When Cedric committed to preparing this preface, he did so on the condition that we do it together, perhaps already aware that his health was failing, but at a rate neither of us anticipated. Alas, his death has left the task in my hands and though we had talked about some possibilities, we wrote not a word together. I would never presume to speak for him despite our fifty years together. Our styles have always been too different, mine more journalistic, sometimes more polemical. His analytic, elegant, meticulously documented. And always going to places I could never anticipate. So I have sat for months trying to figure out how to procede and have finally been delivered thanks to the transcription of a series lectures he gave at UC Irvine in 2012. Thank you, Tiffany Willoughby Herard for organizing the seminar, Kyung Kim for videoing it, and Mohsin Mirza, Yoel Haile, and Marisela Marquez for providing me with the transcription. Much of what you read is literally in Cedric’s voice with only minor corrections from me. His contributions, in italics, were unwritten, so they lack his usual copious footnotes and careful construction. And it is impossible to convey the humor, emphasis, et cetera, of the seminar. But I hope that it gives you a sense of Cedric as teacher.
Elizabeth P. Robinson
Joshua Fit De Battle …
This story in some places might exaggerate possible actual events, but if the truth is here, it can be found. The theme is segregation.
Joshua Cole, a negro of sixty or more years, was sitting on the old broken steps of his shack on his side of town, thinking of the sun and how hot it was, when his musing was interrupted by someone calling his name, “Joshua, Josh’ Cole,” the excited voice cried, “Josh’ yo’ Freddy is dead!”
Suddenly realizing what was being said, Joshua rose quickly then fell back onto the wall of the building, more weight on his shoulders than even his age could account for.
The facts were made known to him, one by one. One of his neighbors, Zeke, had found the body of ten-year-old Freddy near the old tracks in the bushes. His neck was broken, not from a rope but a mighty blow …
… Going inside his shack, Joshua confronted Zeke who rapidly told Joshua in his eighty-year-plus-voice what he had seen. Zeke had done more than find the body, he had been sleeping in the nearby brush when Tom Caspine had chased Freddy after the boy had called Tom “white trash.” Caspine had turned red with rage and had struck the boy with a vicious sweep of his fist. Caspine had left the boy lying in a peculiar position, not noticing the sightless eyes of the peculiarly positioned head …
… His last words before his blood flowed like wine, were “Lord, ain’t you nevah goin’ to give the world to the meek?”
Cedric Robinson
Jan. 8, 1957, English V
The last line in the essay quoted above was penned in the pall of the lynching of Emmett Till, as well as the promise of the mid-twentieth-century Civil Rights movement. The story was about a brutal murder of a Black child and the denial of justice in the aftermath. In looking for the antecedents of Black radicalism, we should consider our individual moments of awakening. Was this one? Or maybe listening to an old man’s stories of courage and valor as his grandson helped him mop floors in government buildings. We might consider the little girl in Detroit who found something like the life of Sojourner Truth to read every day over breakfast. Maybe a young Arab woman’s discovery that the movie Exodus told a particular and peculiar history of Palestine and that race and racism were entirely mutable. Or maybe being scolded for addressing a Black man as ‘‘Sir.’’ Surely the affronts that are experienced because we’ve had the audacity to be somewhere we don’t belong, the racial taunts and aggressions experienced repeatedly must be factored in to the formation of our racial identities. But the critical moment comes when we realize the political, historical, and social connectedness of those experiences and move from the personal, however important it might be, to the necessity of engagement, to the Black radical tradition. Also, to remember that this is not only about pain, but also about shared knowledge, joy, and humor that are integral to those experiences.
