Dr. Cornel West talking:
Black prophetic fire is really about a deep love for black people, a love of justice, but it’s connected to the four questions that Du Bois wrestles with. How does integrity face oppression? What does honesty do in the face of deception? What does decency do in the face of insult? And how does virtue meet brute force. So, in the face of terror, in the face of trauma, in the face of stigma, 400 years of black people wrestling with all three, what do we produce? This caravan of love, this love train—love of justice, love of poor people, love of working people.
But it’s weak and feeble these days. It’s week and feeble, trying to bounce back. But Ferguson, among the young people, we’re seeing it. Now, this was written, of course, before Ferguson. But when you look at the Phillip Agnews of Dream Defenders, when you look at the Organization of Black Struggle down there, you look at Tef Poe and Tory and the others in Ferguson, you see this magnificent renaissance. And that brings joy to my heart.
Frederick Douglass. he’s certainly the most eloquent ex-slave in the history of the modern world. And by “eloquence,” I mean what Cicero and Quintilian meant: wisdom speaking—of course, he connects it with courage, unbelievable courage to act, and deep, deep love. And there’s simply nobody like him. And we need his spirit these days, because we live in the age of the sellout. We live in the age of those who are willing to sacrifice integrity for cupidity or integrity for venality, of selling their souls. And Douglass, flawed like all of us, stood tall right in the heat of struggle. No matter what popularity was to be sacrificed, he told the truth about the viciousness of white supremacist slavery.
actually made his way up, first to New England, you know, underground, with the help of his wife. He’s in camouflage, as it were. And he meets the white abolitionists, of course, towering white brother like William Lloyd Garrison and a host of others. Wendell Phillips would be another. Charles Sumner would be another. They would be vanilla brothers, who, in deep solidarity with the black struggle for freedom—like Father Pfleger in Chicago, like Christopher Hedges, like Noam Chomsky, Eric Foner. You’ve got a number of them, of course, Dorothy Day, and like Sister Amy herself. We’re talking about on the vanilla side of town, look at Americans say, “We’re going to focus on these particular black folk, these particular black folk.” And that’s a beautiful thing. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel would be an example like that. And, of course, the rich tradition of Latinos. My god, Albizu Campos put black folk at the center, the Puerto Rican—Cesar Chavez.
the first text, of course, he had to be authorized by William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, who would write the introduction and say he actually wrote this book, because in America the very idea of a black person writing a book was rendered—was under deep suspicion. And so, in his first autobiography, where he told this powerful story—of what? Very much like this recent text by Brother Edward Baptist on slavery and American capitalism. It was not just terror, but torture, to generate high levels of productivity—for what? Profit, profit, profit. So that when we talk about American terrorism—and we live in the age of terrorism. And terrorists, of no matter what stripe, no matter what color, they’re gangsters, and they’re thugs. No doubt about that. But American terrorism, we don’t like to talk about, first toward our precious indigenous peoples, and then the slaves for 240 years, and almost 80 years under the U.S. Constitution, the U.S. Constitution being a pro-slavery document, a pro-terrorist document, for over 80 years, in practice. Wonderful words on paper, now, but when it came to black folk, it was still a rationalizer of vicious of slavery. And Douglass was keeping track of the humanity of those precious black folk and saying, “I’m willing to tell the truth”—with a bounty on his head.
Douglass was not only a revolutionary in terms of the struggle for emancipation of African Americans, he was also, in his newspaper, one of the fiercest critics of the U.S. war against Mexico. He was also an advocate for women’s suffrage and the equality of women.
integrity requires moral consistency, what Jane Austen called constancy, being willing to follow through on your moral convictions regardless of what the cost is, regardless of the risk that you have to take. And most importantly, he was willing to die. You see, anybody in America who tells the truth about the barbarity of white supremacy and its legacy must be willing to die. You’ve got to recognize that you become a target, not just of fellow citizens with character assassination, but with literal assassination in terms of the powers that be. Why? Because the most dangerous thing in America is for black rage to take the form of love and justice among everyday people, among the black masses, that then invite human beings of integrity of all colors. That’s a major threat to the system. That’s one of the reasons why our young black people are being so viciously targeted with the soul murder in the educational system, with the vicious mass incarceration. You know, Brother Carl Dix and I have called for stop mass incarceration today, stop it now. And one of the reasons why you see this massive unemployment, and yet no serious attention to it, the level of almost genocidal attack on our precious young people is really beyond language. We don’t really have a language for it. It’s that vicious. It’s that ugly.
