Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  CW: I think that’s very true. Actually, I would go to 1876 and 1877 with the so-called Compromise, which is a capitulation that allowed for the withdrawal of the military troops in the South, which would allow for states’ rights to become predominant, which would allow for white supremacists powers to take over so that the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens’ Councils would move into positions of power culturally, economically, and politically, and so Black folk would be subject to that kind of terror. The troop withdrawal allowed for an emerging reconciliation between the former foes, the Confederacy and the Union. Now the South and the North are able to view themselves more and more as a family, and they are unified by the scapegoat, they are unified by these Black folk who are sacrificed with the withdrawal of the troops.

  It had much to do, of course, with the fact that other issues were emerging, issues of depression, issues of international relations, and they were just tired of dealing with the so-called race question; they were tired of dealing with the legacy of white supremacy. So that even great figures like William Lloyd Garrison—for whom I have tremendous respect, who gave his time, energy, and life to abolish slavery—do not engage in the kind of follow-through to deal with the vicious legacy of white supremacy after the Civil War. Now that slavery is over, the notion is “Thank God, it’s all done; the business is over.”

  Now, let me tell a story. I was at West Point the other day and was talking to a number of students and professors there. The biggest picture in the library they have at West Point is of Robert E. Lee, who was superintendent of West Point when he was part of the Union army, but was only a colonel in the Union army. He became a general in the Confederate army. And the painting they have of him is in Confederate attire, with a Black slave bowing in the right corner. So Lee is a general in the army of rebels and traitors against West Point. They were telling me that the reconciliation on the military front began when the soldiers from the South joined the soldiers in the North in the Spanish-American War, so that the imperial front becomes a space for them of coming together. Then, by the end of the Spanish-American War, lo and behold, West Point embraces the memory of Robert E. Lee. Then, in 1971, President Nixon tries to force them to have a monument to Confederate troops and Confederate soldiers. Nixon appoints Alexander Haig to establish the monument. There was Black opposition—they had just admitted Black soldiers to West Point in the sixties—the Black cadets strongly rejected the idea; there was tremendous disarray, and West Point gave up on the idea. So you see, this tribute to the legacy of white supremacy remains integral to West Point, past and present.

  So on the imperial front, after Reconstruction, the white Southerners and the white Northerners were able to come together, subordinate the peoples of color in Hawaii, in Guam, in the Philippines, in Puerto Rico, and domestically subordinate the Black folk, so that, lo and behold, the Confederate and the Union view themselves as part of a cantankerous family not really at odds over whether the Union ought to exist or not, but a cantankerous family whose members have more in common than what separates them. And there is a united front against Black folk internally and brown folk externally, and to me this is really important, because Ida B. Wells is willing to speak courageously and sacrificially and candidly about the brutality of American terrorism at home and acknowledge the terrorism abroad.6

  Unlike Booker T. Washington, Ida B. Wells publicly denounced lynching. Du Bois is not really hit by the issue until he sees the knuckles of lynching victim Sam Hose on display in Atlanta, gives up his detached, disinterested, scientific orientation and becomes a political activist—now this is seven years after Ida B. Wells has a bounty on her head!

  CHB: True. But it needed that confrontation, and he reacts to the experience, whereas Ida B. Wells has that experience earlier; she is in the South. And in the Memphis lynching, one of the three victims, Tom Moss, was one of her close friends; she was godmother to his daughter. So I think it is about the immediate confrontation, and when Du Bois is confronted, it changes his life just as much as it changed her life.

  CW: That’s true. But you know, Du Bois is in Nashville in the 1880s as a student at Fisk University and then teaches those two summers there in a small town in Tennessee, so he must have heard about the lynching and the terror.

  CHB: In his autobiography he writes about that very different kind of— He would not call it terror but a kind of discrimination of Blacks in the South that he was not used to. But as far as I remember, he does mention lynching, but it is the lynching of Sam Hose that, as he puts it, “startled me to my feet.”7

  CW: Exactly. But there is something about—and I love it—sister Ida B. Wells’s rebellious spirit. As a youth, she had a deep suspicion of authority.8 She reminds me of Malcolm, and Malcolm reminds me of her in terms of this willingness to be candid and honest about any sources of pain and suffering, and you speak to it directly regardless of the price, regardless of what burden goes along with it, or whatever cost you have to pay.

  CHB: The first time she was so courageous was when her parents had just died and the community decided to distribute the children, her five younger siblings, to be adopted by other families, and as a young girl of sixteen, she says: “No. No way. You can’t do that. Give me a job instead, and I will take care of my brothers and sisters.” It was unheard of for so young a woman to be the independent head of a family, and it was highly suspicious, and she got the reaction of the community in the form of really vicious slander: when Dr. Gray, a white physician, returned the savings her dying father had entrusted to him, and when the community noticed the transaction taking place in the town square, she is immediately suspected of prostituting herself. So we see early in life the bravery of a young woman who would take the responsibility for her family, which was something that did not fit into the Victorian model of womanhood, and thus people resented it and consequently suspected her of a transgression of quite a different type. That is the first moment when you see her courage.

