Black Prophetic Fire

by Cornel West

51. Both Walter Sisulu, secretary general of the African National Congress (ANC), 1949–54, and Joe (Yossel Mashel) Slovo, a Lithuanian Jew whose family had emigrated to South Africa when he was eight years old, were members of the South African Communist Party and of the Umkhonto we Sizwe, “Spear of the Nation,” the armed wing of the ANC, led by Mandela.

  Chapter Four: The Heat of Democratic Existentialism

  1. See Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 170.

  2. Ibid., 273.

  3. “Receptivity” is a core concept of Romand Coles’s theory of radical democracy that proposes the practices of listening and one-on-one relations in grassroots organizing. In an essay on both Cornel West and Ella Baker, Coles submits an extraordinarily perceptive reading of West’s work, emphasizing the passages that testify to West’s listening rather than his voicing, while at the same time offering a candid critique by juxtaposing West’s “incredible passion and charisma” to Ella Baker’s “democratic receptivity,” because Coles “still think[s] that Cornel West has a great deal to learn from Ella Baker and from Bob Moses” and wants to push him beyond certain limits he discerns in his work. Romand Coles, ‘“To Make This Tradition Articulate’: Practiced Receptivity Matters, Or Heading West of West with Cornel West and Ella Baker,” in Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles, Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary: Conversations Between a Radical Democrat and a Christian (Cambridge, UK: Lutterworth Press, 2008), 79, 53, 81.

  4. Baker took Robert Parris Moses, a “deeply spiritual young man with a sharp intellect and a perceptive ear” (Ransby, Ella Baker, 248), under her wing. For an instructive summary of his educational background, his beginnings as an activist in SNCC, and his excellent rapport with Baker, see ibid., 248–52. Ransby highlights their “similar sensibilities”: “Both were intellectuals, thoughtful and analytical, yet at the same time practical and personable. Both were deeply attentive to ideology and the ideological implications of certain tactical decisions, but both were equally willing to do the messy, hands-on work necessary to implement those ideas” (ibid., 251).

  5. Baker and Schuyler were close friends in the 1930s; she was a founding member of the Young Negroes’ Cooperative League (YNCL), launched by Schuyler in 1930, and became its national director. Among the various factions of anarchism, the economic model of the cooperative as a third way between capitalism and state Marxism was the most prominent concept during the Great Depression. As Schuyler wrote in 1930: “Cooperative democracy means a social order, in which the mills, mines, railroads, farms, markets, houses, shops and all the other necessary means of production, distribution and exchange are owned cooperatively by those who produce, operate and use them. Whereas the Socialists hope to usher in such a Utopia society by the ballot and the Communists hope to turn the trick with the bullet the cooperator (who is really an Anarchist since the triumph of his society will do away with the state in its present form—and I am an Anarchist) is slowly and methodologically doing so through legal, intelligent economic cooperation or mutual aid.” Pittsburgh Courier, November 15, 1930; quoted in Ransby, Ella Baker, 87. Baker considered the cooperative movement as a path toward radical social change, toward “the day,” as Baker wrote in 1935, “when the soil and all of its resources will be reclaimed by its rightful owners—the working masses of the world.” “Youthful City Workers Turning to Cooperative Farming,” Amsterdam News, May 11, 1935; quoted in Ransby, Ella Baker, 86. For Du Bois’s propagation of cooperative economics in the 1930s, see Dusk of Dawn.

  6. For Bayard Rustin, see chap. 3, n. 15.

  7. Best known as the cofounder of the Catholic Worker Movement and writer for the Catholic Worker, Dorothy Day, who converted to Catholicism in 1927, combined her anarchist and socialist convictions with a fervent religious belief. See Cornel West, “On the Legacy of Dorothy Day,” Catholic Agitator 44, no. 1 (February 2014): 1–3, 6; and Cornel West, “Dorothy Day: Exemplar of Truth and Courage,” a lecture given at Maryhouse Catholic Worker, New York City, November 8, 2013, the 114th birthday of Dorothy Day (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AcMmXSMqJag). For the anarchist thought of Day, Bayard Rustin, and Henry David Thoreau, see Anthony Terrance Wiley’s Princeton PhD dissertation (2011), “Angelic Troublemakers: Religion and Anarchism in Henry David Thoreau, Dorothy Day, and Bayard Rustin.”

