On the evening of September 20, 2013, Cedric Robinson addressed the Critical Ethnic Studies Conference in Chicago. As he was part of a huge roundtable titled “What Is to Be Done? The Future of Critical Ethnic Studies,” he only talked for about ten minutes, mostly extemporaneously. Choosing his words carefully, he spoke in his customarily slow and deliberate style, occasionally pausing to allow his subtle humor to catch hold of the audience. “Critical Ethnic Studies is not really about the academy,” he intoned. It was about the people who believed that our presence in the academy might make a difference in the lives of the most vulnerable. “We are not possible without, in effect, the encouragement, the urgency, and the requirement that we be here by those who are being trampled on.” By which he meant the imprisoned, the under-housed, the underemployed, the undocumented, the people who sacrificed for us and whom the state sacrifices for capital. He warned of the moral catastrophe we face if we succeed in the academy while those who insisted we be here continue to suffer premature death, in the streets or behind bars.
Near the end of his remarks he began to speak wistfully about the spiritual and communitarian traditions in which he was raised.
One of the things I was exposed to was this immense notion of the possible through the construction of the notion of faith. So Christian faith trained me to be able to believe in, to anticipate, something coming into being that was not in being. That’s called by the Greek word “utopia,” which means the good society. It also means no society, no such place. That gave me a framework for looking at what others, before me, had imagined was possible in their lifetime. And that’s why it was so important for me to look at the notion of radicalism from the vantage point of slaves … According to some scholars, the slaves … [had] no ambitions, except to perhaps live or perhaps to die. They had experienced social death. Well that’s nonsense. Because they were something more than what was expected of them, they could invent, manufacture, conspire, and organize way beyond the possibilities.1
Cedric Robinson always wrote about Black radical futures, but history was his pathway for comprehending what others “imagined was possible in their lifetime.” He consistently turned to the past to understand the Black Radical Tradition and its capacity to envision a world beyond the possibilities. The essays gathered here, as well as his entire oeuvre, bear this out. Futures of self-determined, collective democracy find flashes in seventeenth-century marronage, in nineteenth-century camp revivals, in anticolonial millenarian uprisings. W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James turned to slave rebellions in order to chart a future beyond fascism. Amilcar Cabral, one of Robinson’s favorite subjects, understood that a radical future for Africa required that we “return to the source.”2
Cedric revealed in those brief but profound remarks in 2013 that the source of his own conception of the possible was not some seminal text or archival revelation but his West Oakland upbringing, his Alabama roots, his family and the community that nurtured him. While Cedric was reluctant to dwell in the autobiographical, he never hid the enormous respect and admiration he held for his maternal grandfather, Winston Whiteside, whom he often cited as a formative intellectual influence.3 Affectionately known as “Cap” or “Daddy” Whiteside, he and his wife Cecilia were largely responsible for raising Cedric. By acknowledging Winston Whiteside, Cedric was telling us something about the nature of the Black Radical Tradition, signaling what he meant by “a revolutionary consciousness that proceeded from the whole historical experience of Black people and not merely from the social formations of capitalist slavery or the relations of production of colonialism.”4 Cedric listened to elders and ancestors, heeded memories, spirits, and “ghostly matters,” learned from the extraordinary folks whom professional historians mistook for ordinary, and discovered in the Black Radical Tradition whole communities in motion—full of imperfections and contradictions but holding on to each other because they had to and because their culture demanded it.
