Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  36. Crusade, 123. As Wells states, the British journalist and reformer William T. Stead “had come late to visit the World’s Fair and remained for three months writing his book If Christ Came to Chicago and welding the civic and moral forces of the town into a practical working body” (122–23). Stead’s book If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (1894) became a best seller. See Joseph O. Baylen, “A Victorian’s ‘Crusade’ in Chicago, 1893–1894,” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 418–34.

  37. As early as 1891, Wells was aware of the importance of concrete organizational measures for the purpose of unification. Having attended the second national Afro-American League convention, in Knoxville, Tennessee, she complained that the gathering had not addressed the “gravest questions”: “How do we do it? What steps should be taken to unite our people into a real working force—a unit, powerful and complete?” (quoted in Giddings, Ida, 170).

  38. James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1986); paperback edition 2004, with a new preface by Quinton H. Dixie, foreword by Cornel West.

  39. In May 1910, owing to Wells-Barnett’s initiative, the Negro Fellowship League Reading Room and Social Center opened its doors on State Street amid the saloons and gambling houses of Chicago’s Black Belt. While Wells-Barnett “was lifted to the seventh heaven and cheerfully went about the work of helping to select the library,” there was “great objection among some of our members to going there. Some of them took the ground that State Street was beneath their consideration” (Crusade, 304).

  40. West alludes to Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), especially chap. 5, “The Meaning of Emancipation According to Black Women” (87–98).

  41. Like Wells, Victoria (Vicki) Garvin (1915–2007) was a long-distance radical, yet, until recently, her lifelong political activism has been unduly neglected (and for this reason is highlighted in this note). Her work focused on, but was by no means limited to, the struggle for Black workers’ rights. In the 1950s, she served as executive secretary in the New York chapter of the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) and as vice president of the national NNLC, an organization suspected by other unions to be (and in 1951 by the US attorney general officially declared) a Communist front. Garvin belonged to a network of leftist women who had been radicalized in the 1930s and had held on to their radical convictions even when they came under attack during the McCarthy era; see the seminal study by Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011), which unearths the largely neglected history of Black women radicals of the 1950s. See also Gore’s article, “From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria (Vicki) Ama Garvin,” in the essay collection Want to Start a Revolution?, 71–94. In the late 1950s, Garvin moved to Africa and in 1961 settled in Accra, Ghana, where she was a member of the African American community headed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, and where she also met Malcolm X again, with whom she had collaborated closely in Harlem. Encouraged by Du Bois, Garvin accepted an invitation to go to China, where from 1964 to 1971 she taught English at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. See the biographical information in the highly instructive article on Black radical activists, e.g. Robert Williams, Huey Newton, and Amiri Baraka, embracing Mao’s cultural revolution, in Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, no. 4 (September 1999): 6–41. Back in the United States in the 1970s, Garvin continued her struggle for social justice by working as a community organizer, joining rallies on behalf of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and through speaking engagements, for example, in March 1981, when she appeared with Harry Haywood in a presentation attended by Cornel West; see West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 176. As Gore aptly puts it in Radical Crossroads: “Her distinct political legacy rests not in official titles but in revolutionary experience and solidarity efforts that always combined local organizing with a global vision” (73).

  42. As to party politics, the Barnetts remained loyal to the party of Lincoln, but Wells-Barnett actively supported unions, for example, in the mid-1920s, she assisted the young Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCPM), under its new Socialist leader A. Philip Randolph, in its struggle against strong resistance in Chicago, the seat of the Pullman Company (Giddings, Ida, 634–41).

  43. Crusade, 302. Ironically, due to the initiative of the Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, a successful campaign led to the erection of a YMCA for African Americans, in 1913. See Giddings: “In the past there would have been more debate among the Chicago black leadership about the propriety of supporting an all-black institution in lieu of demanding that the white-only Y accept African Americans. But by 1912, need, appreciation of the effort by prominent whites, and a growing sense of, and desire for, the black community’s emergence as an entity in and of itself resulted in blacks, with few exceptions, supporting the effort” (Ida, 506).

  44. Crusade, 301–2.

  45. Wells, A Red Record, 75.

  46. Wells gives a lively account on her collaboration with Douglass at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in her autobiography (Crusade, 115–20). According to Wells, the pamphlet was turned into “a creditable little book called The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was a clear, plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored people in this land of the free and home of the brave. We circulated ten thousand copies of this little book during the remaining three months of the fair” (117).

  47. Wells-Barnett’s relations with Du Bois were strained after Du Bois took her off the list of the NAACP’s Founding Forty (see above, n. 30). As Giddings suggests, Wells-Barnett’s “ideology and militant views were something that the civil rights organization could, literally, not afford” (Ida, 497).

  48. On Wells-Barnett’s relations with Garvey, see Crusade, 380–82. Garvey applauded her by counting her among the “conscientious workers [. . .] whose fight for the uplift of the race is one of life and death” (Giddings, Ida, 585). Garvey invited her several times to address his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the fall of 1918, when Wells-Barnett and other radical activists, e.g., William Trotter and A. Philip Randolph, were elected to represent the UNIA at the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations (but were denied passports by the government). In 1919, Ferdinand Barnett defended Garvey in a libel case; see Giddings, Ida, 619.

  49. As an exception to the rule, Wells-Barnett recounts her support of Robert T. Motts, who turned his saloon into the Pekin Theater, with its company of Black actors and an African American orchestra. It is typical of Wells’s broad-mindedness that, trying to convince other socially active women to collaborate with Motts, she argues “that now [sic] Mr. Motts was engaged in a venture of a constructive nature, I thought it our duty to forget the past and help him, that if he was willing to invest his money in something uplifting for the race we all ought to help” and that, furthermore, she “felt that the race owed Mr. Motts a debt of gratitude for giving us a theater in which we could sit anywhere we chose without restrictions” (Crusade, 290). In contrast to her autobiography, the few entries of her short Chicago diary passed down to us clearly manifest her love of music and her regular attendance at concerts, shows, and movies. See The 1930 Chicago Diary of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, included in the Memphis Diary.

  50. Younger than Wells, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune lived to support the election campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and became a close friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Bethune was both a devoted educator (best known for having founded a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904) and an activist focusing on various Black women’s associations (she was president of the Fl
orida chapter of the National Association of Colored Women and in 1935 founded the National Council of Negro Women, which united twenty-eight different organizations).

  51. In Prophesy Deliverance!, West presents Woodbey as a case of an “alliance of black theology and Marxist thought,” who “devoted his life to promoting structural social change and creating a counter-hegemonic culture in liberal capitalist America” (126).

  Conclusion: Last Words on the Black Prophetic Tradition in the Age of Obama

  1. Jason DeParle: “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs,” New York Times, January 4, 2012.

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