Brother West (10 page)

“You may well be right, but I’m here to listen to your point of view.”

“From the Nation’s point of view, you disrespected one of our ministers, just as Malcolm disrespected the Honorable Elijah Muhammad. Do you realize what Minister Muhammad meant to Malcolm?”

“I do,” I said. “I’ve always believed that there’s no Malcolm without Elijah. Elijah’s love for Malcolm was deep, rich, and resurrecting. I’ve never denied this. But you all be calling the brother a dog, and I can never allow that. Not in public. That’s a level of disrespect that’s too much.”

“Our platform and our philosophy are sacred to us,” said the brother.

“I understand that, but you can see where I’m coming from.”

“Yes, but are you able to feel where
I’m
coming from?”

The brother had a point. At first our dialogue was tense, but when I kicked back a bit and allowed myself to listen—and listen from the heart—we started connecting. Ultimately, we had a wonderful conversation. But that was only possible when I tried to put myself in his shoes. Wasn’t that I changed my mind or that he changed his. It was just a matter of giving each other space to be heard. After a couple of hours of exploring each other’s backgrounds, we got closer. Empathy overwhelmed anger. By the end of the evening, the brother assured me that all was cool. I no longer had anything to worry about. Mutual respect was in place.

My incident with the Nation raised my profile and was one of the reasons I was elected co-president with Kevin Mercadel of the Black Student Association. In that capacity I invited prominent speakers. At the top of my list was Imamu Amiri Baraka, a seminal man of letters, a revolutionary black nationalist, and a mesmerizing poet. I had the high honor of introducing him.

I read off his many credits and praised him to the sky, saying something about democratic socialism and the European cultural tradition that had helped shape us all. Well, when Baraka came to the microphone, he turned on me like I was Satan himself. He said it was insulting to be introduced by a two-bit Eurocentric wrong-headed boot-licking pseudo-Marxist slave to Western thought. Meanwhile, as he went on, I was thinking to myself,
Lord have mercy, what is wrong with this Negro?

Anyone who knew me understood that I always gave props to the European minds and hearts that inspired me. But Baraka didn’t know me. He was digging deep into his black nationalist bag. Any whiff of European appreciation coming from a black man made him crazy.

We spoke afterward and I argued my position. I think Baraka was taken aback by an eighteen-year-old who came on so strong, but when he saw I could hold my own, he reluctantly offered respect. I explained that I look for intellectual riches wherever I can find them—America, Africa, Asia, Europe. “Wise men and women have emerged from every culture and country,” I said, “and I don’t want to cut off any source of strength.” Baraka warned me about the dangers of European thinking. I argued for the advantages of universal thinking. We went back and forth, didn’t really get anywhere, but decades later we became friends. In fact, when Baraka’s son ran for the City Council in Newark, I spent a day knocking on doors for him. I was eager for Ras Baraka to serve as a critical contrasting voice for my dear brother Cory Booker, whose mayoral candidacy I had strongly backed.

D
URING MY UNDERGRADUATE YEARS
students at Harvard took protest to the highest level yet—we staged the biggest strike in the history of the university. Black students took over the president’s office to demand Harvard divest its holdings in Gulf Oil, a colonialist exploiter and amoral force in the international marketplace. Our militancy paid off when the president finally agreed.

Ferment continued to brew over recently inaugurated black studies departments coast to coast. The old guard of African American intellectuals could not accept the concept. John Hope Franklin, a black scholar who stands as one of America’s supreme historians, had received his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1941. From his endowed position at the University of Chicago, he refused to be associated with black studies. Like my dear brother, the scholar Nathan A. Scott, Franklin shared the views of my mentor, Professor Kilson. These monumental figures had invested a lifetime in the prevailing disciplinary division of knowledge.

