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    Black Prophetic Fire
    Black Prophetic Fire
    Black Prophetic Fire
    Ebook345 pages5 hours

    Black Prophetic Fire

    By Cornel West and Christa Buschendorf

    4/5

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    About this ebook

    An unflinching look at nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American leaders and their visionary legacies.

    In an accessible, conversational format, Cornel West, with distinguished scholar Christa Buschendorf, provides a fresh perspective on six revolutionary African American leaders: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. In dialogue with Buschendorf, West examines the impact of these men and women on their own eras and across the decades. He not only rediscovers the integrity and commitment within these passionate advocates but also their fault lines.
     
    West, in these illuminating conversations with the German scholar and thinker Christa Buschendorf, describes Douglass as a complex man who is both “the towering Black freedom fighter of the nineteenth century” and a product of his time who lost sight of the fight for civil rights after the emancipation. He calls Du Bois “undeniably the most important Black intellectual of the twentieth century” and explores the more radical aspects of his thinking in order to understand his uncompromising critique of the United States, which has been omitted from the American collective memory. West argues that our selective memory has sanitized and even “Santaclausified” Martin Luther King Jr., rendering him less radical, and has marginalized Ella Baker, who embodies the grassroots organizing of the civil rights movement. The controversial Malcolm X, who is often seen as a proponent of reverse racism, hatred, and violence, has been demonized in a false opposition with King, while the appeal of his rhetoric and sincerity to students has been sidelined. Ida B. Wells, West argues, shares Malcolm X’s radical spirit and fearless speech, but has “often become the victim of public amnesia.”
     
    By providing new insights that humanize all of these well-known figures, in the engrossing dialogue with Buschendorf, and in his insightful introduction and powerful closing essay, Cornel West takes an important step in rekindling the Black prophetic fire.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBeacon Press
    Release dateOct 7, 2014
    ISBN9780807003534
    Black Prophetic Fire
    Author

    Cornel West

    Cornel West is the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy and Christian Practice at Union Theological Seminary. He is also Class of 1943 Professor of African American Studies Emeritus at Princeton University. He is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College and obtained his MA and PhD in philosophy at Princeton. Professor West is best known for his classics Race Matters and Democracy Matters. His memoir is entitled Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. He made his film debut in the Matrix—and was the commentator (with Ken Wilber) on the official trilogy released in 2004. He has made several spoken word albums including Never Forget, collaborating with Prince, Jill Scott, André 3000, Bootsy Collins, and others. In 2021, he won a Grammy Award along with Arturo O’Farrill for the year’s best Latin jazz album. Professor West has a passion to share and keep alive the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr.—a legacy of telling the truth and bearing witness to love and justice.

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    Reviews for Black Prophetic Fire

    4/5

    19 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Man, this was a fantastic read!

      I've been meaning to read more Cornel West, so when I found this browsing through the library, I immediately grabbed it. And I'm so glad I did, because it's a brilliant look at several outstanding figures of the Black prophetic tradition through a series of conversations between West and Christa Buschendorf.

      These conversations, held over the past few years, cover Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Jr, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells. Wells and Baker were new names to me, which probably says something vital about the patriarchal approach to history we are presented with (and which is one of the points West and Buschendorf make throughout their conversations).

      This book is an honest, frank look at the Black prophetic tradition, both in the day of those discussed and in the present. West has a keen mind and a strong system of belief, and he doesn't let anything interfere with the truth that he feels needs to be shared with the world.
    • 4/5
      In Black Prophetic Fire, Dr. West discusses the lives and legacies of six preeminent Black intellectuals and activists (Frederick Douglass, W.E.B Du Bois, MLK, Ella Baker, Malcolm X and Ida B. Wells) and how their examples of prophetic vision are needed to counter the forces of neoliberalism and capitalist imperialism that have silenced those voices.

      Much has been made of Dr. West’s criticism of President Obama but Dr. West’s reasoning here is made clear and one cannot legitimately claim it is based on anything other than substance.


