcolm X had begun to appear, and he said, ‘Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery’” (17).

  21. In the last months of his life, Malcolm X frequently talked about the necessity of seeking international alliances and of holding the United States responsible for human rights violations. The most extensive passage can be found in one of his
most famous speeches, which he entitled “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which, on April 3, 1964, he told his Black audience: “They keep you wrapped up in civil rights. And you spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor. When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court.” Malcolm X Speaks, 34–35. According to the FBI files on Martin Luther King Jr., two months after this speech, in June 1964, there was a meeting between Malcolm X and representatives of several civil rights organizations; among others, King’s lawyer, advisor, and friend Clarence Jones attended and was authorized to speak for King (who at the time was in jail). As the FBI report maintains, “Jones said that in ‘reflecting on today’s conference the most important thing discussed was Malcolm X’s idea that we internationalize the question of civil rights and bring it before the United Nations.’ [. . .] Jones stated that ‘we should present the plight of the Negro to the United Nations General Assembly in September of this year.’” Michael Friedly and David Gallen, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 242.

  22. James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991; 20th anniversary ed., 2012). See Cone’s recapitulatory statement: “We should never pit them against each other. Anyone, therefore, who claims to be for one and not the other does not understand their significance for the black community, for America, or for the world. We need both of them and we need them together. Malcolm keeps Martin from being turned into a harmless American hero. Martin keeps Malcolm from being an ostracized black hero” (ibid., 316).

  23. “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist.” Speech at the Audubon Ballroom, December 20, 1964, quoted in Malcolm X Speaks, 121. For a more elaborate use of the metaphor of the vulture, see the following statement by Malcolm X: “It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.” “The Young Socialist Interview,” January 18, 1965, By Any Means Necessary, 165–66.

  24. In his speeches, Carmichael would highlight the importance of preserving the spirit of the radical Black tradition: “We must listen to Malcolm very closely, because we have to understand our heroes. We cannot let them be used by other people, we cannot let them be interpreted by other people to say other things. We must know what our heroes were saying to us—our heroes, not the heroes of the white left or what have you.” Stokely Speaks, 178; for references to Douglass, Du Bois, and contemporary activists, see also ibid., 62–63, 74–75.

  25. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) was a radical organization formed in the aftermath of the Detroit riots in 1969 by auto industry workers who were frustrated with inhumane working conditions and dissatisfied with the neglect of Black workers’ interests in the United Auto Workers union. Kenneth Cockrel and General Gordon Baker Jr. were members of the LRBW’s executive committee, and Darryl Mitchell was one of the founding members. For a detailed history, see James A. Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); it is interesting to note that the classic Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975) was reissued with a foreword by Manning Marable in 2012 by Haymarket Books.

  26. Mumia Abu-Jamal, former member of the Black Panther Party and prolific radio journalist and writer, was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in 1982; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2012. For the defense’s view of the trial, see Abu-Jamal’s attorney Leonard I. Weinglass’s “The Trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” in Abu-Jamal’s book of autobiographical reflections, Live From Death Row, introduction by John Edgar Wideman (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 195–215. In that book’s “Musings on Malcolm” (133–36), Abu-Jamal affirms the significance of Malcolm X for the Black Panthers and stresses the continuity of Malcolm X’s fight against systemic racism: “Malcolm, and the man who returned from Mecca, Hajii Malik Shabazz, both were scourges of American racism. [. . .] He stood for—and died for—human rights of self-defense and a people’s self-determination, not for ‘civil rights,’ which, as the Supreme Court has indeed shown, changes from day to day, case to case, administration to administration” (136). See also Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, foreword by Cornel West (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1997). West’s foreword ends with the urgent question that has motivated the making of Black Prophetic Fire: “Will we ever listen to and learn from our bloodstained prophets?” (xii). The Black prophetic fire of Pam Africa and Ramona Africa of the MOVE organization has helped keep the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal alive—along with the efforts of many others. In his more recent conversations with Marc Lamont Hill, Abu-Jamal also refers to some other great figures of the Black radical tradition; for example, in an extended exchange on Du Bois, he reveals that “my favorite Du Bois book isn’t The Souls of Black Folk, it’s Darkwater, which is far rougher and harder and angrier.” Mumia Abu-Jamal and Marc Lamont Hill, The Classroom and The Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America (Chicago: Third World Press, 2012), 70. See also the excellent documentary film by Stephen Vittoria, Long-Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal (Street Legal Cinema, 2013), which clearly situates Abu-Jamal in the Black prophetic tradition, both by references to predecessors such as Douglass and Malcolm X and by interviews with current intellectuals and activists such as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Cornel West.

  27. Assata Shakur has been a radical activist since her student days in the mid-sixties; she was a leading member of the Harlem branch of the Black Panther Party but left the BPP for its members’ want of an awareness of the Black historical tradition. As she claims in her autobiography, the “basic problem stemmed from the fact that the BPP had no systematic approach to political education. They were reading the Red Book [by Mao Tse Tung] but didn’t know who Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Nat Turner were.” Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1987; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 221. As to her own steps in self-education, Shakur emphasizes the importance of learning about “Black resistance”: “You couldn’t catch me without a book in my hand after that [after “i found out about Nat Turner”]. I read everything from [. . .] Sonia Sanchez to Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee). I saw plays by Black playwrights like Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. [. . .] A whole new world opened up to me” (175). She joined the more radical BPP split-off, the underground Black Liberation Army (BLA). In the so-called New Jersey Turnpike shootout trial, she was found guilty of the murder of a state trooper; she escaped prison in 1979 and eventually fled to Cuba, where she has been granted political asylum since 1984. Classified as a “domestic terrorist” since 2005, the FBI placed her on the Most Wanted Terrorists list in May 2013.

  28. As stated in a letter by J. Edgar Hoover in March 1968, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) defined the following five very distinct long-range goals: to prevent “the coalition of militant black nationalist groups,” to prevent violence on the part of these groups, to prevent them from gaining respectability, and to prevent their growth. In the context of the Black prophetic tradition, the second of these five goals is particularly interesting: “Prevent the rise of a ‘me
ssiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah’; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed [sic] all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.” This letter and other excerpts from the FBI’s BPP files are reprinted in a booklet that speaks to the problem raised by West: Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the U.S. War Against Black Revolutionaries (New York: Semiotext/e, 1993), 245.

  29. Roger Wareham, human rights attorney and long-time political activist, is a member of the New York–based December 12 movement, a nongovernmental organization committed to Malcolm X’s legacy of bringing the United States before a world court for its continued violations of Black peoples’ human rights.

  30. Elombe Brath, graphic artist and long-time activist in the Pan-African movement, was one of the founders of the African Jazz-Arts Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of Black artists active in the mid-1950s and considered a forerunner of the famous Black Arts Movement (BAM); it was launched by Amiri Baraka after the assassination of Malcolm X. In 1967, H. Rap Brown followed Stokely Carmichael as SNCC chair. While in Attica Prison (1971–1976), Brown converted to orthodox Islam, changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, and became a devout Imam. After a shooting in 2000, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. His memoir about growing up Black in America abounds with psychosociological reflections—reminiscent of Fanon’s (see chap. 1, n. 23) analysis of the pathology of oppression—such as the following: “When a race of people is oppressed within a system that fosters the idea of competitive individualism, the political polarization around individual interests prevents group interests.” H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! A Political Autobiography, foreword by Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (1969; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 16.