  8. Dutch poet and activist Herman Gorter and Dutch astronomer and theorist of council Communism Anton Pannekoek both criticized Lenin and the party dictatorship of the Bolsheviks. See, for example, Gorter’s pamphlet The World Revolution (1923) and Pannekoek’s Lenin as Philosopher: A Critical Examination of the Philosophical Basis of Leninism (1948; rev. ed., edited, annotated and with an introduction by Lance Byron Richey (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2003). There is also a recent English translation of Pannekoek’s 1946 De arbeidersraden, Workers’ Councils (Edinburgh: AK, 2003), with an introduction by Noam Chomsky.

  9. And yet, Baker’s influence on Carmichael is evident in the following remark: “He [the Southern Negro] has been shamed into distrusting his own capacity to grow and lead and articulate. He has been shamed from birth by his skin, his poverty, his ignorance and even his speech. Whom does he see on television? Who gets projected in politics? The Lindsays and the Rockefellers and even the Martin Luther Kings—but not the Fannie Lou Hamers.” Stokely Carmichael, “Who Is Qualified?” (1966), in Stokely Speaks, 13.

  10. Though Baker’s focus was the Black freedom struggle, she also dealt with international issues, e.g., the Vietnam War, the Puerto Rican fight for independence, and South African apartheid, as well as national problems of inequity, such as poverty, social injustice, unequal education, and discrimination against women (Ransby, Ella Baker, 5).

  11. West refers to the following two biographies on Baker: Joanne Grant’s Ella Baker: Freedom Bound (New York: John Wiley, 1998) and Barbara Ransby’s Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement (cited above, n. 1). For Coles’s work, see ‘“To Make This Tradition Articulate,’” above, n. 3.

  12. It would be a mistake to consider Ella Baker as an activist exclusively rooted in practice. In fact, her practice was informed by theoretical reading; for example, according to a friend, “Ella Baker was a student of Marx and we used to debate that often” (Ransby, Ella Baker, 68); for further information on Baker’s education in Harlem, “a hotbed of radical thinking” (Baker, quoted in ibid., 64), see “Harlem during the 1930s: The Making of a Black Radical Activist and Intellectual” (ibid., 64–104). Ransby summarizes Baker’s logic of practice as follows: “Baker’s theory of social change and political organizing was inscribed in her practice. Her ideas were written in her work: a coherent body of lived text spanning nearly sixty years” (ibid., 1).

  13. Williams, Long Revolution.

  14. Mary Frances Berry and John Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982).

  15. Saul David Alinsky, a student of sociologist Robert Park at the University of Chicago, was a pioneer of community organizing, and his book Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals (New York: Random House, 1971) has been an influential manual of grassroots organizing. Alinsky established the community organizing network the Industrial Areas Foundation (IAF) in 1940. With his first organizing project, the Back of the Yards Neighborhood Council, located in an industrial area next to the Chicago stockyards, Alinsky joined two basic social forces of the neighborhood: organized religion (the Catholic church) and organized labor. It not only improved the living conditions of the people but also their understanding of the importance of self-organizing: “The organizations and institutions of the people back of the yards feel that the only way that they can get their rights is through a community organization that is built, owned, and operated by themselves rather than by outside interests which in many cases are basically opposed to many of the fundamental objectives which these people want.” Alinsky, “C
ommunity Organizing and Analysis,” American Journal of Sociology 46 (May 1941): 807. Ernesto Cortés, trained by the Industrial Areas Foundation in the early 1970s, is now cochair and executive director of the West/Southwest regional network of the IAF.

  16. According to West, the best treatment of these issues is Jeffrey Stout’s Blessed Are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

  17. The FBI considered Baker potentially subversive and observed her for decades, but due to her unconventional behavior and her frequency in changing affiliations with various organizations, the agency, as Ransby puts it, “did not know what to make of this middle-aged hell-raiser who defied categorization” (Ransby, Ella Baker, 129).

