Читать книгу Cedric Robinson - Joshua Myers - Страница 9

When he was asked, Cedric cited his maternal grandfather, Winston “Cap” Whiteside, who for much of his life worked as a janitor, as a primary intellectual influence.¹ Intellectual genealogies, like familial genealogies, evoke relationships across time, premised on cultural or philosophical ideals that determine the nature of those relations. In most academic treatments, conceptions of intellectual genealogies privilege intellectuals in the “formal” sense, even when those presences are not acknowledged or are obscured in the citation practices that accompany a text. But Black thought has always taken seriously the intellectual influences that exist beyond the patina of scholarly legitimacy and in locations that are unbound by relationships to conventional western educational environments. Blackness, insofar as it is a repository of African cultural meanings, produces another way to think genealogy, intellectual or otherwise.² In Cedric’s case, there are many instances that point to the imprint that Cap – who never wrote an academic text – had upon his conception of Black being, his orientation toward the meaning of Black radicalism. And in one important case, a direct citation – a natural inclusion of Cap as part of that tradition – was present all along.

In Black Movements in America, a text that deftly traces the continuity of mass Black political action throughout the history of the American project, Cedric contextualizes the “push” factors of early twentieth-century Black migration in the United States with a story about his own grandfather. One day, sometime in 1927, the manager of the Battle House Hotel – a white elite enclave of Mobile, Alabama – attempted to “exercise his sexual privileges,” with a maid named Cecilia, Cap’s wife. According to Cedric’s account, “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.” A white hotel manager, heir to the long tradition of white sexual violence against Black women, was “chastened” by a Black man, heir to a tradition of resistance to that imposition. That tradition thrived among a significant segment of Black Alabama, as well as the Black South writ large, and through both word and deed asserted that white supremacist violence against Black women were terms of order that would not be accepted.³ Resistance, however, also meant that Cap Whiteside could no longer stay in Mobile. Concluding the story, Robinson added: “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.”⁴ It was in Oakland that one of those daughters, Clara, gave birth to Cedric a little over a decade later.

In retelling this story days after Robinson’s transition, Robin D. G. Kelley reminded us that Cap’s influence registered in Cedric’s commitment to understanding not only the historical and political realities of the Black experience but also its spiritual meaning – for this is how he also understood those conditions of Black existence. Kelley writes that it was Cap who represented the “personal dignity, discipline, quiet intelligence, spiritual grounding, courage, and commitment to family and community” that served as the foundation for that alternative tradition, what Cedric would characterize in his conception as “the Black Radical tradition.”⁵ What he would write of the radical intelligentsia was also true of his own life. This was a tradition that was “all around” him, present in the midst of his people – in their search for a level of autonomy in Mobile, in their migration to Oakland, in the community they forged in their churches and neighborhoods, in their common pursuit of knowing, and in the love they produced out of what may have seemed a kind of nothingness.⁶ In times of trouble and in moments of joy, this was their ontological totality. The horizons of the possibility of a Black Radical tradition constituted a theme that Cedric would pursue throughout his intellectual work, but perhaps nowhere more beautifully than in the conclusion to Black Movements in America, where in a note of resolution he honors “the continuity of Afro-Christian belief and vision … with them it is always possible that the next Black social movement will obtain that distant land, perhaps even transporting America with it.”⁷

Figure 1.1 Cedric Robinson with Winston Whiteside

Image courtesy of Elizabeth Robinson

All around him were these people, his people. They know that life, Black being, had required struggle. Their faith was the warrant for extending that tradition. One did not have to see what the end would be. One only had to believe in this collective intelligence that had been gathered from struggle.⁸