NOTES

Introduction: Why We Need to Talk About Black Prophetic Fire

1. Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Tragic,” in West, Prophetic Thought in Postmodern Times, vol. 1, Beyond Eurocentrism and Multiculturalism (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1993), 45; cf. Cornel West, “Pragmatism and the Sense of the Tragic,” in West, Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1993), 114.

2. West, “Pragmatism and the Tragic,” 32.

3. Cornel West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 147.

4. James Baldwin, “Down at the Cross,” in The Fire Next Time (New York: Vintage, 1992), 26; cf. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 170.

Chapter One: It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire

1. “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” speech at Rochester, New York, July 5, 1852, in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writings, ed. Philip S. Foner (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 188–206 (hereafter cited as Selected Speeches). One of Douglass’s most powerful orations, it is best known in its abbreviated version published by Douglass himself, with other extracts from his speeches, under the title “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in an appendix to his autobiography My Bondage and My Freedom in Frederick Douglass, Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1855; New York: Library of America, 1994), 431–35.

2. Angela Davis’s first lecture as an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles was on Frederick Douglass. “Angela said for a people in slavery ‘the first condition of freedom is an open act of resistance—physical resistance, violent resistance.’” Howard Moore Jr., “Angela—Symbol in Resistance,” in If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance, ed. Angela Y. Davis et al. (New York: Third Press, 1971), 191–92. See also chap. 3, n. 31.

3. Toward the end of his life, Douglass gave two speeches against the “frequent and increasing resort to lynch law in our Southern States.” “Lynch Law in the South” was published in the renowned North American Review (July 1892); reprinted in Selected Speeches, 746. According to the editor, “[A]ll the fire of his early years returned as Douglass struck out hard against the defenders of lynching” (Selected Speeches, 746). Provoked by the outcry it caused, Douglass extended his attack in his last major address, “Why Is the Negro Lynched?” published in a pamphlet entitled The Lesson of the Hour (1894); reprinted in Selected Speeches, 750–76.

4. “Oration in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, delivered at the unveiling of the Freedmen’s Monument in Memory of Abraham Lincoln, in Lincoln Park, Washington, D.C., April 14, 1876,” in Selected Speeches, 616–24. The sculptor Thomas Ball had designed the statue that Douglass criticized later for presenting “the Negro on his knees when a more manly attitude would have been indicative of freedom” (615). Yet Douglass failed to come up to his own standards expressed in his 1852 oration (see above, n. 1), when he had demanded: “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future” (193).

5. Owing to a result of a highly contested election, the nineteenth president of the United States, Rutherford B. Hayes, was inaugurated in early March 1877 as a result of the so-called “Compromise of 1877,” which allowed the Republicans to claim the presidency in exchange for ending the implementation of Reconstruction in the Southern states. Immediately afterwards, Hayes appointed Douglass United States Marshal of the District of Columbia, and despite substantial opposition, Douglass was confirmed by the Senate on March 17, 1877. According to Douglass, one of the reasons against his appointment was that “a colored man at the Executive Mansion in white kid gloves” should perform the ceremony “of introducing the aristocratic citizens of the republic to the President of the United States” (Life and Times of Frederick Douglass Written By Himself, in Autobiographies, 856). Although Douglass had protested the diminishing Republican commitment to Reconstruction during the election campaign, he was silent when the newly elected president decided to withdraw federal troops from the South.

6. “Yeah, brother, you find me in a crack house before you find me in the White House.” Jeff Sharlet, “The Supreme Love and Revolutionary Funk of Dr. Cornel West, Philosopher of the Blues,” Rolling Stone, May 28, 2009.

7. Michael Lind, The Next American Nation: The New Nationalism and the Fourth American Revolution (New York: Free Press, 1995).

8. Herman Melville juxtaposes the illusion of individual autonomy with the reality of social interdependence, when, in chap. 108 of Moby-Dick, he has Ahab, the epitome of human hubris, complain about his dependence on the carpenter who is in the process of crafting an artificial leg for him: “Here I am, proud as a Greek god, and yet standing debtor to this blockhead for a bone to stand on! Cursed be that mortal inter-indebtedness which will not do away with ledgers.” Moby-Dick or The Whale (Evanston: Northwestern University Press/Newberry Library, 1988), 471–72.

9. The two prominent Abolitionists authorize, as it were, Douglass’s narrative; see William Lloyd Garrison’s preface and a letter by Wendell Phillips to Douglass in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Written by Himself (1845), in Douglass, Autobiographies, 3–10, 11–13.

10. Cornel West with David Ritz, Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud (Carlsbad, CA: Smiley Books, 2009).

11. Douglass, Narrative, in Autobiographies, 33.

12. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), in Autobiographies, 169.

13. Douglass, Life and Times (1881; rev. 1893), in Autobiographies, 492.

14. For an extended argument, see Christa Buschendorf, ‘“Properly Speaking There Are in the World No Such Men as Self-Made Men’: Frederick Douglass’s Exceptional Position in the Field of Slavery,” in Intellectual Authority and Literary Culture in the US, 1790–1900, ed. Günter Leypoldt (Heidelberg: Winter Verlag, 2013), 159–84.

15. Douglass, Narrative, in Autobiographies, 97.

16. Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity (1841), trans. from the second German edition by Marian Evans (London: Chapman, 1854; New York: Blanchard, 1855). Based on a fundamental critique of Hegelian idealism, Feuerbach interpreted religion anthropologically, claiming that God is a mere projection of human beings that reflects their desire for self-transcendence.

17. In 1860, Douglass read Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity with his German friend Ottilie Assing, who seems to have tried to convert Douglass to agnosticism and in a letter to Feuerbach (1871) claimed, “Douglass has become your enthusiastic admirer.” See Maria Diedrich, Love Across the Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999), 227–29. See also the allusion to Feuerbach in a letter by Assing to Douglass (Jan. 6, 1879), in which she encouraged him to write a sequel to his second autobiography that “would furnish an abundance of [. . .] highly interesting material, and of all things your conversion to free thinking, how through your own courage and strength, with Feuerbach tendering a helping hand to you as it were, you broke the chains of a second bondage.” Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing’s Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass, ed., trans., and introduced by Christoph Lohmann (New York: Peter Lang, 1999), 351. Douglass, however, preferred not to mention Feuerbach in Life and Times.

18. In Douglass’s 1846 report of his visit to the Scottish town of Ayr, the birthplace of “the brilliant genius,” he describes the social position of the poet in terms reminiscent of his own recent experiences: “Burns lived in the midst of a bigoted and besotted clergy—a pious but corrupt generation—a proud, ambitious, and contemptuous aristocracy, who, esteemed a little more than a man, and looked upon the plowman, such as was the noble Burns, as being little better than a brute.” Philip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, vol. 1., Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 153. The eighteenth-century poet was a stern critic of false claims of authority, a passionate spokesperson for the working poor, and a resolute defender of the dignity of the common man. Not surprisingly, “Douglass had a special fondness for the highland singer shared by many American Negroes.” Arna Bontemps, Free At Last: The Life of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1971), 127. Almost fifty years after his tour through Scotland, Douglass connected the suppression of independent thinking in his former life as a slave with Burns’s poem “Man Was Made to Mourn”: “Obedience was the duty of the slave. I in my innocence once told my old master that I thought a certain way of doing some work I had in hand the best way to do it. He promptly demanded, ‘Who gave you a right to think?’ I might have answered in the language of Robert Burns, ‘Were I designed your lordling’s slave, / By Nature’s law designed, / Why was an independent thought / E’er placed in my mind?’ But I had not then read Robert Burns. Burns had high ideas of the dignity of simple manhood.” “The Blessing of Liberty and Education” (1894), in The Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 5, 1881–95, ed. John W. Blassingame and John R. McKivigan (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 565.

19. “Hereditary bondmen, know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?” Douglass quotes the famous couplet from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, canto ii, stanza 76, at the end of chap. 17 of My Bondage and My Freedom, in which he describes the long victorious battle with the notorious slave breaker Covey, a victory that Douglass considered the turning point in his life as a slave (Autobiographies, 287). Douglass’s library contained both The Works of Robert Burns (1837) and The Works of Lord Byron (New York: Blake, 1840). See William L. Petrie and Douglas E. Stover, eds., Bibliography of the Frederick Douglass Library at Cedar Hill (Fort Washington, MD: Silesia Companies, 1995).

20. John T. Grayson is still at Mt. Holyoke, where he conducts research on the women in Douglass’s life.

21. Autobiographies, 431, 432.

22. See Christa Buschendorf, “The Shaping of We-Group Identities in the African American Community,” in The Imaginary and Its Worlds: American Studies after the Transnational Turn, ed. Laura Bieger et al. (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England, 2013), 84–106.

23. Here and elsewhere in our dialogue, West refers to the title of what has become the classic of anticolonialism by the trained psychiatrist, Marxian revolutionary humanist, and activist Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth (1961), trans. Constance Farrington, preface by Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Grove Press, 1963); new edition, trans. Richard Philcox, foreword by Homi K. Bhaba (New York: Grove Press, 2004). For Fanon’s influence on the Black Power movement, see David Macey’s acclaimed biography, Frantz Fanon (2000; London: Verso, 2012), 23.

24. “Inasmuch as ye have done it to the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25: 40.

25. In reflecting upon critiques of optimism, West mentions major French and German eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers. Voltaire’s most famous work, Candide, or Optimism (1759), is a satire on philosophic optimism represented by the protagonist’s mentor Pangloss. In Rameau’s Nephew (written between 1760 and 1774), Denis Diderot criticizes contemporary French society in the form of a highly satirical philosophic dialogue. The major philosopher of German idealism, Immanuel Kant, postulated man’s exercise of rationality and self-determination (What Is Enlightenment? 1784), but in his philosophy of religion he saw a propensity of human beings toward radical evil (Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason, 1793). The playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing put his ideal of brotherly love and religious tolerance into his drama Nathan the Wise (1779); in his various contributions to contemporary theological controversies he was known for his position of critical questioning.

26. John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 210.

27. “An organic intellectual, in contrast to traditional intellectuals who often remain comfortably nested in the academy, attempts to be entrenched in and affiliated with organizations, associations, and, possibly, movements of grass-roots folk.” Cornel West, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 234. The conception of the “organic intellectual” stems from the Italian thinker in the Marxist tradition, Antonio Gramsci, who discusses it in his essay “The Intellectual Selections from the Prison Notebooks.” See Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 5–23. West has appropriated Gramsci’s core concept of hegemony (“the set of formal ideas and beliefs and informal modes of behavior, habits, manners, sensibilities, and outlooks that support and sanction the existing order”) and his view of “organic intellectuals as leaders and thinkers directly tied into a particular cultural group primarily by means of institutional affiliations” to the Black prophetic tradition as early as Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1982; Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002; anniversary ed. with a new preface by the author), 119, 121. In his book on American pragmatism, West explains why his own concept of prophetic pragmatism “is inspired by the example of Antonio Gramsci [. . .] the major twentieth-century philosopher of praxis, power, and provocation” whose “work is historically specific, theoretically engaging, and politically activistic in an exemplary manner” (American Evasion of Philosophy, 231).

28. The English journalist William Cobbett (1763–1835) investigated the difficult living conditions of the English rural population on the basis of first-hand observations published under the title Rural Rides in 1830.

29. There seems to be no evidence that Douglass read the liberal political journalist and literary critic William Hazlitt (1778–1830), who is considered one of the greatest essayists in the English language.

30. Douglass possessed several volumes of the works of John Ruskin, who was not only the major art historian of the Victorian era but also an early critic of modern industrial capitalism whose utopian vision of human society was to inspire many Socialists. It is interesting to note that Douglass owned not only studies in art history, e.g., Lectures on Architecture, but also three famous Ruskin lectures, “Work,” “War,” and “Traffic,” collected in The Crown of Wild Olive (New York, n.d. [1866]); see Bibliography of the Douglass Library, s.v. Ruskin.