They resented Ewart Guinier, Jr., who had been appointed the first head of Harvard’s Department of Afro–American Studies. Guinier was certainly not a scholar—he didn’t even have a Ph.D.— but he had forged a distinguished career as a trade unionist and political activist. He’d gone to Harvard as an undergraduate where he’d been spit on by white students and barred from the dorms. He’d gone through discriminatory hell and had little use for the Harvard administration. That, of course, made him a favorite of many student radicals. With his enormous white Afro and toughminded anti-establishment attitude, Guinier was beloved by the students.

I could understand why the old guard reacted so strongly against Guinier. Their scholastic structure was under attack. Despite my love for many of those venerable professors, I opposed the old guard. I stood with my fellow students, convinced then— as I am now—of the need to break down the old paradigm that tended to marginalize black humanity.

“C
LIFF
,” I
SAID
, “
YOU AIN
’
T GONNA
believe this, man.”

“What’s wrong, Corn?”

Cliff knew something was wrong because I hardly ever called from college. We couldn’t afford it.

“Calling you from jail, bro.”

“Jail!”

“The Cambridge police took us. We down here now, right across the street from the City Hall.”

“What happened?”

“Accused of rape.”

“Rape!”

“Me and my two roommates. They hauled all three of us down here.”

“Corn, I can’t believe it.”

“Girl down the hallway got raped. Said it was a black dude. So they just came by and arrested us.”

“I’ll get a plane right now,” said Cliff. “I’ll be there in the morning.”

“Don’t do that, man. Let me see if I can get it worked out first. None of us touched the lady, so there’s no evidence of any kind.”

“Is she white?”

“She’s white.”

“Then the police don’t need no evidence. I’m catching a plane.”

“Stay put for a day or two, Cliff. And don’t say anything to Mom or Dad. I don’t want them worrying.”

“You know a lawyer?”

“We’ll get someone to help us. But if you don’t hear from me in a couple of days, then head on out here.”

I had good reason to worry. This was the first year the Harvard dorms were coed. The idea of men and women living on the same floor was worrisome to some. The idea of black men being close to white women was even more worrisome to others.

My roommates and I, all black brothers, found ourselves in the lockup, no questions asked. We demanded a lawyer, but the lawyer didn’t come around in time to spring us for the night. We were given no information except that we were suspects in a rape charge. Didn’t matter that the woman said she was raped by one man. All three of us were being held.

We each could account for our whereabouts when the rape happened. Our innocence was absolutely provable, but when you’re sitting in a cold jail cell, you start thinking about the jacked-up cases involving so-called sexual assaults by black men on white women. You start worrying that, no matter the facts, the system is designed to hang you. You work your head off in high school; you get good grades. Against all odds, you make it into Harvard and then, just like that, you wind up spending your young life in prison for something you didn’t do.

“They can rig this thing anyway they wanna,” said my roommate, Brother Paul.

“They probably already have,” said my roommate, Brother Lenny.

“This is some funky stuff,” I said.

I hardly slept that night, and when I did, nothing but nightmares.

In the morning, we were called into an office to face the girl. We knew her and she knew us. She looked frightened and confused. As terrified as I was about what could happen to me and my friends, my heart went out to her.

The white detective doing the interrogation was strong-minded and insistent. His questioning was harsh.

“You sure you were raped?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure it was a black man?”

“Yes.”

“Was it these men?”

“It was only one man.”

“Well,” said the detective, “was it
one
of these three?”

She swallowed hard before answering. Only a few seconds passed, but, man, it felt like a lifetime.

“No,” said the lady.

We exhaled.

“You sure?” asked the detective.

“I’m sure.”

“I’m not sure you’re sure,” said the man. “I think you’re afraid. These guys can’t hurt you anymore.”

“They never did hurt me.”

“I want you to close your eyes now,” said the detective, “count to ten and then open them again.”

She closed her eyes, counted to ten, and opened them.

“Okay,” he said. “Take a deep breath and look around. These guys live right down the hall from you. They’ve been watching you. They’ve been studying you. They have access to you. I know these kinda guys all look alike, but study them, study them good.”

She studied us. Again we held our breath. Again, this woman spoke the truth. “They didn’t do it,” she said.