      Black Prophetic Fire weighs the reader down with a lot of insights on each of the figures. The book is written as a series of dialogues between Dr. West (author) and Dr Buschendorf (editor), both of whom are likely far more erudite than most readers, and while it’s a fascinating conversation to be eavesdropping on, it’s going to be very hard for the reader to follow without delving back and forth from the dialogue to the (thankfully) extensive notes at the end of the book. I can’t help but thinking it would have been more rewarding for the reader had Dr. West and Ms. Buschendorf collaborated to write this in traditional narrative form rather than just transcribed dialogues. For substance, I’d give the book 4.5 (of 5) stars, but only 3 for format.

      Still, this is a very rewarding read and highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      This collection of conversations between Cornell West and German sociologist Christa Buschendorf is mostly West, of course, and therefore highly inflammatory every few pages. But West is highly intelligent, extremely insightful, and a worthy opponent in the reader's mental debates. He is too quick to judge the actions and words of others, which is what produces inflammatory passages. But he is too perceptive and insightful to dismiss or to simply ignore. Buschendorf's remarks and questions mostly lead him to say what he wants to say--not much differing opinion from her. But the discussions of Frederick Douglass, W. E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Ella Baker are all engaging and revealing. There are ample endnotes which not only identify the people referenced, but also give a sense of what to read to find out more. And there is a thorough bibliography. The index could be more thorough, but still this is a very thoughtful, spirited discussion by a man who speaks his mind and tells you why he thinks the way he does.
    • 4/5
      This book consists of a series of dialogues between the American intellectual Cornel West, and the German intellectual Christa Buschendorf. They discuss six prophetic African American leaders, arranged in the order the conversations were recorded.

      The leaders - Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King Jr., Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and Ida B. Wells, all offered analyses of the power mechanisms that allowed white power and privilege to perpetuate itself in America’s social and political structures, and all considered ways to overcome these obstacles.

      West is particularly eager to break through what he sees as a shift in Black America “from a we-consciousness to an I-consciousness” that reflects both a growing sense of defeatism (or as he says in the conclusion, “desperation, confusion, and capitulation”) but also “a Black embrace of the seductive myth of individualism in American culture.” He wants to keep alive the memory of “Black prophetic fire” and reinvigorate that tradition. He explains the “logic of practice” - i.e., the correlations between social structures and mental structures - and hopes that this book will help inspire Blacks to break free of the socializing myths that acts as such a powerful deterrent to change. Ironically, in his chapter on Du Bois, he mentions Du Bois’s early naivety in thinking that “you just have to teach people; you just have to tell them the truth, and they will accept it and they will change.”

      But that isn’t my main problem with this book. To me, it seems like a transcript of a post-grad level seminar that would take place after one had become familiar with at least a selection of writings by all of the leaders covered by these two in their dialogues. I think the essays are excellent, but I can’t imagine they would be more than marginally meaningful to anyone who hasn’t a familiarity not only with the six main subjects of their talks, but also with the many thinkers whose ideas they reference in such an off-hand manner, such as Ruskin, Carlyle, Bourdieu, Evelyn Higginbotham, and Jane Addams, to name but a very few.

      So who will the audience for this book be? At the very least, I hope it engenders people to realize it would be a very positive thing to gain familiarity with these six great Black philosophers. And I especially appreciated the outstanding concluding chapter on why the election of Barak Obama has been problematic for the progress of Black America. I would love to see that last chapter replicated in a magazine for a wider audience.

      My rating reflects my sense of the limited accessibility of this book, rather than its merits. Cornel West is absolutely brilliant, and it would be wonderful if his words could reach more people.
    • 3/5
      I was reading this book, Black Prophetic Fire, as one of its authors, Cornel West, was being arrested in Ferguson, MO for a nonviolent resistance. [10 Aug 2015] For that alone I would have liked to give this a five star, but I couldn't. Its audience is too limited, and its thesis too strong for me.

      These conversations of black history and theory are between Ph.D professors in African and African diaspora praxis, West and Buschendorf. The authors are very intelligent, engaged, and instructing individuals. This academic book is an exploration of African American resistance and the leadership thereof. It has a great index, its notes lead to other sources to continue research, and it is well organized, although not organized by chronology of subject lives.