31. An avid disciple of Ruskin, the prolific writer of poetry and fiction and staunch Socialist William Morris applied Ruskin’s concept of the revival of craftsmanship to the art of textile design and in 1861 founded a decorative arts firm together with the artists Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and others. But as with Hazlitt, there is no evidence of Douglass’s reception of Morris.

32. The Scottish philosopher, historian, and essayist Thomas Carlyle published Sartor Resartus in 1831, followed by The French Revolution (1837) and On Heroes and Hero Worship and the Heroic in History (1841). For Carlyle’s 1849 “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question,” see Collected Works, vol. 11, Critical and Miscellaneous Essays: Collected and Republished in Six Volumes, vol. VI (London: Chapman and Hall, 1870), 169–210.

33. James McCune Smith, “Introduction,” in Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 132.

34. On Douglass’s reading of Emerson, see Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-Fashioning,” 205. In addition, there are references to Emerson in Douglass’s published papers. In his early years in the North he regularly attended popular lectures, and among the lecturers he heard was Emerson; see Frederick Douglass Papers, vol. 1: 1841-46, xxiii; and in a manuscript (ca. 1865), he “discusses Emerson’s comments on producers and poets” (Frederick Douglass Papers, series 1, vol. 3: 1855-63, 620).

35. Gay Wilson Allen, Waldo Emerson: A Biography (New York: Viking Press, 1981).

36. Lawrence Buell, Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003). Referring to Emerson’s address on British emancipation, Buell states: “Never before had he so firmly associated himself in public with any social reform movement, on the same platform with noted activists like Frederick Douglass” (251). Buell also presents evidence from Emerson’s papers that Douglass knew Emerson’s Representative Men: soon after its publication, on February 5, 1850, Douglass had written Emerson to ask for a copy (368, n. 14).

37. Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville: Essays in Relation, ed. Robert S. Levine and Samuel Otter (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

38. See Sterling Stuckey’s article “Cheer and Gloom: Douglass and Melville on Slave Dance and Music,” in ibid.: “Melville’s evocation of the music described by Douglass is so faithful to its tragic joy-sorrow quality that, as we shall see, blues form and feeling shape and suffuse his writing style at critical junctures in the novel” (71).

39. See also William V. Spanos, The Legacy of Edward W. Said (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

40. William V. Spanos, Herman Melville and the American Calling: Fiction After Moby-Dick, 1851–1857 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008); and William V. Spanos, The Errant Art of Moby-Dick: The Canon, the Cold War, and the Struggle for American Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995). Meanwhile Spanos has published the third volume “in a trilogy whose essential aim is to retrieve Herman Melville’s subversion of the myth of American exceptionalism”: The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), xi.

41. In the last and programmatic chapter of The American Evasion of Philosophy, “Prophetic Pragmatism,” West explains that he defines his conception of pragmatism as “prophetic” because “it harks back to the Jewish and Christian tradition of prophets who brought urgent and compassionate critique to bear on the evils of their day. The mark of the prophet is to speak the truth in love with courage—come what may” (233).

42. Robert S. Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Literary Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008).

43. Charles Sumner served as US senator from Massachusetts from 1851 to 1874. A staunch and eloquent spokesman for the abolition of slavery and a harsh critic of Lincoln’s moderate politics toward “slave power,” he remained a strong advocate for civil and voting rights for the freedmen after the Civil War. One of Sumner’s colleagues and friends was the German American Carl Schurz, who, as a student, had fought in the German Revolution of 1848, and after his emigration to the United States in 1852 brought his belief in democratic principles to the fight for the emancipation of slaves. Schurz served as a brigadier general in the Union army, held political posts under Presidents Lincoln and Hayes, and became the first German American to be elected to the US Senate (Missouri), in 1869.

44. See Levine, Dislocating Race and Nation, 209.

45. For Collins’s remark, “Give us the facts, we will take care of the philosophy,” see Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 367.

46. See John Stauffer, Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln (New York: Twelve, 2008), 87–88.

47. The novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man was published anonymously in 1912 because Johnson was afraid it might harm his reputation as a diplomat; it appeared under his name in 1927 (by Knopf) with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten. James Weldon Johnson, Along This Way: The Autobiography of James Weldon Johnson (New York: Viking Press, 1933).

48. This was prior to Obama’s retreat on green issues such as the Keystone Pipeline.

49. Frederick Douglass, “West India Emancipation,” speech delivered at Canandaigua, NY, August 3, 1857, in Selected Speeches, 367. In this speech Douglass again quotes Byron: “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow” (366); see also above n. 19.

50. “I had reached the point, at which I was not afraid to die.” In Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 286. Douglass cites Patrick Henry in connection with his first attempt at escape and points out that “incomparably more sublime” is “the same sentiment, when practically asserted by men accustomed to the lash and chain—men whose sensibilities must have become more or less deadened by their bondage” (312).

51. Douglas A. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Random House, 2008).

52. Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998). See also Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010).

53. W. E. B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Towards an Autobiography of a Race Concept (1940), in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). The nineteen-volume edition of Du Bois’s works is dedicated to Cornel West.

54. “The anti-slavery platform had performed its work, and my voice was no longer needed. [. . .] A man in the situation in which I found myself has not only to divest himself of the old, which is never easily done, but to adjust himself to the new, which is still more difficult. [. . .] But what should I do, was the question. I had a few thousand dollars [. . .] saved from the sale of ‘My Bondage and My Freedom,’ and the proceeds of my lectures at home and abroad, and with this sum I thought [. . .] [to] purchase a little farm and settle myself down to earn an honest living by tilling the soil.” Douglass, My Bondage, in Autobiographies, 811, 812.

Chapter Two: The Black Flame

1. This conversation was recorded in the summer of 2010 and was first published under the title ‘“A Figure of Our Times’: An Interview with Cornel West on W. E. B. Du Bois,” in the Du Bois Review 10, no. 1 (2013): 261–78.

2. Cornel West, “W. E. B. Du Bois: The Jamesian Organic Intellectual,” in West, American Evasion of Philosophy, 138–50.

3. Cornel West, “Black Strivings in a Twilight Civilization,” in The Future of the Race, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West (New York: Vintage, 1997), 53–112, 180–96, 55; reprinted in The Cornel West Reader (New York: Civitas, 1999), 87–118, 571–79.

4. Ibid., 55.

5. West alludes to the main work of the eminent eighteenth-century British historian Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in six volumes (1776–88).

6. In Dusk of Dawn, Du Bois carefully registers his intellectual development from both conformity with the Puritan work ethic (“My general attitude toward property and income was that all who were willing to work could easily earn a living; that those who had property had earned it and deserved it and could use it as they wished; that poverty was the shadow of crime and connoted lack of thrift and shiftlessness. These were the current patterns of economic thought of the town of my boyhood” [9]) and consent to the ideology of the “White man’s burden” (“French, English and Germans pushed on in Africa, but I did not question the interpretation which pictured this as the advance of civilization and the benevolent tutelage of barbarians” [21]) to insights into the international scope of the problem of labor and property, which he first gained during his studies at the University of Berlin in 1892–1894, when he “began to see the race problem in America, the problem of the peoples of Africa and Asia, and the political development in Europe as one [23].”

7. The Negro covers African history and cultures and contains one chapter each on the slave trade and on “The Negro in the United States” (New York: Holt, 1915). Cf. Du Bois on the sequence of his writings on Africa in the foreword to The World and Africa: An Inquiry into the Part Which Africa Has Played in World History (1946; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2007): “Twice before I have essayed to write on the history of Africa: once in 1915 when the editors of the Home University Library asked me to attempt such a work. The result was the little volume called The Negro. [. . .] Naturally I wished to enlarge upon this earlier work after World War I and at the beginning of what I thought was a new era. So I wrote Black Folk: Then and Now (1939), with some new material and a more logical arrangement. But it happened that I was writing at the end of an age which marked the final catastrophe of the old era of European world dominance. [. . .] I deemed it, therefore, not only fitting but necessary in 1946 to essay again not so much a history of the Negroid peoples as a statement of their integral role in human history from prehistoric to modern times” (xxxi). By 1946, Du Bois views the history of European colonialism from a Marxian perspective: “I have also made bold to repeat the testimony of Karl Marx, whom I regard as the greatest of modern philosophers, and I have not been deterred by the witch-hunting which always follows mention of his name” (xxxii).

8. Studies on Du Bois as “sociological pioneer” have increased considerably in the past decade. On Du Bois’s exclusion from the canon of sociology in the past and the increasing recognition of his work in the social sciences, see the introduction to The Social Theory of W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Phil Zuckerman (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2004). See also Robert A. Wortham’s numerous publications on Du Bois’s sociology, especially on the sociology of religion: “Du Bois and the Sociology of Religion: Rediscovering a Founding Figure,” Sociological Inquiry 75, no. 4 (2005): 433–52; “W. E. B. Du Bois, the Black Church, and the Sociological Study of Religion,” Sociological Spectrum 29:2 (2009), 144–72; “W. E. B. Du Bois and the Scientific Study of Society: 1897–1914,” in W. E. B. Du Bois and the Sociological Imagination: A Reader, 1897–1914, ed. Robert A. Wortham (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2009), 1–20. For the neglect of Du Bois within the discipline of sociology on the one hand, and his achievements in the fields of urban and rural sociology, the sociology of race, gender, religion, as well as education and crime on the other hand, see W. E. B. Du Bois, ed. Reiland Rabaka (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2010). Drawing upon Michel Foucault’s theories, Rabaka has written extensively on Du Bois; most relevant with regard to Du Bois’s innovative transdisciplinary method is his monograph Against Epistemic Apartheid: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Disciplinary Decadence of Sociology (Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2010). For a broader approach that situates Du Bois and other Black sociologists in the field of US-American sociology, see the seminal study by Pierre Saint-Arnaud, African American Pioneers of Sociology: A Critical History, trans. Peter Feldstein (Toronto: University Press, 2009 [French original, 2003]. Saint-Arnaud summarizes Du Bois’s significance as follows: “[G]iven the enormous scope of the task Du Bois had assigned himself—that of rehistoricizing the Negro ‘problem,’ which the Anglo-American paradigm viewed through an ahistorical lens—he had to invent sociohistorical analysis as such. He had to revolutionize his field in order to make room for black sociology” (143).

9. To be more precise, no review of The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (Boston: Ginn & Co., 1899) appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, at the time the only American journal in that field; moreover, as Saint-Arnaud puts it, “As for the possibility that Du Bois might actually publish a paper in the Journal, it was completely out of the question” (African American Pioneers, 155). Cf. Du Bois’s comment on the academic neglect of the Atlanta University studies on the social condition of African Americans he and his team of social scientists undertook between 1896 and 1914: “Our reports were widely read and commented upon. On the other hand, so far as the American world of science and letters was concerned, we never ‘belonged’; we remained unrecognized in learned societies and academic groups. We rated merely as Negroes studying Negroes, and after all, what had Negroes to do with America or science?” Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International Publishers, 1968), 145.

10. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 67.

11. See Du Bois: “Once in a while through all of us there flashes some clairvoyance, some clear idea, of what America really is. We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans can not.” “Criteria of Negro Art,” Crisis 32 (October 1926): 290.

12. “A Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’ shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.” Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940), in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 257–58.

13. “I did not understand at all, nor had my history courses led me to understand, anything of current European intrigue, of the expansion of European power into Africa, of the Industrial Revolution built on slave trade and now turning into Colonial Imperialism; of the fierce rivalry among white nations for controlling the profits from colonial raw material and labor—of all this I had no clear conception. I was blithely European and imperialist in outlook; democratic as democracy was conceived in America” (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 16–17).