In compiling this collection of essays, the editors and authors invite or insist that we project a tradition, Black Radicalism, into the future. It is certainly our intention to celebrate that and suggest some ways in which we can find inspiration in our histories for our present moment. In the latter, we are confronted daily with police lethality and other abuse, mass incarceration, and a politics of greed. It is difficult to keep feelings of depression and defeat at bay, but our histories, perceived in all their dynamism, their resistance and resilience, can give us heart and direction. Our pasts are not dead; why else are there repeated attempts to bury them, to erase or forget them? Why does generation after generation have to rediscover W. E. B. Du Bois, Pauline Hopkins, Oliver Cox, and so many others? How is it that the indigenous people at Standing Rock, North Dakota, are telling us about massacres we’ve never heard of? Why don’t we know about Black and white workers who made common cause for mutual benefit? Beyond US borders, why is it not common parlance that peoples’ movements from Vietnam, Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Chile, Guatemala, to name but a few, were undermined or simply destroyed by Western capitalist greed and militarism? Perhaps it is simply too painful to remember these assaults; but burying them also buries the rich histories of resistance. While slavery and emancipation are part of our official histories, maroons and marronage, Palmares, quilombos, and the Great Dismal Swamp are unknown or little known when they should be the bedrock of contemporary struggles.
I had argued in Black Marxism that Black Radicalism critically emerges from African culture, languages, and beliefs, and enslavement. What emerged from that conjunction were powerful impulses to escape enslavement.
At some point when I was writing Black Marxism, I came across the notion of the “runaway.” Most historians talk about runaways, write about runaways. But I became convinced that that language contained and persisted in the notion that slave agency was childlike. Children run away, but what these people were doing was achieving fugitive status. So I began to use the term “fugitive” instead of the term “runaway.” But you have to use the term runaway sometimes because, when you’re looking at archival material, it is the term that is in fact being employed. The first impulse of these Africans was to remove themselves from the slave system. Rather than going after slavery, they wanted to recreate their African homelands. Rather than confront the system as the system, they removed themselves from it. They created maroon communities which in some instances became so massive and so powerful that, as in Palmares in seventeenth-century Brazil, they became republics themselves. Palmares persisted for ninety years or so. And there were similar kinds of adventures (you might call them) in the West Indies, in Jamaica, and elsewhere. In the North American colonial situation, one area that became famous for marronage was the Great Dismal Swamp. And indeed, in 1857 or so, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her second anti-slavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Meaning, in effect, that she understood, as many did, that there in the swamp were to be found fugitives from not only slavery, but Native American fugitives, and poor white fugitives. And Stowe was suggesting in Dred that her earlier proposal for a muscular Christianity had to be replaced. And so she invented a son for Nat Turner in her novel. In that sense, she was of course engaging in the Black Radical Tradition as well.
To return to this question of sovereignty, Palmares, in Brazil, had to be destroyed, and several armies were sent to destroy it in the seventeenth century. In a similar sense, Haiti at the beginning of the nineteenth century had a similar trajectory. Haiti was not only an instance of an extraordinary achievement—slaves having created a republic—but it was a constant threat to the slave-owning planter class in North America. What becomes of the notion of Haiti, what becomes of the notion of Black sovereignty in the nineteenth century? One of the maneuvers to deal with Haiti was to extract from the Black population in North America its freed Black population on the presumption that the free Black population could only contaminate the slave population. Black radicalism led to a particular maneuver which created Liberia. Liberia was supposed to function to siphon off the free Black population, and that maneuver was a fairly successful one in many ways. But the plague of Black sovereignty continued to be a part of American consciousness and that plague resurfaced at the end of the nineteenth century, and the beginning of the twentieth century. At the end of the nineteenth century the plague was in part carried by the Black soldiers who entered the Philippines. We have some sense of how they saw this war from 1899 on because they wrote letters which were published in Black newspapers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Willard Gatewood allowed those letters to resurface in his study called “Smoked Yankees.” One of the stories that was revealed there was the defection of Black troops from the American military to the Philippine independent national soldiers. One particular Black trooper, David Fagan, became so well known that the US military put out a reward not for his capture but for his being killed and beheaded. He became a commandante in the Philippine army and was killed in two or three years’ time. But again, his was a kind of expression of Black radicalism, as well as a notion of Black sovereignty.
