by Cornel West
I think it’s impossible to understand the greatness of a Stokely Carmichael without understanding the impact of Malcolm’s talk about human agency and collective insurgency,24 without any reference to any kind of otherworldly powers. By the time you get to the Black Panther movement, SNCC in its last stage, and then the League of Revolutionary Black Workers, Ken Cockrel, General Baker, Darryl Mitchell,25 and others, you see Malcolm’s legacy. Other legatees of Malcolm X today, like Mumia Abu-Jamal26 and Assata Shakur,27 grand figures that they are—most of them are in jail; they’ve been actually in jail for twenty, thirty years—were real warriors; those were the real soldiers, and the counterintelligence program of the FBI knew these were the ones to target.28 Roger Wareham of the December 12 movement29 went to jail for so many years; Elombe Brath, and H. Rap Brown30—these are the ones we don’t really talk about because the system ran them down even though they are still holding on. And yet we need to take them very seriously.
There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm’s spirit that they became warriors, and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells. Many changed their names; some became Muslims; they had that same Malcolm X–like spirit. The grand artist and legendary educator Haki Madhubuti was deeply influenced by Malcolm X,31 and Sonia Sanchez32 and others on the female side. The great Toni Morrison, she has got a Malcolm X spirit in her sense of being an intellectual warrior, a kind of literary soldier, as it were, even given all of the white acceptance in the establishments of our day, and I think Toni Morrison would be the first to acknowledge the tremendous impact on her of Malcolm’s revolutionary sincerity and his revolutionary love and his willingness to pay the ultimate price.
CHB: In regard to organization, Malcolm X was really not as important as others we have talked about in terms of organizing, although he did his own organizing once he was independent. He founded two organizations, the Muslim Mosque Incorporated and the Organization of Afro-American Unity. We have talked about these prophetic activists in terms of organic intellectuals, so in what sense does he fit into that Gramscian model?
CW: I think that Malcolm was indeed an organic intellectual, which is to say, he was a countervailing force and a counter-hegemonic voice against the powers that be. And by using all of the various linguistic tools that touch people’s souls and hearts and minds and body simultaneously, his critiques and visions connected with the people. During his life his major weapons were his fierce intellect, undeniable sincerity, and oral power of presentation. After his death his autobiography emerges as another kind of intellectual weapon. There is a sense in which Malcolm actually lives in a very powerful way among large numbers of people through the autobiography, even more than for people who saw him speak physically.
CHB: So the organizing itself would not be necessarily part of the organic intellectual?
CW: For Gramsci, the war of position includes raising the consciousness of people and motivating them to fight for justice. Malcolm specializes much more in these activities than in building and sustaining organizational structures.
CHB: Malcolm X once said if you inspire the people, if you bring them to the political sense, you don’t have to worry any longer; they become active themselves.33 So that would explain why he thought he could, through his rhetorical power, lead the path to a revolutionary spirit in the people.
CW: I think that’s true. In that sense he sounds like Ella Baker. I think if Malcolm were to choose between a Luxemburgist versus a Leninist conception of organization, where a Luxemburgist would put much more stress on the radical consciousness arising among the people themselves, and the people themselves creating their own organization—the so-called spontaneity thesis, or more spontaneous forms of organization—versus Lenin, where you get professional revolutionaries who then go out and bring the masses inside of a vanguard party, then Malcolm would be highly suspicious of a Leninist orientation. He would be much closer to a Luxemburgist one.
Just before he was shot, in New York in the Audubon Ballroom, Malcolm had planned on setting up his own mosque. He was a Sunni Muslim leader. When we think what it means to be a revolutionary Muslim in this day and age, when people are looking for ways in which Islam is compatible with democracy, compatible with progressive politics, compatible with revolutionary politics, Malcolm is a looming example of that. But he was going to be a Sunni Muslim clergyman with his own mosque, reaching out with his own organizations and programs for the poor. He would have relations with left wing-organizations, but he would not be a member of left-wing organizations. It’s a fascinating development that could have taken place, that could have created a paradigmatic model of what it means to be a revolutionary Muslim in the way in which King at the end of his life becomes a revolutionary Christian, and both perspectives begin more and more to overlap. Their critiques of capitalism and imperialism led the FBI and the CIA to view them and their followers as the most fundamental and formidable threat to the status quo in the history of America. There would have been nothing like it, especially at a moment when so many of the white middle-class youth were responding against the draft, responding against the Vietnam War, upset deeply with Jim Crow in the South—all converging at the same time, Good God Almighty. You have such a fiery situation for social change; there is no doubt about it.
