After having spoken about the two towering male figures of the Black tradition of activists and intellectuals in the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries, Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois, we decided to focus next on Martin Luther King Jr. Du Bois died aged ninety-five on August 27, 1963, that is, on the eve of the famous March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, passing on the baton, as it were, to King, who delivered his celebrated “I Have a Dream” speech before the Lincoln Memorial.
Though our exchange had been motivated by politics from the very beginning, the dramatic political events of 2011—with the anti-government protests in Spain, the Arab Spring, and the emerging Occupy Wall Street movement in the United States—brought an urgency to our transatlantic conversations. We knew that if we wanted to bring the precious Black prophetic voices into the current debates and struggles for freedom, justice, and economic equality, we would have to wrest them from a collective memory that had reduced their radical messages to inoffensive sound bites. The most evident example of a sanitized national icon was Martin Luther King Jr., a fact that strengthened our decision to select him for the subject of our next talk, which took place in August 2011. Our project gained further momentum when the dialogue on King was accepted for publication in the German journal Amerikastudien/American Studies.1 The idea of a book took shape—and we sped up.
CHRISTA BUSCHENDORF: You consider Martin Luther King Jr. the “most significant and successful organic intellectual in American history.”2 Your claim that “never before in our past has a figure outside of elected public office linked the life of the mind to social change with such moral persuasiveness and political effectiveness” seems to be based on the following interconnected assumptions: first, that the vocation of the intellectual is to “let suffering speak, let victims be visible, and let social misery be put on the agenda of those in power,”3 and, second, that “moral action is based on a broad, robust prophetism that highlights systemic social analysis of the circumstances under which tragic persons struggle.”4
The following quotation by Martin Luther King Jr. is particularly pertinent in view of the present global crisis of capitalism, which drives more and more people into poverty:
I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to identify with the poor, I choose to give my life for the hungry, I choose to give my life for those who have been left out of the sunlight of opportunity. [. . .] This is the way I’m going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice saying, “Do something for others.”5
“Let us march on poverty,” King suggested in 1965.6 To highlight the increasing plight of the poor in the United States almost half a century later, Tavis Smiley and you recently undertook the “Poverty Tour” through eighteen cities, talking to Americans of all colors who struggle to make ends meet.7 In his mission statement, Tavis Smiley quotes from King’s declaration, thus it seems to be particularly apt to speak about Martin Luther King Jr. at this very moment—his historical significance to America and his relevance in the present.
CORNEL WEST: One of the great prophetic voices of the twentieth century, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, said that the future of America depends on the American response to the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.8 Martin himself had said that the major issues in the America that he would soon die in—what he called a “sick country”—were militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty. Those four, for him, were going to be the fundamental challenges. And I think he was prophetic in this sense: when we look at the role of the military-industrial complex—the role of the Pentagon, the share of the national budget, the ways in which militarism has been routinized and institutionalized and recently outsourced; then the materialism, which is really very much tied to corporate media in the various ways in which it produces its weapons of mass distraction that try to pacify and to render the citizens sleepwalking by means of stimulation and titillation; then when you look at racisms, beginning with the “new Jim Crow” that Michelle Alexander talks about9—with the prison-industrial complex in ways in which legacies of white supremacy are still very much operative, even though in some ways more covert than before; and then the last one—poverty—which is very much tied to the Wall Street oligarchic and plutocratic complex—so, when you think about the military-industrial complex, the corporate-media multiplex, the prison-industrial complex, and the Wall Street oligarchic and plutocratic complex, those four complexes have really squeezed most of the juices or sucked most of the life out of the democratic experiment. And this was what Martin was talking about.
So, I think, in fact, when brother Tavis and I were on that Poverty Tour and said, “Look, we are trying to make the world safe for the legacy of Martin Luther King,” that it was really responding to Heschel and saying, “You know, since 1968, what has been the response of the country to Martin on all four issues?” When we look at wealth inequality increasing, hyper-incarceration; when we use brother Loïc Wacquant’s language, from his brilliant book Punishing the Poor10—the kind of emptying of souls given the debased and decayed culture that is produced day-in and day-out by the corporate media, Martin’s characterization of America as a sick country really makes more and more sense, and I think more and more people are seeing that. Part of the problem is, I think, the death of Martin in some sense signified that America was in deep need of a revolution. He used the language of revolution, the need of a revolution in priorities, revolution in values, the need for a transfer of power from oligarchs to the people. America was deeply in need of a revolution, but he wondered whether America was only capable of a counter-revolution, and therefore all he could do was just bear witness and be willing to live and die for what he understood at the end of his life as democratic socialism or kind of a radical redistribution of power and wealth, as he put it. He used to say, over and over, every day he would put on his cemetery clothes. That was all he could do. And in some ways I think he was right; you just have to be coffin-ready for this bearing of witness and struggle in the midst of a very sick country run by greedy oligarchs and avaricious plutocrats whose interest is very entrenching, whose power is mighty. It’s not almighty. Rebellion could make a difference; civil disobedience could have some impact. But the kind of fundamental rise of a revolutionary social movement is very, very unlikely given the powers that be.
