Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

  15. See Du Bois’s concept of “the negro co-operative movement” (Dusk of Dawn, 106–9).

  16. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

  17. Du Bois stresses that in the South he “had accepted and embraced eagerly the companionship of those of my own color” (Dusk of Dawn, 17). He describes his first encounter with “the frenzy of a Negro revival in the untouched backwoods of the South” in the beginning of chap. X of The Souls of Black Folk (1903; New York: Modern Library, 2003), 190–91.

  18. See Du Bois’s self-characterization in Dusk of Dawn: “In general thought and conduct I became quite thoroughly New England. [. . .] I had the social heritage not only of a New England clan but Dutch taciturnity. This was later reinforced and strengthened by inner withdrawals in the face of real and imagined discriminations. [. . .] The Negroes in the South, when I came to know them, could never understand why I did not naturally greet everyone I passed on the street or slap my friends in the back” (9).

  19. The book ends with a credo, as it were, a praise of “tragicomic hope” that “is wedded to a long and rich tradition of humanist pursuits of wisdom, justice, and freedom from Amos through Socrates to Ellison. The high-modern moments in this tradition—Shakespeare, Beethoven, Chekhov, Coltrane—enact and embody a creative weaving of the Socratic, prophetic, and tragicomic elements into profound interpretations of what it means to be human. These three elements constitute the most sturdy democratic armor available to us in our fight against corrupt elite power.” Cornel West, Democracy Matters: Winning the Fight Against Imperialism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 217.

  20. The essay referred to is entitled “Of Beauty and Death.” It juxtaposes the enjoyment of beauty in nature with the painful experience of social death under Jim Crow in a dialogue with a female friend, “who is pale and positive,” and accuses the first-person narrator, a persona of Du Bois, of being “too sensitive.” Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil (1920; New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 171.

  21. “The Souls of White Folk.” It is interesting to note that in this essay, Du Bois anticipates the negative reaction of white readers to his collection of essays, fiction, and poetry: “My word is to them mere bitterness and my soul, pessimism” (Du Bois, Darkwater, 21). As David Levering Lewis points out in his “Introduction,” in “many of the mainstream American newspapers and periodicals the standard reproach was similar: Darkwater was tragically infected with its author’s bitterness” (xvi).

  22. Ibid., 35–36.

  23. As Du Bois stated in the manifesto “Krigwa [= Crisis Guild of Writers and Artists] Little Theatre Movement,” “a real Negro theatre” should be “About us, By us, For us, and Near us,” Crisis 32 (July 1926): 135. “I believed that the pageant, with masses of costumed colored folk and a dramatic theme carried out chiefly by movement, dancing and music, could be made effective. [. . .] I wrote and staged an historic pageant of the history of the Negro race, calling it ‘The Star of Ethiopia.’ Before a total attendance of thirty thousand persons, we played it on the floor of an armory with three hundred fifty actors” (Dusk of Dawn, 136). After this first performance in New York in 1913, the pageant was reproduced in Washington in 1915 and in Philadelphia in 1916. It should be pointed out that Du Bois clearly understood that the genre was doomed to fail due to the competition from technically advanced media: “But alas, neither poetry nor pageants pay dividends, and in my case, they scarcely paid expenses. My pageant died with an expiring gasp in Los Angeles in 1925. But it died not solely for lack of support; rather from the tremendous and expanding vogue of the motion picture and the power of the radio and loud speaker. We had no capital to move into this field and indeed in face of monopoly, who has. Yet, my final pageant took place significantly in Hollywood Bowl, and was still a beautiful thing” (137). On the popularity of the pageant in America as a genre of political struggle in general and Du Bois’s pageant in particular, see Soyica Diggs Colbert’s interpretation of The Star of Ethiopia in her informative study The African American Theatrical Body: Reception, Performance, and the Stage (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 48–90.