14. See Du Bois on his earlier faith in the power of enlightenment: “The Negro Problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation” (Dusk of Dawn, 30). By 1940, Du Bois had developed a more differentiated view: “Admitting widespread ignorance concerning the guilt of American whites for the plight of the Negroes; and the undoubted existence of sheer malevolence, the present attitude of the whites is much more the result of inherited customs and of those irrational and partly subconscious actions of men which control so large a proportion of their deeds. Attitudes and habits thus built up cannot be changed by sudden assault” (ibid., 98). In hindsight, Du Bois himself names the theoretical munitions that allowed him to transform his position: “My long-term remedy was Truth: carefully gathered scientific proof that neither color nor race determined the limits of a man’s capacity or desert. I was not at the time [in 1906] sufficiently Freudian to understand how little human action is based on reason; nor did I know Karl Marx well enough to appreciate the economic foundations of human history” (ibid., 145).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22. Ibid., 35–36.

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

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

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

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

27. Ibid., 67.

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

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

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

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

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

33. See chap. 1, n. 23.

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

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

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

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

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

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

40. Ibid.

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

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

43. Ibid., 181–82, 183.

Chapter Three: Moral Fire

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

12. Like King, Norman Thomas was very much influenced by Walter Rauschenbusch, a leading voice of the Social Gospel movement. And, like King, Thomas believed in nonviolent activism in the tradition of Gandhi and spoke out fervently against US militarism. Apart from Rauschenbusch’s Christian concept of socialism, it was the extreme poverty and utter despondency of the working class of all colors, which Thomas witnessed as a social worker in lower Manhattan and later as a pastor of the East Harlem Church and which turned him toward a socialist critique of capitalism. In the chapter “The Negro,” in his study Human Exploitation in the United States (New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1934), 258–83, he discusses at length the interrelation between Black economic exploitation in the twentieth century and “the plantation psychology”; in emphasizing in particular the economic and psychological factors of lynching, he draws upon the case studies in Arthur Raper’s The Tragedy of Lynching (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1933). He supported major civil rights campaigns, and though physical frailty prevented him from joining the Selma marches in 1965, he was one of the speakers at the March on Washington in August 1963. In 1965, King wrote an article about Thomas entitled “The Bravest Man I Ever Met,” Pageant 20 (June 1965), in which he praised him for his undaunted commitment to the cause of justice and equality. For further details on Thomas’s fight for racial justice and his relations with King, see Harry Fleischman, Norman Thomas: A Biography: 1884–1968, with a new chapter, “The Final Years” (New York: Norton, 1969), 323–24; and Raymond F. Gregory, Norman Thomas: The Great Dissenter (New York: Algora, 2008), 250–51, 271–72. West is an honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America, the institutional heir of Norman Thomas’s legacy.

13. Walter R. Chivers taught sociology at Morehouse College from 1925 to 1968. For his impact on other Black sociologists, his devotion to teaching, and his activism based on his early experiences as a social worker, see Charles V. Willie, “Walter R. Chivers—An Advocate of Situation Sociology,” Phylon 43, no. 3 (1982): 242–48. John H. Stanfield, who considers King “a public sociologist par excellence,” puts great emphasis on the Morehouse curriculum, with its stress “on thinking sociologically to promote the public good of racial justice,” and maintains that Chivers, “who was the chief black community researcher for Arthur Raper’s (1933) The Tragedy of Lynching” (see above, n. 12) “had a profound influence on King.” Stanfield, s.v. King, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, vol. 5, ed. George Ritzer (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2007), 2465–67.

14. The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), an essential organizational force in the sit-ins, freedom rides, and voter-registration activities, turned more radical in the mid-1960s and under its new chairman, Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture), propagated “Black Power.” A seminal text that presented “a political framework and ideology” of this revolutionary faction of the movement was Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America, by Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton (New York: Random House, 1967), vi; an enlarged edition with a new afterword by both authors critically discussing their concepts appeared in 1992. It clearly stated the necessity for a grassroots model: “The power must be that of a community” (ibid., 46). On SNCC’s concept of Black Power, see also Stokely Carmichael, “What We Want,” New York Review of Books, September 1966; reprinted as “Power and Racism” in Stokely Speaks: From Black Power to Pan-Africanism (1971; Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2007), 17–30. For confrontations between Carmichael and King, see Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 481–85; for King’s critique of Black Power politics, see the chap. “Black Power” in Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967; Boston: Beacon Press, 2010), 23–69.

15. Both Stanley David Levison, a Jewish businessman and member of the Communist Party who had been introduced to King by Bayard Taylor Rustin in the mid-1950s, and Rustin himself were close advisors to King. The FBI’s supposition that Levison was a Communist agent prompted the wiretapping of Levison and King, and led Robert Kennedy to exert great pressure on King. See Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988), 516–18, 835–38. Rustin, a Quaker, champion of nonviolent struggle, and one of the most important organizers of the movement, withdrew from the front line when his homosexual orientation was used to compromise King. Thus, Brother Outsider (Nancy Kates and Bennett Singer, dir. [California Newsreel, 2002]) is an appropriate title for a documentary on Rustin’s life. For a study that analyzes Rustin’s marginal position from the perspective of relational sociology, see Nicole Hirschfelder’s PhD dissertation, “Oppression as Process: A Figurational Analysis of the Case of Bayard Rustin,” University of Tübingen, 2012.

16. Per a May 22, 1967, Harris poll.

17. Carl T. Rowan was a highly successful and influential journalist in the 1960s. His syndicated columns were published in more than a hundred American and international newspapers, and in addition, he had contracts as a weekly radio and TV commentator. In 1964 and 1965, he was director of the US Information Agency and, thus, became the first black man to be present in meetings of the National Security Council. In a Reader’s Digest article published in September 1967, Rowan distanced himself from King, whose civil rights activism he had formerly covered very favorably (“Martin Luther King’s Tragic Decision”). It is interesting to note that in a speech given February 14, 1965, Malcolm X, speaking about tokenism, mentioned Rowan: “Tokenism benefits only a few. It never benefits the masses. [. . .] So that the problem for the masses has gone absolutely unsolved. The only ones for whom it has been solved are people like [. . .] Carl Rowan, who was put over the USIA, and is very skillfully trying to make Africans think that the problem of black men in this country is all solved.” Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York: Pathfinder, 1990), 174.

18. Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in the 1960s, was an impassioned spokesman for the civil rights movement, yet a staunch critic of militant voices. His friend Whitney Moore Young Jr., who firmly believed in operating within the system, became famous for his successful work as executive director of the National Urban League.

19. The Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded in early 1957 as an organization that endorsed forms of nonviolent protest. King became its first president, and Ella Baker was its first and—in the beginning—only staff member.

20. On the fear of these and other prominent African Americans that King’s radical criticism of the Vietnam War might harm the civil rights movement, see Henry E. Darby and Margaret N. Rowley, “King on Vietnam and Beyond,” Phylon 47, no. 1 (1986): 49–50.

21. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

22. On Clarence B. Jones and the plan to put the United States on trial at the UN, see also below, chap. 5, n. 21.

23. There has been an increase in the last decade in scholarly attention toward Black Greek-letter organizations. For an account of the origins and legacy of the Alphas, see Stefan Bradley, “The First and Finest: The Founders of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity,” Black Greek-Letter Organizations in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Gregory S. Parks (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2008), 19–39.

24. Fred Hampton, leader of the Chicago chapter of the Black Panther Party, was twenty-one years old when he was assassinated in a Chicago police raid in December 1969; Bobby Hutton, treasurer of the Black Panther Party, was not yet eighteen when, on April 6, 1968, he was shot dead by Oakland police.

25. Fannie Lou Hamer began her work in the civil rights movement as a voter registration activist, and although she experienced severe physical abuse by law enforcement officers, she refused to be intimidated and remained committed to the struggle for civil rights, e.g., as a candidate of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party for Congress in 1965. Like King, she would call America “a sick place,” and like Malcolm X, she insisted on fighting not just for civil rights but for human rights; see, for example, her speeches “America Is a Sick Place, and Man Is on the Critical List” (May 27, 1970) and “Nobody’s Free Until Everybody’s Free” (July 10, 1971), in The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is, ed. Maegan Parker Brooks and Davis W. Houck (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011).

26. Tavis Smiley’s well-known PBS television special called Beyond Vietnam is the best treatment of this historic speech. For the speech, see “A Time to Break Silence,” in Testament of Hope, 231–44.

27. Cf. the seminal volume of essays by Vincent Harding, Martin Luther King: The Inconvenient Hero (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2008, rev. ed.), in which he challenges the “amnesia” vis-à-vis the national hero and quotes the poem “Now That He Is Safely Dead,” by Carl Wendell Himes Jr., who, as early as 1977, wrote: “Dead men make / such convenient heroes: They / cannot rise / to challenge the images / we would fashion from their lives” (3).

28. “Eugene Debs was one of the greatest trade unionists as well as the leader of the US Socialist Party. His crusade against vast wealth inequality was legendary, yet despite his own antiracist views, he could not convince his organization to integrate with peoples of color” (West, Democracy Matters, 53). Like Debs, Jim Larkin was a Socialist and a trade union leader who, during his stay in the United States, became a speaker for the Socialist Party of America and supported Debs’s presidential campaign. A famous legend has it that he once “unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a cross, and told his largely atheist [New York] audience: ‘There is no antagonism between the Cross and socialism. [. . .] I stand by the Cross and I stand by Karl Marx.’” See Emmet O’Connor, “James Larkin in the United States, 1914–1923,” Journal of Contemporary History 37, no. 2 (2002): 185.

29. “At that time [in the early seventies], MLK was a grand example of integrity and sacrifice but, in sharp contrast to Malcolm X, not a distinct voice with a credible politics in our Harvard conversations. [. . .] King was for us the Great Man who died for us—but not yet the voice we had to listen to, learn from and build on. This would change in the next decade.” Cornel West, “Introduction: The Making of an American Democratic Socialist of African Descent,” in West, The Ethical Dimensions of Marxist Thought (New York: Monthly Review, 1991), xv–xxxiv; reprinted in The Cornel West Reader, 6–7.

30. In 1966, Huey P. Newton cofounded the Black Panther Party, which he and his combatant Bobby Seale conceptualized under the influence of Malcolm X and on the basis of writings by revolutionaries such as Mao Zedong, Frantz Fanon, and Che Guevara. Though the Black Panthers established armed self-defense patrols that often led to violent confrontations with the police, they also ran social programs, e.g., the children’s breakfast program and free clinics.

31. Angela Y. Davis has been a radical activist since her youth, an associate of the Black Panther Party and a member of the Communist Party of the United States. For her early years of activism, her trial and acquittal of the charge of first-degree murder in the early 1970s, which had turned her into an internationally known and supported political prisoner, see Angela Davis, An Autobiography (New York: Random House, 1974). In her latest book, The Meaning of Freedom, a collection of unpublished speeches, she emphasizes the interconnectedness of the issues of power, race, gender, class, and mass incarceration, arguing for, among other things, the abolition of the prison-industrial complex. The Meaning of Freedom, foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2012). See also above chap. 1, n. 2.

32. For Stokely Carmichael, see above, n. 14.

33. Dr. Gardner C. Taylor, recognized for his elegant rhetorical style, is yet another prominent example of spiritual leadership and social activism.