Ida B. Wells. We end the text with Sister Ida B., because in many ways she’s probably the most courageous of all of them. And that’s hard to say, but it really is true, because she, at a time in which Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois are arguing back and forth over conceptions of education, civil rights struggle versus subservience to the powers that be, in Booker T. Washington’s case, she looks the raw violence in the face and writes the classic, Red Terror. “I want to talk about Jim Crow-Jane Crow lynching that sits at the very center of American life, has been trivialized in so many ways.” And, of course, she’s run out of Tennessee with a bounty on her head. Thank God that T. Thomas Fortune at The New York Age was in place at that time.
She was born in 1862. She was born a slave in Mississippi. Both parents died very quickly. She had to raise her brothers and sisters, and went on to become one of the great intellectuals, one of the great freedom fighters. Championed the campaign against lynching. anti-terrorism. See, a lot of people don’t realize, you see, black freedom movement has always been an anti-terrorist movement. NAACP itself responded to the riots in Springfield, Illinois. It’s in the face of American terrorism. And Ferguson is an extension of it. It’s in the face of American terrorism.
she began reporting in her Memphis Free Speech and Headlight about the killing of three of her friends in Memphis and was run out of town, her press destroyed, but then she went all around the country covering—exposing lynchings throughout the country. She really was one of the original muckrakers, but the muckrakers that are not talked about. Before Upton Sinclair. Before Sinclair and Lincoln Steffens and all the others.
And this is very important in terms of our present moment, because you remember Carl Rowan. Carl Rowan was the most popular black journalist in the 1960s. He demonized Malcolm X. He trivialized Martin Luther King Jr. when he came out against the empire in Vietnam. And we’re living in a moment now where there’s a kind of Carl Rowanization of black journalism. So you see it on TV, in MSNBC and so forth, of people who act as if they’re saying something critical, but in fact it’s milquetoast, and it’s well adjusted to the status quo. And when we look back at the 1960s, very few people talk about Carl Rowan in any positive way. And you see his vicious attacks on Spike Lee when Spike made the movie on Malcolm X, and especially that Reader’s Digest piece that he wrote in ’67 talking about how Martin Luther King Jr. had lost integrity, lost responsibility. You say, “Carl, what are you talking about?” But same is true for so many of the black journalists today on TV and those who are often in mainstream white newspapers. The black independent press is being lost, just like black independent radio is being lost. And this Black Prophetic Fire is simply a way of saying, well, when it comes to our youth, when it comes to our music, when it comes to the culture, when it comes to politics, we need a renaissance of integrity, courage, vision, willingness to serve and, most importantly, willingness to sacrifice.
W. E. B. Du Bois, you just say that brother’s name, and you want to be silent for a while. You know, 95 years of struggle. And keep in mind, what did he say when he was on the boat after 95 years? “Cheer up, Negro. You can never win in America. You must cast your struggle on an international stage. I’m going to Ghana. I’m going to Africa. I remain tied to the best of America, but I recognize that it may very well be the case that America needs a revolution. But America but does not have the capacity for revolution, only capacity for counterrevolution at the moment. But we can go other places—Latin America, Asia, Africa.” There’s nobody like W. E. B. Du Bois. He was a sociologist, a historian, a civil rights activist, born in 1868, dies in 1963.
W. E. B. Du Bois speaking in 1951 about African Americans’ and workers’ rights, “Because most American Negroes of education and property have long since oversimplified their problem and tried to separate it from all other social problems, they conceive that their fight is simply to have the same rights and privileges as other American citizens. They do not for a moment stop to question how far the organization of work and distribution of wealth in America is perfect, nor do they for a moment conceive that the economic organization of America may have fundamental injustices and shortcomings which seriously affect not only Negroes, but the whole world.”