CHB: It was a long process for him, too, to discover what you were just talking about: the power of these forces.
CW: But it’s funny, though, because it’s two things about Martin people tend to overlook. Coretta Scott King told me one time that when she went out with Martin on their first date, it was the first time in her life she ever met a Socialist, that Martin was already calling himself a Socialist and was part of the intercollegiate Socialist movement.11 The other interesting thing is that when Martin was called by the Nobel Prize committee and told that he had won, he said that he didn’t deserve to win if Norman Thomas had not yet won. Norman Thomas, of course: Princeton undergraduate, Union Theological Seminary grad, left the church, became head of the Socialist Party, ran for president six times—three times against Franklin Roosevelt—and actually was supported by John Dewey.12 So that even as a very young man, especially under Chivers—there was a professor named Walter Chivers at Morehouse who was a Socialist—13
CHB: And sociologist—
CW: And sociologist too, absolutely. So they read a lot of Marx, and Martin was very influenced by this brother. So that in an interesting kind of way—even though a lot of people think that Martin really began as a liberal and was radicalized as a result of the movement and the pressures of Stokely Carmichael and the pressures of those in SNCC14 and, of course, Stanley Levison, who had been a Communist, and Bayard Rustin, who was a Socialist15—in fact, as Coretta has suggested, he actually began early on as a Socialist but knew that he could never use that language in the Jim Crow South or even America. And so it became a matter of a kind of confirmation of what Norman Thomas and others had been talking about in the thirties and forties. Even in the early sixties, Norman Thomas was one of his great heroes. Martin is a very fascinating figure in that regard. He really is.
CHB: But don’t you think there was a change in him, after all? At least I think he talks about that himself—that once he went to Chicago and lived there among the poor, that this was yet another dimension to him. Or was it just that when he was confronted with that situation in the ghetto, he thought he had to speak out, that he had to be more explicit, that he had to drop his careful distance in rhetoric to socialist or Marxist phrases in order to get his message across. Or is it both?
CW: I think there were two things going on when he moved to 1550 South Hamlin Avenue in Chicago. I was just there at the apartments with brother Tavis in the very room where he and Coretta lived, and then when we met Bernice and Martin Luther King III and laid the wreath a couple of days later, they talked about living in Chicago—because he brought the kids with him to Chicago—that, on the one hand, Martin had little experience in the North. Boston and Philadelphia had been the only places where he had spent time, and Boston in some ways was an aberration as opposed to Chicago and Detroit, as opposed to even Los Angeles or New York, with high concentration of Black folk, even Washington, DC. To move to Chicago was to recognize that the ways in which Jim Crow Jr. in the North operated, as opposed to Jim Crow Sr. in the South. The dynamics were different. It was more entrenched in the North in terms of getting at some of the economic causes, but it was much more visible in the South, because the apartheid was right in your face, you know, and the violence was right in your face. And so he knew he had to come to terms with class issues in the North in a way that he just didn’t in the South. But in addition, I think—and here, of course, it goes beyond Norman Thomas—that when Martin became a critic of American imperialism—because that happened roughly at the same time: he moves to Chicago in ’66; he is already being pushed by SNCC to come out against the war; then he reads Ramparts magazine and sees the bodies of those precious Vietnamese children, and decides he must speak out: he can’t be against violence in Mississippi and not also be against violence in Vietnam—that being forced to come to terms with class in Chicago and forced to come to terms with empire in Vietnam does in fact change him and sharpen his analysis, even given his earlier socialist sensibilities and sentiment. It really does. But it’s in the heat of battle, it’s in the context of intense struggle that Martin begins to have this clarity, and, ironically, it’s the clarity that intensifies his dance with mortality.
CHB: And toward the end it becomes a battle not just against all these forces you mentioned but against his own activist groups, because they become anxious that he is going too far. And he is very isolated.