34. Thomas Dexter Jakes maintains the television ministry of the Dallas-based Potter’s House, which he founded in 1996.

35. Glen A. Staples is pastor of the Temple of Praise in Washington, DC.

36. “Under the dynamic leadership of Rev. Herbert Daughtry, the National Black United Front (composed of black Christians, Marxists, nationalists, and left-liberals) has established itself as the leading voice of progressive black America. Far beyond liberalism and indifferent to social democracy, this Christian headed-group is staunchly anti-US imperialist and vaguely pro-Socialist with a black nationalist twist. With the founding of the African Peoples’ Christian Organization in March 1983, Rev. Daughtry has extended his vision by supplementing the National Black United Front with an exclusively Christian organization, especially for those prophetic black Christians demoralized and debilitated by the secular ideological battles in NBUF: Rev. Daughtry continues to head both organizations” (West, Prophetic Fragments, 71). Daughtry’s most well-known book is No Monopoly on Suffering (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1997), with an introduction by Cornel West. The well-respected Father Pfleger is the John Brown of contemporary America—a white leader profoundly committed to Black freedom. West has preached annually in his church for fifteen years. See Robert McClory, Radical Disciple: Father Pfleger, St. Sabina Church, and the Fight for Social Justice (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010).

37. J. Alfred Smith Sr., pastor emeritus of Allen Temple Baptist Church, in Oakland, clearly reveals his commitment to the tradition of prophetic Christianity in the title of his 2004 autobiography: On the Jericho Road: A Memoir of Racial Justice, Social Action, and Prophetic Ministry, with Harry Louis Williams II (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004). Frederick Douglas Haynes III is senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church, Dallas. Rev. Dr. Carolyn Ann Knight studied under Cornel West at Union Theological Seminary, where she received a master’s of divinity and a master’s of sacred theology; she earned a doctor of ministry from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio. She founded “Can Do” Ministries, devoted to the spiritual and intellectual advancement of youth, and she was professor of preaching at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta for many years. She is one of the great preachers of her generation. Rev. Dr. Bernard Richardson is the dean of Howard University’s historic Andrew Rankin Memorial Chapel and professor at Howard University’s Divinity School. West has preached in this chapel annually for the past twenty years. Rev. Toby Sanders is pastor of the Beloved Community, former president of the Trenton Board of Education, and “dean” of the New Jersey STEP prison/college program (directed by Margaret Atkins), in which West teaches philosophy with 140 brothers/students in Rahway. Rev. Dr. Barbara King is the founder/minister of the Hillside Chapel and Truth Center in Atlanta. Rev. Dr. M. William Howard Jr. is the pastor of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey, and was the first Black president of the National Council of Churches. Rev. Dr. William Barber is one of the grand King-like figures in our time.

38. For statistics on housing and wealth distribution quoted in this passage and the next, see the Pew Research Center analysis based on 2009 government data: Rakesh Kochhar et al., Twenty to One: Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks, Hispanics (Washington, DC: Pew Research Social and Demographic Trends, July 26, 2011), http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2011/07/26/wealth-gaps-rise-to-record-highs-between-whites-blacks-hispanics.

39. West refers to the period between December 2010 and August 2011.

40. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957).

41. Kochhar, Twenty to One. For soaring corporate profits based largely on layoffs, see, for example, Floyd Norris, “As Corporate Profits Rise, Workers’ Income Declines,” New York Times, August 5, 2011. The figure of $2.1 trillion is based on Federal Reserve statistics released in 2011 and discussed widely, e.g., by Jacob Goldstein on National Public Radio, September 20, 2011.

42. Marian Wright Edelman, a civil rights attorney, graduate of Yale University Law School, the first African American woman admitted to the Mississippi Bar, and promoter of the Poor People’s Campaign, is best known for her indefatigable work on behalf of poor children, e.g., with the Children’s Defense Fund.

43. Wolin defines democracy as a “project concerned with the political potentialities of ordinary citizens, that is, with their possibilities for becoming political beings through the self-discovery of common concerns and of modes of action for realizing them.” Consequently, democracy “seems destined to be a moment rather than a form.” Sheldon S. Wolin, “Fugitive Democracy,” Constellations 1, no. 1 (1994): 11, 19.

44. Though Bourdieu argues that “there is an inertia [. . .] of habitus” (Pascalian Meditations, 160), he also emphasizes that habitus can be “practically transformed” and even “controlled through awakening consciousness and socioanalysis.” Pierre Bourdieu, In Other Words: Essays Towards a Reflexive Sociology, trans. Matthew Adamson (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1994), 116.

45. Howard Zinn on Race, introduction by Cornel West (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2011).

46. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Chatto, 1961).

47. This was also a favorite word of Fannie Lou Hamer’s, who would say in many of her speeches that to be born Black in America is to be born in a mess.

48. Garrow, Bearing the Cross, 562.

49. On King’s support for Carl Stokes’s 1967 election campaign for mayor of Cleveland, see ibid., 580.

50. For Huey Newton and Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), see also chap. 5. Baraka passed away on January 9, 2014.

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

Chapter Four: The Heat of Democratic Existentialism

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

2. Ibid., 273.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Williams, Long Revolution.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter Five: Revolutionary Fire

1. West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 143.

2. West, Race Matters, 135–36.

3. The Cornel West Reader, 7.

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

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

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

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

8. William Faulkner, Light in August, opening of chap. 6 (New York: Modern Library, 1012), 110.

9. One instance in which Malcolm X highlighted the importance of history and memory for a people was, again, the speech at the founding rally of the OAAU. In it, he quotes from and expounds upon the propositions in the “Statement of Basic Aims and Objectives of the Organization of Afro-American Unity,” written by a committee. The OAAU demands “a cultural revolution to unbrainwash an entire people”: “This cultural revolution will be the journey to our rediscovery of ourselves. History is a people’s memory, and without a memory man is demoted to the level of the lower animals.” “Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensible weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.” Malcolm X, By Any Means Necessary, 54–56.

10. This is Malcolm X’s answer to Black reporter Claude Lewis’s question about how he wanted to be remembered, in an interview that took place in New York in the last months of his life. Peter Goldman, The Death and Life of Malcolm X (1973; Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013), 238. See also Malcolm X’s statement on March 12, 1964: “I am not educated, nor am I an expert in any particular field—but I am sincere, and my sincerity is my credentials” (Malcolm X Speaks, 20).

11. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” in The Collected Poetry, ed. Joanne M. Braxton (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 71.

12. On Robert Williams, see chap. 6, n. 19.

13. None of these debates with the long-time leader of the Nation of Islam exists in print. Though West does not ignore “the disagreeable views of Farrakhan,” he insists on the minister’s “deep love and service for his people. [. . .] He bravely stood up against white supremacy at a time in our history when to do so required courage and character” (West, Brother West, 186). “We agree on highlighting black suffering,” West wrote in a statement justifying his participation in Farrakhan’s Million Man March in 1995 (“Why I Am Marching in Washington,” Million Man March/Day of Absence: A Commemorative Anthology, ed. Haki R. Madhubuti and Maulana Karenga (Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press, 1996), 37.

14. In three seminal studies James Hal Cone developed a Black theology of liberation that addressed the questions of what it meant to be a Black Christian during the Black Power movement and what the example of the life of Jesus could contribute to the liberation of oppressed Black people suffering from the legacy of white supremacy: Black Theology and Black Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1969; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1997), followed by A Black Theology of Liberation (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1970; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990) and The Spirituals and the Blues (1972; Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991). See also Cornel West’s homage to Cone, “Black Theology and Human Identity,” in Black Faith and Public Talk: Critical Essays on James H. Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, ed. Dwight N. Hopkins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1999), 11–19.

15. “No matter how much respect, no matter how much recognition, whites show towards me, as far as I’m concerned, as long as it is not shown to every one of our people in this country, it doesn’t exist for me” (1964), quoted in West, Race Matters, 35.

16. See Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, 14.

17. For a vivid portrait of his father, see Huey P. Newton’s autobiography Revolutionary Suicide (1973), especially chap. 4, “Changing,” in which he states, for example: “When I say that my father was unusual, I mean that he had a dignity and pride seldom seen in southern Black men. Although many other Black men in the South had a similar strength, they never let it show around whites. To do so was to take your life in your hands. My father never kept his strength from anybody.” Huey P. Newton, with J. Herman Blake, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Penguin, 2009), 29.

18. See also chap. 3, n. 30. On the famous murder trial of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins, which ended in acquittal on all charges, see the detailed account by Donald Freed, Agony in New Haven: The Trial of Bobby Seale and Ericka Huggins and the Black Panther Party (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973). See also Seale’s presentation of the major years of the party’s history, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton (New York: Random House, 1970), as well as his autobiography, A Lonely Rage: The Autobiography of Bobby Seale (New York: Times Books, 1978).

19. It is significant that although Ericka Huggins was a high-ranking Black Panther Party leader, at first in the Los Angeles chapter and then as a founder and leader of the New Haven chapter of the BPP, she and so many other female revolutionary activists are far less known than the party’s male leaders, just as the party’s multifaceted community services have been downplayed. For a long time, scholarship focused almost exclusively on the militant male image of the party, as it had in part been encouraged by male members themselves and certainly enforced by the media. For a revisionist reading of the BPP history, see Ericka Huggins and Angela D. LeBlanc-Ernest, “Revolutionary Women, Revolutionary Education: The Black Panther Party’s Oakland Community School,” in Want to Start a Revolution?, 161–84, with further references to the neglected women’s contributions to the revolutionary work of the BPP. For a highly balanced and differentiated assessment of the crucial role of women in the BPP, and the difficulties both male and female members of the party had with gendered power relations, see “A Woman’s Party,” in Mumia Abu-Jamal, We Want Freedom: A Life in the Black Panther Party (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2004), 159–84; on Abu-Jamal, see below, n. 26. Interestingly, Abu-Jamal draws attention to Ella Baker’s “collectivist model of leadership”: “In essence, Baker was arguing against civil rights organizations mirroring the Black church model—a predominantly female membership with a predominantly male clergy—and for the inclusion of women in the leadership of these organizations. Baker was also questioning the hierarchical nature of these groups’ leadership” (ibid., 159). For an emphasis on BPP community services, see The Black Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, ed. David Hilliard (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008). In the foreword, West, who as a student participated in the BPP Free Breakfast for Schoolchildren Program, highlights the avant-garde character of the party’s political vision: “The Black Panther Party [. . .] was the highest form of deniggerization in niggerized America. The Black Panther Party was the greatest threat to American apartheid because it was indigenous in composition, interracial in strategies and tactics, and international in vision and analysis. It was indigenous in that it spoke to the needs and hopes of the local community. [. . .] It combined bread-and-butter issues of everyday people with deep democratic empowerment in the face of an oppressive status quo. It was interracial in that it remained open to strategic alliances and tactical coalitions with progressive brown, red, yellow, and white activists. And it was international in that it understood American apartheid in light of anti-imperial struggles around the world” (x).

20. For the great impact Malcolm X had on Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones), see, for example, “The Legacy of Malcolm X, and the Coming of the Black Nation,” in Baraka’s collection of “Social Essays” entitled Home (1966; New York: Akashi Classics, 2009), 266–79, as well as the new introduction to the reprint, in which he highlights the significance of Malcolm X for the development that Baraka defines as “the open dialectic of the Afro-American national movement, splitting one into two, because my generation—though clearly we had to love and respect Dr. King—rejected that call [‘If any blood be shed, let it be ours!’] with our whole-ass selves. Why? Because Malcolm X had begun to appear, and he said, ‘Be peaceful, be courteous, obey the law, respect everyone; but if someone puts his hand on you, send him to the cemetery’” (17).

21. In the last months of his life, Malcolm X frequently talked about the necessity of seeking international alliances and of holding the United States responsible for human rights violations. The most extensive passage can be found in one of his most famous speeches, which he entitled “The Ballot or the Bullet,” in which, on April 3, 1964, he told his Black audience: “They keep you wrapped up in civil rights. And you spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor. When you expand the civil-rights struggle to the level of human rights, you can then take the case of the black man in this country before the nations in the UN. You can take it before the General Assembly. You can take Uncle Sam before a world court.” Malcolm X Speaks, 34–35. According to the FBI files on Martin Luther King Jr., two months after this speech, in June 1964, there was a meeting between Malcolm X and representatives of several civil rights organizations; among others, King’s lawyer, advisor, and friend Clarence Jones attended and was authorized to speak for King (who at the time was in jail). As the FBI report maintains, “Jones said that in ‘reflecting on today’s conference the most important thing discussed was Malcolm X’s idea that we internationalize the question of civil rights and bring it before the United Nations.’ [. . .] Jones stated that ‘we should present the plight of the Negro to the United Nations General Assembly in September of this year.’” Michael Friedly and David Gallen, Martin Luther King, Jr.: The FBI File (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1993), 242.