      I am familiar with the the main individuals being discussed by Buschendorf and West, but only in a superficial way. I have read one or more books by Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, MLK,Jr, and Malcolm X. I have read biographies of Ella Baker and Ida B. Wells. I am not familiar with the philosophers and theoreticians the conversationalists mention throughout. I kept getting the idea that I would understand and like this book better if only I were smarter, knew German philosophers, or was embedded in the Black Community. Constant name-dropping of people I had never heard of, or knew of only peripherally was aggravating.

      Overall, the book took a long time for me to read, by my standards, and I never got past a feeling that Cornell and Buschendorf were painting with a very broad brush. There was also no evidence presented for her (Buschendorf's) theories.
      1) blacks (African Americans, not Africans or POC) are a special race or culture, distinctly different from whites.
      2) that culture / race is collectivist (we-centric), community based, even socialistic.
      3) good blacks are socialist / communal if not communist.
      4) bad blacks are individualists and/or capitalists
      5) prophetic does not need to be defined as it is obvious (not to me, at least not as they use the term).
      6) Cornell and Buschendorf are good blacks and President Obama is not.

    Book preview

    Black Prophetic Fire - Cornel West

    To the memory of two spiritual giants always full of Black prophetic fire:

    David Walker and Harriet Tubman

    That man has a truly noble nature

    Who, without flinching, still can face

    Our common plight, tell the truth

    With an honest tongue,

    Admit the evil lot we’ve been given

    And the abject, impotent condition we’re in;

    Who shows himself great and full of grace

    Under pressure. . . .

    —GIACOMO LEOPARDI

    winds of change are blowing

    i know because of the revolutionaries and most of all the people—

            the wretched of this earth

                   will be free

    —ERICKA HUGGINS

    CONTENTS

    INTRODUCTION  Why We Need to Talk About Black Prophetic Fire

    ONE  It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire—Frederick Douglass

    TWO  The Black Flame—W. E. B. Du Bois

    THREE  Moral Fire—Martin Luther King Jr.

    FOUR  The Heat of Democratic Existentialism—Ella Baker

    FIVE  Revolutionary Fire—Malcolm X

    SIX  Prophetic Fire—Ida B. Wells

    CONCLUSION  Last Words on the Black Prophetic Tradition in the Age of Obama

    NOTES

    WORKS CITED

    INDEX

    INTRODUCTION

    Why We Need to Talk About Black Prophetic Fire

    Are we witnessing the death of Black prophetic fire in our time? Are we experiencing the demise of the Black prophetic tradition in present-day America? Do the great prophetic figures and social movements no longer resonate in the depth of our souls? Have we forgotten how beautiful it is to be on fire for justice? These are some of the questions I wrestle with in this book.

    Since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., it is clear that something has died in Black America. The last great efforts for Black collective triumph were inspired by the massive rebellions in response to Dr. King’s murder. Yet these gallant actions were met with increasing repression and clever strategies of co-optation by the powers that be. The fundamental shift from a we-consciousness to an I-consciousness reflected not only a growing sense of Black collective defeat but also a Black embrace of the seductive myth of individualism in American culture. Black people once put a premium on serving the community, lifting others, and finding joy in empowering others. Today, most Black people have succumbed to individualistic projects in pursuit of wealth, health, and status. Black people once had a strong prophetic tradition of lifting every voice. Today, most Black people engage in the petty practice of chasing dollars. American society is ruled by big money, and American culture is a way of life obsessed with money. This is true for capitalist societies and cultures around the world. The Black prophetic tradition—along with the prophetic traditions of other groups—is a strong counter-force to these tendencies of our times. Integrity cannot be reduced to cupidity, decency cannot be reduced to chicanery, and justice cannot be reduced to market price. The fundamental motivation for this book is to resurrect Black prophetic fire in our day—especially among the younger generation. I want to reinvigorate the Black prophetic tradition and to keep alive the memory of Black prophetic figures and movements. I consider the Black prophetic tradition one of the greatest treasures in the modern world. It has been the leaven in the American democratic loaf. Without the Black prophetic tradition, much of the best of America would be lost and some of the best of the modern world would be forgotten.

    All the great figures in this book courageously raised their voices in order to bear witness to people’s suffering. These Black prophetic figures are connected to collective efforts to overcome injustice and make the world a better place for everyone. Even as distinct individuals, they are driven by a we-consciousness that is concerned with the needs of others. More importantly, they are willing to renounce petty pleasures and accept awesome burdens. Tremendous sacrifice and painful loneliness sit at the center of who they are and what they do. Yet we are deeply indebted to who they were and what they did.

