Black Prophetic Fire

Our conversations on the Black prophetic tradition started in 2008 during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, when, on many occasions, the senator from Illinois would identify himself with Abraham Lincoln. And in his inauguration speech, in January 2009, President Obama strengthened the association with the sixteenth president by using the phrase “a new birth of freedom” from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as a theme. Which Lincoln did Obama have in mind? Did Obama acknowledge the role Frederick Douglass and the Abolitionist movement played in making Lincoln the great president we remember? And how could Douglass’s prophetic witness be carried into Obama’s presidency?

The ascendancy of Barack Obama could easily dampen Black prophetic fire and thereby render critiques of the American system to be perceived as acts of Black disloyalty. Ironically, the incredible excitement of the Obama campaign could produce a new sleepwalking in Black America in the name of the Obama success.

CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: Undoubtedly, Frederick Douglass is a towering figure of nineteenth-century American history in general and African American history in particular. His extraordinary ascent from a slave to the much-admired orator and prominent activist in the Abolitionist movement and the women’s suffrage movement, best-selling author and successful editor of an influential newspaper, United States Marshal, Recorder of Deeds in Washington, and Minister to Haiti, has inspired innumerous African Americans. On the cover jacket of W. E. B. Du Bois’s autobiographical essay Dusk of Dawn there is a photograph showing Du Bois standing before a huge framed portrait of Douglass, which seems to be a strong statement regarding the impact of Douglass on Du Bois. What is your general assessment of Douglass’s influence on both African American and American culture at large?

CORNEL WEST: Frederick Douglass is a very complicated, complex man. I think that Douglass is, on the one hand, the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century; on the other hand, he is very much a child of his age, which is not to say that he does not have things to teach those of us in the twenty-first century, but he both transcends context and yet he is very much a part of his context at the same time. I think that’s part of the complexity in our initial perception of his influence on America, on Black America, on Du Bois and subsequent freedom fighters.

CHB: What are the factors we should consider, when you call him a child of his age, and would you say that these factors contribute to reducing his status in a sense?

CW: I think that his freedom fighting is very much tied to the ugly and vicious institution of white supremacist slavery. Those of us in the post-slavery era experienced Jim Crow and other forms of barbarism, but that’s still different from white supremacist slavery, and we learn from Douglass’s courage, his vision, his willingness to stand up, the unbelievable genius of his oratory and his language. And yet there is a sense in which with the ending of slavery, there was a certain ending of his high moment. He undoubtedly remained for thirty years a very important and towering figure, but for someone like myself, he peaks. It’s almost like Stevie Wonder, who peaks, you know, with Songs in the Key of Life, The Secret Life of Plants, despite his later great moments. There are moments when people peak, and that peak is just sublime; it’s an unbelievable peak. I don’t think any freedom fighter in America peaks in the way Douglass peaks. And that’s true even for Martin Luther King in a certain sense. And yet Douglass lives on another thirty years; that’s a long time. Martin peaked and was shot and killed. Malcolm peaked and was shot and killed. But what if Martin had died in 1998 saying, “Well, what am I? Well, I’m a professor at Union Theological Seminary teaching Christian ethics.” There are different stages and phases of their lives. So it’s not a matter to reduce Douglass, but to contextualize him, to historicize him. And any time you historicize and contextualize, you pluralize; you see a variety of different moments, a variety of different voices. His voice in the 1880s is very different than his voice on July 4, 1852, July 5, 1852.

CHB: Yes, when he gave his famous speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”¹ But while you love the militant Douglass—as did Angela Davis, for example, when she referred to him in the late 1960s²—others seem to appreciate him for his later development, for his integrationist policies. And often Douglass the “race man” is juxtaposed to Douglass the “Republican party man.” Did he become too pragmatic a politician? Was he in his later years out of touch with the ongoing suffering of African Americans? Had he adopted a bourgeois mentality? Did his second marriage to Helen Pitts play a role in his development, as some critics claim?

CW: I think that the old distinction between the freedom fighter against slavery early on and then the Republican Party man later on might be a bit crude, but it makes some sense, because Douglass in his second stage, the later stages of his life, certainly is significant and never entirely loses sight of trying to fight for the rights of Black people and, by extension, the rights of women and rights of others. But the relevance for us is that he is less international, he is less global in those later years. You see, when he spends time with the Chartist Movement in Britain in the late 1840s—when he is pushed out of the country twice, after publication of the first autobiography, and then following John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry—he makes his connections in Europe, makes the connection between the planetizing, globalizing of the struggle for freedom; whereas in the later phase of his life, Douglass became such a nationalist and a patriot and so US centered. He is so tied in to the machinations of the Republican Party and willing to make vulgar compromises, and he is relatively silent against Jim Crow, and his refusal to speak out boldly, openly, publicly, courageously against barbarism in the South is troubling.

CW: Yes, but it was a somewhat isolated thing. For example, at the great Freedman’s Memorial ceremony in 1876, when they unveiled Lincoln’s grand statue,⁴ Douglass hardly makes any reference to what was happening in the South at that time. He says Lincoln is the white man’s president, you are his children, Black people are his step-children, seemingly beginning with a critique. But the twenty thousand Black folk who were there waited for him to say something about the present: nothing, nothing. And then, you see, to allow himself to be used and manipulated by Rutherford B. Hayes,⁵ so that at the final withdrawal of American troops he is right away appointed to the honorable position of US Marshal of the District of Columbia, as if that were a kind of symbolic exchange, you see.