22. James H. Cone, Martin & Malcolm & America: A Dream or a Nightmare? (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991; 20th anniversary ed., 2012). See Cone’s recapitulatory statement: “We should never pit them against each other. Anyone, therefore, who claims to be for one and not the other does not understand their significance for the black community, for America, or for the world. We need both of them and we need them together. Malcolm keeps Martin from being turned into a harmless American hero. Martin keeps Malcolm from being an ostracized black hero” (ibid., 316).

23. “You can’t operate a capitalistic system unless you are vulturistic; you have to have someone else’s blood to suck to be a capitalist.” Speech at the Audubon Ballroom, December 20, 1964, quoted in Malcolm X Speaks, 121. For a more elaborate use of the metaphor of the vulture, see the following statement by Malcolm X: “It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it’s more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody’s blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, then capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It’s only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely.” “The Young Socialist Interview,” January 18, 1965, By Any Means Necessary, 165–66.

24. In his speeches, Carmichael would highlight the importance of preserving the spirit of the radical Black tradition: “We must listen to Malcolm very closely, because we have to understand our heroes. We cannot let them be used by other people, we cannot let them be interpreted by other people to say other things. We must know what our heroes were saying to us—our heroes, not the heroes of the white left or what have you.” Stokely Speaks, 178; for references to Douglass, Du Bois, and contemporary activists, see also ibid., 62–63, 74–75.

25. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (LRBW) was a radical organization formed in the aftermath of the Detroit riots in 1969 by auto industry workers who were frustrated with inhumane working conditions and dissatisfied with the neglect of Black workers’ interests in the United Auto Workers union. Kenneth Cockrel and General Gordon Baker Jr. were members of the LRBW’s executive committee, and Darryl Mitchell was one of the founding members. For a detailed history, see James A. Geschwender, Class, Race, and Worker Insurgency: The League of Revolutionary Black Workers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); it is interesting to note that the classic Detroit, I Do Mind Dying: A Study in Urban Revolution, by Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975) was reissued with a foreword by Manning Marable in 2012 by Haymarket Books.

26. Mumia Abu-Jamal, former member of the Black Panther Party and prolific radio journalist and writer, was sentenced to death for allegedly killing a police officer in 1982; the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 2012. For the defense’s view of the trial, see Abu-Jamal’s attorney Leonard I. Weinglass’s “The Trial of Mumia Abu-Jamal,” in Abu-Jamal’s book of autobiographical reflections, Live From Death Row, introduction by John Edgar Wideman (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 195–215. In that book’s “Musings on Malcolm” (133–36), Abu-Jamal affirms the significance of Malcolm X for the Black Panthers and stresses the continuity of Malcolm X’s fight against systemic racism: “Malcolm, and the man who returned from Mecca, Hajii Malik Shabazz, both were scourges of American racism. [. . .] He stood for—and died for—human rights of self-defense and a people’s self-determination, not for ‘civil rights,’ which, as the Supreme Court has indeed shown, changes from day to day, case to case, administration to administration” (136). See also Mumia Abu-Jamal, Death Blossoms: Reflections from a Prisoner of Conscience, foreword by Cornel West (Farmington, PA: Plough Publishing House, 1997). West’s foreword ends with the urgent question that has motivated the making of Black Prophetic Fire: “Will we ever listen to and learn from our bloodstained prophets?” (xii). The Black prophetic fire of Pam Africa and Ramona Africa of the MOVE organization has helped keep the cause of Mumia Abu-Jamal alive—along with the efforts of many others. In his more recent conversations with Marc Lamont Hill, Abu-Jamal also refers to some other great figures of the Black radical tradition; for example, in an extended exchange on Du Bois, he reveals that “my favorite Du Bois book isn’t The Souls of Black Folk, it’s Darkwater, which is far rougher and harder and angrier.” Mumia Abu-Jamal and Marc Lamont Hill, The Classroom and The Cell: Conversations on Black Life in America (Chicago: Third World Press, 2012), 70. See also the excellent documentary film by Stephen Vittoria, Long-Distance Revolutionary: A Journey with Mumia Abu-Jamal (Street Legal Cinema, 2013), which clearly situates Abu-Jamal in the Black prophetic tradition, both by references to predecessors such as Douglass and Malcolm X and by interviews with current intellectuals and activists such as Angela Davis, Alice Walker, and Cornel West.

27. Assata Shakur has been a radical activist since her student days in the mid-sixties; she was a leading member of the Harlem branch of the Black Panther Party but left the BPP for its members’ want of an awareness of the Black historical tradition. As she claims in her autobiography, the “basic problem stemmed from the fact that the BPP had no systematic approach to political education. They were reading the Red Book [by Mao Tse Tung] but didn’t know who Harriet Tubman, Marcus Garvey, and Nat Turner were.” Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography (1987; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 221. As to her own steps in self-education, Shakur emphasizes the importance of learning about “Black resistance”: “You couldn’t catch me without a book in my hand after that [after “i found out about Nat Turner”]. I read everything from [. . .] Sonia Sanchez to Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee). I saw plays by Black playwrights like Amiri Baraka and Ed Bullins. [. . .] A whole new world opened up to me” (175). She joined the more radical BPP split-off, the underground Black Liberation Army (BLA). In the so-called New Jersey Turnpike shootout trial, she was found guilty of the murder of a state trooper; she escaped prison in 1979 and eventually fled to Cuba, where she has been granted political asylum since 1984. Classified as a “domestic terrorist” since 2005, the FBI placed her on the Most Wanted Terrorists list in May 2013.

28. As stated in a letter by J. Edgar Hoover in March 1968, the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program (COINTELPRO) defined the following five very distinct long-range goals: to prevent “the coalition of militant black nationalist groups,” to prevent violence on the part of these groups, to prevent them from gaining respectability, and to prevent their growth. In the context of the Black prophetic tradition, the second of these five goals is particularly interesting: “Prevent the rise of a ‘messiah’ who could unify, and electrify, the militant black nationalist movement. Malcolm X might have been such a ‘messiah’; he is the martyr of the movement today. Martin Luther King, Stokely Carmichael, and Elijah Muhammed [sic] all aspire to this position. Elijah Muhammed is less of a threat because of his age. King could be a very real contender for this position should he abandon his supposed ‘obedience’ to ‘white, liberal doctrines’ (nonviolence) and embrace black nationalism. Carmichael has the necessary charisma to be a real threat in this way.” This letter and other excerpts from the FBI’s BPP files are reprinted in a booklet that speaks to the problem raised by West: Dhoruba Bin Wahad, Mumia Abu-Jamal, and Assata Shakur, Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the U.S. War Against Black Revolutionaries (New York: Semiotext/e, 1993), 245.

29. Roger Wareham, human rights attorney and long-time political activist, is a member of the New York–based December 12 movement, a nongovernmental organization committed to Malcolm X’s legacy of bringing the United States before a world court for its continued violations of Black peoples’ human rights.

30. Elombe Brath, graphic artist and long-time activist in the Pan-African movement, was one of the founders of the African Jazz-Arts Society and Studios (AJASS), a collective of Black artists active in the mid-1950s and considered a forerunner of the famous Black Arts Movement (BAM); it was launched by Amiri Baraka after the assassination of Malcolm X. In 1967, H. Rap Brown followed Stokely Carmichael as SNCC chair. While in Attica Prison (1971–1976), Brown converted to orthodox Islam, changed his name to Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, and became a devout Imam. After a shooting in 2000, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole. His memoir about growing up Black in America abounds with psychosociological reflections—reminiscent of Fanon’s (see chap. 1, n. 23) analysis of the pathology of oppression—such as the following: “When a race of people is oppressed within a system that fosters the idea of competitive individualism, the political polarization around individual interests prevents group interests.” H. Rap Brown, Die Nigger Die! A Political Autobiography, foreword by Ekwueme Michael Thelwell (1969; Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2002), 16.

31. In the preface to his collection of poems Don’t Cry, Scream (1969), Haki R. Madhubuti (Don L. Lee) defined his poetics as follows: “Blackpoetry is like a razor; it’s sharp & will cut deep, not out to wound but to kill the inactive blackmind.” In Liberation Narratives: New and Collected Poems 1966–2009 (Chicago: Third World Press, 2009), 61. His poetry bears witness to his deep commitment to the Black prophetic tradition. In the collection Killing Memory, Seeking Ancestors (1987), Madhubuti pays homage to Malcolm X by asking: “if you lived among the committed / this day how would you lead us?” And he gives the answer: “it was not that you were pure. / the integrity of your vision and pain, / the quality of your heart and decision / confirmed your caring for local people, and your / refusal to assassinate progressive thought / has carved your imprint on the serious.” “Possibilities: Remembering Malcolm X,” in Liberation Narratives, 278.

32. Sonia Sanchez has repeatedly expressed great admiration for and deep gratitude to Malcolm X, most famously in her poem of mourning “Malcolm,” from the collection Home Coming (Detroit: Broadside Press, 1969), 15–16, and in her play Malcolm Man/Don’t Live Here No Mo’ (1972). In her prose poem “Homegirls on St. Nicholas,” Sanchez vividly describes how her life changed radically when she first heard Malcolm X speak, even so “I didn’t want to hear him. His words made my head hurt. [. . .] Why did he bring his hand-grenade words into my space?” But when Malcolm X “demanded, ‘Do you know who you are? Who do you really think you are? Have you looked in a mirror recently brother and sister and seen your Blackness for what it is?’ [. . .] something began to stir inside me. Something that I had misplaced a long time ago in the classrooms of America. On that cold wet afternoon, I became warm again.” Wounded in the House of a Friend (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 52–53. See also her remarks on Malcolm X in a collection of interviews, especially in the conversation with David Reich (1999), where she states that Malcolm X “became our articulator”: “Malcolm articulated all that we thought. For many of us, Baraka and the rest, he gave us his voice.” Conversations with Sonia Sanchez, ed. Joyce A. Joyce (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 90, 89.

33. “I for one believe that if you give people a thorough understanding of what it is that confronts them and the basic causes that produce it, they’ll create their own program. And when the people create a program, you get action.” Speech at a meeting of the Organization of Afro-American Unity on the evening of December 20, 1964, Malcolm X Speaks, 118–19. As in his famous “Message to the Grass Roots,” delivered in November 1963, Malcolm X sets off the people against the leaders by emphasizing the latter’s propensity to control rather than ignite the revolutionary fire. Earlier that day, Malcolm X had appeared with grassroots activist Fannie Lou Hamer at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem and had invited her to attend the evening meeting at the Audubon Ballroom; see Malcolm X Speaks, 114–15.

34. For West’s statements on rising secularism here and below, see statistics on religiously unaffiliated Americans released by the Pew Research Religion and Public Life Project, Nones on the Rise: One in Five Adults Have No Religious Affiliation (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life, October 9, 2012), http://www.pewforum.org/2012/10/09/nones-on-the-rise-religion/.