But I’m the first to confess that I missed the cues. Only after Cedric joined the ancestors did I recognize the importance of his ancestors. Again, Cedric left us a hint, buried in a short paragraph from his book Black Movements in America:
Many did not need the [Chicago] Defender or the railroads or the agents [to decide to move North]. Like “Cap” Whiteside, who left Mobile, Alabama, in the late 1920s, they relied on family who had already migrated. A few like Whiteside punctuated their leaving the South with their own unique parting gestures. The white manager at the Battle House, an exclusive hotel in Mobile, had tried to exercise his sexual privileges with a young maid, Cecilia, Whiteside’s wife. When Cap was told, he returned to the Battle House that evening, beat the manager up, and hung him in the hotel’s cold storage. In a few days, Whiteside headed for Oakland, California. When he earned their fare, he sent for his family: Cecilia and his daughters, Clara, Lillian, and Wilma. Chastened, the manager gained a reputation as one of the best friends of the Negro in Mobile.5
I’d read this extraordinary passage a few times (always with James Brown’s “Papa Don’t Take No Mess” playing in my head). I’d even assigned Black Movements in America in my undergraduate social movements course before Routledge jacked up the price, but had not realized that Whiteside was his grandfather. And yet, as the author of a book about Black radicals in Alabama, familiar with crime reports in the Mobile Register about Black men and women hanged, shot, and jailed for lesser violations, I understood that Cap had risked death to protect and avenge his wife. What I did not know was the degree to which Cap’s act of defiance—inspired clearly by “an immense notion of the possible”—changed history.
So who is “Cap” Whiteside? And what about his precious Cecilia? What did they teach their grandson? Who and what made them? Who are his people? How did they live and organize beyond the possibilities of the Jim Crow racial regime?
Born in Mobile, Alabama, on June 7, 1893, Winston Wilmer Whiteside was the youngest of seven children belonging to Clara and Benjamin Whiteside Sr. The four oldest children were each two years apart, with Benjamin Jr. born in 1872, followed by Spencer, Addison, and Nellie. Although by 1900 they all resided in the family’s rambling house at 615 North Jackson Street in the First Ward, just a few blocks from the Mobile River, the four eldest worked as day laborers while Winston’s sisters Clara and Lillian attended school.6 Separated by seven and three years, respectively, Winston grew up much closer to Clara and Lillian.
Winston’s parents had been slaves. Benjamin was born in September 1847, on Richard Whiteside’s plantation in Coopers Gap, North Carolina, in the Western part of the state near the South Carolina border. Born in 1808, Richard was the child of William and Elizabeth Whiteside, part of a very distinguished and powerful planter family whose branches extended from Illinois to South Carolina. Of Richard and Sarah Whiteside’s nineteen Negroes recorded as property on their 1860 slave schedules, twelve-year-old Benjamin appeared simply as “M” for mulatto, without a name and without acknowledgment of his master’s paternity. Incidentally, he was the only “mulatto” in the group. I have not been able to determine his mother’s name.7
As the Whiteside plantation was situated in Polk County at the edge of the Appalachian Mountains, whites vastly outnumbered Black people. In fact, in 1860 western North Carolina held about 9,000 enslaved people, of which only sixty-two resided in Polk County.8 The Union Army did not invade that part of the state until 1865, so it is unlikely that Benjamin became “contraband” and traveled the march route with the troops.9 We do know that he left North Carolina as soon as he could and made his way as far south as he could go, finally settling in the port city of Mobile, Alabama. Around 1870, he met a pretty, young domestic worker named Clara Mercer. She lived with her sixty-five-year-old widowed mother, a former slave from Virginia who also went by Clara.10 Like Benjamin, they were seeking a new beginning in an era when the South was poised to achieve the impossible dream of a multiracial, popular democracy. They lived through the ratification of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, the democratization of state constitutions in 1868 under Republican-ruled “military Reconstruction,” and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and other forms of organized racial terror. They found each other in a whirlwind of movement, when families broken up under bondage sought to reunite, and marriage, family, and community building were the priorities of freed people. They came together at a moment when the ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment and the question of “Negro suffrage” dominated the press and presumably a good deal of informal street chatter. The Mobile Register ran an editorial titled “The Future of the Negro” (March 13, 1870) warning Black people to disavow Northern Republicans and stop biting the hand that fed them—namely the good white people of the South. The editorial declared,
In these states [Black people’s] physical condition has, heretofore, been better than anywhere in the world. In these states they have more sympathy and kindness than has yet been shown to them anywhere in the world by the other races. In these States, by preserving their proper relations to the white people, they stand their only chance for safety and preservation.
When Black leaders and their Republican allies “war on the interests of the property holders who employ the great mass of their race they do injury to themselves.”