You say: “Oh Frederick, Frederick, oh my God! How could you allow that to take place, given who you are, given the tremendous respect that is so well earned that people have for you, especially Black people but all freedom-loving people, and the degree to which once you get caught in the machinations of any political party in the United States as a freedom fighter you are going to be asked to make tremendous concessions, compromises.” The shift from prudence to opportunism looms large. And I think you can see this also in terms of his role in the American imperial apparatus: as he became the minister to Haiti and so on. It’s just hard to be that kind of bold, free-thinking, free-speaking, freedom fighter we witness in the early Douglass when you are caught within the political system.

CHB: I agree. Yet one might still consider that the conditions for fighting for the cause had changed so dramatically that he may have decided to try whatever he could to assist Black people rising within the power system. You said in a recent interview with Jeff Sharlet, one will not find you in the White House.⁶ But that’s a decision, and once you make a different decision, you will have to compromise. Moreover, we have to historicize again, because there had not been any African American in such eminent political posts before. That in itself was highly significant and symbolic, just as today it is symbolic that Barack Obama is president.

CW: That’s true. But you can also see the ways in which the political system could seize on the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century, absorb him, incorporate him, diffuse his fire, and make him a part of the establishment, so that the next generation that comes along would have memories of the fiery freedom fighter of the 1830s, 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s. But during those last thirty years he is an incorporated elite within a Republican Party, which itself is shot through with forms of white supremacy, not to mention male supremacy, and imperial sensibility. For example, what would a Frederick Douglass in the later part of his life have looked like and what legacy would he have left if he had sided with the populist movement, if he had sided with the working-class movement, multiracial, the way he sided with the multiracial women’s rights movement in Seneca Falls in 1848? It would have sent a whole different set of signs and signals, so that the mainstream would have had difficulties incorporating him. I remember reading Michael Lind’s book on the new American nationalism a few years ago, and the hero is Frederick Douglass.⁷ He is a hero because he is a representative American; he has got a white father, a Black mother who dies when he is seven; he’s got Native American blood in his mother; he becomes the multicultural icon of America so that he can be incorporated in the latter part of the twentieth century as this patriot, nationalist, multicultural liberal. I mean, he is just tamed; he is defanged in terms of his real power and his buoyancy as a militant freedom fighter. And Michael Lind has grounds for that; Douglass provides grounds for that. Then, of course, when he marries sister Helen Pitts—he marries a white sister—all kinds of controversy break out as well. And part of it has to do with the way he manages that: he just tells the truth about his personal life—out of respect for the people who respected him. He wants some kind of rest and calm and serenity, too, a peaceful place in a luxurious mansion in Anacostia that last decade of his life. But I just wonder what kind of a multiple legacy he would have left if he hadn’t taken the Republican route. Even though, you know, people are who they are and not somebody else.

CHB: And yet he is very much this heroic icon because people remember his first years.

CW: There is nobody like him. I mean, I don’t know of any figure in American history whose language and oratory is so full of fire and electricity focusing on a particular form of injustice. I think Douglass stands alone in that regard. He really does. And he was somebody with no formal schooling at all, probably the most eloquent ex-slave in the history of the modern world.

CHB: Owing to these extraordinary accomplishments, he has often been considered a self-made man. In fact, in 1859, he begins delivering his successful lecture “Self-Made Men” on a tour through the Midwest.

CW: Now, his attempt to view himself as being a self-made man—a reference made famous by Henry Clay—I am also very critical of that, though. I don’t like this notion of being self-made. I love the degree to which he attempts to make himself in a context where he is dependent on others, but this notion of some isolated monad or some isolated autonomous entity feeds into the worst of American ideology. I prefer Melville’s notion of “mortal inter-indebtedness.”⁸

CHB: Yes, American individualism is such a central facet of the American mind. But what I admire in Douglass is that, on the other hand, in his autobiographies, he seems to be quite interested in the factors that both hindered him and furthered him, societal factors that shaped him. He talks a lot about the conditions under which he grew up and which made it harder or easier for him to become what he became, and in that respect he is almost like a sociologist, I think, because he analyzes the system. He is very perceptive when it comes to revealing the master-slave relationship and power structures and so on, and in that sense, I think he is still relevant for us, because those power structures are not yet overcome, after all, even if they were cruder then than they are now. But they still exist.

CW: That’s true. Yet there are two sets of issues here for me. One is what you rightly note, which is Douglass’s sensitivity to the institutions and structures that serve as obstacles for his flowering as a person and, therefore, by extension the flowering of other persons. But the other side of this is, when you stress those institutions and structures but still view yourself as self-made, it can feed into the worst kind of individualism, even given the sociological analysis that is subtle. For example, you can hear Clarence Thomas talk about what he has overcome. So if he gave an analysis of Jim Crow, if he gave an analysis of institutional racism and discrimination, he would point out the fact that he overcame all of that, he is still a self-made man. There is a sensitivity to the sociological factors, but it is still him in and of himself who triumphs like Horatio Alger. For example, you notice Douglass never mentions his first wife, Anna, in terms of the crucial role she plays in his escape. She is the one who gave him money; she is the one who bought the hat and the clothes; she is the one who gave money to the chap who bore a resemblance to Douglass, who served as the person who bought the pass. Now, how are you going to omit that in your narrative if you are going to be true to the social character of who you are and consequently sensitive to the social structures and the institutions of society?