35. Ibid.

36. Robert Green Ingersoll was one of the most popular freethinkers of the late nineteenth century and considered one of the best lecturers, if not the best orator, of his time. Though he was best known for his controversial talks on agnosticism (or atheism: in contrast to common understanding, according to which an agnostic claims not to know whether God exists, as opposed to an atheist who denies God’s existence, Ingersoll did not think it made sense to distinguish between the two), he delivered speeches on a broad range of topics, and in the name of humanism advocated racial equality, women’s rights, and civil liberties. In a speech in honor of Walt Whitman, “Liberty in Literature,” given in the presence of the poet (two years before he delivered a much-praised eulogy at Whitman’s funeral), Ingersoll, referring to Shelley, Lord Byron, and Robert Burns, praises the prophetic quality of great poets: “The great poets have been on the side of the oppressed—of the downtrodden. They have suffered with the imprisoned and the enslaved. [. . .] The great poets [. . .] have uttered in all ages the human cry. Unbought by gold, unawed by power, they have lifted high the torch that illuminates the world.” Walt Whitman. An Address. Delivered in Philadelphia, Oct 21, 1890 (New York: Truth Seeker Co., 1890). It does not come as a surprise that Frederick Douglass and Ottilie Assing (see chap. 1, n. 17) were on friendly terms with Ingersoll; see Diedrich, Love Across the Color Lines, 358. In a meeting in Washington, DC, to protest the 1883 Supreme Court decision that found sections 1 and 2 of the 1875 Civil Rights Act unconstitutional, Ingersoll—introduced by Douglass—condemned the Court’s decision and painted its effects in gruesome colors: “The masked wretches who, in the darkness of night, drag the poor negro from his cabin, and lacerate with whip and thong his quivering flesh, will, with bloody hands, applaud the Supreme Court.” Ingersoll, “Address on the Civil Rights Act,” The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, vol. XI, Miscellany (New York: C. P. Farrell, 1900), 2. See also Susan Jacoby’s The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013), 111, and in that book, her “Letter to the ‘New’ Atheists,” who, according to Jacoby, have largely ignored Ingersoll (192–202).

37. Clarence Seward Darrow was a renowned lawyer. Among his famous cases was his defense of John T. Scopes, put to trial for teaching evolution in a classroom in Dayton, Tennessee. In his autobiography, Darrow devotes three chapters to this trial, which he had taken on “solely to induce the public to stop, look, and listen, lest our public schools should be imperilled with a fanaticism founded on ignorance.” The Story of My Life, with a new introduction by Alan M. Dershowitz (1932; New York: Da Capo Press, 1996), 276. See also the chapter “Questions without Answers,” in which Darrow discusses the belief in God (385–95). Together with Wallace Rice, Darrow compiled Infidels and Heretics: An Agnostic’s Anthology (1928; New York: Gordon Press, 1975). The current revival of atheism mentioned by West is reflected, for example, in the following recent publications: In the Clutches of the Law: Clarence Darrow’s Letters, ed. and with an introduction by Randall Tietjen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), and Attorney for the Damned: Clarence Darrow in the Courtroom, ed. and with notes by Arthur Weinberg; foreword by Justice William O. Douglas (1957; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

38. See Baldwin’s address to the World Council of Churches, July 7, 1968, “White Racism or World Community,” in Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 749–56. Referring to his credentials as a speaker, Baldwin says: “I never expected to be standing in such a place, because I left the pulpit twenty-seven years ago. [. . .] And I want to make it clear to you that though I may have to say some rather difficult things here this afternoon, I want to make it understood that in the heart of the absolutely necessary accusation there is contained a plea. The plea was articulated by Jesus Christ himself, who said, ‘Insofar as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me’” (749). In his autobiographical essay “Down at the Cross,” originally published in the collection The Fire Next Time (1963), Baldwin rejects Christianity’s claim of the monopoly on morals: “It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being [. . .] must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church” (Baldwin, Collected Essays, 314). Yet he also admits that the church service held great attractions for him: “The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like this music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together crying holy unto the Lord” (306). In a 1965 interview, Baldwin explicates, “I’m not a believer in any sense which would make any sense to any church, and any church would obviously throw me out. I believe—what do I believe? [. . .] I believe in love. [. . .] [By love] I don’t mean anything passive. I mean something active, something more like a fire, like the wind, something which can change you. I mean energy. I mean a passionate belief, a passionate knowledge of what a human being can do, and become, what a human being can do to change the world in which he finds himself.” James Mossman, “Race, Hate, Sex, and Colour: A Conversation with James Baldwin and Colin MacInnes” (1965), in Conversations with James Baldwin, ed. Fred L. Standley and Louis H. Pratt (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), 48. It is interesting to note that Sonia Sanchez ends her homage to James Baldwin, written on the occasion of his passing away in 1987, by thanking him “for his legacy of fire. A fine rain of words when we had no tongues. He set fire to our eyes. Made a single look, gesture endure. Made a people meaningful and moral. Responsible finally for all our sweet and terrible lives” (“A Remembrance,” Wounded, 34).

39. See Malcolm X’s speech at the Williams Institutional CME Church in Harlem, December 20, 1964: “I’m not for anybody who tells black people to be nonviolent while nobody is telling white people to be nonviolent. [. . .] Now if you are with us, all I say is, make the same kind of contribution with us in our struggle for freedom that all white people have always made when they were struggling for their own freedom. You were struggling for your freedom in the Revolutionary War. Your own Patrick Henry said ‘liberty or death,’ and George Washington got the cannons out, and all the rest of them that you taught me to worship as my heroes, they were fighters, they were warriors” (Malcolm X Speaks, 112–13).

40. See Du Bois, “The Propaganda of History,” in Black Reconstruction, 594.

41. Excerpts from Malcolm X’s contribution to the Oxford Union Society debate December 3, 1964, are available in By Any Means Necessary, 176–77, 182. The question debated was “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue.” Almost fifty years later, on November 22, 2012, Cornel West took part in the Oxford Union Society debate on this motion: “This House would occupy Wall Street.” Both speeches can be accessed on YouTube.

42. For an in-depth exploration of Black Nationalism, see Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Jews and Blacks: A Dialogue on Race, Religion, and Culture in America (New York: Penguin, 1996), 91–114; reprinted as “On Black Nationalism,” in West, The Cornel West Reader, 521–29.

43. Marable, Malcolm X. For an account of the immense difficulties Marable faced in collecting factual evidence on Malcolm X, see his article “Rediscovering Malcolm’s Life: A Historian’s Adventure in Living History,” Souls 7, no. 1 (2005): 20–35; reprinted in The Portable Malcolm X Reader, ed. Manning Marable and Garrett Felber (New York: Penguin, 2013), 573–600.

44. See the first collection of essays published in reaction to Marable’s biography, By Any Means Necessary: Malcolm X: Real, Not Reinvented; Critical Conversations on Manning Marable’s Biography of Malcolm X, ed. Herb Boyd, Ron Daniels, Maulana Karenga, and Haki R. Madhubuti (Chicago: Third World Press, 2012), which offers a wide range of critical opinions. It opens with Sonia Sanchez’s poem “Malcolm” (see above, n. 32) and contains essays by Mumia Abu-Jamal, Amiri Baraka, and many others who, above all, seek to affirm the radical Black tradition. See also A Lie of Reinvention: Correcting Manning Marable’s Malcolm X, ed. Jared A. Ball and Todd Steven Burroughs (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2012), which contains contributions by, among others, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Amiri Baraka, and Herb Boyd. Though most statements criticize Marable’s extensive use of conjecture in presenting his arguments, the most severe critique, voiced repeatedly against Marable’s portrayal, is that the historian deprived Malcolm X of the political radicalism of his message and turned him into a “mainstream-leaning, liberal Democrat” (6).

45. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978). In the context of the Black prophetic tradition, it is interesting to note that Haywood praises Du Bois as a pioneer of historical revisionism with his “tour de force, Black Reconstruction, and the epilogue, ‘Propaganda of History,’ which contained a bitter indictment of the white historical establishment” (95).

46. West refers to the 1992 Hollywood film Malcolm X, directed and cowritten by Spike Lee, with Denzel Washington in the title role. Given the fierce political struggle over Malcolm X’s legacy, it is not surprising to learn that, though the screenplay was largely based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the film was highly controversial, both during the long history of planning and production, and after its release.

47. On the iconization and commodification of Malcolm X, see Angela Davis’s “Meditations on the Legacy of Malcolm X,” in Malcolm X in Our Own Image, ed. Joe Wood (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992), 40–41.

48. For the criticism by Baraka and others, see, for example, Evelyn Nieves, “Malcolm X: Firestorm Over a Film Script,” movie section of the New York Times, August 9, 1991. The new book by activist-scholar Maulana Karenga on Malcolm X as a moral philosopher promises to be a major contribution to our understanding of Malcolm. West wrote the introduction to this text.

49. In 1966, Baldwin accepted the offer by Columbia Pictures to write a screenplay based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X, although he had “grave doubts and fears about Hollywood. [. . .] The idea of Hollywood doing a truthful job on Malcolm could not but seem preposterous. And yet—I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life thinking: It could have been done if you hadn’t been chicken. I felt that Malcolm would never have forgiven me for that.” Baldwin, “To Be Baptized,” from the essay collection No Name in the Street (New York: Library of America, 1998), 413. In an interview, Baldwin commented on his disagreements with Hollywood as follows: “To put it brutally, if I had agreed with Hollywood, I would have been allowing myself to create an image of Malcolm that would have satisfied them and infuriated you, broken your hearts. At one point I saw a memo that said, among other things, that the author had to avoid giving any political implications to Malcolm’s trip to Mecca. Now, how can you write about Malcolm X without writing about his trip to Mecca and its political implications? It was not surprising. They were doing the Che Guevara movie while I was out there. It had nothing to do with Latin America, the United Fruit Company, Che Guevara, Cuba . . . nothing to do with anything. It was hopeless crap. Hollywood’s fantasy is designed to prove to you that this poor, doomed nitwit deserves his fate.” Interview with Jewell Handy Grasham (1976), in Standley and Pratt, Conversations with James Baldwin, 167. See also Baldwin’s screenplay One Day, When I Was Lost: A Scenario, based on The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

50. The Black Agenda Report: News, Commentary & Analysis from the Black Left is a radio and TV program launched in 2006 by long-time radio journalist Glen Ford, life-long activist and community organizer Bruce Dixon, and legendary Harlem activist Nellie Bailey, as well as writer and peace activist Margaret Kimberley and political scientist and activist Leutisha Stills.

51. Carl Dix, self-proclaimed “veteran revolutionary fighter from the ’60s,” is cofounder of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA (RCP), established in 1975, and has been a committed activist, for example, on behalf of Mumia Abu-Jamal and as a leading voice in the campaign against New York Police Department’s “stop and frisk” practice; see his article “Why I Am Getting Arrested Today” (Huffington Post, October 21, 2011), in which he explains the rationale behind the act of civil disobedience, during which he was joined by thirty other activists, including Cornel West. Dix and West have conducted several public dialogues entitled “In the Age of Obama: What Future for Our Youth?” as well as a series of “Mass Incarceration Dialogues.” Bob Avakian has been RCP chair since its founding; for his unwavering commitment to radical political activism, see From Ike to Mao and Beyond: My Journey from Mainstream America to Revolutionary Communist; a Memoir (Chicago: Insight Press, 2005). Avakian wrote his life story on the suggestion of Cornel West; see preface (ix).

52. Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, best-selling author, and activist, was a foreign correspondent for the New York Times (1990–2005) and is now a regular columnist for Truthdig. In November 2011, Hedges, West, and others held a mock trial of Goldman Sachs in Zuccotti Park, New York. Glenn Greenwald practiced law as a litigation attorney specializing in constitutional law and civil rights before he became an award-winning journalist and best-selling author; he gained worldwide fame in June 2013 due to his involvement in publishing whistleblower Edward Snowden’s documents on US surveillance practices in the Guardian. (For Margaret Kimberley, see above, n. 50.) Larry Hamm—a distinguished Princeton University graduate—is the legendary founder and leader of the revolutionary People’s Organization for Progress.

53. The best anthology on the Black prophetic tradition remains African American Religious Thought, edited by Cornel West and Eddie Glaude Jr. (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003).