  18. For an extended discussion of the possibilities of Black rebellions and revolutions in the United States, see Harold Cruse’s volume of essays Rebellion or Revolution? (New York: Morrow, 1968).

  19. Among the artists who have inspired West, Chekhov, “the great writer of compassion” (“Chekhov, Coltrane and Democracy,” The Cornel West Reader, 555), ranks first. In a 1992 interview with the Hungarian philosopher Eva L. Corredor on Georg Lukács’s philosophy of history, West accounts for his own “deep Chekhovian strain” by pointing out that though, for Chekhov, love and service are not linked to an optimistic view of life, we are not condemned to cynicism: “What is so great about Chekhov? I think he understood this better than others, that we are able to love, care [sic] and serve others—and this is so true of his life and his art—but we are able to do that with there being no deep faith in life or human nature or history or what-have-you. And then it does not mean that we are anti-life, it does not mean that we are cynical toward it, it is simply there” (“The Indispensability Yet Insufficiency of Marxist Theory,” The Cornel West Reader, 228). See also West’s comments on his boundless enthusiasm, especially in the mid-1970s, for Russian literature in general and for his favorite writer, Chekhov, in particular: “Chekhov is the deep blues poet of catastrophe and compassion, whose stories lovingly depict everyday people wrestling with the steady ache of misery and yearning for a better life” (West, Brother West, 92–94).

  20. In his philosophy of war, Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) famously defined war as “an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our will.” Of the three elements of war that, according to Clausewitz, form “a fascinating trinity” (violence, chance, and reason), West here obviously thinks of the first: “primordial violence, hatred and enmity, which are to be regarded as a blind natural force.” Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 89.

  21. Singer and songwriter Bernice Johnson Reagon, “one of Ella Baker’s political daughters” (Ransby, Ella Baker, 12), was active in the civil rights movement, for example, as a member of the Freedom Singers, organized by SNCC. Reagon composed and performed “Ella’s Song” for the documentary film Fundi (see n. 24 below); reprinted as an epigraph in Grant’s biography, Ella Baker.

  22. This statement should not be misconceived as referring to the individual Ella Baker. In fact, Baker was known for being “a powerful speaker who talked without notes from her heart to the hearts of her audience. Very forceful, with a strong voice that projected even without a microphone. Her speeches [. . .] were to the point [. . .] very human and warm.” This observation by one of her female coworkers in the NAACP is quoted in Ransby, Ella Baker, 131. Notwithstanding her personal rhetorical power and charismatic gifts, as a woman, Baker would not have been considered suited for the male-denoted model of charismatic leadership. On gender divisions in African American leadership, see Erica E. Edwards, Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012).

  23. For today’s legacy of Martin Luther King and Ella Baker, see the movements of the Dream Defenders, led by Philip Harper, and Moral Mondays, led by Rev. Dr. William Barber.

  24. The 1981 documentary Fundi: The Story of Ella Baker was directed by Joanne Grant, who comments on the film’s title as follows: “The designation ‘fundi’ seemed to characterize her. Fundi [. . .] is a Swahili word which denotes the person in a community who passes on the wisdom of the elders, the crafts, the knowledge. This is not done in an institutional way, a way which Baker would have rejected, but as an oral tradition, handed down from one generation to the next” (Grant, Ella Baker, 143).

  25. For example, Baker maintained in an interview in 1977: “The only society that can serve the needs of large masses of poor people is a socialist society.” Wesley Brown and Aeverna Adams, interview with Ella Baker, New York, 1977; quoted in Grant, Ella Baker, 218.

  26. The radicalism of Ella Baker’s political thinking derives from the systemic critique she advocates: “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed. This means we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning—getting down to and understanding the root cause. It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.” Ella Baker, “The Black Woman in the Civil Rights Struggle,” speech given at the Institute for the Black World, Atlanta, 1969, in the possession of Joanne Grant, in Grant, Ella Baker, 227–31; see also, Ransby, Ella Baker, 1, 377.