There is a sense in which the Horatio Alger ideology can be sociologically astute and still ideologically backwards because of the self-made agent at its center. Douglass tends to feed into that ideology that we associate with Abe Lincoln and going back to Henry Clay all the way up to Clarence Thomas, and it’s a very blinding, obscuring, and obfuscating ideology that, for me, is quite dangerous. There is a sense in which, for me, piety is central. Piety is but a way of talking about the reverent attachment that we have to those in family, in social movements, in civic institutions, in various social networks who help make us who we are. So Douglass should be the first who would have to say he was made, in part, by the Abolitionist movement. There is no great Frederick Douglass without William Lloyd Garrison. But on the other hand, he helped make the movement. There is no great Abolitionist movement without Frederick Douglass, you see. There is no great Frederick Douglass without Wendell Phillips—Phillips and Garrison, of course, the two who wrote the dedicating narratives for the first autobiography.⁹ But once you take this kind of socially infused notion of piety that I accent—and I spent a lot of time on this in my memoir¹⁰—then you recognize what goes into that self as a supposedly self-made person, and then you are also sensitive to the structures and institutions as well; then you get, it seems to me, a much fuller and truer treatment of who we are as persons, as individuals, socially mediated persons and individuals. So that, again, I don’t want to appear too obsessed with his limitations, but I’m very sensitive to his limitations given his iconic status.

CHB: In contrast to you, though, historians have emphasized the self-made man concept. I have hardly come across any comments that stressed the interrelation between the individual Douglass and society, or that underlined Douglass’s own acknowledgments of what he owed to others. It is true, indeed, and it has been criticized often, that he hardly ever mentions the women who loved and supported him. Besides his first wife, Anna, and his second wife, Helen, there is, for example—

CHB: Right. But, nevertheless, he gives us many facts about his life recognizing circumstances where it is not due to him but to others that he can go forward.

CW: Take his name itself, “Douglass,” from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lady of the Lake,” from the chap in New Bedford whose name was Johnson. Remember, he says, “Too many Johnsons in town; it’s too many Johnsons in town.” He gives him a new name, “Douglas,” and Douglass adds an “s” because he remembers a street in Baltimore. That’s part of the inter-dependency; that’s part of the piety in terms of acknowledging that one is indebted to and dependent on others in shaping you, and it becomes a source of good in your life, and it becomes the very launching pad for you in terms of your future, the wind at your back in the present. So, you’re right that he notes those. But I don’t think he accents those. I think that’s one of the reasons why historians so easily assimilate him into this very narrow individualistic ideology, you see. And it could be that Douglass deliberately crafted himself in such a way that he would be acceptable to an American culture that tends to accent self-made men and later on maybe women, and that to me warrants criticism, you know, because it’s just not the truth of who we became over time.

CHB: Yes, you are right. But as someone with a special interest in relational sociology, I am trying to pay attention to the analysis of the societal structures he provides, as well as to the contingent elements in his life. For example, when he is on the plantation of Master Lloyd, he happens to have frequent contact with the youngest son of Master Lloyd, Daniel, and in the first autobiography, he remarks only in passing that it was due to that contact that he learned standard English. Whereas in the first autobiography, he emphasizes that Master Daniel would protect him and divide his cakes with him,¹¹ and in My Bondage and My Freedom, he writes that Master Daniel “could not give his black playmates his company, without giving them his intelligence, as well,¹² it is only in Life and Times, the third autobiography, that he explains at length what to many Northerners was a mystery, namely, how he “happened to have so little of the slave accent in my speech.”¹³ He acknowledged then that, owing to his companionship with Daniel, he had learned the dominant language and thus was able to turn into a successful orator immediately after he had fled the South, which I doubt he could have, if he had acquired only the Black vernacular. That’s just one example.¹⁴

CW: I like that. I think you are onto not just something, but you are onto a lot. There is probably a lot more buried in the text that has been overlooked because of the narrow lens of the ideology of self-made men that Douglass has so much contributed to.

CHB: Douglass was highly critical of “the slaveholding religion of this land,”¹⁵ repeatedly castigating the hypocrisy of Christian slaveholders. But one also wonders when reading his three autobiographies, how important religion was to his own worldview. It seems to me that he is very much a man of the Enlightenment.

CW: You know, I just preached at the Mother Zion in Harlem on 138th Street. Its pastor, Gregory Robeson Smith, was a student of mine; he is the grandnephew of the great Paul Robeson. This is the church that Paul Robeson’s brother pastored for thirty years. Talking about the AME Zion Church tradition that produced Harriet Tubman, Paul Robeson, Frederick Douglass, and John Coltrane, I said, “My God, even as a Baptist, we don’t have anybody who was comparable to all four of them.” But it raises the question of the role of religion in the shaping of Frederick Douglass and whether, in fact, he was much more secular than one would think. I was on a committee for a dissertation at Union Theological Seminary thirty years ago. It was on Douglass and Feuerbach. Douglass fell in love with Ludwig Feuerbach. That was the first set of texts that you saw in his library, both in Rochester as well as in Anacostia in Washington, DC. It’s quite interesting. The first thing he wanted to do when he got to Britain was to meet Marian Evans, who was, of course, the great George Eliot, who translated The Essence of Christianity¹⁶ and was also the great author of Middlemarch and other novels. She was obsessed with Feuerbach, too. She and Lewes, George Henry Lewes—a grand journalist—they were living together and really made a difference in the intellectual life of England and Europe. But the thesis was that even though Douglass did speak and preach in AME Zion Church, was deeply shaped by it and would say so quite publicly, that privately he was an agnostic, and that after reading Feuerbach he began to use Christian themes and motifs, narratives and stories, but did not have a cognitive commitment to the claims, and he could never really put this out in public, but he had a lot of private discussions, and so in that sense, one of the points you make, he seems much more a figure of the Enlightenment than he would be if he had remained tied to religious authority.¹⁷ I didn’t introduce all of this in my Mother Zion sermon. AME Zion Church, they still have a right to claim him, you know. But of course, Coltrane was not a Christian either; he was ecumenical and spiritual and so forth, but he was shaped by the AME Zion Church. His grandfather was an AME Zion pastor, and Coltrane grew up in the parsonage there in Hamlet, as well as in High Point in North Carolina at the AME Zion Church. This issue of how secular was Frederick Douglass deserves further investigation.