On May 16, 1870, Benjamin and Clara were married; he was twenty-three and she was nineteen. Clara’s mother moved in as well, and on the meager earnings of two domestic workers and a day laborer, they started a family.11 Within a few years, they bought the house on the corner of Jackson and Adams Streets, which would remain their home for the remainder of their lives, mort-gage-free.12 Benjamin took whatever job he could find to make ends meet. During the early 1880s he worked for the southern Alabama lumber and coal giant A.C. Danner & Co., followed by several years at the Mobile stockyards under the employ of R. L. Maupin & Co. At the stockyards he acquired skills as a drayman—running deliveries in a flatbed horse-drawn cart (an occupation later taken up by his son Spencer). By 1901, Benjamin had parlayed those skills into his own business, renting the house next door and turning it into a wood retail and delivery company.13 Meanwhile, Clara turned her prodigious cooking skills into yet another family business. Sometime in the late 1890s, they rented the other house next door (616 N. Jackson) and transformed it into Clara’s “cook shop,” where she prepared home-cooked meals for customers to take away and, perhaps, to eat at the shop as well.14
As the baby of the house, Winston received both the benefits and the burdens of his parents and older siblings’ tireless work ethic. Unlike his parents, who could neither read nor write, he attended school and most likely received some tutoring from his doting sisters, Lillian and Clara. Being the youngest, he could always rely on their protection, though he matured into an incredibly handsome, well-built, and determined young man with a reputation as a skilled fighter. But, as his parents aged, they could no longer maintain the pace of entrepreneurship supplemented by waged work. By 1910, their respective businesses had come to an end and Clara, most likely beset by health problems, stopped working altogether.15 Winston had no choice but to seek full-time employment. The situation became even more dire on August 17, 1910, when his beloved sister, Lillian, barely twenty years old, died suddenly.16 Less than four years later, their mother would die as well at only fifty-nine years old.17 As his siblings left the Jackson Street home to start their own families, Winston took responsibility for the house and the care of his father. And he started his own family.
Sometime around 1916, Winston married a girl from the neighborhood named Corine Cunningham. Six years his junior, Corine was the daughter of Ella McLean, a fifteen-year-old unwed mother who still lived at home. Corine’s grandmother, an independent widower and survivor of slavery named Clara McLean, helped raise her.18 Corine was about seventeen years old when she moved into the Whiteside house on Jackson. Winston made a living as a porter for the United Cigar Company while Corine kept house, caring for her father-in-law and giving birth to three daughters in succession: Ella May (b. 1917), Wilma May (b. 1918), and Dorothy (b. 1920).19
The marriage proved to be short-lived. By 1924, Winston was living at 1011 Caroline Avenue with his new wife, Cecilia. He had left United Cigar Company to take a job with the railway company L&N Shops, and Cecilia, a year older than Winston, found work as a maid. At some point the three girls moved in with them and their father decided to change two of his daughters’ names. His eldest, Ella May, was renamed Clara after Winston’s mother, grandmother, and sister. Clara Whiteside was Cedric’s mother. Dorothy, the baby, was named after her recently deceased aunt Lillian.20
Cap’s confrontation with the Battle House manager, as Cedric reported it, hastened the Whiteside’s family exodus from the deep South. Winston had no interest in the “future” that the city fathers had conceived for the Negro, and no desire to confront the police or a mob anxious to exact punishment for his insolence. So he went West, arriving in Oakland, California, in 1927. He found work as a janitor and lodging at 1448 Jackson Street, not far from Lake Merritt and downtown Oakland. Cecilia and the girls joined him the following year, first renting a house on 34th and West Streets in West Oakland before settling into what would become their permanent home at 3020 Adeline Street.21
