Brother West by Cornel West

Negroes. Who was I, a seventeen-year-old kid, to challenge him? I respected his scholarship, respected his position at Harvard, respected his place as an accomplished black man in the white world of academia. I also respected how he showed me respect. The man never talked down to me. When he discovered that I held a different view than his own, he argued energetically but never condescendingly. I wrote a long paper on the Black Panther Party in Kilson’s famous course, Social Sciences 132—and he gave me an A!
    As the faculty–student wars heated up in the early ’70s, Kilson would find himself in a tough position. Because he opposed a separate department for black studies—after all, he had worked to assimilate into the university’s structure, not to separate from it—the radicals sometimes called him an Uncle Tom.
    I was with the radicals. I thought the creation of black studies required official recognition and considerable resources. But to insult Kilson would be as painful as insulting my own father. Far as I was concerned, he had paid the dues to tell the news. His news was different than mine. From where I was sitting, it looked like old news. But he was entitled to say what he had to say without being ridiculed. Unfortunately, this was an era of ridicule, one generation looking to shame another.
    My focus stayed on the studies, not only because the studies held me spellbound—I loved learning Hebrew, for example, and reading the Hebrew scripture—but I had my scholarship to maintain. Keeping in mind, though, what Dad had told me about caring for my people, I decided, beyond my work at Pleasant Hill Baptist, to do a prison outreach. Seemed like the brothers and sisters behind bars needed to know that those of us on the outside—and especially those of us fortunate enough to attend college—cared about them. They needed to be taught, just as we were being taught.
    O N CAMPUS, THERE WERE SOME marvelous students—such as Sylvester Monroe and Karl Strom—who gave me a sense of family and home. In my dorm room, I hung two pictures on the wall: Malcolm X and Albert Einstein.
    “How come those two?” asked my roommate James Brown— not the singer but the extraordinary brother who would become an outstanding national sportscaster. Beautiful brother.
    “Well,” I said, “Einstein’s probably the baddest scientist of the past hundred years and Malcolm inspires me.”
    “Aren’t you more of a Martin man?” asked James.
    “I am, but one doesn’t cancel out the other. I’m loving them both, just the way both of them loved us.”
    “Talking about a lovin’ brother,” said James, “Muhammad Ali is talking on campus tomorrow.”
    “What?” I didn’t know.
    “You been too busy cleaning those toilets.”
    “What time is he talking?”
    “Noon,” said James.
    “That’s toilet-cleaning time.”
    “Well, I know Valerie’s going,” said James, referring to a girl I was crazy about. “Once the Champ gets a look at Valerie, you will be out of the picture.”
    “That’s another reason for me to go,” I said. “I got to protect Valerie.”
    James laughed and left.
    I couldn’t sleep that night. I had to see the Champ. I viewed Ali as the athletic equivalent of Dr. King. He had big love for his people. He had big courage. He thought beyond narrow nationalism and conventional views of patriotism. Mainly, he represented his own view of integrity. He did what he had to do. He spoke the unvarnished truth. When he said that no North Vietnamese had ever called him a nigger, that made sense. When he said he had nothing against the North Vietnamese people, that made even more sense. He had reached the pinnacle of celebrity in the paradigm of American sports, and then turned that paradigm on its head. He converted to Islam out of conviction. Even devout Christians like my dad loved Ali for his guts and honesty, not to mention his skill. I had to see this brother in person. Like Richard Pryor, and Dizzy