CHB: He seems to shift his position, but what to me is rather prominent are his references to humanism; as if he wanted to say, you don’t really need religion; it’s enough if you believe in human dignity, the right to freedom, and other values established by the Enlightenment. But as you said, he could not admit as much. He indicates it quite often, but he could not tell the public, “I’m a non-believer.”

CW: Exactly. When he went to Great Britain, you know, one of the places he wanted to go was the birthplace of Robert Burns, because Burns meant so much to him,¹⁸ and then from Burns, he goes on to say, “But my favorite of all favorites is the great Lord Byron.”

CW: Absolutely. And when you actually look closely at Byron, he really almost worships the imagination as he affirms the eclipse-of-God talk. Which is to say that there is a certain kind of secularization in such a Romantic poetic position, and I do think that Douglass was deeply influenced by Byron in that regard, freedom fighter first and foremost, and it’s about the imagination, it’s about transgression, it’s about transformation, and not God, and yet he couldn’t be explicit in the secular mode. I don’t think that this dissertation on Douglass and Feuerbach was ever published. I know the professor, his name is John Grayson, he teaches at Mount Holyoke.²⁰ But your question about Douglass being a child of the Enlightenment or even a child of secular Romantic thinking is a very important one. Because then the question becomes, well, in the Black intellectual tradition, what legacy does he leave regarding secular thinking? I think the most secular thinker the Black tradition has ever produced is Richard Wright, and it would be interesting to look at Richard Wright’s writings on Douglass.

CHB: In his famous speech we mentioned before, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass draws a distinct line between his white “fellow-citizens” and himself as someone “identified with the American bondman,” a disparity that culminates in his words: “This Fourth of July is yours, not mine.”²¹ This statement is connected to the vital question of the possibility of African Americans to identify with the American nation. Even after Emancipation, the sense of belonging to the nation-state has been both a crucial and a controversial issue for African Americans. One answer is the idea of the brotherhood of men, humanity, as a community everybody belongs to and on the basis of which Black people admonish America, the nation, to come up to its promises.²² You find this thought in many Black writers besides Douglass, for example, in Ida B. Wells’s or W. E. B. Du Bois’s autobiographies. What is your position on African American national identity?

CW: If you have a notion of the potential nation, of a nation that has the potential and possibility of being free, equal, and just; treating other nations with respect; and multilateral in its foreign policies, then I find the idea of African American national identity in part desirable, that’s true.

CW: In part. It means that you are still a bit too tied to the most powerful ideology of modernity, which is nationalism. And I am so suspicious of nationalisms, be they potential or actual. If internationalism tied to the “wretched of the earth”²³ had become much more powerful in the latter part of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, the twentieth century would have been less barbaric, less fascistic, less chauvinistic, you see. And even these days, when globalism and internationalism are much more popular, more buzzwords, they tend to still be easily colonized by capitalism and a lot of other more mainstream ways of looking at the world.

CHB: But isn’t the notion of humankind, humanity, the counternotion to what you are criticizing? Or what would you say? What is your solution if you want to avoid the nationalisms?

CW: Well, for me, the three major counter-voices against the nationalisms, be they potential or actual, would be Marxism, radical democratic movements and views, or a prophetic religious view. So, in the Marxist tradition, you have at the center an internationalism and a globalism that are always tied to working-class movements and so on. That is one of the reasons why I resonate so deeply with that tradition. And the second, the radical democratic one, you’re still concerned with everyday people, no matter where they are, no matter what the national context, no matter what boundaries they find themselves in terms of land and space. And in terms of prophetic religion—but for me, especially, prophetic Christianity—you’ve got the symbol of a Cross, which is the catastrophic, the mutilated body of this particular Jew in the face of the Roman Empire, that is tied to a love, connected to a concern for the least of these, and every flag is subordinate to that Cross; every nationalism, every ideology, even, is subordinate to that Cross; and that Cross is nothing but the scandalous, the calamitous, the horrendous, the catastrophic in the human condition, which is suffering. And how do you transfigure that suffering into some voice, some vocation, some vision to empower the least of these (as in the twenty-fifth chapter of Matthew)?²⁴ So, for me, all three are intertwined; so the Marxism is indispensable, and the radical democracy is indispensable.

CHB: But I wonder why you do not include the Enlightenment ideas of human brotherhood, of universalism. Is it because they are too optimistic in that the belief in progress comes with that particular historic movement of Enlightenment and the rationality that is also part of it, and that you would consider too one-sided?

