Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  31. In the preface to his collection of poems Don’t Cry, Scream (1969), Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) defined his poetics as follows: “Blackpoetry is like a razor; it’s sharp & will cut deep, not out to wound but to kill the inactive blackmind.” In Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966–2009 (Chicago: Third World Press, 2009), 61. His poetry bears witness to his deep commitment to the Black prophetic tradition. In the collection Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (1987), Madhubuti pays homage to Malcolm X by asking: “if you lived among the committed / this day how would you lead us?” And he gives the answer: “it was not that you were pure. / the integrity of your vision and pain, / the quality of your heart and decision / confirmed your caring for local people, and your / refusal to assassinate progressive thought / has carved your imprint on the serious.” “Possibilities: Remembering Malcolm X,” in Liberation Narratives, 278.

  32. Sonia Sanchez has repeatedly expressed great admiration for and deep gratitude to Malcolm X, most famously in her poem of mourning “Malcolm,” from the collection Home Coming (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969), 15–16, and in her play Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No Mo’ (1972). In her prose poem “Homegirls on St. Nicholas,” Sanchez vividly describes how her life changed radically when she first heard Malcolm X speak, even so “I didn’t want to hear him. His words made my head hurt. [. . .] Why did he bring his hand-grenade words into my space?” But when Malcolm X “demanded, ‘Do you know who you are? Who do you really think you are? Have you looked in a mirror recently brother and sister and seen your Blackness for what it is?’ [. . .] something began to stir inside me. Something that I had misplaced a long time ago in the classrooms of America. On that cold wet afternoon, I became warm again.” Wounded in the House of a Friend (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52–53. See also her remarks on Malcolm X in a collection of interviews, especially in the conversation with David Reich (1999), where she states that Malcolm X “became our articulator”: “Malcolm articulated all that we thought. For many of us, Baraka and the rest, he gave us his voice.” Conversations with Sonia Sanchez, ed. Joyce A. Joyce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 90, 89.

  33. “I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program. And when the people create a program, you get action.” Speech at a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity on the evening of December 20, 1964, Malcolm X Speaks, 118–19. As in his famous “Message to the Grass Roots,” delivered in November 1963, Malcolm X sets off the people against the leaders by emphasizing the latter’s propensity to control rather than ignite the revolutionary fire. Earlier that day, Malcolm X had appeared with grassroots activist Fannie Lou Hamer at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem and had invited her to attend the evening meeting at the Audubon Ballroom; see Malcolm X Speaks, 114–15.

  34. For West’s statements on rising secularism here and below, see statistics on religiously unaffiliated Americans released by the Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project, Nones on the Rise: One in Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, October 9, 2012), http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise-religion/.

  35. Ibid.

  36. Robert Green Ingersoll was one of the most popular freethinkers of the late nineteenth century and considered one of the best lecturers, if not the best orator, of his time. Though he was best known for his controversial talks on agnosticism (or atheism: in contrast to common understanding, according to which an agnostic claims not to know whether God exists, as opposed to an atheist who denies God’s existence, Ingersoll did not think it made sense to distinguish between the two), he delivered speeches on a broad range of topics, and in the name of humanism advocated racial equality, women’s rights, and civil liberties. In a speech in honor of Walt Whitman, “Liberty in Literature,” given in the presence of the poet (two years before he delivered a much-praised eulogy at Whitman’s funeral), Ingersoll, referring to Shelley, Lord Byron, and Robert Burns, praises the prophetic quality of great poets: “The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed—of the downtrodden. They have suffered with the imprisoned and the enslaved. [. . .] The great poets [. . .] have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.” Walt Whitman. An Address. Delivered in Philadelphia, Oct 21, 1890 (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1890). It does not come as a surprise that Frederick Douglass and Ottilie Assing (see chap. 1, n. 17) were on friendly terms with Ingersoll; see Diedrich, Love Across the Color Lines, 358. In a meeting in Washington, DC, to protest the 1883 Supreme Court decision that found sections 1 and 2 of the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional, Ingersoll—introduced by Douglass—condemned the Court’s decision and painted its effects in gruesome colors: “The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court.” Ingersoll, “Address on the Civil Rights Act,” The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XI, Miscellany (New York: C. P. Farrell, 1900), 2. See also Susan Jacoby’s The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 111, and in that book, her “Letter to the ‘New’ Atheists,” who, according to Jacoby, have largely ignored Ingersoll (192–202).