  24. See “The Talented Tenth Memorial Address” (delivered at the Nineteenth Grand Boulé Conclave, Sigma Pi Phi, 1948); reprinted in Gates and West, Future of the Race, 159–77. In his attempt “to re-examine and restate the thesis of the Talented Tenth” (159), Du Bois concedes that he erroneously “assumed that with knowledge, sacrifice would automatically follow. In my youth and idealism, I did not realize that selfishness is even more natural than sacrifice” (161). Conceptually, the major shift is from individual to “group-leadership,” or the “Guiding Hundredth,” which then “calls for leadership through special organization” (168, 177).

  25. See Shirley Graham Du Bois’s portrait of her husband in His Day Is Marching On: A Memoir of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: Lippincott, 1971), which not only conveys Du Bois’s superior intellect, stalwart courage, and prophetic vision but also his sharp wit and (oftentimes mischievous) humor. On her own political activism, which has all too often been neglected, see Gerald Horne and Margaret Stevens, “Shirley Graham Du Bois: Portrait of the Black Woman Artist as a Revolutionary,” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle, ed. Dayo F. Gore et al. (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 95–114.

  26. “It is difficult to let others see the full psychological meaning of caste segregation. It is as though one, looking out from a dark cave in a side of an impending mountain, sees the world passing and speaks to it; speaks courteously and persuasively, showing them how these entombed souls are hindered in their natural movement, expression, and development. [. . .] It gradually penetrates the minds of the prisoners that the people passing do not hear; that some thick sheet of invisible but horribly tangible plate glass is between them and the world. They get excited; they talk louder; they gesticulate. [. . .] They may scream and hurl themselves against the barriers, hardly realizing in their bewilderment that they are screaming in a vacuum unheard and that their antics may actually seem funny to those outside looking in” (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 66).

  27. Ibid., 67.

  28. In The American Evasion of Philosophy, West calls Black Reconstruction the “most significant product of Du Bois’ encounter with Marxist thought” (146) and gives an example of Du Bois’s “graphic and hyperbolic language”: “America thus stepped forward in the first blossoming of the modern age and added to the Art of Beauty [. . .] and to Freedom of Belief [. . .] a vision of democratic self-government. [. . .] It was the Supreme Adventure, in the last Great Battle of the West, for that human freedom which would release the human spirit from lower lust for mere meat, and set it free to dream and sing. And then some unjust god leaned, laughing, over the ramparts of heaven and dropped a black man in the midst. It transformed the world. It turned democracy back to Roman Imperialism and Fascism; it restored caste and oligarchy; it replaced freedom with slavery and withdrew the name of humanity from the vast majority of human beings.” Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 29–30; cf. West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 147.

  29. John A. Hobson (1858–1940) was an English economist and prolific writer best known for his critique of imperialism as a consequence of modern capitalism.

  30. See West: “The last pillar of Du Bois’s project is his American optimism. Like most intellectuals of the New World, he was preoccupied with progress. [. . .] Du Bois tended to assume that U.S. expansionism was a sign of probable American progress. In this sense, in his early and middle years, he was not only a progressivist but also a kind of American exceptionalist. [. . .] Du Bois never fully grasped the deeply pessimistic view of American democracy behind the Garvey movement” (“Black Strivings,” 71–72). In a footnote to this passage West h
ighlights the importance of two essays by Du Bois, one of which he mentions above: “Du Bois confronts this pessimism most strikingly in two of the most insightful and angry essays in his corpus—‘The White World,’ in Dusk of Dawn (1940), and ‘The Souls of White Folk,’ in Darkwater (1920)” (West, “Black Strivings,” 187n27).

  31. “I just cannot take any more of this country’s treatment. We leave for Ghana October 5 and I set no date for return. [. . .] Chin up, and fight on, but realize that American Negroes can’t win.” Du Bois quoted in Gerald Horne, Black and Red: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Afro-American Response to the Cold War, 1944–1963 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), 345; see also, West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 149.

  32. For an extended argument regarding the similarities between “the Russian sense of the tragic and the Central European Jewish sense of the absurd and the black intellectual response to the African-American predicament,” and Du Bois’s neglect of this connection, see West, “Black Strivings,” 76–79, 184n14, 187–90n29.