CW: Well, it depends on which particular figures. When you’re thinking of Voltaire’s Candide, you don’t get a deeper critique of optimism, Pangloss and so forth. It would also be true of Rameau’s Nephew, of Diderot. I think that the greatness of the European Enlightenment was precisely the shattering of the tribalism and clannishness, the nationalism, to turn instead to grand visions of justice, and I see that in Voltaire; I see it in Diderot; I see it in Kant, in his own very complicated conceptions of autonomy and rationality; I see it in Lessing.²⁵

CHB: But what is your apprehension, why don’t you include it in your list—except if you claim that it is in Marx anyway?

CW: Yeah, I think, Marx, for me, would be one of the grand fruits of the Enlightenment but also of a certain Romanticism. I don’t want to downplay Romantic thinkers; I think the Byrons and Shelleys are magnificent. Shelley died for Greek independence, but it was an independence of Greeks that was tied to the call for the independence of all peoples who are under forms of the yoke of oppression. So I don’t really want in any way to disparage the best of the Enlightenment or the best of Romanticism. Of course, I don’t know enough about the East, Islam. I’m sure they have great humanist traditions too. So, I’m with you on that.

CHB: In an essay on Douglass, John Stauffer comments on Douglass as an intellectual as follows:

Throughout the book, Douglass quotes or paraphrases famous white writers: Coleridge, Sir Walter Scott, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Aristotle, Milton, Martin Luther, William Cowper, Longfellow, and Whittier; and there are at least thirty-five separate biblical references. These references reveal not only Douglass’s growing intellectual powers, they highlight his efforts to break down the color line. He anticipates W. E. B. Du Bois, who declared in The Souls of Black Folk (1903): “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not.” Like Du Bois, the Douglass of My Bondage seeks to become a “co-worker in the kingdom of culture,” dwell above the veil of race, and merge his double self—a black man and an American—into a better and truer self.²⁶

But there are others who would think of Douglass more as an activist than an intellectual. You have written on the predicaments of Black intellectuals. What kind of an intellectual was Douglass? You have propagated the Gramscian concept of the “organic intellectual.”²⁷ Would you call him one?

CW: He is definitely an intellectual. He is not an academic, but he is certainly an intellectual. Douglass, I think, represents the height of modern eloquence, what Cicero and Quintilian call “wisdom speaking,” or a memorable and moving utterance that touches not just mind but also heart and soul, both to think and act, and I can’t think of someone who is able to do that and not be an intellectual in a certain sort. Absolutely. I think he is also an organic intellectual. He is an intellectual who was shaped by a movement, the Abolitionist movement, one of the greatest social movements in the history of America, maybe even of modern times, the nineteenth century certainly. To have someone who was molded, shaped, and formed in that movement—you can just see it over time, the intellectual exposure, the readings of a variety of different thinkers as he is trying to promote the cause of the movement, the cause of freedom and justice. I mean, it’s very rare that you have a kind of Gramscian-like organic intellectual who does not go to school, who learns how to read and write and think in a serious way in the context of a movement. That’s a rare thing, you know. It’s not even true for Marx himself. When he is writing his dissertation on “The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,” he’s not part of a movement at all, not as of yet.

As to Douglass, one wonders whether he is reading William Cobbett, one of the great cultural social critics who was tied to working-class, populist concerns.²⁸ I don’t know if he’s reading Hazlitt.²⁹ I don’t know if he’s reading Ruskin.³⁰ Did he read William Morris?³¹ One wonders. We know he loved Carlyle. This is very interesting. Carlyle’s book On Heroes and Hero Worship meant a lot to Douglass, and the Carlyle between Sartor Resartus up unto maybe The French Revolution does have some very important things to say in terms of his critique of society. He later became much more conservative, and by the time we get to the pamphlet on niggers, Carlyle is really degenerated.³² I’m telling you, sometimes it is best just to die early.

CHB: Well, there is a link to Emerson, I would think, because Emerson liked Carlyle, too.

CW: Absolutely, absolutely. Do we have evidence, though, of Douglass reading Emerson?

CHB: Oh, I can’t tell you. For example, there is the idea of representative men, which James McCune Smith takes up in his introduction to the second autobiography. He explicitly alludes to Emerson’s Representative Men by claiming that Douglass himself is “a Representative American man—a type of his country men.”³³ I remember Douglass read English Traits, but that was later in his life, in 1886.³⁴

CW: I wonder how widely, how deeply. But I know that they were on platforms together for the celebration of British emancipation of slaves in the West Indies; I remember they are mentioned in the Gay Allen biography.³⁵ Historians make much of that, as my dear friend at Harvard, Lawrence Buell, who wrote that wonderful biography of Emerson, did.³⁶ You can see the overlap there with Douglass, but it’s not tight; it’s not close. Emerson wasn’t close to anybody, including his wife. But it would be interesting, if they had spent more time together. But, you know, this recent work³⁷ that you note between Douglass and Melville . . .

CHB: Yes, it is quite fascinating to see how many scholars have considered comparing the two.