  37. Clarence Seward Darrow was a renowned lawyer. Among his famous cases was his defense of John T. Scopes, put to trial for teaching evolution in a classroom in Dayton, Tennessee. In his autobiography, Darrow devotes three chapters to this trial, which he had taken on “solely to induce the public to stop, look, and listen, lest our public schools should be imperilled with a fanaticism founded on ignorance.” The Story of My Life, with a new introduction by Alan M. Dershowitz (1932; New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 276. See also the chapter “Questions without Answers,” in which Darrow discusses the belief in God (385–95). Together with Wallace Rice, Darrow compiled Infidels and Heretics: An Agnostic’s Anthology (1928; New York: Gordon Press, 1975). The current revival of atheism mentioned by West is reflected, for example, in the following recent publications: In the Clutches of the Law: Clarence Darrow’s Letters, ed. and with an introduction by Randall Tietjen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), and Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom, ed. and with notes by Arthur Weinberg; foreword by Justice William O. Douglas (1957; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

  38. See Baldwin’s address to the World Council of Churches, July 7, 1968, “White Racism or World Community,” in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 749–56. Referring to his credentials as a speaker, Baldwin says: “I never expected to be standing in such a place, because I left the pulpit twenty-seven years ago. [. . .] And I want to make it clear to you that though I may have to say some rather difficult things here this afternoon, I want to make it understood that in the heart of the absolutely necessary accusation there is contained a plea. The plea was articulated by Jesus Christ himself, who said, ‘Insofar as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me’” (749). In his autobiographical essay “Down at the Cross,” originally published in the collection The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin rejects Christianity’s claim of the monopoly on morals: “It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being [. . .] must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church” (Baldwin, Collected Essays, 314). Yet he also admits that the church service held great attractions for him: “The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like this music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together crying holy unto the Lord�
� (306). In a 1965 interview, Baldwin explicates, “I’m not a believer in any sense which would make any sense to any church, and any church would obviously throw me out. I believe—what do I believe? [. . .] I believe in love. [. . .] [By love] I don’t mean anything passive. I mean something active, something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you. I mean energy. I mean a passionate belief, a passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become, what a human being can do to change the world in which he finds himself.” James Mossman, “Race, Hate, Sex, and Colour: A Conversation with James Baldwin and Colin MacInnes” (1965), in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 48. It is interesting to note that Sonia Sanchez ends her homage to James Baldwin, written on the occasion of his passing away in 1987, by thanking him “for his legacy of fire. A fine rain of words when we had no tongues. He set fire to our eyes. Made a single look, gesture endure. Made a people meaningful and moral. Responsible finally for all our sweet and terrible lives” (“A Remembrance,” Wounded, 34).

  39. See Malcolm X’s speech at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem, December 20, 1964: “I’m not for anybody who tells black people to be nonviolent while nobody is telling white people to be nonviolent. [. . .] Now if you are with us, all I say is, make the same kind of contribution with us in our struggle for freedom that all white people have always made when they were struggling for their own freedom. You were struggling for your freedom in the Revolutionary War. Your own Patrick Henry said ‘liberty or death,’ and George Washington got the cannons out, and all the rest of them that you taught me to worship as my heroes, they were fighters, they were warriors” (Malcolm X Speaks, 112–13).

  40. See Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History,” in Black Reconstruction, 594.

  41. Excerpts from Malcolm X’s contribution to the Oxford Union Society debate December 3, 1964, are available in By Any Means Necessary, 176–77, 182. The question debated was “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Almost fifty years later, on November 22, 2012, Cornel West took part in the Oxford Union Society debate on this motion: “This House would occupy Wall Street.” Both speeches can be accessed on YouTube.

  42. For an in-depth exploration of Black Nationalism, see Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (New York: Penguin, 1996), 91–114; reprinted as “On Black Nationalism,” in West, The Cornel West Reader, 521–29.

  43. Marable, Malcolm X. For an account of the immense difficulties Marable faced in collecting factual evidence on Malcolm X, see his article “Rediscovering Malcolm’s Life: A Historian’s Adventure in Living History,” Souls 7, no. 1 (2005): 20–35; reprinted in The Portable Malcolm X Reader, ed. Manning Marable and Garrett Felber (New York: Penguin, 2013), 573–600.

  44. See the first collection of essays published in reaction to Marable’s biography, By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented; Critical Conversations on Manning Marable’s Biography of Malcolm X, ed. Herb Boyd, Ron Daniels, Maulana Karenga, and Haki R. Madhubuti (Chicago: Third World Press, 2012), which offers a wide range of critical opinions. It opens with Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Malcolm” (see above, n. 32) and contains essays by Mumia Abu-Jamal, Amiri Baraka, and many others who, above all, seek to affirm the radical Black tradition. See also A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, ed. Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2012), which contains contributions by, among others, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Amiri Baraka, and Herb Boyd. Though most statements criticize Marable’s extensive use of conjecture in presenting his arguments, the most severe critique, voiced repeatedly against Marable’s portrayal, is that the historian deprived Malcolm X of the political radicalism of his message and turned him into a “mainstream-leaning, liberal Democrat” (6).