    Unfortunately, their mainstream reception is shaped according to the cultural icon of the self-made man or the individual charismatic leader. This is especially true for the male figures. This is not to say that they did not fulfill the function of leaders and speakers of their organizations. But I want to point out that any conception of the charismatic leader severed from social movements is false. I consider leaders and movements to be inseparable. There is no Frederick Douglass without the Abolitionist movement. There is no W. E. B. Du Bois without the Pan-Africanist, international workers’, and Black freedom movements. There is no Martin Luther King Jr. without the anti-imperialist, workers’, and civil rights movements. There is no Ella Baker without the anti-US-apartheid and Puerto Rican independence movements. There is no Malcolm X without the Black Nationalist and human rights movements. And there is no Ida B. Wells without the anti-US-terrorist and Black women’s movements.

    There is a gender difference in regard to men’s and women’s roles assigned in social movements. This shapes their reception in history books and in popular culture. Male figures are prominent on the basis of their highly visible positions. They often are chosen to represent the movement, usually due to their charismatic qualities. Yet despite the charisma of many women leaders, it is difficult for them to be chosen to represent the movement. They are often confined to untiring efforts in organizing the movement. As a consequence, even when women give speeches, even when they contribute to the political thinking of movements, their words are not taken as seriously as they ought to be. One of the aims of our dialogues about the Black prophetic tradition is to bear witness to the fiery prophetic spirit of Ida B. Wells by presenting examples of her fearless speech and action, and to bear witness to the deep democratic sensibilities of Ella Baker, who understood better than any of the others the fundamental role of movements in bringing about fundamental social change.

    This book becomes even more important in the age of Obama, precisely because the presence of a Black president in the White House complicates our understanding of the Black prophetic tradition. If high status in American society and white points of reference are the measure of the Black freedom movement, then this moment in Black history is the ultimate success. But if the suffering of Black people—especially Black poor and working people—is the ultimate measure of the Black freedom movement, then this moment in Black history is catastrophic—sadly continuous with the past. With the Black middle class losing nearly 60 percent of its wealth, the Black working class devastated with stagnating wages and increasing prices, and the Black poor ravaged by massive unemployment, decrepit schools, indecent housing, and hyperincarceration in the new Jim Crow, the age of Obama looks bleak through the lens of the Black prophetic tradition. This prophetic viewpoint is not a personal attack on a Black president; rather it is a wholesale indictment of the system led by a complicitous Black president.

    The Black prophetic tradition highlights the crucial role of social movements in the United States and abroad. The Occupy Wall Street movement was a global response to the thirty-year class war from above, which pushed the middle class into the ranks of the working class and poor, and even further exacerbated the sufferings of working-class and poor people. The 2008 financial crisis, primarily caused by the systemic greed of unregulated Wall Street oligarchs and their bailout by the Wall Street–dominated US government, revealed the degree to which American society is ruled by big money. And the fact that not one Wall Street bank executive—despite massive criminality on Wall Street—has gone to jail, while any poor and, especially, Black person caught with crack goes straight to prison, shows just how unjust our justice system is. The realities of the power of big banks and corporations are hidden and concealed by a corporate media that specializes in generating weapons of mass distraction. This systemic concealment also holds for the military-industrial complex, be it the Pentagon or the CIA. Rarely are the death-dealing activities of both institutions made public to the American citizenry. And courageous whistle-blowers—such as Chelsea Manning, Julian Assange, John Kiriakou, and Edward Snowden—who reveal to the public the corrupt activities of the US government are severely punished. Even the recent discussions about drones dropping bombs on innocent civilians remain confined to American citizens. The thousands of non-American civilian victims—including hundreds of children—receive little or no attention in the corporate media. The Black prophetic tradition claims that the life of a precious baby in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Haiti, Gaza, Tel Aviv, Lagos, Bogotá, or anywhere else has the same value as a precious baby in the USA.