CW: Absolutely. At the time he is shot dead, 72 percent of Americans disapprove of him and 55 percent of Black Americans disapprove of him.16 He is isolated. He is alienated. He is down and out. He is wrestling with despair. He is smoking constantly; he is drinking incessantly. He is, in many ways, more and more—not so much distant but having more difficulties with Coretta, who was heroic in her own ways. His relations with the various women and so forth are increasing as a way of what he called dealing with his anxiety, getting relief from the deep anxiety of living under the threat of death and all of the vicious attacks and assaults on his character by Black writers like Carl Rowan17 and leaders like Roy Wilkins and Whitney Young18 and within his own organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,19 people seeing him becoming more radical.20 And that too is something that’s not talked about as much as it should: that Martin King started very much as a patriot, that he was part of that generation of the Black bourgeois formation, where the Declaration of Independence had nearly the same status as the Bible, not as much, but it nearly did.
CHB: The American civil religion.
CW: Exactly. It’s just so tied into his own Christianity.
CHB: But the interesting question here is, to me, is it patriotism or is it some kind of universalism? Because what he appeals to when he refers to the Declaration of Independence is the declaration of equality of people. So often in the past, as we have seen in Douglass and Du Bois, there was a conscious reference to those values that, at the same time, are values of the United States of America, and thus there is an interrelation between universalist values and patriotism, because you might be proud of your country if you believe that it represents those values.
CW: That’s true. But I think—maybe I could be wrong because I am fundamentally opposed to any version of American exceptionalism—American exceptionalism is not just self-justifying but one of the most self-deceiving concepts in the history of the nation. There is a distinctiveness to the American democratic experiment, but America is in no way a nation as chosen, in no way a nation that God smiles at and winks at and shuns others. I think Martin King, early in his career, did subscribe to a form of American exceptionalism, and in that sense, there still is an interplay between universal values and the fact that America enacts or embodies those values at their best.
But I believe at the end of his life he felt that American exceptionalism was a major impediment for the struggle for justice in America and around the world; he had discovered that it was Gandhi that had influence; he had discovered that South African struggles for democracy were as inspiring as anything Thomas Jefferson had to offer. Maybe it was a matter of growing and maturing and recognizing that internationalism was the only way to go. I recall listening to a sermon of his in ’68, ’67/’68, where he says that he has to recognize now more than ever that his commitment is fundamentally to a struggle for justice that doesn’t just transcend the US context but views the US context alongside of the international context. You see, when he began in ’55, ’56, ’57, that’s not his language. Now, you would think as a Christian preacher—which is his fundamental vocation—every flag would be beneath the Cross. And Martin did always believe that the Cross was about unarmed truth and unconditional love. Those are the two pillars that he always talked about: unarmed truth and unconditional love, across the board. And that is an internationalism; every flag is beneath that. But that American exceptionalism, you see, sneaks back in again, and lo and behold, the United States becomes that very special case that embodies it more than anybody else. And the next thing you know—going back to American civil religion—it’s providential. And even if America somehow died out, it would undoubtedly bounce back, rooted as it was in that heroic errand into the wilderness—an American jeremiad that our dear brother Sacvan Bercovitch talked about with such an insight.21 And Martin was a part of that for much of his calling and career. But I think at the end he was beginning to let that go. Malcolm X had already let it go a long time before, though we must not forget Martin reaching out through his personal lawyer Jones22 to Malcolm, joining him in his efforts to put the United States on trial at the UN for the violation of the human rights of Blacks.
CHB: But it was easier for Malcolm X to see through the deception because of his upbringing that left him no—or hardly any—illusions to begin with, whereas King rose in the academy and had a successful career, and so it’s the upbringing that very much shaped him.
CW: That’s exactly right. Even in fraternity—Martin King was an Alpha like myself, as were W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and Duke Ellington, Jesse Owens, Adam Clayton Powell Jr., Donny Hathaway, John Hope Franklin.23 All of these were Alphas—and we Alphas do tend to move in patriotic ways. But you look at Du Bois: he swerves from US patriotism; Robeson: swerves; and Martin at the very end: swerves. That’s what’s fascinating. That’s a very difficult thing to do, to break like that. Someone like myself, I had the privilege of building on their breaks, you know, with the Black Panther Party and others. I had already learned lessons as a young lad that America didn’t have this special providential role in the history of the world, ordained by God to embody democracy, given its history of what it did to indigenous peoples and crushing the workers, enslaving Black folk, and so on. But there is something about that Black middle-class incorporation and formation in the South as a “PK,” as a preacher’s kid, that made it much more difficult for Martin to break and made his break more heroic. Very much so. Martin—there simply is no one like him in the history of the American experience because he really is an intellectual, but he never really has a lot of time to meditate and reflect. But he has a deep tie to the life of the mind, and his calling is rooted in his Christian faith, unlike Douglass and unlike Du Bois.
CHB: How did he talk about the possibilities of combining religious faith and socialism? It was not really a problem for him, or was it?