  27. At the behest of Pedro Albizu Campos, leading activist and president of the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party, Lolita Lebrón, together with three companions, led an attack on the House of Representatives on March 1, 1954, demanding a free Puerto Rico. For Ella Baker’s involvement with the Puerto Rican Solidarity Organization (PRSO), see Ransby, Ella Baker, 354–55. The keynote address Baker gave at a Puerto Rican Independence rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden took place in 1978. In 1979, after having served twenty-five years in prison, Lebrón and her companions were pardoned by President Jimmy Carter.

  Chapter Five: Revolutionary Fire

  1. West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 143.

  2. West, Race Matters, 135–36.

  3. The Cornel West Reader, 7.

  4. The Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey was one of the most important and influential Black leaders of the early twentieth century; he succeeded in mobilizing the Black masses with his commitment to Black Nationalism and Afrocentrism, and with his message of Black self-esteem and independence. Like the later Du Bois, Garvey was convinced that organizing a mass movement called for a “cultural nationalism” that offered resplendent parades and pageants endowed with such paraphernalia as gaudy uniforms, banners, and nationalist anthems. Malcolm X’s parents were Garveyites. His father, Earl Little, was active in local branches of Garvey’s organization, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and he would often take his favorite son, Malcolm, to UNIA meetings. “The meetings always closed with my father saying several times and the people chanting after him, ‘Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!’” Manning Marable, Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention (New York: Viking, 2011), 27.

  5. In 1946, Malcolm X was sentenced to eight to ten years in prison for burglary, for which he served seven years. In 1948, owing to his sister Ella’s indefatigable endeavors, he was transferred to Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, a particularly progressive institution emphasizing rehabilitation. It was at Norfolk that his siblings introduced him to the Nation of Islam and where he subsequently started a rigorous program of self-education that would turn him, paradoxically, into a free man: “From then until I left that prison, in every free moment I had, if I was not reading in the library, I was reading on my bunk. [. . .] [M]onths passed without my even thinking about being imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I had never been so truly free in my life.” The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1973), with Alex Haley (New York: Ballantine Books, 1992), 188.

  6. Elijah Muhammad (born Elijah Robert Poole) led the Nation of Islam from 1934—the year its founder, Wallace D. Fard, disappe
ared—until his death in 1975. Fard’s and Muhammad’s religious teachings were not congruent with orthodox Islam, as Malcolm X realized during his pilgrimage to Mecca. Like Garvey, Elijah Muhammad propagated Black pride and separatism as the only means to gain independence from white domination. The strict dietetic rules and moral laws aimed at the acquisition of a discipline that was to impede whites’ control over Blacks. Malcolm X, who “had believed more in Mr. Muhammad than he believed in himself” (ibid., 335), was profoundly shaken when he found out that the adored leader had not adhered to his own moral principles; see also the chapter “Out” in Autobiography.

  7. Here, as elsewhere in our dialogue, West indirectly hints at remarks by Malcolm X. At the founding rally of the Organization of Afro-American Unity (OAAU), modeled on the Organization of African Unity, Malcolm X praised Patrice Lumumba as “the greatest man who ever walked the African continent. He didn’t fear anybody. He had those people so scared they had to kill him. They couldn’t buy him, they couldn’t frighten him, they couldn’t reach him.” In his speech in Harlem’s Audubon Ballroom on June 28, 1964, Malcolm X quoted from Lumumba’s “greatest speech,” addressed to the King of Belgium at the ceremony of the proclamation of the Congo’s independence (June 30, 1960), advising his Black audience that they “should take that speech and tack it up over [their] door” because, as Malcolm X suggests, Lumumba’s message was just as relevant to African Americans as it was to Africans: “This is what Lumumba said: ‘You aren’t giving us anything. Why, can you take back these scars that you put on our bodies? Can you give us back the limbs that you cut off while you were here?’ No, you should never forget what that man did to you. And you bear the scars of the same kind of colonization and oppression not on your body, but in your brain, in your heart, in your soul, right now.” Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary: Speeches, Interviews, and a Letter by Malcolm X, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1970), 64–65.