CHB: I think this is especially true for the US, because as we said in one of our other conversations, the Black Power movement had the difficulty of being too secular, not being able to stay in contact with Black masses who did not want to hear too secular a message.
CW: That’s exactly right. But it’s very interesting in our present moment, where there is a rising atheistic movement in the country. Now nearly 20 percent of Americans call themselves atheists,34 and there are various atheistic clubs and atheistic groups in the Black community as well. Secularism is becoming more widespread, and it’s a fascinating thing to see. Even as a Christian I think that a lot of this atheism is very healthy, because in many ways it is a rejection of the idolatry in the dominant churches; it’s a rejection of the gods—small “g”—who are being worshipped in mainstream America and in mainstream Black America, and that kind of atheism is always healthy for prophetic religious people. It’s healthy precisely because it allows people to freely think for themselves and engage in wholesale rejection of forms of idolatry, and, you see, the prophetic is predicated on critiques of idolatry. It is true that my atheistic brothers and sisters do not accept conceptions of God linked to love and justice as I do. But the atheistic movement itself can be one of the carriers of the prophetic tradition in its rejections of forms of idolatry that I find very healthy.
And we haven’t had enough conversation about this in the country, let alone in Black America. You think of somebody like Bill Maher, my dear brother, who has played such an important role in giving me tremendous exposure around the country and the world in his TV shows, who is a proud atheist, a progressive atheist whose prophetic witness is undeniable. We could give many other examples in terms of popular culture; we have always had a number of prophetic atheists in the academy. If my only options for belief in God were the idols of our market culture, I would be an atheist too. But the Black prophetic tradition that produced me provides rich views of God that yield moral integrity, spiritual fortitude, and political determination.
CHB: I am so surprised that you maintain secularism is on the move, whereas from a European perspective, my hunch would be that religiosity is on the move again, that there has been a major backlash as to the secular force of enlightened humanism in the last ten, twenty years or so.
CW: Things have changed; the numbers are now turning in a very different direction. The new data that just came out in 2012 reported that 18 percent of the country call the
mselves atheists.35 It’s a major leap; it’s the highest in the history of the country. Brother Robert Ingersoll36 and brother Clarence Darrow,37 two exemplary atheists back in the 1910s and ’20s, are coming back now with tremendous force. I love their prophetic witness.
Much of the force of Malcolm’s prophetic witness is his critique of idolatry in America. And again, that coincidence of critiques of idolatry from prophetic secular figures and critiques of idolatry from prophetic revolutionary Islamic figures like Malcolm or prophetic revolutionary Christian figures like the later King is fascinating. Du Bois is secular in so many deep ways, yet as we saw, he has a profound spirituality. Frederick Douglass began as a religious man and seems to have ended up agnostic. Ella came out of the church, but she was agnostic, too, I think.
CHB: Well, I think all these prophetic figures saw what Christianity could do to the suppressed, namely to suppress them even more. It was a tool, as you said before, of white supremacy. So there was always the ambivalence about the dangers of the church as an oppressive institution on the one hand, and on the other hand, the benefits of religion that might carry you on in your struggle.
CW: That’s exactly right. And although we are unable to actually do a longer reflection on the great James Baldwin, we should not overlook the sublime fact that he exemplifies the prophetic tradition in a literary form and a political form on a very high level. When he left the church, as he says in order to preach the gospel,38 he was agnostic from fourteen years old until he died. So he had the church in his heart and in his soul in terms of love, love, love, because he is on the love train; he is a love supreme kind of brother, like the one and only John Coltrane. But Baldwin is secular in terms of any cognitive commitments to God; he is agnostic to the core.