CW: I think that because he was part of the Black prophetic tradition, he always connected religious faith with social change, and socialism just became one particular end and aim of social change that he began to take very seriously. Black prophetic tradition has always rooted spirituality and religiosity with social transformation. And this is where you can show that present-day America is so profoundly decadent, especially in the age of Obama—it is demeaning, devaluing, and marginalizing the Black prophetic tradition, which has been the primary tradition that has contributed to the renewal and regeneration of American democracy.
CHB: Could it be that this moral change is based on a change of social conditions that people are confronted with, so that something like the hope that is embodied in Christian prophetic faith is hard to maintain, hard to sustain, when in your social conditions you see hardly any future for your kids, for yourself?
CW: Yes, but you think through 244 years of slavery, that kind of American terrorizing and traumatizing and stigmatizing of Black folk, and we still kept the Black prophetic tradition alive. You are right. I think the social conditions that you are talking about have as much to do with the changes in the culture, with market forces so fundamentally undermining family and community, with corporate media filling the void with narcissism and materialism and individualism and those distractions. So that during slavery we could keep the Black prophetic tradition alive by lifting our voices—music was fundamental in sustaining Black dignity and sanity—and families still had networks, even given that the slaveholders attempted to destroy the Black family. Whereas in contemporary late-capitalist culture, there is such a distraction from empathy and compassion and community and non-market values as a whole, and you cannot have the Black prophetic tradition without non-market values. I mean, one of the problems since Martin’s death is when it comes to leadership. You have either the fear of being killed because the FBI, the CIA, and the repressive apparatus of the nation-state might kill you quickly—as was the case in the 1960s—not just Martin but Fred Hampton, Bobby Hutton,24 and a lot of others—or the other alternative is just buying people, so that you end up with Black leaders today, most of whom are just up for sale. All you got to do is just give them a bit of money, give them access to corporate position, give them access to the White House, give them access to whatever status they want and they are paid off. So you either get killed or bought. And Martin, I mean, one of the reasons why he stands out so is that there was no price that he was ever willing to accept to be bought—and in that he was like Malcolm and like Fannie Lou Hamer.25 He was not up for sale, and that’s just so rare. It’s almost alien to us, really; it’s alien to us that corporate America couldn’t buy off everybody. The White House couldn’t incorporate him. He supported Lyndon Johnson intensely when LBJ helped to break the back of US apartheid, and then two and a half years later, LBJ was calling him a nigger preacher he wished would go away because of Martin’s opposition to the war. And Martin refused to support him in ’68, and LBJ decided to withdraw from the race. You see, that’s something. Even among the Black intelligentsia, Black leadership, and the Black community as a whole, many were talking about Martin like a dog. Here he is willing to die for folk, and they are still talking about him so bad. He refuses to be bought, you know. He doesn’t want to be popular in the community if he can’t have integrity. It’s a very rare thing.
CHB: And now he is no longer able to defend himself, because in public memory he has not been turned into a radical leader, but as you always say, he has been sanitized, and it’s that sanitized King that has survived, and it is the radical King that has disappeared. Or maybe, due to the increasing suffering and the increasing crisis of capitalism, he is being rediscovered. One instance I noticed recently was when Tavis Smiley talked on National Public Radio about King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam,” which is not very well known.26 It is interesting to juxtapose the “I Have a Dream” speech with the “Beyond Vietnam” speech, but the latter is the forgotten or repressed Martin. I wonder how you see it, whether the more radical Martin has a chance to be rediscovered now.
CW: The radical Martin is highlighted in what brother Tavis Smiley has done in the National Public Radio show on the “Beyond Vietnam” speech. And that Martin cannot but come back. So that the kind of, as you say, sanitized, sterilized Martin, the deodorized Martin, the Martin that has been Santaclausified,27 so that the Santa Claus that he now becomes, jolly old man with a smile giving out toys to everybody from right-wing Republicans to centrists to progressives, is opposed to the version of King who took a stand on the side of a class war and of an imperial battle, which is actually closer to the truth. He really did take a fundamental stand: “I choose to identify with the underprivileged, I choose to identify with the poor.” That sounds like Eugene Debs; that sounds like Jim Larkin of the Dublin working-class 1913 strike; it sounds like all of the great freedom fighters of the last hundred and fifty years in modern times.28 Now that Martin is so scary; that Martin requires so much courage; that Martin requires all of us to pay such a price, that that Martin will live and come back, precisely how is the open question.