The kindness, patience, and generosity that Cedric had experienced from his grandfather was not shared by his mother or aunts growing up on Adeline. A strict disciplinarian and patriarch tasked with raising three beautiful girls, “Daddy” imposed suffocating limits on his daughters. I suspect that their conversion from Baptists to Seventh-day Adventists may have exacerbated the situation, as new rules with respect to diet, behavior, and worship were enforced. Elizabeth Robinson heard stories of Daddy Whiteside waiting around the corner for the girls’ boyfriends to show up and then beating them mercilessly.22 The result was predictable: rebellion. When their father’s authority prevailed, they left home. Clara, the eldest, found her escape in the fast life of clubs, bars, and dance halls. She fell for a married San Francisco nightclub owner about twenty years her senior named Frederick Hill, known to his friends as “B. Hill.” The affair may have been brief, but on November 5, 1940, Clara gave birth to her one and only child, who she named Cedric James Hill. Frederick Hill acknowledged his paternity and opened his home to Cedric on occasion. Shortly after their split, however, Clara briefly married Dwight Robinson and decided to give Cedric, known to his family simply as “Ricky,” the last name of his new stepfather.23
Clara was not in a position to care for Cedric, so he sometimes stayed with his Aunt Wilma and sometimes with Frederick Hill. He spent the lion’s share of his time, however, with his grandparents on Adeline Street. What Cedric saw in Daddy and Mama Whiteside was a quiet dignity, a deep spiritual grounding, and a work ethic that he would go on to emulate. He watched his aging grandfather head to the County Courthouse in downtown Oakland, where he would spend hours cleaning and polishing the floors and banisters with great pride.24 He watched his grandmother spend all day every Friday preparing the Sabbath meal, which often included a visit from the pastor. Beryl Warren, a family friend from Mobile who stayed with Clara for about a year in 1960–61 and grew quite close to Cedric, remembers the Whitesides as “a very loving couple. Not well educated, just down to earth. They welcomed me like I was their child. They were friendly toward all the neighbors, and well respected in the church. Daddy Whiteside had a big influence on [Cedric’s] life.”25
The nature of his influence may appear simple at first glance. As we’ve already seen, Cedric himself traced his discovery of the notion of faith to his grandfather’s church. For him this was less about the existence of God than the recognition of what he later described in Black Marxism as “a metaphysical system that had never allowed for property in either the physical, philosophical, temporal, legal, social, or psychic senses.” In other words, slavery and racial capitalism were incapable of what Aimé Césaire called “thingification” so long as Black people could preserve this “ontological totality.”26 As Beryl Warren recalls, Cedric continued to attend church services and to derive both enjoyment and intellectual stimulation from them, despite not being “very religious at the time. He called himself an atheist.”
But in addition to bringing his grandson into his church, Daddy Whiteside both modeled and engaged in a kind of ontological affirmation of Blackness that consistently beat back the prevailing logic of Black inferiority—a logic accepted by many within Cedric’s own family. A three-page handwritten family history dated 1975 reveals an obsession with race and a consistent denial of African heritage. Each family member is identified in terms of racial percentages—mostly Irish, French, Indian, English, and the like. In fact, Winston Whiteside was identified as “Blk, Puerto Rican, and white.” But as Elizabeth Robinson explained to me, “For all this stuff about denial about race, that didn’t come from Daddy … Cedric had fond memories of listening to a Joe Louis fight on the radio with Daddy and other Black men, and how much race pride they had rooting for Louis over some white boxer.” And when Cedric was old enough to grasp the implications and consequences of race, he peppered his grandfather with questions about the South—a request that his grandfather was always happy to oblige. Even while Cedric felt that he was treated as the “black sheep” of the family because of his dark complexion, his grandparents loved and embraced him unconditionally.
Perhaps it all boils down to this: love and affirmation; holding on to the notion of the possible; preserving the ontological totality. Cap’s stories and lessons—those he lived and those he received—pervade all of Cedric’s work, even if they are not readily apparent. And as ancestors, Cap and Cecilia, Benjamin and Clara, the whole Whiteside clan and more served as the scaffolding for his brilliance, continually steering him back to the Black Radical Tradition.
Cecilia Whiteside passed on December 17, 1966, nine months before Cedric and Elizabeth were married. Winston Whiteside returned South, settling down in Georgia. He died on September 21, 1979, just months before the publication of Ricky’s first book, The Terms of Order: Political Science and the Myth of Leadership. He would have appreciated the dedication: “For Winston (Cap) Whiteside, grandson of slaves / a man of extraordinary courage and profound understanding / … my grandfather and my first teacher.”