These narratives are found in popular media as well as in the hallowed halls of universities. And those media constructions span far more than 100 years and remain a contemporary practice, not just a historical one. Consider the 2012 film, Lincoln: how was it possible to make a film about the post–Civil War United States with barely a presence of Black people as agents in the events at hand? Perhaps, given some particularly mean moments in US politics, the filmmaker thought we needed an ‘‘uplift’’ film with a great man at the helm. But like most ‘‘great men’’ versions of history, it is at best a partial truth, at worst, a persistent lie. Of course, these predilections are rife and can be found in old as well as new forms. Just as Spielberg told a convenient story, so too did Eugene O’Neill, and each would argue a sensitivity to, even an affinity for, Black people. Now let me offer you a reading of some of the language that O’Neill thought was useful and necessary in constructing this Black figure [Emperor Jones]. And this is the speech in the original play which eventually becomes the architecture around which Dubose Hayward produces the first two-thirds of the film. He is talking to his Cockney collaborator, a merchant who has been cheating the islanders for years and selling them goods. In Emperor Jones’s final moments of rule, he threatens the Cockney in this way.
Maybe I goes to jail for getting in an argument with razors over a crap game. Maybe I gets 20 years when that colored man dies, maybe I gets in another argument with the prison guard who oversee us when we are working the road, maybe he hits me with a whip and I splits his head with a shovel and runs away ’n files the chain and gets away safe. Maybe I does all that and maybe I don’t. It’s a story I tells you so you know I used to be the kind a man that if you ever repeat one word of it, I end your stealing on this earth mighty damn quick.
I can’t read it the way Charles Gilpin or Paul Robeson read it, because it’s difficult. It’s that invented Black speech that we find both in film and on stage during the 1920s and 1930s.
Now Charles Gilpin has maintained that he created the Emperor Jones, that Eugene O’Neill had merely written it. Part of that claim to authority by Charles Gilpin was that, after performing it several hundred times over the years, Gilpin had begun to change the play. He changed it in this way, one of the ways in which we know that he changed it. In a one-act play, there are fifty or sixty occasions in which the Emperor Jones uses the word “nigger.” Gilpin started changing that language, and O’Neill was very upset with him and eventually maintained that he was going to beat Gilpin up if he continued to change his play. Eventually, O’Neill would replace Gilpin with Paul Robeson. Robeson, of course, would perform it not only on stage but also when it became a film. The film went back to the original play, so all those “niggers” reappear in the film the way O’Neill had written them originally in the one-act play. Alright, so of Gilpin’s performance as Emperor Jones, we have no historical archive. Of Gilpin’s other work, we know he made one silent film in about 1927 or so. But what we are told is that Gilpin’s performance as Emperor Jones was awesome because of the nature of his voice, the power of his voice, but we’ll have to take his contemporaries’ word for it.
To be sure, Gilpin’s subversion of O’Neill’s written words seems to have represented a refusal to accede to the lie that Black people were brutes, incapable of mastering the English language.
It is easy for us to presume that Blacks have always existed in this country since the occasion of the African Slave Trade. But understand the contest that was taking place in the end of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century. That is, the kind of savages—how would you put it? —well, let me put it simply in the terms we addressed earlier. The “Negro” was in place; that is, his docility, ignorance, bestiality, child-like inferiority, that was in place. But a strata was emerging in conflict with that, to contest it. Some of the strata contested it by in effect competing with the standard for becoming white, Anglo-Saxons. Others turned in the direction of W. E. B. Du Bois, who wrote The Negro in 1915. Understand when Du Bois writes The Negro in 1915, there is no history of Black people published! [Cedric pounds his fist into his hand as he makes this point.] This is the first, that is, Du Bois is a part of the invention or reinvention of Blackness, which a small part of his class has undertaken.
They will write a history of Blackness in the place of a vacuum of such material, and they’re saying that in effect all of these people who have in some sense an immediate origin in Africa are one people. This is an entirely new idea, because what they are adding to it, codifying with it, is in effect a sense of a historical people. Not simply of origins, but a historical people. A people who achieved civilization, who have achieved cultures, who have left a mark on the world. Gathering all that material together, Du Bois’s excerise in 1915, The Negro, is a massive propaganda ploy: we are a people, it doesn’t matter whether we’re in Brazil, on the African Continent, in Mexico, doesn’t matter where we are, we are the same people, and these are the things we can accredit to ourselves. Consequently, we have had a past, we can have a future … Black Sovereignty!
Of course, Du Bois was not alone or the first and hardly the last who would reject the degradation of Black people. Others too would reimagine, resurrect narratives which were/are repeatedly buried. We might not find all of them compelling, some even odious, but they were all rejections of a fundamental, willful error in the imagined Black people that demanded correction. Many of the proponents were a part of the elite, but not all. Many were Black, but not all.