I have the feeling that that Martin, in some ways, is going to be much more in the possession of people outside of the United States, in Brazil, in Africa, in Asia, than in America, since that Martin is really a prophetic figure for the world more than he is for America. I think he is too much for America. He is too honest; he is too truthful; he is too loving for a culture that is fearful of the truth and is fearful of a genuine love especially of poor people. There will be voices in America that will try to hold on to that later Martin, but I think the kind of hysteria—let’s use the wonderful word of Tennessee Williams—the hysteria of America doesn’t allow it to really come to terms with the deep truth of its history, and in that sense that Martin is repressed. That’s why all this notion of people walking around with the juxtaposition on the same shirt—Malcolm, Martin, Obama—is such a joke. And in people’s minds, they really think all three are identical, and you say, “What? Wait a minute. Do you understand?” I mean, you got Obama, who is the friendly face of the American empire, with drone-dropped bombs killing innocent people, at home crushing the poor with policies that are pro–Wall Street and pro-oligarchy and pro-plutocracy. And you got Martin, who is with the poor folk who Obama is crushing, and Malcolm with the poor folk who Obama is crushing, especially the later Malcolm, who is a revolutionary even more so than Martin in some way. And you see all three of those and you can see the level of confusion and obfuscation that is taking place in America, which reinforces why the counter-revolution of the deeply conservative reactionary forces is triumphing.
CHB: But it’s so easy because the media play into it. I read that you thought that the radical King in your own time, early as a young man at Harvard, was not yet the voice you listened to.29 This would change in the next decade; that’s what you said. And I wondered about that: Did it change in the eighties? Did you then read “Beyond Vietnam”? Did it resonate with the Left at that time?
CW: You know, I had already read the radical Martin and had great respect for the radical Martin, and as a Christian I have very deep ideological affinities with him in terms of religious sensibility. But what was lacking in Martin—and I continue to say it is lacking in Martin—was his refusal to identify or immerse himself in youth culture.
See, what Malcolm had was a style that resonated more with young people. Martin’s style had difficulties, and even as a young person and as a young Christian, I could identify much more with Malcolm the way I could identify with Huey Newton,30 Angela Davis,31 and Stokely Carmichael.32 It had something to do with church and the church leadership styles that Martin as a preacher tended to. And as a Southern preacher, too, a Black Southern preacher, his style was more distant from northern California rhythm and blues, funk orientation. Now, Malcolm himself was very conservative in some ways, especially as a member of the Nation of Islam, where they don’t even have music in their rituals, you see, but you could just tell in his style that he was closer to the styles in youth culture. There was a certain swagger; there was a certain sincerity in keeping it real, which is what the funk is all about. So there were elements of James Brown, George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Lakeside, Ohio Players. You could feel it in Malcolm, whereas in Martin, you couldn’t feel that.
CHB: That’s the same with the Du Bois we talked about. And it’s again the upbringing. It would have been quite difficult for them to step beyond certain limits that are produced by a bourgeois upbringing and bourgeois values and the emphasis on turning children into “civilized” human beings.
CW: That’s true, but part of it is choices. Habitus is fundamental, but there is still choice. You can think of figures who come out of this same context as Du Bois who fundamentally chose to identify with the blues the way Du Bois did not, see what I mean? Duke Ellington, bourgeois to the core, but that Negro genius that he was—you could see him identifying with Biggie and Tupac. He had that kind of capacious personality. Louis Armstrong—Negro genius that he was—of course, from the street, so he is a little different. You could see Louis sit down with Ice Cube and probably kicking and having a good time, you know what I mean, whereas with Du Bois that’s not going to take place. You cannot see him sitting down with Billie Holiday; Billie Holiday would scare him to death. And I think that there is a sense in which George Clinton would scare Martin King to death: “George, what is all that hell, man? You know, I love you, but damn man, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” “Come on Martin, get into the groove!” That’s not his style, and that’s just something missing in Martin from my own point of view, just in terms of my own orientation. And it’s not a major thing, but I do think that the appropriation of Martin by young people is ongoing here and around the world—because I mean youth culture has been Afro-Americanized around the globe now—so there is a sense in which any appropriation of Martin is going to be effected by the Afro-Americanization that is already taking place among young people in Asia, Africa, Europe, Central America. He comes out of a different habitus that has its own specificity and distinctiveness. There is no doubt about that.
CHB: What about the space, the social space of the church today? You talked about the moral decline, and the church was always the institution that would provide a space for self-assertion, even in those much worse times such as slavery and militant Jim Crow in the South. What about young people and the church today? Is it only for the middle class, something you do on Sunday because it’s proper to do? Or is there still real power in the churches?