Keep in mind he’s 83 years old. He’s just emerged from a court case where they’ve had him in handcuffs. He was head of the Peace Information Center, which is simply an organization to ban nuclear weapons. He was viewed as a representative of a foreign government or agent of a foreign government. He was under arrest. He had just married Sister Shirley Graham Du Bois, a towering freedom fighter in her own right, on Valentine’s Day of 1951. And he’s still strong as ever. He’s left-wing. He’s a threat, not just to the system; he’s a threat to the black middle class. They’re attempting to gain access to a mainstream. They’re attempting to become more and more part of a status quo. He is determined to follow through on the love for poor people, oppressed people. But he begins on the chocolate side of town, as so many of us. He starts with black people and loves brown, red, yellow, white, across the board. And when, I think, the history is written of the decline and fall of the American empire, Du Bois’s voice will probably be the major voice, along that of Herman Melville and Toni Morrison and a few others. He was a truth teller.
he put capitalism at the center. He put at the center of American capitalism slavery. He put at the center of American slavery black humanity, black agency, with the oppression—what kind of creative responses. When you heard Curtis Mayfield sing “We are a Winner,” where does his hope come from? Where does his joy come from? You’ve got to keep track of the creativity. You’ve got to keep track of the sense of community, the we-consciousness. When he always cast it in an international—or didn’t always, he started casting it in an international context in the 19-teens, so he understood empire, as well. His famous essay, “The Damnation of Women,” highly sensitive to patriarchy emerging. Of course, I think he would say similar things about our gay brothers and lesbian sisters.
he started as a pink socialist; he ended very much as a communist. He joined the Communist Party before he left the United States. But he always recognized a certain kind of free thinking. At a certain moment, he’s critical of Stalinism; another moment, he’s too uncritical of Stalinism. But he’s very improvisational in his concern with oppressed peoples. And he always understood the centrality of music, primarily the spirituals for him. For us, it would be blues and rhythm and blues and hip-hop.
Ella Baker. Born 1903, dies 1986. I think she is the central figure in this text, and, I think, in the American tradition when it comes to democratic theory and practice. And here she’s even more important than Brother Martin, because Martin is still tied to a messianic model of leadership. He’s still tied to that one charismatic figure at the top. Ella Baker understood that leadership is something that comes not just from below, but it comes in the creative capacities of those Sly Stone called everyday people, those James Cleveland called ordinary people. So she’s always highly suspicious of the charismatic messianic figure at the top, the male egos that bounce off against one another in front of the cameras when it comes to various marches. She’s doing the work and understands that leadership comes from among the everyday—interacting with the everyday people and, most importantly, understanding the centrality of we-consciousness, as opposed to that isolated ego. And she enacted it. Stokely, Bob Moses, Diane Nash—we can go on and on and on—Occupy, in that sense, is an extension of the best of Ella Baker. And I think anytime we talk about Martin Luther King Jr., we must talk about Malcolm X, we must talk about Ella Baker. All three go hand in hand.
Malcolm, I mean, good God, we just don’t have a language for that brother. He’s black music in motion. He’s jazz enacted and embodied, in that sense. And as he grew, he’s John Coltrane’s Love Supreme at the core. He starts not loving white folk enough, but he grows. He matures. But his intensity, his authenticity, his sincerity in telling the truth and exposing lies and bearing witness is, I think, in many ways, unprecedented. In the beginnings as a gangster, he’s Malcolm Little. He’s loved by Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X. And then he takes on the world with his love, with his willingness to live, his willingness to die, for struggle for the people.
Martin Luther King Jr. Martin, in many ways, is the closest to me as a Christian, because we both choose the way of the cross. And the way of the cross is unarmed truth and unapologetic love. And the condition of the truth is always to allow the least of these suffering to be heard. And, of course, that love means that you end up loving not just neighbor, not just stranger, but you even love your enemies, because enemies can change. You don’t trump their sense of possibility. It’s tied to a cross of a Palestinian Jew named Jesus, and it’s something that allows you to look death in the face and say, “Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?” We’re willing to live and die for the everyday people.
Du Bois used to say what happens to black folk in “the dusty desert of dollars and smartness,” in The Souls of Black Folk. And I think what he’s talking about is a highly commodified culture, instant gratification, fleeting pleasures, weapons of mass distraction, making it difficult for sleepwalking to actually be shattered and to wake up and be concerned about deep issues of life and death and justice and struggle for freedom. And I think we live in a culture that’s been saturated with that kind of commodification on every level. Now, granted, when I talk about whether it’s dead, the prophetic fire is dead or not, I was just really down and out and being highly rhetorical, but, my god, you know, with Ferguson, with this magnificent march regarding climate change, with Sister Klein, Naomi’s text coming out, there’s a whole host of pieces of evidence of an awakening that’s taking place. So if we can make the connections and somehow make the links, I think that we might be able to turn a corner.