Yet the more she exonerated us, the more the detective pushed her. For a third time he asked her to reconsider her assessment, and for a third time she held fast. Much to the chagrin of the Cambridge Police Department, we were released. And we were so glad that the white sister told the truth. Her example convinced me even more how sublime the courage to bear witness to truth and justice can be.

WHAT’S GOING ON:
LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN
AND/OR AL GREEN?

E
DUCATION AT HARVARD HAD TO
do with learning the masters. My masters were the world’s leading philosophers who wrestled with the questions of how to live. I devoured books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Though I read voraciously, I like to think I also read critically. In the great Socratic mode, I was taught to question, question, question. But if the thinker was astute, if his ideas were original and his explanations eloquent, I could vigorously question and still remain fascinated.

Early on, I didn’t embrace a Cartesian tradition or dream of transparency. That’s the thinking that says reasoning leads to indubitable certainty. I embraced a sense of history, like Hegel or Marx, so that all reasoning is contextual—yet truth does exist even if we never fully reach it.

Now thinkers like Hegel and Marx had subtle minds. Their critiques demand careful study. And naturally I believe that critical energy, applied to any body of information, can unearth some truth. But for every unearthing, you don’t find absolute truth— you find another fallible truth, and then still another. That’s because each revelation is tied to another concealment. You reveal what’s been concealed, only to repeat the process into infinity. Enlightenment has no end. The paradoxes are never resolved.

In 1971, at age eighteen, my paradoxes went unresolved. At age fifty-six, the same is still true. I was excited about discovering my calling. I had to teach. I still have to teach—teaching as I had been taught—with loving passion for uncovering and recovering vital knowledge and wise insights that lead to intellectual clarity and moral growth.

The knowledge and insights could be found in textbooks, but they were also just as powerfully present in music. The music contained the paradoxes, expressed the paradoxes, and exploded the paradoxes with such a sense of heightened joy and rhythmic wonder that all we could do was dance the night away.

It was in 1971, working and studying and dealing with an America in the throes of massive confusion, that I heard Marvin Gaye’s
What’s Going On
. It was everything I wanted, everything I needed. It was the ideological/theological feast of funk that got me—and countless others, black and white, yellow and brown— through these years of uncertainty and fear. Marvin worked with uncertainty and fear. They were his emotional clay. He molded them into things of lyrical beauty. His answer to the profound question “What’s going on?” was in the imagery of his songs. Police brutality. Ghettoes ravaged by drugs. Boys going off to die in an unconscionable war. A planet ravaged by greed and waste. A political landscape of hopelessness. Yet hope comes. Hope emerges from his gut-bucket black Christian faith, a faith powerful enough to transcend the sins of his own Christian father and have Marvin believe—believe to the very end of his life—in the transformational miracle of love seen from the cross. Like Marvin’s ethereal suite of songs, that love does not deny calamity or scandal. It sees injustice, just as Jesus saw injustice, as a worldly reality to be transcended through a funky faith. Marvin calls this faith the “Wholy Holy.” It’s nothing more or less than the love ethos, the love that lasts forever, the love that leads us from darkness to light.

So I was listening to Marvin, I was listening to Stevie telling us
Where I’m Coming From
, and then, at the start of my junior year at Harvard, I was listening to the Spinners singing about “How could I let you get away?” when I spotted this brown-eyed angel. I had to ask her to dance. We took off—mind, body, and spirit—and the Spinners were working it out, the Spinners were saying it for me: “Girl, I’m kinda glad you walked into my life.” The Spinners were bringing us closer together, Philippe Wynne whispering in this girl’s ear, “It takes a fool to learn that love don’t love nobody.” The Spinners breaking into “Mighty Love.”

This sister had style. Beauty. Brilliance. She was a knockout. I was smitten and smitten bad. One dance led to another. She was a freshman at Radcliffe and her name was Mary Johnson. Years later she’d become the first black woman to earn a Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard. But on that night of nights, when fate smiled and the planet tilted in my direction, she was just a young thing, filled with promise and boundless energy. Soon she’d become the most important woman in this stage of my life.