  33. See chap. 1, n. 23.

  34. For the passage we refer to, see chap. VI of The Souls of Black Folk entitled “Of the Training of Black Men”: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the color line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas [. . .] I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn or condescension” (109–10).

  35. See West, “Black Strivings,” 190–91n30.

  36. On the influence of German and European culture and manners in general on his education, see the chap. “Europe 1892 to 1894” in Du Bois, Autobiography.

  37. Du Bois wrote a very positive review of Wright’s 1941 photo-history 12 Million Black Voices: A Folk History of the Negro in the United States (photo direction Edwin Rosskam); he was more skeptical of Wright’s autobiography Black Boy (1945), which he considered “as a work of art patently and terribly overdrawn” (see reviews nos. 104 and 115 in Book Reviews by W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: KTO Press, 1977), and he was highly critical of Wright’s book Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954): “Naturally I did not like Richard Wright’s book. Some of his descriptions were splendid but his logic is lousy. He starts out to save Africa from Communism and then makes an attack on British capitalism which is devastating. How he reconciles these two attitudes I cannot see.” Letter to George Padmore, December 10, 1954, in The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. III, Selections, 1944–1963, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1954), 375.

  38. Edward J. Blum, W. E. B. Du Bois: American Prophet (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2007).

  39. “The Revelation of Saint Orgne, the Damned,” commencement address, 1938, Fisk University; reprinted in W. E. B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1920–1963, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 111.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957) is best known for his novels Zorba the Greek (1946; trans. 1952), The Greek Passion (1948; trans. 1954), The Last Temptation of Christ (1951; trans. 1960), and Saint Francis (1954; trans. 1962). He also wrote the play Buddha (1941–1943; trans. 1983) and the epic poem The Odyssee: A Modern Sequel (1938; trans. 1958). In 1928, while Kazantzakis worked at the first version of the Buddha, a verse tragedy he later destroyed, he also developed ideas for a screenplay on Lenin that he hoped to turn into a film; see The Selected Letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, ed. Peter Bien (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012). Another link between Du Bois and Kazantzakis is their interest in the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian experiment in Communism, which led them both to travel to Russia in the 1920s. In 1927, Kazantzakis was a guest of the Soviet government for the celebrations of the tenth anniversary of the revolution, and in his letters from Moscow, he praised “the atmosphere [. . .] filled with spirit, every race has come to worship at the red Bethlehem” (Selected Letters, 278). See also his travel book Russia: A Chronicle of Three Journeys in the Aftermath of the Revolution, trans. Michael Antonakes and Thanasis Maskaleris (Berkeley, CA: Creative Arts Book, 1989). Cf. Du Bois’s summary of his impressions of Russia during his trip in 1928: “Yet, there lay an unforgettable spirit upon the land” (Dusk of Dawn, 143); see also chap. IV, “The Soviet Union,” Autobiography, 16–25.

  42. Just forty days before he was assassinated, Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at an event marking the hundredth anniversary of Du Bois’s birth, at Carnegie Hall in New York City, “Honoring Dr. Du Bois,” in Black Titan: W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. John Henrik Clarke et al. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970), 176–83.

  43. Ibid., 181–82, 183.

  Chapter Three: Moral Fire

  1. The first and slightly different version of this chapter appeared as “We Need Martin More Than Ever” in Amerikastudien/American Studies 56, no. 3 (2011): 449–67. A shortened version was published in the German political journal Die Gazette (Summer 2013), translated into German by Marlon Lieber.

  2. Cornel West, “Prophetic Christian as Organic Intellectual: Martin Luther King, Jr.,” in The Cornel West Reader, 426; first published in Cornel West, Prophetic Fragments: Illuminations of the Crisis in American Religion and Culture (1988; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1993), 3–12.

  3. Quoted in James Cone, “‘Let Suffering Speak’: The Vocation of a Black Intellectual,” in Cornel West: A Critical Reader, ed. George Yancy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001), 108.