    The Black prophetic tradition accents the fightback of poor and working people, be it in the United States against big money, be it in the Middle East against Arab autocratic rule or Israeli occupation, be it against African authoritarian governments abetted by US forces or Chinese money, be it in Latin America against oligarchic regimes in collaboration with big banks and corporations, or be it in Europe against austerity measures that benefit big creditors and punish everyday people. In short, the Black prophetic tradition is local in content and international in character.

    The deep hope shot through this dialogue is that Black prophetic fire never dies, that the Black prophetic tradition forever flourishes, and that a new wave of young brothers and sisters of all colors see and feel that it is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice and that there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others—especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!

    —CW

    It was November 1999. On the occasion of the publication of The Cornel West Reader, Harvard’s African American studies department honored the author for his outstanding academic achievements, and it was announced that Cornel West would give a talk in Emerson Hall, the home of Harvard’s philosophy department, in Harvard Yard. I was on sabbatical doing research in the Harvard libraries, revising a book-length manuscript on the US reception of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. I decided to seize the opportunity to hear one of the stars of the widely praised dream team that Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. had brought together. I had heard much about West, but I had read very little—and I was in for a great surprise.

    In his talk, West directed the audience’s attention to the life-size portraits of Harvard’s Golden Age of Philosophy, which adorn the walls of the lecture hall. They include, among others, William James and Josiah Royce, who figure prominently in West’s book about American pragmatism, The Evasion of American Philosophy. Then, to my amazement, West started to talk about Royce’s lifelong struggle with Schopenhauer’s profound pessimism. Royce, he explained, was convinced that one had to come to terms with this philosopher’s dark yet realistic view of the omnipresent suffering and sorrow in human life. But, West claimed, as much as Royce wrestled with Schopenhauer, he would not give in to Schopenhauer’s hopelessness but, rather, would resort to the only option to Schopenhauerian pessimism: a leap of faith. I couldn’t believe my ears!

    After the lecture I introduced myself to Cornel West and said that my work-in-progress was related to Schopenhauer (and to Royce, for that matter). He answered, Well, I heard there is a woman in Germany who works on the reception of Schopenhauer in America. Yes, I said, that’s me. We have to talk, he said. And since then we have been in conversation.

    By now I am, of course, aware of the fact that given Schopenhauer’s focus on human suffering and his great compassion with all living beings, Cornel West’s interest in his work does not come as a surprise. Nor does his attention to Royce because notwithstanding West’s unflinching acknowledgment of the deep sense of the tragic in human lives, he has remained what he calls a prisoner of hope. In fact, West’s strong affinity to these philosophers derives from the fact that the questions they raised have been fundamental to his own thinking and, moreover, to his understanding of American democracy. After all, as West confesses in the lecture Pragmatism and the Tragic, he believes, like Melville, that a deep sense of evil in the tragic must inform the meaning and value of democracy.¹ If, as West expounds in the same text, a sense of the tragic is an attempt to keep alive some sense of possibility. Some sense of hope. Some sense of agency. Some sense of resistance in a moment of defeat and disillusionment and a moment of discouragement,² then who is better qualified to understand this than Black people? After all, as West reminds us, Malcolm X’s definition of a nigger is a victim of American democracy.³

    But in contrast to Schopenhauer, Royce, and Melville, Cornel West is an activist not just of the word but also of the deed. This is why the twentieth-century Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci and his concept of the organic intellectual is a key figure in these dialogues on the Black prophetic tradition. As West has professed repeatedly, his own thinking and activism have been inspired by the Gramscian notion that intellectuals should be rooted in or closely tied to cultural groups or social organizations. Again, this is not surprising, for the practical counterpart to Gramsci’s theoretical concept is the long history of the Black struggle for freedom, in which the firm entrenchment of leaders in their group’s organizations has been a vital practice.