CW: Well, I haven’t read the new collection; I know Sterling Stuckey and others had talked about the Black elements in, as well as Black influences on, Melville in Moby-Dick and other texts, but Douglass and Melville, wow, I’d be quite interested.³⁸ There is nobody like Melville in American literature, I’m telling you. There is this new book by William Spanos on Melville. That is powerful. On Melville’s critique of American imperialism. He’s got a Heideggerian reading, too, and a critique of the metaphysical tradition and the openness to concrete, lived experience not being subsumable under any kind of philosophical system. But William Spanos, my dear brother, he was a teacher of Edward Said at Mount Hermon, when Said was a prep school student,³⁹ and, you know, Spanos founded Boundary 2, the first postmodern journal. I was blessed to be on the board together with Paul Bové, Jonathan Arac, Donald Pease, and the others. But Spanos has got two huge volumes out on Melville, one just on Moby-Dick, and the recent one is on the later fiction. It is called Herman Melville and the American Calling,⁴⁰ and it is about Melville’s resistance to the American call for nationalist, chauvinist, exceptionalist discourse. It’s a fascinating read. But Melville is just so profound, and to juxtapose him with Douglass, who has his own kinds of profundities but is very, very different, is a complicated matter.

CHB: One possible aspect of comparison would be their concepts of power, how they describe power relations, and I think in that respect they would be equal.

CHB: As you defined it, to be a prophet is not about predicting an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils, and both did.⁴¹

CW: Absolutely, in that sense both would be deeply prophetic. And yet, Douglass was such an activist, and Melville was hardly an activist at all, or not a political activist. You could say he was an activist in language, and, my God, identifying those concrete evils was a form of activism. I’m quite intrigued by how these folk are connecting Melville and Douglass.

CHB: But to come back to the question of nationalism, there is another interesting recent study on Douglass, a chapter in a book by one of the editors of the collection of essays on Douglass and Melville, Robert Levine: Dislocating Race and Nation.⁴² Levine investigates the critique of Douglass that you share as to his commitment to the nation in the later years, to American patriotism and so on. One of the issues usually mentioned in this context is the annexation of Santo Domingo, later known as the Dominican Republic. Douglass was involved in exploring the possibilities of an annexation, that is, he was a member of a government committee that went there and interviewed the people, and he is always criticized in that he seemed to encourage the annexation in dialogue with President Grant. Levine takes a close look at the contemporary debate and shows that those people, for example, Charles Sumner or Carl Schurz, who were against the annexation, were against it partly for the wrong reasons from Douglass’s point of view.⁴³ Their arguments based on climate theory were racist in fearing that annexation would add “tropical” Blacks, who allegedly were unfit for civilization to the US nation. According to them, certain regions of the earth were preserved for specific races and one should not mix them.

So, their anti-imperialist arguments seem to be progressive, but they were racist as well. In contrast, Douglass argued for the annexation, granted that the Blacks of Santo Domingo would consent to it, and he believed they would. As you know, it never came about, but it was a very concrete plan at the time, and Levine tells a much more complex story than most historians who complain about Douglass, asking, “How could he ever be in favor of the annexation?”

CW: Well, I think that even if Douglass had his own good reasons, if he’s acting as an agent of the US government, there is a good chance that the US government does not have the same reasons that he does. And in the end their reasons will prevail in terms of the effects and consequences of the policy.

CHB: That’s right. But Levine goes into the papers of the president, and there is a “Memorandum” in his personal files, a list that he made for himself of “Reasons why San Domingo should be annexed to the United States.”⁴⁴ Well, what are his reasons? What are good reasons for the annexation? You’re right, they are economic reasons.

CHB: Exactly. But the interesting thing is that, in this list, there is also the issue of race and, for example, the reflection that it would be favorable in terms of fighting slavery that still existed in Brazil if the US were less dependent on Brazilian goods.

CW: That’s interesting. No, that’s true. It’s very true, because we have to keep in mind that Douglass had encountered some very ugly racism within the Abolitionist movement himself, you know, reducing him from person to symbol and spectacle and “stay away from philosophy, you just give the facts,” as John Collins used to tell him all the time.⁴⁵ Now, it’s true, people like William White saved his life, so that there’s a white brother and a Harvard grad who really sacrificed himself to save Douglass’s life, and Douglass almost got killed in Pendleton, Indiana.⁴⁶ So he had some white comrades who he knew cared for him. But the racism within the Abolitionist movement was something he was quite sensitive to. And, therefore, you can understand how he would also be sensitive to some of the anti-imperialist arguments that were also racist. It’s true that those kinds of complications always need to be acknowledged, even though in the end, I would want to come down on the anti-imperialist side with good reasons rather than on the US government side with good reasons. See, Douglass situated himself historically on the wrong side. It reminds you of James Weldon Johnson in Nicaragua, who wrote The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man.⁴⁷ Remember, when he is in Central America—that’s where he writes that novel—he’s an agent of US imperialism. He’s pushing, supporting the companies down there, and then still reflecting on various forms of oppression in the metropole, in the US itself. So it’s interesting how you get those kinds of contradictions. But, I guess, we’re all shot through with contradictions.

CHB: Let us talk about the significance of Douglass in this particular historical moment. In a recent interview with Tavis Smiley on Public Radio International, you talked about Douglass’s attempts to influence President Lincoln, trying to push him toward more forceful action with regard to Emancipation. Discussing the prospects of the Obama presidency, you suggested that we need a Douglass today as well, a Douglass who would put pressure on President Obama as to the recognition of today’s problems of African Americans—and, by extension, Americans of all colors who suffer from the effects of neoliberal politics. Obama refers to Lincoln and to Douglass.