  4. Cornel West, “Introduction: The Crisis in Contemporary American Religion,” Prophetic Fragments, ix-xi; reprinted in The Cornel West Reader, 338.

  5. Martin Luther King Jr., “The Good Samaritan,” sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, August 28, 1966; quoted in David J. Garrow, Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (New York: Vintage, 1988), 524.

  6. “Let us march on poverty, until no American parent has to skip a meal so that their children may march on poverty, until no starved man walks the streets of our cities and towns in search of jobs that do not exist.” Martin Luther King Jr., “Our God Is Marching On!” speech, Montgomery, AL, March 1965, in I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World, ed. James M. Washington (New York: Harper, 1992), 123.

  7. See Tavis Smiley and Cornel West, The Rich and the Rest of Us: A Poverty Manifesto (New York: Smiley Books, 2012).

  8. Abraham Joshua Heschel, descended from a highly distinguished family of Polish Hasidic rabbis, was able to escape to London shortly before the German invasion of Poland, from where he emigrated to the United States in 1940. One of the leading Jewish theologians of the twentieth century and an advocate of interreligious dialogue, Heschel—on the basis of his study of Hebrew prophets and what in his University of Berlin doctoral dissertation he called “prophetic consciousness” (Die Prophetie, 1936)—insisted on combining religious commitment with social activism. He supported the civil rights movement, e.g., by taking part in the Selma-Montgomery march, and he spoke out against the Vietnam War (see, for instance, a publication on behalf of the interfaith group Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, Robert McAfee Brown, Abraham J. Heschel, and Michael Novak, Vietnam: Crisis of Conscience (New York: Association Press, 1967). Heschel was one of the speakers at New York’s Riverside Church on April 4, 1965, when King gave his controversial speech “Beyond Vietnam,” also known as “A Time to Break Silence.” As Heschel wrote in 1972: “Would not our prophets be standing with those who protest against the war in Vietnam, the decay of our cities?” See Michael A. Chester, Divine Pathos and Human Being: The Theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel (London: Mitchell, 2005), 195.

  9. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, foreword by Cornel West (New York: New Press, 2010).

  10. Loïc Wacquant, Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

  11. Though Coretta King chose not to reveal this in he
r autobiography, she did mention that “Martin had, of course, read Karl Marx, who, he said, had convinced him that neither Marxism nor traditional capitalism held the whole truth, but each a partial truth.” Coretta Scott King, My Life with Martin Luther King, Jr. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1970), 71. Cf. King’s statement about their first date: “I never will forget, the first discussion we had was about the question of racial and economic injustice and the question of peace.” The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. Clayborne Carson (New York: Warner, 1998), 35. King’s autobiography contains an extended passage on Marxism, in which King criticizes the “materialistic interpretation of history,” the “ethical relativism,” and the “political totalitarianism” of the “Communist writings” of Marx and Lenin on the one hand, yet acknowledges that Marx had made him “ever more conscious [. . .] about the gulf between superfluous wealth and abject poverty” on the other hand (Autobiography, 21). As early as 1952, King, in a letter to his wife, addressed the failure of the capitalist system: “So today capitalism has out-lived its usefulness. It has brought about a system that takes necessities from the masses to give luxuries to the classes” (ibid., 36). By 1967 King did not hesitate to publicly question the capitalist economy, for example, when, in his last Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) presidential address, he spoke about “restructuring the whole of American society” and declared “that one day we must come to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring” and that “you begin to ask the question, ‘Who owns the oil?’” In summary, he claimed, “When I say question the whole society, it means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together.” “Where Do We Go From Here?” in A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Melvin Washington (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1991), 250. For a thorough and differentiated assessment of King’s adoption of ideas of Marxism and democratic socialism, see Adam Fairclough, “Was Martin Luther King a Marxist?,” History Workshop Journal 15 (Spring 1983): 117–25; reprinted in Martin Luther King, Jr.: Civil Rights Leader, Theologian, Orator, vol. 2, ed. David J. Garrow (Brooklyn, NY: Carlson, 1989), 301–9.