CHB: I’d like to come to another issue that plays such a great role with all the activists, namely their stance vis-à-vis self-defense, the question as to whether to fight with military weapons or not. We have the position of nonviolence of Martin Luther King; we have Ella Baker’s pacifism; and we have the notion of self-defense in the case of Malcolm, which has always been exaggerated as militancy. Where do you stand on that?
CW: Martin thought that there was something distinctive about the Negro, that we had certain peculiar spiritual gifts that allow us to withstand suffering and pain and respond by opting for a nonviolent strategy. It’s almost a kind of implicit moral superiority that we had accumulated over time that didn’t allow us to engage in that kind of gangster-like activity, whereas with Malcolm, you know, Malcolm would say over and over again: “I am the man you think you are. What do you think you would do after four hundred years of slavery and Jim Crow and lynching? Do you think you would respond nonviolently? What is your history like? Let’s look at how you have responded when you are oppressed. George Washington—revolutionary guerrilla fighter!”39 Malcolm was just so direct. One could easily imagine his response to Johnny Carson if he’d been on The Tonight Show and had been asked, “Well, what do you think about the Negro problem? What does the Negro really want?”—“Well, brother Johnny, what do you really want? Do you want your children to live in a safe neighborhood, do you want a job with a living wage, do you want decent health care, do you want respect for yourself and your community? There is no Negro problem. We want what you want. We are the people you think you are. If you are in our situation, what do you think you would want? And how would you go about getting it?” As has been reported, Richard Nixon says in his files: “If I was a Black man I would be head of the Black Panther Party. If I was a Black man I wouldn’t put up with all this violation and exploitation. I’m Richard Nixon.” And all Malcolm would say is: “Listen to the Man.” You see what I mean. There is that line in Du Bois where he says that if in fact the slave insurrectionists were whites struggling against Black supremacy, they would be heroes in every corner of the European world.40 So Malcolm was saying explicitly: “Be honest, y’all.”
So when it comes to self-defense, it’s a matter of “by any means necessary,” as he said in the great Oxford Union Debate.41 “Oh, my God, does that mean you pick up the gun?” “Do you have a history of picking up the gun? Did you drop the bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima? Whose history are we talking about? We are human beings, man. We just like you in that sense.” Now Martin would come back and say, “Malcolm, you are scaring them, brother. Oh, you got them so upset. They get so scared; they gonna be harder on us now than ever.” And Malcolm would say: “I’m not talking about strategy; I’m talking about the truth at this point. But Martin, we got to be honest, the community you are leading—even given your spiritual and moral ideals and vision—that’s how they really think. Most of them are just scared. They are scared to the core, and as long as they stay scared, they don’t even follow you in any serious way.” So you can imagine the juxtaposition there.
If there was an imaginary meeting between Malcolm and Martin it would go as follows: Malcolm would say: “Brother Martin, Garvey and others have told us that the vast majority, the masses of Black people, will never be treated with dignity. They will always live lives of ruin and disaster tied to the prison system in the hoods and the projects. There might be spaces for the middle classes, but there will never be for the masses.” And Martin would say: “No, I can’t believe that. I just can’t. We’ve got to redeem the soul of America.” Malcolm would say: “There is no soul, Martin.” “That can’t be true, Malcolm.” But then Martin would come back to Malcolm and say: “So what you gonna do after you tell your truths? You gonna follow Elijah and create a Black state in the Southern United States that has the same chance as a snowball in hell?” Malcolm would come back and say: “But the chance of your integration full-scale is a snowball in hell too! It’s gonna be a truncated integration. It’s gonna be assimilation; it’s gonna be the bourgeoisification of Black people. Some may go all the way up to the White House, but even when they get to the White House, they still going to have the crack houses; they still gonna have the prison-industrial complex, and if he doesn’t say a mumbling word about the new Jim Crow, that’s going to get worse and worse, and unemployment will be getting worse and worse. So even with a Black person in the White House, Garvey is still right.” You see.