CW: I was blessed to be at the Progressive Baptist Convention just a few weeks ago, which is the convention that Martin helped found when he was booted out of the National Baptist Convention in 1961, with Gardner Taylor,33 who was the mentor of Martin King. He is now ninety-five years old. Brother Tavis Smiley and I were blessed to interview Reverend Taylor in front of the Progressive Baptist Convention, and it was something, because you look out, you see only about twenty-five hundred people there. Twenty years ago you would have seen ten thousand. That’s the result of the decline of the denominations. So, two basic phenomena are taking place: First, the impact of market culture on the Black church is the decline of denominations, so you get the rise of nondenominational churches, so many of the members of Progressive Baptists joined the nondenominational churches. And the second phenomenon is the Pentacostalization of the nondenominational churches, you see. So that here you get Pentacostals, which is, of course, a denomination founded by Black Baptists, the fastest-growing denomination in the whole world, which places stress on the third person in the Trinity, on the Holy Ghost, the Holy Spirit and highly individualist salvation. Most Pentacostal churches shy away from direct political involvement or action. In addition, you get nondenominational churches growing. You end up with a towering figure like Bishop T. D. Jakes,34 who is a spiritual genius, a great preacher, but doesn’t have a whole lot of political courage. I could go on and on. Another towering figure is Bishop Glen Staples,35 my dear brother, nondenominational and very much tied to working and poor people and politically active. Pentacostalism is still, in style, too funky for the well-to-do, the Black elites, you see, so that what happens is you get the breakdown of denominations, the Pentacostal styles becoming hegemonic.
But the prophetic element associated with the old denominations, like progressive Baptists, is lost. So that you have some prophetic folk, like Bishop Staples—and there are few like him—but for the most part, it really is a matter of spiritual stimulation and titillation that has market parallels and market stimulation and titillation, and these nondenominational churches really don’t have the rich prophetic substance of courage, compassion, sacrifice, and risk. For example, there is the story that Wacquant and others tell about the $300 billion invested in the prison-industrial complex, the Marshall Plan for jails and prisons, so you get these escalating, exponentially increasing numbers of prisons, but most churches don’t have prison ministers. So you get a sense how far removed they are from the suffering of the people. Now, the preachers probably have one or two Bentleys, some have Lamborghinis, but they don’t have prison ministers, whereas the Progressive Baptist Convention in the 1950s, they are so attuned to the suffering of the people that wherever the people were being dominated, in whatever form they were dominated, they had a ministry that’s somehow connected. And so in that sense, the market-driven religiosity of much of the Black church these days is counter to the prophetic sensibility of Martin—what Martin King was all about—and that’s one of the major, major things missing in contemporary America. The two outstanding exceptions are my mentor, Reverend Herbert Daughtry, pastor of the House of the Lord Pentacostal Church, in Brooklyn, founder of the National Black United Front, an exemplary Black freedom fighter, and my dear brother Father Michael Pfleger, pastor at historic Saint Sabina, in Chicago, whose prophetic leadership is deeply grounded in King’s witness and legacy.36
CHB: You associated the liberal Black church with social analysis, with an insight that goes with the preaching of how you can cope with these conditions, but you’re saying that this element is basically lost these days?
CW: For the most part. I mean you get a J. Alfred Smith in Oakland, one of the great prophetic figures; Freddy Haynes or Carolyn Knight, major prophetic figures, or Reverend Dr. Bernard Richardson, Reverend Toby Sanders, Dr. Barbara King, or Reverend Dr. M. William Howard Jr., Reverend Dr. William Barber.37 Of course, the great Vincent Harding—scholar, activist, teacher—is the reigning dean of King-like prophetic witness. So you have some exceptions, but generally speaking it’s lost, and it’s exacerbated in the age of Obama, because identification with Obama could easily become—in the eyes of Black leaders—an identification with the Black prophetic tradition. So that Obama displaces the Black prophetic tradition; people think they are doing something progressive and prophetic by supporting our Black president given the history of white supremacy in America, counter-hegemonic, countervailing and so forth, you see. And given the trauma of overcoming blatant legalized racism, Obama is counter-hegemonic, but it’s overshadowed by his identification with the oligarchs, with his identification with the imperial killing machine and so forth. But that small sliver gives these Black leaders the sense of “I’m very progressive. I’m with the Black president. The right wing hate him, right wing want to kill him, right wing tell lies about him, but we are taking a stand,” you see. And so it’s very deceiving, very confusing, and very obfuscating in terms of any clear social analysis of the relations of domination and of power in American society.
CHB: So often the argument is “But isn’t there progress? Not just that visual, symbolic progress, but the African American middle class is growing, after all, so what are you talking about?”
CW: Yes, it’s true. And they could use that argument up until 2008, when the financial catastrophe took place owing to the greed of Wall Street bankers, when Black people lost 53 percent of their wealth.38 So we are seeing the relative vanishing of the Black middle class, most of whom had wealth in their homes; large numbers lost their homes. The predatory lending that was connected to the market bubble that burst—those bad loans were for the most part given to Black and brown lower-middle-class people. They’ve lost their homes, and so there is a transformation taking place. For example, even in the churches, they used to preach prosperity gospel, but now with the lack of prosperity, the material basis of their theology is called into question.