[Pauline] Hopkins was not a member of that strata. Hopkins comes out of the arti-sanal class in Massachusetts. She was apparently a genius: eighteen years old, she writes a musical which is preformed in San Francisco, as well as in other places, about the Underground Railroad. She is eighteen years of age—1879! By 1899, twenty years later, she is such a powerful alternative locus that Booker T. Washington proceeds to try and deliberately destroy her, and he succeeds. How many have heard of Pauline Hopkins? [Cedric scans the room for raised hands. Few appear.]
He vanquished her. She constructed a publishing cooperative in Boston, published her own magazine, The Colored American. She edited, wrote biographies for it, wrote studies for it, wrote four novels, if not five, and in each of her novels she proceeded to interrogate a way out. Assimilation? Hagar’s Daughter proves that that is unacceptable, it is a way towards collective tragedy. She pursues Pan Africanism in another of her novels, Contending Forces, and earlier she pursues in effect some resolution to the exploitation of black women. So this is an extraordinary individual, pushed to the side, pushed to the margins, pushed into obscurity, never to resurface until almost sixty or seventy years after her death in 1930. But she was part of that legion of people that were moving toward a recovery of a kind of Blackness which had nobility and had a past. One of the weaknesses of Black radicalism in most of its forms is that it lacks the promise of a certain future. Unlike Marxism [where] victory is inevitable eventually, in Black radicalism it is not. Only when that radicalism is costumed or achieves an envelope in Black Christianity is there a certainty to it. Otherwise it is about a kind of resistance that does not promise triumph or victory at the end, only liberation. No nice package at the end, only that you would be free. It comes, as I said at the beginning, out of the insult to African identities that slavery represents. This was unacceptable. This was unacceptable.
And I guess the most poetic representation of that I’ve ever seen is when Eula tells her story in Daughters of the Dust of why Ibo Landing has its name. Do you remember the story in Daughters of the Dust? The Ibo were brought here in chains, and in chains they were marched from the big boats and conveyed in smaller boats to the shore. They looked at this land and they saw what their future was, and they turned around … and walked back into the ocean.
Only the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!
If we are to move the Black Radical Tradition forward, it is imperative that we understand that it is not utopian. Rather it is about questing for freedom. It is about the necessity of recognizing the importance of struggle regardless of outcomes. Nor does it begin and end intellectually. We must look beyond the straightjackets of race to understand common histories in order to make common cause.
Some of you are interested in why I pursued the Irish in Black Marxism as well as in the latest work, Forgeries of Memory and Meaning. In part, I’m trying to give a great deal of our audience a purchase point. There’s no possibility of really telling a Black story without telling other peoples’ stories. I can tell it in the nationalist trope. And the nationalist trope, in effect, will be guilty of repeating the artificialities that I’m trying to oppose, those kinds of boundaries. The Irish and the Irish Americans are, to a certain degree, opportunistic subjects. Opportunistic in the sense that a lot of their history is coincident with Blackness … Coincident with Blackness. But also because I want you to understand that the Irish were negatively racialized, even before the Africans, in the European imagination. We were simply a lob to occupy a category already established. And given the irony that is history, it became the impression that the category had always been ours, always been ours, exclusively. That simply isn’t how human affairs have been conducted.
So the Irish and their history are our teachers as well as our compatriots. Likewise, we must look beyond the writers to our colleagues such as Otis F. Madison, Mary Agnes Lewis, and Travis Tatum (to name too few) who have steeped thousands of students in the Black Radical Tradition without writing about it and sent them out into the world to carry on. We must look to the activists, actors, and athletes who insist on using their bully pulpits to call attention to realities that corporate media chronically neglect. And we must look to our families, our children, for their particular wisdom. Like the eleven-year-old who tearfully and angrily shouts at her mother, who has insisted to her daughter that she read a text one more time if she didn’t understand it, ‘But, Mom, it doesn’t make sense because it says that after slavery, the slaves couldn’t take care of themselves. But they’d been the ones taking care of everything!” Ah hah! We must know that the truth will win out and most likely be buried yet again.
Only the promise of liberation, only the promise of liberation!