  CW: So true. Then we get her Rosa Parks–like act of protest on the railroad train. That’s still very early in her life. She refuses to give up her seat in the first-class ladies’ coach and is removed by force. She takes it to the court; she wins; the case goes to a higher court; she loses; she must pay fees, but she takes a stand. You are so right about this willingness of this young, militant, uncompromising, bold, and fearless woman.

  CHB: And she sacrifices, because she can’t finish school, and when later she attends a graduation ceremony at her former school, she is in tears because she was not able to graduate. That was the price she had to pay. She makes up for it with her own tireless efforts to learn and to read, but it is a price she has to pay for speaking out and for taking care of her family.9

  CW: And as a teacher taking care of the family, she discovered that she was being paid thirty dollars a month and the white teachers are being paid more than twice that much. She could already see the deeply racist practices there. And we should note, of course, her summers at Fisk University. Like Du Bois, she did spend time at Fisk University. But it also shows she has a tremendous drive for studying and love of learning, not just for knowledge in the abstract but also the very process of coming to know, the very process of being committed to exploring, a sense of intellectual adventure, trying to be culturally cultivated in a variety of different ways by means of voracious reading, conversation, dialogue.

  CHB: As a young woman teaching, she reaches out to young men. In part, of course, she is looking for a partner; that was natural at her age. But sometimes what she wants is a companion to talk with and to be inspired by, someone who is an intellectual, and she loves these discussions but has the problem of decorum, because she is admonished that this is not done. You need a chaperone, all these rules of etiquette against which she often rebels.10 Another point, though, in terms of learning and aspiring to more learning: she is never allowed to teach above the fourth grade, and at one point she realizes that this is unsatisfactory—and here her activist side c
omes to the fore. She wants to be more influential by becoming a journalist and discovers that this is her true vocation. She writes: “It was through journalism that I found the real me.”11

  CW: You know, Ida B. Wells was the first Black correspondent to a major white newspaper, the Daily Inter-Ocean in Chicago, when she was on her tour in Britain, forming the British Anti-Lynching Society—not because Britain had a lynching problem. Britain was deeply racist, but they never had a Jim Crow system. Yet progressive British whites were deeply concerned about the lynching taking place in America. And Ida went there in the 1890s twice and helped form that society and wrote various articles back to that Chicago newspaper. But as a journalist, she had a vocation to tell the truth at an observational level. It reminds me in some ways of the great text of Theodore Weld and Angelina Grimké, American Slavery As It Is,12 which became a best seller in 1839. And it was observational; it was like William Cobbett13 in England or Harriet Martineau,14 where you observe and picture for your audience in a dramatic fashion the suffering and the misery of your fellow human beings, in this case of Blacks vis-à-vis a white audience. And what Ida B. Wells does as a journalist is not just report in a regular way, but she presents these dramatic portraits with statistics, with empirical data, but also stories. Ida was saying: “Let me tell you about these seventeen lynchings, where the myth was to protect white womanhood’s purity and so forth. No, there was a fear of economic competition. No, there was a sense of arbitrary targeting of these Black men that had nothing to do whatsoever with white sisters.” So you are right about the journalistic vocation and the calling. And, my God, journalism is about dead in America today, given that most journalists are extensions of the powers that be, but in those days there was prophetic witness, and Ida B. Wells was one of the great pioneers of this prophetic journalism.

  CHB: Yes, she was what today we would call an investigative journalist, because she often travelled to the places where the lynching had happened and she investigated what was going on there. And then she found out what you just said about the pretext of lynching and the truth. But sometimes she was too radical even for her time. In May 1892, in the context of the Memphis lynching, she warned her white male fellow citizens that they should not go too far:

  Eight Negroes lynched since last issue of the Free Speech. Three were charged with killing white men and five with raping white women. Nobody in this section believes the old thread-bare lie that Negro men assault white women. If Southern white men are not careful they will over-reach themselves and a conclusion will be reached which will be very damaging to the moral reputation of their women.15

  But here, as in so many other cases, when she was really radical, she had to cope with the consequences, and the consequences were severe, because, in this case, with her insinuation of consensual relationships between white women and Black men, she had enraged the white elite of Memphis, who in reaction formed a “committee” of leading citizens who completely demolished the printing office of the Free Speech.16 But often she was even too provocative for her journalist colleagues, so even at a time when, as you pointed out, journalism was more substantial, she went over the top sometimes.