CW: Yeah, I think my dear brother Barack Obama has got the wrong Lincoln in mind. And Douglass could help him here. And I think by keeping track of Douglass, when Douglass called Lincoln a representative of American racism or when Wendell Phillips famously called Lincoln the “slave hound from Illinois,” you wonder what is going on here. You see what I mean. That’s not the Lincoln that people want to take seriously, but it is the Lincoln who is part of the historical record. So that when I say Obama has got the wrong Lincoln, you know, he thinks that is the Lincoln who is concerned with reaching out to rivals, especially on his Right. So you bring in people from the opposite political party or the opposing political group or constituency, and you don’t recognize that Lincoln was not only a child of his age but that one of his heroes was a slaveholder, Henry Clay, from Kentucky; his best friend is a slave-trader, Joshua Speed, with whom he sleeps in the same bed for four years, visits him over and over again. Lincoln has his own slave that Joshua Speed gives him when he goes and spends time with him in Kentucky.

That is not to say that Lincoln didn’t hate slavery, but it is to say that he was quite complacent and willing to defer. He doesn’t oppose the Black Codes in the State of Illinois, where Black people had to pay money in order to enter the state. We know his history of voting for the slave trade in Washington, DC, in the House; we know of his strong support of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. That was really, one could say, the straw that broke the camel’s back for the Abolitionists. We know that in the first inaugural address he talked about supporting the first proposed Thirteenth Amendment, which was to make slavery permanent in the South as a concession to the South, the unamendable amendment. He said, “Yes, I will accept that.” And Douglass, of course, was ready to go to Haiti because of that. That’s one of the moments when he calls Lincoln the pro-slavery president.

Most historians don’t deal with that Lincoln. They don’t want to deal with that Lincoln. Well, Obama needs to recognize that that is an integral part of the Lincoln that he is crazy about, and that the Lincoln Douglass calls pro-slavery goes on from that: he is the Lincoln of colonization; he supports not just either going to Liberia or Cow Island—where he provides the money and over three hundred Black folk die—or to Columbia, which is now Panama, the isthmus there; Lincoln supports colonization. The Lincoln that most of us really cherish is the Lincoln of just the last two and a half years of his life, and that’s because of the Abolitionist movement; it’s because of Harriet Beecher Stowe; it’s because of Wendell Phillips; it’s because of Charles Sumner, and Frederick Douglass at the top. So that you say to President Obama, “Now, wait a minute, you not only support the Republican ambassador to China, you got him in your Cabinet. You feel like you got your team of rivals in this little truncated, domesticated, tamed version of Lincoln.” You say, “No, there is no great Lincoln without the social movement,” and Barack Obama is very, very suspicious of social movement people. He is mesmerized by the establishment. He wants to reassure especially the financial establishment; he is mesmerized by Wall Street; he is seduced by these neoliberal economists, by the economists who have been rationalizing elite interests for the last fifteen or twenty years. And, you see, the great Lincoln was not mesmerized by these kinds of people; he really wasn’t. The great Lincoln would say: “Frederick, you got a point. Harriet, you are the one who got us into this mess. Sooner or later I’ve got to take you all seriously, you know. I’m not an Abolitionist, but I do hate slavery. I didn’t believe that we could overcome white supremacy and create a multiracial body politic until the last few days of my life, but I am influenced by the social movement.” And you say, “OK, but which social movements influence Barack Obama?” The green movement, that’s the one movement. I think, he is very good on green issues; he really is.⁴⁸ But when it comes to the Black freedom movement, he is trying to neutralize if not tame it, you see. He’s got a very, very ambivalent relation to it, he really does.

CHB: And you think it is more than just strategy, because you might realize as an American politician, and especially as a president, that your means are limited, that if you go too far, especially too far to the left, that that’s the end of you. So how do you steer in-between?

CW: I think, in the end, it’s fundamentally a question of style, and here, as Frantz Fanon used to say, style does help to define who you are and help to define your being. Barack Obama is someone who likes to be liked by everyone, and he likes to be able to create some kind of middle-ground synthesis that brings people together without really coming to terms with the deep conflicts. Here he could learn a lot from Douglass. He might quote Douglass all day and all night about power conceding and so forth, but Douglass understood the depth of it, that you don’t find truth in the middle of the road; you find truth beneath the superficial, mediocre, mainstream dialogue, and the truth is buried, is hidden beneath that, and when you connect with that truth, you have to take a stand. When you take a stand, you’re not going to be liked by everybody; people will try to crush you, people will try to lie on you, people will try to kill you. Now, Obama still gets assaults in the media all the time, but I think he really doesn’t want to be someone who just takes a principled stand and risk and is able to withstand all those bows and arrows. That’s not his personality. I would argue that the Black freedom movement has produced a lot of different styles and strategies, but the great figures in the Black freedom movement, like Douglass, know they can’t be liked by everybody. When you think of figures like Martin Luther King, Fannie Lou Hamer, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, that’s not the strand that Barack Obama is comfortable with at all.

CHB: There is this great statement by Douglass you just alluded to from which Obama takes these famous lines: “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”⁴⁹ But in the same speech Douglass also says: “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing of the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning.”

CHB: And he goes on to say, “Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” If that’s not powerful . . . But Obama doesn’t quote it.

CW: He didn’t go that far. No. Well, you see, some of those particular words are not part of the soul of Barack Obama. And, you know, everybody is who they are and not somebody else.

CHB: But you could say that he wouldn’t be where he is if they hadn’t been who they were.

CW: That’s right. Absolutely. He wouldn’t be head of the American empire as a Black man if he followed the fiery Douglass. That’s absolutely right. And that’s both the strength as well as the severe limitation of Barack Obama.