CHB: Yes, I think, what you are talking about—the vanishing of the middle class—is a global development. But probably disproportionately so in the African American community, as always.
CW: Absolutely. In America, whites lost 16 percent wealth, while brown people lost 66 percent wealth. It was worse among Latinos than among Blacks, who lost 53 percent. On a global scale, you do have the middle class contracting with oligarchic and plutocratic power expanding. Now, for the seven past months,39 75 percent of corporate profits were based on layoffs, so corporations are actually able to make big money by cutting costs, which are primarily labor costs. And then, of course, they are sitting on $2.1 trillion that they are hoarding because they are scared that the next collapse is going to leave them dry. So that what happens is that the Black middle class loses—a Black lumpenbourgeoisie under the American bourgeoisie. We never really had a solid Black bourgeoisie, E. Franklin Frazier says in ’57,40 and he is absolutely right. Even given the unprecedented opportunity the last forty years, the Oprah Winfreys, the Michael Jordans, and so on, once you shave off the entertainers who make big money, we are still beneath the American middle class in terms of wealth. And right now the white household in America has twenty times more wealth than the Black: $113,000 for the average white family, Black is $5,000, Hispanic is $6,000.41 And we are not even talking of the social neglect and economic abandonment of the poor, which is the kind of thing brother Tavis and I were accenting on the Poverty Tour. That has had no visibility since Martin was killed. Marian Wright Edelman has been heroic trying to make it visible, but she has had difficulty making it visible.42 Part of Tavis’s creative genius as a media figure is his ability to gain access to media sites to make things visible, so that even without a social movement you can go on a Poverty Tour and get the whole nation talking about poverty, from Nightline to CNN to C-SPAN to the New York Times, Washington Post. That’s unprecedented in so many ways. But in the absence of a social movement, that’s one of the best things you can do to try to shape the climate of opinion, try to have some impact on the public discourse in the country.
CHB: And that influence is stronger, more powerful than in King’s days.
CW: Yes. That’s true. Because King’s social movement was an attempt to dramatize issues of injustice, and the Poverty Tour, which is what brother Tavis and I did, really is an attempt to dramatize the issue of poverty without a social movement. Now, I think that the aim of putting a smile on Martin’s face in the grave is the highest criterion of a freedom fighter in America. And to put a smile on his face is to be willing to live and die and bear witness on behalf of those who are wrestling with all four of those issues: militarism, materialism, racism, and poverty. Now, I would include patriarchy and sexism—I would include homophobia as well—even though he didn’t talk about them, so that when we are talking about racism, we are talking about a species of xenophobia. We could really just say xenophobia as a whole, so it includes anti-Semitism; it includes anti-Arab racism, anti-Muslim sensibility, and so on. But my hunch is that’s probably the best we can do.
I think Sheldon Wolin is probably right with his notion of fugitive democracy,43 where it is a matter of trying to generate and galvanize people to be organized and mobilized to bring power and pressure to bear, but know that the powers that be are going to either kill you, try to absorb you and incorporate you, or lie about you or try to undermine your movement by those weapons of mass distraction that we talked about before. It’s very difficult to conceive of how the kind of revolution that Martin really wanted can take place given current arrangements. Now, it could just be a matter of my limited imagination, but the Frankfurt School and Wolin and the others just make more sense to me. And I think that’s one reason why you have fewer persons who really want to put a smile on Martin’s face, because the possibilities of actualizing what he was calling for tend to be so small, and most people don’t want to fight for something that they don’t think can be actualized or realized—especially in America—rather quickly.
CHB: It always impresses me that Noam Chomsky, an intellectual I appreciate very much, who is so marginalized—naturally—sharply analyzes the situation and sees the difficulties you were just talking about—of how change could come about—and yet always believes that people can do it. And I wonder how he sustains this belief, which seems to be based on some insight that it is possible.
CW: We just had him at Princeton, and I had a chance to speak to him and introduce him, and brother Noam, deep down he is a Cartesian, he really is. So he believes in not just the power of reason but the power of transparency and the power of clarity as themselves fundamentally just agents of change. Beckett, Chekhov, Schopenhauer, they are not part of his world. I think he has a limited grasp of the role of the nonrational, and so he easily pushes it aside, so he really believes that once people are exposed to the clear analysis that he has, somehow they will catch on.
CHB: That’s what Du Bois believed.
CW: For a while, that’s right. He really believed that it is ignorance standing in the way.