    My own contributions to our transatlantic dialogue have been very much shaped by the theory of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. Black prophetic leaders are clear-sighted observers of the various kinds of violence Black people experience as a group and as individuals. Consequently, they tend to look at the evils of their day through a lens resembling a sociological view, which allows them to lay bare the power imbalances deeply ingrained in society. Yet they do so without ever losing sight of the concrete suffering of Black people. To understand their logic of practice (a term coined by Bourdieu that refers to the need to overcome the binary opposition of theory and practice) and, more generally, to reach a better understanding of the situation of Black people in America, I have found Bourdieu’s concepts immensely helpful. Bourdieu assumes that there is a correlation between the structures of the social world and the mental structures of agents, so that divisions in society—divisions that, for example, establish and reproduce power relations between the dominant and the dominated—correspond to the principles of vision and division individuals apply to them. In addition to an insight into the thoroughly relational character of the social world, which implies a refutation of the myth of individualism, Bourdieu also offers precise analyses of mechanisms of power. One of the core concepts of Bourdieu’s theory is the notion of symbolic violence. Being soft and inconspicuous, this type of symbolic force is an apt means to naturalize the social order and thus sustain its inherent inequalities. There is a striking passage in one of Bourdieu’s major books, Pascalian Meditations, in which he draws on a passage from James Baldwin’s essay Down at the Cross in The Fire Next Time in order to illustrate the subtle psychosocial mechanisms of symbolic violence and their function and consequences in the socialization of a Black child. According to Bourdieu, Baldwin’s description shows how Black parents unconsciously pass on the dominant vision and division of the social world, as well as their intense fear of that dominant power and the no-less-terrifying anxiety that their child will be harmed by transgressing the invisible boundaries. Baldwin writes:

    Long before the Negro child perceives this difference, and even longer before he understands it, he has begun to react to it, he has begun to be controlled by it. Every effort made by the child’s elders to prepare him for a fate from which they cannot protect him causes him secretly, in terror, to begin to await, without knowing that he is doing so, his mysterious and inexorable punishment. He must be good not only in order to please his parents and not only to avoid being punished by them; behind their authority stands another, nameless and impersonal, infinitely harder to please, and bottomlessly cruel. And this filters into the child’s consciousness through his parents’ tone of voice as he is being exhorted, punished, or loved; in the sudden, uncontrollable note of fear heard in his mother’s or his father’s voice when he has strayed beyond some particular boundary. He does not know what the boundary is, and he can get no explanation of it, which is frightening enough, but the fear he hears in the voices of his elders is more frightening still.⁴

    Baldwin, himself a powerful prophetic voice in the Black literary tradition, addresses both the structural power imbalances and injustices of the social order, and the terror the dominant evoke in the dominated, who suffer from the violence exerted upon them be it physical or symbolic.

    And so do each of the great six prophetic figures we discuss in our dialogues. Obviously, they are all prophets of the past who battled against very specific ills of their day. But though these particular evils may have vanished—owing in part to the very battles the prophets fought and the sacrifices they made—the power differential and resulting inequalities are still deeply ingrained in the social order, although they exist under a different name. To give but one example, the symbolic violence of signs reading whites only, which once divided social space into privileged and unprivileged sites and erected boundaries that served the functions of excluding, denigrating, and controlling the dominated, today is exerted in the practice of racial profiling called stop and frisk. Thus, though we have to contextualize the historic figures we talk about so that we may appreciate their merits, as well as understand their shortcomings, we should also be aware of their exemplary natures, which enabled them to transcend the horizon of their times and become relevant to us today.

    Given that we touch upon current political events in these talks, we decided to print the conversations in the order they were recorded rather than in the chronological order of the historical figures we discuss.

    As outstanding intellectuals, all the Black prophetic figures in this book offer astute analyses of the mechanisms of power that help us discern these very mechanisms in the different shapes they take today. As organic intellectuals and activists, they reflect on problems of organizing and mobilizing that may provide useful insights for today’s freedom fights. And as prophets who compassionately and fearlessly face both the evils of our world and the powers that be, they inspire us to do the same.

    This is why we need to talk about Black prophetic fire!

    —CHB

    Frederick Douglass, c. 1850–1860

    CHAPTER ONE

    It’s a Beautiful Thing to Be on Fire

    FREDERICK DOUGLASS

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

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

    We recorded our dialogue on Frederick Douglass in the summer of 2009.

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

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

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

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

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

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

     CHB: But what about his speech against lynching?³

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

    You say: "Oh Frederick, Frederick, oh my God! How could you allow that to take place, given who you are, given the tremendous respect that is so well earned that people have for you, especially Black people but all freedom-loving people, and the degree

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