CW: That’s exactly right. In fact, that’s probably the most important thing: the system that wouldn’t allow and concede his ascendency, which is still historic, and that’s the reason why I supported him. But we ought to be honest, the truth that led many of us to support him is the same truth that lead many of us to criticize him and the system, and I think that’s something that the early Douglass would understand, though, later, Douglass could be appropriated by Obama and would be very consistent. In a certain sense, he’s heading the very system that was appointing Douglass.

CHB: Maybe one more thing. In his autobiography Douglass emphasizes the moment when he fights against the slave breaker Edward Covey, and he says one of the preconditions was that he was ready to give up his life. He refers back to Revolutionary times and that famous phrase “Give me liberty or death.”⁵⁰ So to be ready to give up your life for freedom is also a thought that Douglass cherishes, and it is like a red thread in his work, at least its first part.

CHB: Yes, and I thought it was interesting because you refer to something like that yourself.

CW: Absolutely. But this sense of giving up one’s life was the ultimate cause, but there’s also a penultimate cause in the life you live before you die, and that to me is just as important a question, you know. How do you use your time and your energy? And the time and energy that you have available to you before death puts an end to the whole thing, and there again you got this creative tension between truth and power and a commitment to telling the truth, bearing witness to the truth and yet easily being marginalized versus trying to gain access to political power, economic power, cultural power, and oftentimes easily being absorbed and incorporated, and how do you deal with that to and fro, moving back and forth. It is like the early Ralph Bunche, you know—Marxist, leftist, powerful critic of US capitalism—and the later Ralph Bunche, who is one of the Black bourgeoisie to the core, Nobel Peace Prize winner hanging out in the upper-middle-class circles in Black and white DC, caught up in the establishment. We see a similar shift in Douglass: Shakespeare Society on the fifteen-acre Cedar Hill that looks like the White House in Anacostia, all of the different teas there, having the very genteel dialogues about a variety of delicate subjects while Jim Crow is raining terror on Black folk.

Did you see this new book called Slavery by Another Name?⁵¹ It’s a hell of a text. The author is actually the Atlanta bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal, and he is a white Southern brother and his name is Blackmon. Fascinating ironies of life. But he is a kind of centrist guy who follows the white and Black members of the family of Green Cottenham in a book of about five hundred pages that won all these awards. I couldn’t put it down because this guy really concludes that Jim Crow was a form of slavery, a view confirmed by many Black and progressive scholars years ago, for instance, Leon Litwack’s book Trouble in Mind, which is still the best thing ever written on Jim Crow.⁵² People were saying nothing has been written since Litwack—that’s not true—but this guy says something like, “This is slavery by another name, this is the most vicious form of terrorism I could conceive alongside slavery,” and he’s telling a story beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century of the white and Black members of the Cottenham family, how their lives are intertwined. The Black members of the family get caught in this Jim Crow system, and it is quite ugly. The book focuses on the human dimension to it. It is not an analysis solely, but Blackmon is telling the archetypal story of what happened generation after generation. And you say to yourself, Douglass is dead in 1895, but by the 1870s, it is beginning to take shape, crystallizing in the 1880s, legalized in the 1890s, and was in place until the 1960s, and you say, well, where is the voice of that early Douglass in the nation as Jim Crow is developing in the 1870s and ’80s?

CHB: But even so, someone like Ida B. Wells speaks out for Douglass and acknowledges him in this respect. I don’t know whether she idealized him, but she takes him seriously as a fighter for the cause, even in the later years.

CW: Yes, that’s true. And you couldn’t get a grander crusader for justice than Ida in the face of American terrorism as manifested in Jim Crow.

CHB: And she was the person who convinced him that the reasons given for lynching were not the true ones. As you know, she studied the statistics and specific cases, and she told him, and that made him aware that he should not stick to the propaganda, and he changed his mind, and then he gave this speech, which you mentioned earlier.

CW: I mean the last speech that he gave, “Lessons of the Hour,” 1894, that’s a great speech. A powerful speech, there’s no doubt about that. I remember when I first read it. He is looking back; it is almost a self-critique too. He is looking back saying, “Don’t be duped by this kind of false bread of freedom given to emancipated slaves. We got new challenges. America, you either have to come to terms with this or you are going under.” But what I think Ida B. Wells has in mind and what Du Bois has in mind—and you pointed out that on the cover of Du Bois’s Dusk of Dawn,⁵³ he is standing before a portrait of Douglass—is that it is inconceivable to be a freedom fighter in the United States and not have Frederick Douglass’s spirit as integral to what you are doing. That is part of the grand achievement of those twenty-three years. And that is just there. He could have gone off and played golf after Emancipation like William Lloyd Garrison and a lot of the others. For them it was over.

CHB: And that is what, for a moment, he had thought about. Why not go to a farm and lead a quieter life?⁵⁴ Haven’t I done enough—

CW: —Enough in one lifetime. You can understand that. Absolutely right. Even though you can’t ever conceive of Martin or Malcolm doing that in their later lives. You just get the impression that they were so on fire that they would have just burned till the end, no matter what, till sixty-five, seventy, and Du Bois was like that too. At ninety-five he is still on fire, you know. There’s no doubt about it. Very much so. It’s a beautiful thing to be on fire, though. It really is.

CHAPTER ONE It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire FREDERICK DOUGLASS

CHAPTER ONE
It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire
FREDERICK DOUGLASS