CHB: I think it’s, on the one hand, rationality versus irrationality, but on the other hand, it’s also about the interrelation of mind and body, because so much of how we look at the world, our perceptions, our orientations, are deeply ingrained in our bodies, and as embodied dispositions, they are persistent. Thus, according to Pierre Bourdieu, a change of habitus occurs only under certain conditions, mainly in moments of crisis.44 So that is something that one has to address.
CW: You’ve got to come to terms with that. What happens is that the Cartesian element has its place because reason does have a role to play, but it can become a fetish; it can become an idol; it can become a form of false religiosity in order to sustain your optimism, and in some ways I think that’s true for Noam. You know who I think is a better example is my dear brother Howard Zinn. I just wrote an introduction to his writings on race that was recently published.45 Because Howard—like Noam—really believed in the power of reason, clarity, transparency, and analysis. But he also had a deep sensitivity to body, to nonrationality—or maybe nonrationality is not a good word—to trans-rationality—what culture is about—and so Howard had such a long view of things. Reminds me a little of Raymond Williams’s wonderful book The Long Revolution,46 which needs to be read and reread over and over again. And in that sense he is a little closer to reality in a way, whereas I think people like Wolin, they understand all the things that go into social transformation, and it’s always messy, always.
CHB: What about King in that respect? What do you think?
CW: I think King always understood the mess, and I think once he hit those issues of class in Chicago and empire in Vietnam, the mess became more and more Beckett-like, which means all you can do is try to lay bare illuminating analysis and try to live a life committed to justice and love and truth. That’s all you could do at that point. It’s just a matter of integrity, because what you are up against is such a mess, in a very technical sense—which is a term which Beckett uses,47 rather than Being in Heidegger—and King understood that, he really did. And you wonder though—I mean, he died at thirty-nine—if he had lived to be sixty, what would Martin have done? That’s still a question. Some say he would have been a professor in Union Theological Seminary. So he would have been an activist but would be teaching as well, because you have to be able to sustain yourself with something; you can’t be an intense activist every week of your life the way he had done this from twenty-six to thirty-nine—thirteen years—you just can’t do that, you know, especially if you had kids and grandkids and things. But you never know. I know Martin would have been fundamentally in solidarity with the struggles of poor people. I really do. And I think that he would have been a countervailing voice and a countervailing force against the Obama administration, and he would have spoken out very loudly. Now, he spoke out very loudly among Black politicians of his day, when he said that the US Congress was turning “the war on poverty into a war against the poor.”48 And when he supported Carl Stokes as mayor, and Stokes refused to invite Martin on the stage when he won,49 Martin was very hurt. Martin was too radical. He had come out against Vietnam already. He was very hurt, and he would say over and over again, “These Black politicians kind of sell out just as quickly as any white politician. It’s about the people!”
Now you see, Huey Newton and company, they loved that about Martin; even Amiri Baraka,50 who Martin met before he died. Baraka was just telling me about that wonderful encounter that he and Martin had in ’68 in March prior to the death in April, and they loved that about Martin, because they knew that his critique of Black bourgeois politicians was a powerful one. Though he supported these folks, they used him; they used his prowess, his charisma for their campaign, and then they win and they won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. Martin said: “What the hell is going on here?” They know what they do, you know. They know what they do. They got the big business community, the permanent government, to relate to and so forth.
I think if Martin had lived, he would have been critical of the later rule of Mandela as president of South Africa, given his complicity with the business class and given his willingness to in some ways downplay the plight of the poor of South Africa as he moved into the mainstream. You can see the same kind of Santaclausification, the same kind of complicity with the business elites in South Africa, the embrace by Bill Clinton, the embrace by Richard Stengel, the managing editor of Time magazine, so that any time now you talk about Mandela, Clinton and Stengel pop up rather than Sisulu and Slovo,51 who were revolutionary comrades of the revolutionary Mandela, who spent twenty-seven and a half years in prison, you see. Martin would understand the ways that people’s names are promoted and sustained by corporate money and elites who protect their names, but he would resist that kind of sanitizing, which is to say he would be critical of the way that he has been sanitized, too. In some ways it’s probably an inevitable process, but even given its inevitability, it has to be criticized, because it is a shift away from the truth. And there’s a distancing from the truth. He would still have great respect for Mandela, don’t get me wrong, but he would be critical of that process. I think Mandela was critical of this process himself. He told me that when we met, when I gave that Mandela lecture and talked about the Santaclausification of Mandela himself in Africa. I think Martin would resonate with that. No doubt. There is no doubt that the great Nelson Mandela was the most courageous of men and most genuine of revolutionaries—yet as president of South Africa he ruled in a neoliberal manner.