Obama is a neoliberal centrist. He is a pro-imperial president. He is brilliant, he’s charismatic, but he is the head of the American empire and sits at the center of the U.S. status quo. The black prophetic tradition is a profound critique and indictment of the system that he heads, and of course generates profound disappointment in the priorities of Wall Street, of drones, of mass surveillance that we’ve seen in his administration. But we say it in love. People say, “Oh, Brother West, you’re always putting the president down and then talking about love.” I love the brother. I pray for his safety and his family. He’s wrong.
he not only falls outside of the black prophetic tradition, but unfortunately he’s oftentimes been identified with it and confused—and it leads toward confusion, because people think that somehow Barack Obama is the culmination of Frederick Douglass and Martin and Malcolm and Ida and Ella and others, and it’s the exact opposite, that he is as establishmentarian, he is as much pro-status quo, as a Bill Clinton or a Hillary Clinton or any other neoliberal opportunist. And that needs to be said over and over again. It leads toward unbelievable confusion, and in the end it leads toward capitulation.
I was a critical supporter, and I thought that he was much better than what the mean-spirited, cold-hearted Republican Party would put forward. But when I talked with him for five or six hours, my question was: What is your relation to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.? And I was convinced that he was much more progressive. I’d use examples like Harold Washington, talked about González from Texas, those who were inside of the system but were very progressive. But I also promised him that the day he won, I would breakdance in the afternoon, and then next morning, I would emerge as his major critic. And I’ve been true to my word in that sense.
That’s when I say when I love the brother, it means we have to tell the truth about him. He’s not a Muslim. right wing lying on and calling him a Muslim, lying on and calling him a socialist. He’s definitely not a socialist. 25% of Americans don’t even believe he was born in the U.S.
But we have to be able to separate those kind of lies from— the kind of lies and crimes that the system that he heads promotes. And somehow you’ve got to walk that tightrope.
I think that there’s fewer, fewer illusions about the present administration. I think it’s fairly clear that the Wall Street links to him are tight. It’s fairly clear that the assassination of American citizens with no due process or judicial review needs to be called into question. It’s very clear that the drones really are crimes against humanity. And the same is true in the Middle East in terms of Palestinian babies killed without any kind of impunity [sic] whatsoever on behalf of the Israeli occupiers. Those are the kind of issues people see more and more clearly, and I think they begin to acknowledge the degree to which some of the things that we critics have been saying are not just personal catharsis, but actually based on evidence.
anybody who believes deep down in their soul what he said would make it a priority in their actions in the administration. And it’s fairly clear that the vicious criminal justice system, which itself is criminal, has not been a major priority of the Obama administration. The new Jim Crow, prison-industrial complex, even with Eric Holder—Eric Holder has been decent on civil rights. He gets an F for civil liberties. He gets an F when it comes to protecting the mass surveillance. He gets an F in protecting his Wall Street friends—no prosecution of any Wall Street executives. When it comes to new Jim Crow, he made some gestures, but it was not a major priority. So when you have a speech like that, you’re looking for action, you’re looking for policy, not just words in the air.
And he said, “And many minority youth feel as if.” Feel as if? It’s an objective fact. And not only that, but how do you feel about it, Mr. President? We want to hear normative claims coming from your soul. And we do get those normative claims when he’s in front of other groups, you see. He doesn’t go in front of AIPAC and say, “Well, Jews feel as if they don’t have security.” No, no, he lays it out. And he goes to the Catholics, says the same thing. Goes to the Business Roundtable. He doesn’t say, “Wall Street feels as if.” No, no, he lays it out. Gets in front of black folk, you know, we get the superficial performance.