  CW: Yes, when you think of the history of American journalism, people often evoke Upton Sinclair and even Jack London and other muckrakers who were investigating various forms of social injustice and social misery. But Ida B. Wells was there ten, fifteen years before. The Jungle was published by 1906,17 while Ida B. Wells was already there in 1892. As to her radicality, it shows in her statement about the Winchester rifle: that ought to have a place of honor in every Black household.18 Now that’s going to get our dear sister into a whole lot of trouble. She sounded like Deacons for Defense, Robert Williams down in North Carolina, the Black Panther Party, Huey Newton, which is about self-defense: arm yourself and make sure you police the police, so the police do not kill you.19

  CHB: And, again, it was the incident of the lynching in Memphis, when she herself bought a revolver and said, “Well, if I’m attacked, I won’t die like a dog, but I will see to it that someone else—”

  CW: “—Goes before me.”20 Now, you would not hear that out of a Booker T. Washington or W. E. B. Du Bois, maybe a William Monroe Trotter.21 I could hear William Trotter saying something like that, actually. But when you are so far ahead of your time, full of so much prophetic fire as Ida B. Wells—and then, when she marries Ferdinand Barnett, Ida B. Wells-Barnett—the level of loneliness is intense. You feel all by yourself, isolated, misunderstood, and misperceived. We see this over and over again in our prophetic figures. This is something she probably exemplifies more so than any of the figures that we have examined.

  CHB: And in part because she is a woman, and you expect less of that kind of blazing spirit of hers, that militancy, in a woman.22 As I said before, she did not succumb to the image of the Victorian woman, although she grew out of an education that was very strict, teaching her to adhere to that very model, and you see the impact of that education in her early years,23 before she renounced that ideal, and said, “To hell with it, I am here to do something for others.” For example, when her case against the railroad was overthrown, she said she was very disappointed because with her trial she had wanted to achieve something for her people.24 The responsibility she feels as an activist is her focus now, and she is less occupied with respectability and proper behavior. At the same time, she always has to defend herself, because she is so often attacked for being a woman who is—

  CW: Independent and free-thinking. Now, of course, in that case against the railroad, her lawyer is bought off by the railroad. They pay a bribe to him, and he actually succumbs, you know. This Negro, he is selling his soul, while she is fighting for justice. So she has to get a white lawyer who has more integrity in order to fight her case, and yet at the same time she doesn’t give up on the Negro; she just recognizes how cowardly some of these bourgeois Negroes can be. When we think of two classic texts by Evelyn Higginbotham and Kevin Gaines on the politics of respectability and the difficulty of women, especially in a Victorian period in which respectability has such weight and gravity,25 we see an obsession with gaining access to status and stature, with a sense of decorum and tact. Ida B. Wells is able to show that bourgeois respectability is usually a form not just of moral blindness and political cowardice, but it is also a form of conformity that hides and conceals some of the more vicious realities going on in that day. Picture this: Ida B. Wells is focusing on the barbarity of American terrorism while the mainstream is preoccupied with the politics of respectability. Most female citizens of the time are trying to prove to the male normative gaze that they are worthy of being treated in a certain kind of way. All the burden is on them: “You have to show yourself worthy for us to be accepting of you.” And Ida B. Wells shatters that, so that the cost that she has to pay at that time is enormous, and yet she comes back to us as, in some ways, a contemporary, for we take for granted the emptiness of these forms of respectability she attempted to shatter at tremendous personal cost.

  CHB: To come back to her loneliness, she was active in so very many organizations, it’s incredible, but they were bourgeois organizations, Christian organizations, that is, all middle-class organizations, and working within those groups, her base was the middle class. Especially later on, when she lived in Chicago, she was often lonely because she went too far for the middle-class sensibilities, and the sensibilities of middle-class women in particular, and she was not ready to compromise. In fact, she often scolded herself for her temper and told herself that she would have to be more reticent, and when she failed and refused to compromise, she ended up being marginalized within an organization that in some cases she had founded herself.

  CW: Over and over again. I think there was a kind of a myth of Ida B. Wells-Barnett that she was difficult to get along with, when, in fact, she would advocate the truth.26 You can go right down the row: Her critique of Booker T. Washington about his reticence to say a word about American terrorism,
27 and he comes at her very intensely: “Oh she is ridiculous.”28 Her critique of W. E. B. Du Bois, who did take her name off of the list at the founding of the NAACP, and she comes at him, too. Her mistreatment by Black women in the Black club movement that she had helped initiate; there was an Ida B. Wells Club in Chicago, and she didn’t get enough respect from them. Mary Church Terrell29 and Margaret Washington, the wife of Booker T. Washington, both became presidents in the Black club movement organization that Ida B. Wells-Barnett created, while she herself was never, ever a national president. But also her willingness to take on powerful white sisters, like Mary Ovington in the NAACP. They clashed, and Wells was explicit about her critique of Ovington’s paternalism, her racist and sexist arrogance toward her.30 The same would be true with the famous case of Frances Willard. When Willard is in England, Wells attacks her: “Well, you are talking about woman’s rights in America, and you are pushing it here in England, you haven’t said a mumbling word about lynching.” “Well, maybe I have.” “Well, where is it then?” Willard got caught, she was exposed, and Ida was quite explicit about that.31 But we have that kind of willingness with Wells to tell the truth, Black men, white men, white women, Black women. Other than Ferdinand and the kids and the Sunday school class she so loved and taught for ten years,32 there is not a whole lot left. Jane Addams33 was a friend, of course, but Wells had a critique of Jane Addams, too. So you would want to say: “Ida, this is Socratic and prophetic all the way down. How does one cope with this loneliness?” She reminds me of my dear sister, comrade, and coauthor bell hooks34 for all of her courage, consistency, and compassion.