And then Martin and Malcolm would look at each other with tears flowing down their faces because both of them love Black folk so, and they bend over and say: “Let’s sing a song. Let us sing a song.” You know what I mean. Maybe a little George Clinton, maybe a little Stevie Wonder. We need some Aretha Franklin here; we need some Billie Holiday and some Sarah Vaughan and some Curtis Mayfield. “Sing a song, Martin!” And Martin would say: “We gonna go crazy.” “No, we just gonna keep on pushin’.” Because it ain’t a question of what is at the moment credible; it’s a matter of what has integrity, of what is true, what is right, and what is worthy of those who struggled and died for us and for the precious children. That’s what brings Martin and Malcolm together.
That’s what we need so much more now in our situation, because when you actually look at what some of the revolutionary solutions are, they seem to be so far-fetched, and usually when people see that, they say: “Let me go back to my careerism; let me go back to my individualism; let me go back to my hedonism; let me go back to my narcissism.” And Martin and Malcolm, with tears flowing as they both, in their sacrificial and magnificently loving ways, say: “No, just because the solutions are far-fetched, it doesn’t mean you sell your soul for a mess of pottage. That’s not the conclusion. This is not only about being successful. This is fundamentally about being faithful to the freedom struggle that has brought us as far as it has.”
CHB: And Ella Baker would be right there and say: “The revolutionary process takes a long, long time, and we have to have the patience to maintain it, to keep it going.”
CW: That’s exactly right, that revolutionary patience. Eldridge Cleaver wrote a piece years ago in a magazine on revolutionary patience. He was still a revolutionary at that time; he hadn’t become a right-wing
Republican. But it’s a very difficult and very powerful notion of revolutionary patience, of keeping your integrity even when the rest of the world seems to want to sell everything and everybody, or buy everything and everybody.
CHB: And claiming that the problem has gone, after all.
CW: That’s the denial that goes hand in hand with the careerism.
CHB: I would like to address the question of nationalism at this point, because you have been such a critic of nationalism. How does that affect your appreciation of Malcolm X?
CW: Because I am such a critic of all forms of nationalism, be they Italian, German, Ethiopian, Japanese, American, or Black nationalism, I appreciate the progressive revolutionary versions of all of those nationalisms.42 That’s why somebody like Walt Whitman still means much to me, although he is very much a nationalist. And Malcolm is a nationalist; he really is a Black Nationalist, though he represents a very revolutionary and progressive wing of it. I think nationalism is the dominant form of idolatry of modernity, and therefore internationalism and universalism for me has to be always at the center of how I think about the world and how I analyze the world. But we do come in specific human bodies, communities, nations; and therefore we do have to talk about gender and color and race, class and nation. Malcolm’s internationalism is something that, especially at the end of his life, becomes highly attractive and, in the end, indispensable for any serious talk about social change. The same is true with Martin, especially at the very end. Martin actually shifts from being a US patriot to becoming a serious revolutionary internationalist.
But I have to be honest that Malcolm’s revolutionary Black Nationalism is something that cannot be overlooked. Think of Manning Marable’s powerful biography43—Manning was my very dear brother; I loved him very deeply, respected him dearly—I think that the fervor and the fire of Malcolm’s revolutionary Black Nationalism doesn’t come fully through in the text. I think that the book Herb Boyd and Amiri Baraka and others published in response to Marable’s book is a very important dialogue.44 They make that point—and they are on to a very important insight there—that you can’t view Malcolm through the categories of mainstream leftist analysis. Malcolm as Social Democrat—that does not capture his fervor and his fire. That’s why I started this interview with Garvey, because Garvey was not a revolutionary Black Nationalist the way Malcolm was. But there is no Malcolm X without Marcus Garvey. There is no Malcolm X without Elijah Muhammad. It’s inconceivable. It’s impossible given his own personal pilgrimage, his own individual trajectory into becoming the great prophetic revolutionary figure that he was, and therefore we really have to wrestle with this issue of nationalism. How could it be that this Black Nationalist tradition dishes out such remarkable revolutionary fervor and insight?