Dr. Martin Luther King—he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, President Obama also won the Nobel Peace Prize—and what they say about war
I think most of us agree that it was just a joke that a war president would win the Nobel Peace Prize. But it’s happened before. Theodore Roosevelt won, and of course Henry Kissinger, war criminal par excellence, won. So the Nobel Prize committee has made some real mistakes in that regard. But Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board. And what a stark contrast it is. Now, myself, I’m not a pacifist at all. I believe in just war. I would have joined the spirit of the nation to fight against apartheid. I would have joined armies to fight against a thug named Hitler. I would join various movements, out of a motivation for self-defense, to actually pick up arms in this regard. I’m against genocide. I’m against fascism. I’m willing to fight against them, so that in that sense I think one can still be committed to justice and committed to peace, but recognize the circumstances under which one does have to fight. Martin Luther King Jr. would disagree with that. My dear brother Desmond Tutu would disagree with that. Barack Obama has imperial armies with imperial wars going on simultaneously in various parts of the world.
Barack Obama was talking about the centrality of political calculation tied to national security interests, usually the interests of big banks, big corporations and the military arms industry, whereas Brother Martin was a grand critic of empire in the name of the precious humanity of poor people and oppressed people. So you get a major clash. And in the end, it’s all about the actions. In the end, Barack Obama commits war crimes in Somalia and Yemen, commits war crimes in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Martin Luther King Jr. tries to keep the spotlight on the war crimes, to keep track of the innocent children who were being killed, the innocent men and women who were being killed. So you get a major clash. And that’s why I tell my young brothers and sisters, when they walk around with this little sweater of Martin, Malcolm and Barack Obama, I say, “Please. That’s like Coltrane and Sarah Vaughan and Pat Boone.” He’s a very different tradition. We love Brother Pat, but he doesn’t belong on that shirt. And Barack Obama does not belong on that shirt. Let’s be clear. Let’s keep track of the prophetic fire of those on that shirt. Unbelievable sacrifice.
He’s set back progressive movements. He’s set back prophetic possibilities in black America. And one of the aims of this text is to get back on that love train, get back on the courage train, get back on the justice train, that he is not a conductor. He is a president who’s doing what he can based on his choices as a neoliberal opportunist. Let’s be clear who the real thing is—Du Bois, Martin, Malcolm, Ida, Ella, Frederick Douglass. Those are the real ones.
what we tried to do is to focus on Frederick Douglass setting the highest standard, telling the truth about white supremacist slavery and understanding America being predicated very much on slave labor, connecting it to women’s struggle, connecting it to critiques of the United States seizing Mexican lands and so forth—Brother Juan pointed out earlier. And then, of course, Ida B. Wells, born a slave, as well, but looking raw terror of Jim and Jane Crow in the face and standing tall, being willing to tell the truth, as a journalist, and to juxtapose that with the very low-brow and mediocre journalism of so many black folk on television and writing newspapers today.
Then, of course, there’s Martin and Malcolm. And Martin and Malcolm and Ella all go hand in hand. Ella Baker, grassroot organizing. Ella Baker, truth teller, quiet dignity, but always galvanizing others with her spirit of resistance. Brother Martin being willing to pay the ultimate price, always growing, critic of empire, in love with poor people across the board. And then there’s Malcolm, who in many ways isn’t—in some ways, he does stand out more in the book than anybody else, because he’s got such a—what I call parrhesia, a fearless speech, unintimidated speech, that he’s willing to speak truth and unsettle everybody, including black folk. He’s critical of black leaders across the board, and yet he’s got so much love in him, deep, deep love in him.
you can just see how unafraid he is. You can see the love flowing. You see the courage. You see the willingness to pay the price. That’s what we need today. And W. E. B. Du Bois, for 95 years, towering public intellectual, meticulous scholar, also poet and exemplary essayist, same kind of fire, but in his own New England way, born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Malcolm, from the streets. Part of the same tradition, both of them full of prophetic fire in their distinctive modes. And we need it so badly today, not just in black America, but in the nation and in the world. And it is coming back.
And both of them, though, marginalized by the dominant society because of the fear of the message that they brought out. The truth is a dangerous thing. Love is a dangerous thing, especially when it comes to entrenched interests, deep fears and anxieties among the powers that be. And every generation, we’ve got to revive it, over and over again. This book, in some ways, is my own love letter to the younger generation.
To beckon them to get on this love train, find joy in serving others, find joy in telling the truth, find joy in being willing to sacrifice, because you come from a great tradition. And this is not just black folk; this is young people across the board.
— source democracynow.org
Dr. Cornel West, professor at Union Theological Seminary. He is author of numerous books; his latest is Black Prophetic Fire.