Chapter Six: Prophetic Fire

1. See Guy Gugliotta, “New Estimate Raises Civil War Death Toll,” New York Times, April 2, 2012. Gugliotta’s report is based on a study by J. David Hacker, a demographic historian from Binghamton University in New York whose recalculation increased the death toll by more than 20 percent.

2. The assassination of Tsar Alexander II, in 1881, which, according to contemporary rumors, was committed by Jews, set off a wave of pogroms that lasted until 1884; this in turn led to considerable Jewish emigration to the United States.

3. In her autobiography, Wells claims that the lynching in Memphis “changed the whole course of my life.” Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells, ed. Alfreda M. Duster (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 47 (hereafter cited as Crusade). The three men—Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and Will (Henry) Stewart, whom Wells calls both “Henry” and “Lee”; see Crusade, 47, 64—co-owned and ran a cooperative grocery store, the People’s Grocery, located opposite a white grocery store that had enjoyed a monopoly in the densely populated suburb of Memphis.

4. Like Wells, T. Thomas Fortune was a pioneering journalist and newspaper editor as well as a staunch activist. Fortune founded the Afro-American League in 1890, a more militant precursor of the NAACP, which faltered for lack of funding. For several years, Wells and Fortune supported each other, but their paths diverged in 1898, when Fortune, due to several personal and financial blows, grew more and more desperate and turned to Booker T. Washington for help. Washington then subsidized the New York Age and offered assistance; see Paula J. Giddings, Ida: A Sword Among Lions; Ida B. Wells and the Campaign Against Lynching (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), 191.

5. It was the Memphis lynching that opened Wells’s eyes: “Like many another person who had read of lynching in the South, I had accepted the idea meant to be conveyed—that although lynching was irregular and contrary to law and order, unreasoning anger over the terrible crime of rape led to the lynching; that perhaps the brute deserved death anyhow and the mob was justified in taking his life” (Crusade, 64). But the three men “had committed no crime against white women. This was what opened my eyes to what lynching really was. An excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized and ‘keep the nigger down’” (ibid.).

6. But as her biographer, Paula Giddings, points out, even radically minded Blacks like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and her husband, Ferdinand Barnett, who were highly critical of the imperialist politics of the United States, felt obliged to support Black troops: “Even those like Ida and Ferdinand, who loathed the imperialist impulses that the soldiers carried out in the rebellious Philippines and elsewhere, took pride in their tenacity and courage and supported them with fund-raising parties” (Giddings, Ida, 467). Yet, “Ida and Ferdinand helped organize a mass meeting at Chicago’s Bethel Church to demand freedom for the Cubans and to deplore the killing of the island’s Afro-Cuban military hero, Antonio Maceo y Grajales” (378).

7. The passage referred to builds up toward the experience of violence: “My knowledge of the race problem became more definite. I saw discrimination in ways of which I had never dreamed; the separation of passengers on the railways of the South was just beginning; the separation in living quarters throughout the cities and towns was manifest; the public disdain and even insult in race contact on the street continually took my breath; I came in contact for the first time with a sort of violence that I had never realized in New England; I remember going down and looking wide-eyed at the door of a public building, filled with buck-shot, where the editor of the leading paper had been publicly murdered the day before” (Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn, 15). And, in fact, Du Bois recalled that “lynching was a continuing and recurrent horror during my college days,” but it was, indeed, more than a decade later when, in the late 1890s, while he was working as a social scientist at Atlanta University, that the case of Sam Hose affected him deeply (34). It is interesting to note that Wells-Barnett published a pamphlet on the Hose case: Lynch Law in Georgia (1899).

8. As Wells herself puts it in her diary: “I think of my tempestuous, rebellious, hard headed wilfulness, the trouble I gave, the disposition to question his [W. W. Hooper, president of Rust College (formerly Shaw University)] authority.” The Memphis Diary of Ida B. Wells, ed. Miriam DeCosta-Willis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 78.

9. “As I witnessed the triumph of the graduates and thought of my lost opportunity a great sob arose in my throat and I yearned with unutterable longing for the ‘might have been’” (ibid., 78). Wells had been expelled from Rust College for her insubordination, and once she had to earn a living as a teacher, she was not able to continue her formal education.

10. As Patricia A. Schechter puts it in her highly instructive article “‘All the Intensity of My Nature’: Ida B. Wells, Anger and Politics,” Radical History Review 70 (1998): 48–77: “Her ‘anomalous’ craving for social autonomy or platonic male friends suggests the limited range of social identities available to single middle-class black women. One was either a wife, a former wife, or a wife-to-be—all else was strange or irregular” (52–53).

11. Giddings, Ida, 69; see also Wells, Crusade, 31. As journalist Lucy Wilmot Smith notes, Wells, who “has been called the Princess of the Press [. . .] believes there is no agency so potent as the press in reaching and elevating a people” (quoted in Crusade, 33). The praise she received by contemporary journalists highlights the fearlessness of her speech. For example, T. Thomas Fortune writes: “She has plenty of nerve and is as sharp as a steel trap” (ibid.).

12. American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839) was compiled by Theodore Dwight Weld, one of the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society; the sisters Sarah Grimké and Angelina Grimké Weld, staunch Abolitionists and early advocates for women’s rights, contributed to the volume by bearing witness to the cruelties of slavery they had experienced at their father’s plantation in South Carolina.

13. On William Cobbett, see chap. 1, n. 28.

14. On an extended visit to the United States between 1834 and 1836, Harriet Martineau became engaged in the Abolitionists’ fight against slavery, closely observed American society (Society in America, 1837), and reflected upon the methods of social investigations (How to Observe Morals and Manners, 1838). The two books on America established her as a pioneer in sociology avant la lettre.

15. Wells, Crusade, 65–66.

16. See Giddings, Ida, 214. “They had destroyed my paper, in which every dollar I had in the world was invested. They had made me an exile and threatened my life for hinting at the truth. I felt that I owed it to myself and my race to tell the whole truth” (Wells, Crusade, 62–63).

17. The Socialist journalist and novelist Upton Sinclair investigated the working conditions in the Chicago meatpacking industry and published his findings at first as a serialized novel in 1905 in the Socialist paper the Appeal to Reason. In a review of the 1906 Doubleday edition, Jack London famously called The Jungle “the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of wage slavery”; repr. in Jack London: American Rebel; a Collection of His Social Writings Together with an Extensive Study of the Man and His Times, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel, 1947), 524.

18. “The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.” Ida B. Wells, Southern Horrors: Lynch Law in All Its Phases (New York: New York Age Print, 1892), 70.

19. Robert F. Williams recounts the story of how, in 1957, “a Negro community in the South [in Monroe, North Carolina] took up guns in self-defense against racist violence—and used them” in his book Negroes With Guns (New York: Marzani and Munsell, 1962), 39, which he wrote in exile in Cuba, from where he broadcast Radio Free Dixie. In the prologue, Williams invokes “an accepted right of Americans, as the history of our Western states prove, that where the law is unable, or unwilling, to enforce order, the citizens can, and must, act in self-defense against lawless violence,” and claims that “this right holds for black Americans as well as whites.” His example inspired Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party; see Timothy B. Tyson, Radio Free Dixie: Robert F. Williams and the Roots of Black Power (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).

20. “I had bought a pistol the first thing after Tom Moss was lynched, because I expected some cowardly retaliation from the lynchers. I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or a rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked” (Wells, Crusade, 62).

21. Like Wells-Barnett, William Monroe Trotter, newspaper editor of the radical Boston Guardian, lifelong activist, and cofounder of the Niagara Movement, was known for his fearlessness and militancy. He and Wells-Barnett were often marginalized by more moderate activists. For example, they belonged to the militant faction of the group that prepared the founding of the NAACP, and Du Bois did not think them fit to appear on the list of the Founding Forty.

22. When, in 1909, Wells-Barnett had successfully fought against the reinstatement of a sheriff who had been involved in a lynching in Cairo, Illinois, the Springfield Forum praised her as “a lady in whom we are justly proud” and who “towers high above all of her male contemporaries and has more of the aggressive qualities than the average man” (December 11, 1909, quoted in Giddings, Ida, 487). Yet the common reaction to female aggression or anger expressed in public was repression or defamation. See Schechter, “‘All the Intensity of My Nature,’” which—based on extensive research—highlights the pressure exerted on (Black) female radical activists like Wells, accomplished by an instrumentalization of etiquette that asked women to suppress feelings of rage.

23. In fact, she even published an essay in 1885 on the ideal of “true womanhood,” “Woman’s Mission,” in the New York Freeman, edited by T. Thomas Fortune. As Giddings notes in Ida, her “well-received essay had made her an authority on the subject,” “the nineteenth-century idea of the ideal woman who possessed the Victorian-era virtues of modesty, piety, purity, submission, and domesticity—virtues denied by the conditions that faced black women during slavery and deemed essential to not only their uplift but that of their families, and the community” (12, 86–87).

24. She writes in her diary: “I felt so disappointed for my people generally. I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us?” Entry for April 11, 1887, in the unpublished diary of Ida B. Wells, quoted by her daughter Alfreda M. Duster in the introduction to Crusade, xvii.

25. Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880–1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture During the Twentieth Century (Charlotte: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

26. See Trudier Harris in her introduction to Wells-Barnett’s Selected Works: “While she was certainly celebrated by blacks, some of them nevertheless painted her as egotistical or as a crazy woman, a loner who did not represent the sentiments of the majority of forward thinking black intellectuals.” Selected Works of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, compiled with an introduction by Trudier Harris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 11.

27. In her autobiography, Crusade for Justice, Wells expresses her critique by juxtaposing her own “radical” political goals with Washington’s policy, a technique that renders the latter downright absurd: “Our policy was to denounce the wrongs and injustices which were heaped upon our people, and to use whatever influence we had to help right them. Especially strong was our condemnation of lynch law and those who practiced it. Mr. Washington’s theory had been that we ought not to spend our time agitating for our rights; that we had better give attention to trying to be first-class people in a jim crow car than insisting that the jim crow car should be abolished; that we should spend more time practicing industrial pursuits and getting education to fit us for this work than in going to college and striving for college education. And of course, fighting for political rights had no place whatsoever in his plans” (265). After the publication of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, in 1903, when his critique of Washington was ardently debated among whites and Blacks, the “Barnetts stood almost alone in approving them [Du Bois’s views] and proceeded to show why. We saw, as perhaps never before, that Mr. Washington’s views on industrial education had become an obsession with the white people of this country. We thought it was up to us to show them the sophistry of the reasoning that any one system of education could fit the needs of an entire race; that to sneer at and discourage higher education would mean to rob the race of leaders which it so badly needed; and that all the industrial education in the world could not take the place of manhood” (281).

28. Not only did Wells-Barnett publicly oppose Washington’s lenient attitude toward lynching, but she would also repeatedly criticize him sharply for certain political moves, for example, when in 1900 he launched a new organization, the National Negro Business League, in order to counterbalance the Afro-American Council and its Anti-Lynching Bureau headed by Wells-Barnett (see Giddings, Ida, 423–26). In reaction to Wells-Barnett’s attack in an editorial, Washington’s mouthpiece, secretary Emmett J. Scott, wrote: “Miss Wells is fast making herself so ridiculous that everybody is getting tired of her” (426).

29. Wells-Barnett’s great rival, Mary Church Terrell, a highly educated teacher, journalist, and lifelong activist, also advanced the Black women’s club movement. In fact, according to Angela Davis, “Mary Church Terrell was the driving force that molded the Black women’s club movement into a powerful political group.” Davis, “Black Women and the Club Movement,” in Angela Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), 135. Though Davis praises Wells and Terrell as “unquestionably the two outstanding Black women of their era,” she also states that regrettably their “personal feud, which spanned several decades, was a tragic thread within the history of the Black women’s club movement” (136).