  45. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978). In the context of the Black prophetic tradition, it is interesting to note that Haywood praises Du Bois as a pioneer of historical revisionism with his “tour de force, Black Reconstruction, and the epilogue, ‘Propaganda of History,’ which contained a bitter indictment of the white historical establishment” (95).

  46. West refers to the 1992 Hollywood film Malcolm X, directed and cowritten by Spike Lee, with Denzel Washington in the title role. Given the fierce political struggle over Malcolm X’s legacy, it is not surprising to learn that, though the screenplay was largely based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the film was highly controversial, both during the long history of planning and production, and after its release.

  47. On the iconization and commodification of Malcolm X, see Angela Davis’s “Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X,” in Malcolm X in Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 40–41.

  48. For the criticism by Baraka and others, see, for example, Evelyn Nieves, “Malcolm X: Firestorm Over a Film Script,” movie section of the New York Times, August 9, 1991. The new book by activist-scholar Maulana Karenga on Malcolm X as a moral philosopher promises to be a major contribution to our understanding of Malcolm. West wrote the introduction to this text.

  49. In 1966, Baldwin accepted the offer by Columbia Pictures to write a screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, although he had “grave doubts and fears about Hollywood. [. . .] The idea of Hollywood doing a truthful job on Malcolm could not but seem preposterous. And yet—I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking: It could have been done if you hadn’t been chicken. I felt that Malcolm would never have forgiven me for that.” Baldwin, “To Be Baptized,” from the essay collection No Name in the Street (New York: Library of America, 1998), 413. In an interview, Baldwin commented on his disagreements with Hollywood as follows: “To put it brutally, if I had agreed with Hollywood, I would have been allowing myself to create an image of Malcolm that would have satisfied them and infuriated you, broken your hearts. At one point I saw a memo that said, among other things, that the author had to avoid giving any political implications to Malcolm’s trip to Mecca. Now, how can you write about Malcolm X without writing about his trip to Mecca and its political implications? It was not surprising. They were doing the Che Guevara movie while I was out there. It had nothing to do with Latin America, the United Fruit Company, Che Guevara, Cuba . . . nothing to do with anything. It was hopeless crap. Hollywood’s fantasy is designed to prove to you that this poor, doomed nitwit deserves his fate.” Interview with Jewell Handy Grasham (1976), in Standley and Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin, 167. See also Baldwin’s screenplay One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario, based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

  50. The Black Agenda Report: News, Commentary & Analysis from the Black Left is a radio and TV program launched in 2006 by long-time radio journalist Glen Ford, life-long activist and community organizer Bruce Dixon, and legendary Harlem activist Nellie Bailey, as well as writer and peace activist Margaret Kimberley and political scientist and activist Leutisha Stills.

  51. Carl Dix, self-proclaimed “veteran revolutionary fighter from the ’60s,” is cofounder of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP), established in 1975, and has been a committed activist, for example, on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal and as a leading voice in the campaign against New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” practice; see his article “Why I Am Getting Arrested Today” (Huffington Post, October 21, 2011), in which he explains the rationale behind the act of civil disobedience, during which he was joined by thirty other activists, including Cornel West. Dix and West have conducted several public dialogues entitled “In the Age of Obama: What Future for Our Youth?” as well as a series of “Mass Incarceration Dialogues.” Bob Avakian has been RCP chair since its founding; for his unwavering commitment to radical political activism, see From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Re
volutionary Communist; a Memoir (Chicago: Insight Press, 2005). Avakian wrote his life story on the suggestion of Cornel West; see preface (ix).

  52. Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, best-selling author, and activist, was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times (1990–2005) and is now a regular columnist for Truthdig. In November 2011, Hedges, West, and others held a mock trial of Goldman Sachs in Zuccotti Park, New York. Glenn Greenwald practiced law as a litigation attorney specializing in constitutional law and civil rights before he became an award-winning journalist and best-selling author; he gained worldwide fame in June 2013 due to his involvement in publishing whistleblower Edward Snowden’s documents on US surveillance practices in the Guardian. (For Margaret Kimberley, see above, n. 50.) Larry Hamm—a distinguished Princeton University graduate—is the legendary founder and leader of the revolutionary People’s Organization for Progress.

  53. The best anthology on the Black prophetic tradition remains African American Religious Thought, edited by Cornel West and Eddie Glaude Jr. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

  Chapter Six: Prophetic Fire

  1. See Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” New York Times, April 2, 2012. Gugliotta’s report is based on a study by J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York whose recalculation increased the death toll by more than 20 percent.

  2. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II, in 1881, which, according to contemporary rumors, was committed by Jews, set off a wave of pogroms that lasted until 1884; this in turn led to considerable Jewish emigration to the United States.