Black Prophetic Fire - A Review

By Kurt Stand

On October 14, Cornel West spoke to a capacity crowd at the 5^th and K Street Busboys and Poets bringing a message of hope and determination in the struggle for justice, a struggle that has grown sharper in recent years.  The occasion was publication of West’s new book, Black Prophetic Fire – an exploration of the contemporary relevance of the legacies left by Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. DuBois, Ella Baker, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X.   A set of dialogues with Christa Buschendorf (a German scholar at the University of Frankfurt/Main specializing in African-American studies), the work emphasizes how these figures championed a different, alternative conception of US democracy by uniting demands for racial and economic justice.

Rejecting the caricatures and simplifications by which history remembers them, West reminds us of the prophetic tradition – the “Black Fire” referred to in the title – within the African American community, a tradition which strove for liberation from the shackles of racism by positing a vision of human liberation.   Each leader he discusses, in his or her own unique way, connected the dots that link the pervasive social and personal alienation inherent in a system of racial privilege to the exploitation and violence that pervades everyday life.   Thus, as they spoke out and organized against the horrors of slavery, lynching, and segregation, they sought not acceptance into an oppressive system, but rather social transformation that would make society worthy of inclusion.   Whether we look at the largely forgotten Ida B. Wells, whose pioneering role documenting the scourge of lynching served as a precursor to Progressive Era muckraking, or recall DuBois, whose towering intellectual importance has been placed in a corner by anti-Communism, dominant historical narratives leave out the substance of the struggles for equality that have been at the core of political struggles throughout our history.