30. Mary White Ovington, born to white progressive Unitarians who were active in the struggle against slavery and for women’s rights, was one of the cofounders of the NAACP and served this organization in various functions for thirty-eight years. It was during the founding phase of the NAACP that the two women collided, when Du Bois had taken Wells off the list of the so-called Founding Forty, and Wells felt that Ovington approved of his decision (see Wells, Crusade, 325). Wells settled her account with Ovington by making her responsible for the fact that the NAACP “has fallen short of the expectations of its founders,” because it “has kept Miss Mary White Ovington as chairman of the executive committee. [. . .] She has basked in the sunlight of the adoration of the few college-bred Negroes who have surrounded her, but has made little effort to know the soul of the black woman; and to that extent she has fallen far short of helping a race which has suffered as no white woman has ever been called upon to suffer or to understand” (327–28).

31. Wells devotes a whole chapter (“Chapter VIII: Miss Willard’s Attitude”) of A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynchings in the United States, 1892–1893–1894 (Chicago: privately published, 1895), 138–48, to this battle with the national president of Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, Frances E. Willard; see also “A Regrettable Interview,” Wells, Crusade, 201–12. Willard’s voice was a potent one; after all, she headed the era’s largest and most powerful organization of white women. The more harmful for the Black community was her claim that Black men were excessively indulging in both alcohol and sex—and here she “quotes” an anonymous voice from the South—and consequently became an omnipresent threat to Southern women: “The colored race multiplies like the locusts of Egypt. The grog-shop is its center of power. ‘The safety of woman, of childhood, of the home is menaced at a thousand localities at this moment, so that the men dare not go beyond the sight of their own roof-tree’” (Wells, Red Record, 142).

32. According to Wells-Barnett, teaching Sunday school turned her life in Chicago into “one of the most delightful periods. I had a class of young men ranging from eighteen to thirty years of age. [. . .] Every Sunday we discussed the Bible lessons in a plain common-sense way and tried to make application of their truths to our daily lives. I taught this class for ten years” (Crusade, 298–99).

33. Jane Addams’s famous Chicago settlement project of Hull House was a great model to Wells-Barnett; in fact, she regarded Addams as “the greatest woman in the United States” (Crusade, 259) and must have been proud to be called the “Jane Addams among Negroes” by a Danish visitor to the United States (Giddings, Ida, 538). However, Wells-Barnett’s admiration for the outstanding social reformer did not prevent her from sharply criticizing Addams for failing to question the common charge of rape in an article that condemned lynching on legal grounds. See Jane Addams, “Respect for Law,” New York Independent, January 3, 1901, and Wells-Barnett’s response, “Lynching and the Excuse for It,” Independent, May 1901. Both articles are reprinted in Bettina Aptheker’s unearthing of this dispute, Lynching and Rape: An Exchange of View, by Addams and Wells, occasional papers, no. 25 (New York: American Institute for Marxist Studies, 1977). See also Maurice Hamington, “Public Pragmatism: Jane Addams and Ida B. Wells on Lynching,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 19, no. 2 (2005): 167–74, which presents this debate as “a wonderful example of public pragmatist philosophy” between the two activists who, despite Wells’s critique, would continue to collaborate “on behalf of civil justice despite their public disagreement” (173).

34. See hooks and West, Breaking Bread.

35. An early experience of a lack of support in the Black community was when, in 1889, she wrote an article in the Memphis Free Speech and Headlight about the poor conditions in Black schools while she was still working as a teacher. As a result of her criticism, the school board did not reelect her. “I had taken a chance in the interest of the children of our race and had lost out. The worst part of the experience was the lack of appreciation shown by the parents. They simply could not understand why one would risk a good job, even for their children. [. . .] But I thought it was right to strike a blow against a glaring evil and I did not regret it. Up to that time I had felt that any fight made in the interest of the race would have its support. I learned then that I could not count on that” (Crusade, 37). Wells’s belligerent fight for justice would isolate her throughout her life. As her youngest daughter, Alfreda, remembered: “I’ve seen my mother shed tears after she’d come home from some organization where she worked so hard to try to get change . . . and had met with just obstinate antagonism” (Giddings, Ida, 623). See also Thomas C. Holt, “The Lonely Warrior: Ida B. Wells-Barnett and the Struggle for Black Leadership,” in Black Leaders of the 20th Century, ed. John Hope Franklin and August Meier (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 39–61, especially 58.

36. Crusade, 123. As Wells states, the British journalist and reformer William T. Stead “had come late to visit the World’s Fair and remained for three months writing his book If Christ Came to Chicago and welding the civic and moral forces of the town into a practical working body” (122–23). Stead’s book If Christ Came to Chicago! A Plea for the Union of All Who Love in the Service of All Who Suffer (1894) became a best seller. See Joseph O. Baylen, “A Victorian’s ‘Crusade’ in Chicago, 1893–1894,” Journal of American History 51 (December 1964): 418–34.

37. As early as 1891, Wells was aware of the importance of concrete organizational measures for the purpose of unification. Having attended the second national Afro-American League convention, in Knoxville, Tennessee, she complained that the gathering had not addressed the “gravest questions”: “How do we do it? What steps should be taken to unite our people into a real working force—a unit, powerful and complete?” (quoted in Giddings, Ida, 170).

38. James Melvin Washington, Frustrated Fellowship: The Baptist Quest for Social Power (Macon, GA: Mercer, 1986); paperback edition 2004, with a new preface by Quinton H. Dixie, foreword by Cornel West.

39. In May 1910, owing to Wells-Barnett’s initiative, the Negro Fellowship League Reading Room and Social Center opened its doors on State Street amid the saloons and gambling houses of Chicago’s Black Belt. While Wells-Barnett “was lifted to the seventh heaven and cheerfully went about the work of helping to select the library,” there was “great objection among some of our members to going there. Some of them took the ground that State Street was beneath their consideration” (Crusade, 304).

40. West alludes to Hazel Carby, Reconstructing Black Womanhood (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), and Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class (New York: Vintage, 1983), especially chap. 5, “The Meaning of Emancipation According to Black Women” (87–98).

41. Like Wells, Victoria (Vicki) Garvin (1915–2007) was a long-distance radical, yet, until recently, her lifelong political activism has been unduly neglected (and for this reason is highlighted in this note). Her work focused on, but was by no means limited to, the struggle for Black workers’ rights. In the 1950s, she served as executive secretary in the New York chapter of the National Negro Labor Council (NNLC) and as vice president of the national NNLC, an organization suspected by other unions to be (and in 1951 by the US attorney general officially declared) a Communist front. Garvin belonged to a network of leftist women who had been radicalized in the 1930s and had held on to their radical convictions even when they came under attack during the McCarthy era; see the seminal study by Dayo F. Gore, Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York: New York University Press, 2011), which unearths the largely neglected history of Black women radicals of the 1950s. See also Gore’s article, “From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria (Vicki) Ama Garvin,” in the essay collection Want to Start a Revolution?, 71–94. In the late 1950s, Garvin moved to Africa and in 1961 settled in Accra, Ghana, where she was a member of the African American community headed by W. E. B. Du Bois and Shirley Graham Du Bois, and where she also met Malcolm X again, with whom she had collaborated closely in Harlem. Encouraged by Du Bois, Garvin accepted an invitation to go to China, where from 1964 to 1971 she taught English at the Shanghai Foreign Language Institute. See the biographical information in the highly instructive article on Black radical activists, e.g. Robert Williams, Huey Newton, and Amiri Baraka, embracing Mao’s cultural revolution, in Robin D. G. Kelley and Betsy Esch, “Black Like Mao: Red China and Black Revolution,” Souls 1, no. 4 (September 1999): 6–41. Back in the United States in the 1970s, Garvin continued her struggle for social justice by working as a community organizer, joining rallies on behalf of political prisoners such as Mumia Abu-Jamal, and through speaking engagements, for example, in March 1981, when she appeared with Harry Haywood in a presentation attended by Cornel West; see West, Prophesy Deliverance!, 176. As Gore aptly puts it in Radical Crossroads: “Her distinct political legacy rests not in official titles but in revolutionary experience and solidarity efforts that always combined local organizing with a global vision” (73).

42. As to party politics, the Barnetts remained loyal to the party of Lincoln, but Wells-Barnett actively supported unions, for example, in the mid-1920s, she assisted the young Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids (BSCPM), under its new Socialist leader A. Philip Randolph, in its struggle against strong resistance in Chicago, the seat of the Pullman Company (Giddings, Ida, 634–41).

43. Crusade, 302. Ironically, due to the initiative of the Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, a successful campaign led to the erection of a YMCA for African Americans, in 1913. See Giddings: “In the past there would have been more debate among the Chicago black leadership about the propriety of supporting an all-black institution in lieu of demanding that the white-only Y accept African Americans. But by 1912, need, appreciation of the effort by prominent whites, and a growing sense of, and desire for, the black community’s emergence as an entity in and of itself resulted in blacks, with few exceptions, supporting the effort” (Ida, 506).

44. Crusade, 301–2.

45. Wells, A Red Record, 75.

46. Wells gives a lively account on her collaboration with Douglass at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair in her autobiography (Crusade, 115–20). According to Wells, the pamphlet was turned into “a creditable little book called The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition. It was a clear, plain statement of facts concerning the oppression put upon the colored people in this land of the free and home of the brave. We circulated ten thousand copies of this little book during the remaining three months of the fair” (117).

47. Wells-Barnett’s relations with Du Bois were strained after Du Bois took her off the list of the NAACP’s Founding Forty (see above, n. 30). As Giddings suggests, Wells-Barnett’s “ideology and militant views were something that the civil rights organization could, literally, not afford” (Ida, 497).

48. On Wells-Barnett’s relations with Garvey, see Crusade, 380–82. Garvey applauded her by counting her among the “conscientious workers [. . .] whose fight for the uplift of the race is one of life and death” (Giddings, Ida, 585). Garvey invited her several times to address his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the fall of 1918, when Wells-Barnett and other radical activists, e.g., William Trotter and A. Philip Randolph, were elected to represent the UNIA at the Versailles Peace Treaty negotiations (but were denied passports by the government). In 1919, Ferdinand Barnett defended Garvey in a libel case; see Giddings, Ida, 619.

49. As an exception to the rule, Wells-Barnett recounts her support of Robert T. Motts, who turned his saloon into the Pekin Theater, with its company of Black actors and an African American orchestra. It is typical of Wells’s broad-mindedness that, trying to convince other socially active women to collaborate with Motts, she argues “that now [sic] Mr. Motts was engaged in a venture of a constructive nature, I thought it our duty to forget the past and help him, that if he was willing to invest his money in something uplifting for the race we all ought to help” and that, furthermore, she “felt that the race owed Mr. Motts a debt of gratitude for giving us a theater in which we could sit anywhere we chose without restrictions” (Crusade, 290). In contrast to her autobiography, the few entries of her short Chicago diary passed down to us clearly manifest her love of music and her regular attendance at concerts, shows, and movies. See The 1930 Chicago Diary of Ida B. Wells-Barnett, included in the Memphis Diary.

50. Younger than Wells, Mary Jane McLeod Bethune lived to support the election campaign of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 and became a close friend to First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. Bethune was both a devoted educator (best known for having founded a school for Black girls in Daytona Beach, Florida, in 1904) and an activist focusing on various Black women’s associations (she was president of the Florida chapter of the National Association of Colored Women and in 1935 founded the National Council of Negro Women, which united twenty-eight different organizations).

51. In Prophesy Deliverance!, West presents Woodbey as a case of an “alliance of black theology and Marxist thought,” who “devoted his life to promoting structural social change and creating a counter-hegemonic culture in liberal capitalist America” (126).

Conclusion: Last Words on the Black Prophetic Tradition in the Age of Obama

1. Jason DeParle: “Harder for Americans to Rise from Lower Rungs,” New York Times, January 4, 2012.