William Jelani Cobb Remembers His Mother

Children Remember Their Mother's Influence

by NPR Staff

William Anthony Cobb's friends know him to be outspoken. They think the 42-year-old developed that trait in law school, but he says it's genetic.

Cobb credits his mother, Mary Cobb, because she was "prone to some rather long-winded debates about just about everything" when he and his sister were growing up.

"You should be able to talk to a person in the Bowery as well as to the president of the United States," he remembers her telling him. "Then you can say that you are a well-rounded, well-educated person."

Mary died in February at the age of 67. She had pancreatic cancer — the same kind of cancer that killed her husband, Willie Lee Cobb, in 1992.

Before Mary died, she and her son reminisced. Cobb remembers finishing his doctorate. There were thousands of people at his graduation, and Mary was about 10 rows away from the stage. "And only my son gets up and walks down the middle of the aisle. I didn't know why you got up, and I said, 'Oh my God, I hope he doesn't have to go to the bathroom,' " she said at the time, laughing.

Listen @ NPR

William Jelani Cobb: " Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow"

from The Nation

Cleveland, Texas and Gender Jim Crow
by William Jelani Cobb | March 29, 2011

In the three weeks since the New York Times [1] broke the story [1] of a child’s rape there, the events in Cleveland, Texas, have morphed into a category five media storm. The Times piece, which echoed and amplified currents of victim-blaming in the town, generated a tide of criticism. Yet beneath the outrage was a parable of modern media. Aside from the familiar and incendiary themes it contained, the Times article seemed an object lesson in what happens when cash-strapped newspapers parachute a reporter into a complex situation hoping for coverage on the cheap. In-depth coverage requires resources and the time to do the deliberate, painstaking gathering of facts that were in short supply in James McKinley’s article. “The New York Times,” as one friend put it, “can no longer afford nuance.”

Add to that equation the fact that Twitter-orchestrated protests, web petitions and Facebook posts pushed the Times to apologize (or at least come close to it), and our understanding of the gang rape of an 11-year-old girl becomes yet another front in the battles between old and new media. Even the way the assault became public knowledge—digital images traded around on cellphones—seems to be part of the narrative of modern technology and information.

Yet for all this modernity, the most troubling aspect of the ongoing fallout from Cleveland is the way it resurrects themes of race, sexual violence and provincialism long interred in American history. Some weeks ago I taught students in my civil rights history class about the plague of lynching, which claimed the lives of more than 3,000 African-Americans in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Beyond the horror of the organized murder of black citizens, students were most troubled by the recreational nature of it all: the images of smiling white citizens, fathers and sons, upstanding Christians gathered in fellowship around the smoldering ruin of a black body—all preserved on postcards.

If you asked any of these people in the abstract if it is right to hang a person, set him on fire and then riddle the body with bullets, they would likely have called those actions illegal and sinful. But there is an asterisk: unless that person was black; unless he had demanded his wages, or been to slow to vacate a sidewalk when a white person walked by, or been “unpopular” (these are all actual reasons cited for lynching). These are actions of people who have been given a moral escape clause, an asterisk in which upstanding Christians can sate the demonic appetites of their collective id. Thus an act of abomination becomes a moment worthy of commemorating with a photograph.

I thought about that discussion of lynching again as news spread that the alleged perpetrators were so utterly secure in the righteousness of their act that some of them snapped pictures or recorded footage on their cellphones. We have, in 2011, reached a point when the public display of charred human remains is no longer acceptable. But the response of some of the citizens of Cleveland, Texas, to this horrific assault has brought us face to face with a kind of gender Jim Crow. Here the asterisk is not failure to conform to racial etiquette but the lax adherence to an equally stringent gender code, one where “innocent” is a relative concept and rape, like lynching, can be elevated nearly to the level of civic responsibility.

Read the Full Essay @ The Nation

'Left of Black': Episode #10 featuring William Jelani Cobb & Bassey Ikpi

Left of Black: Episode # 10

w/Mark Anthony Neal

Monday, November 22, 2010

Host and Duke University Professor Mark Anthony Neal talks with William Jelani Cobb author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and spoken-word poet Bassey Ikpi.

Cobb is Professor of History and Africana Studies at Rutgers University and the author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic and The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays.

The Nigerian born Ikpi, is a Washington, D.C. based mental health advocate and writer who blogs at Bassey World

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Also available for download from iTunes U

From the Belly of the Beast (New Birth Missionary Bapist Church)

Long Odds
by William Jelani Cobb

The cars began streaming into the parking lot at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church even before the sun had risen. On a normal Sunday church traffic chokes the off-ramps at Interstate 20, down to Bishop Eddie Long Boulevard that leads onto the grounds. This, as the news vans lining Bishop Eddie Long Boulevard attested, was not a normal Sunday.

For those who had no knowledge of Eddie Long before charges of sexual coercion were leveled at him last week it's difficult to convey Eddie Long's niche in the Atlanta ecosystem. He presides over a massive institution, with reportedly more than 25,000 members. On I-85, just north of the airport, a titanic billboard featuring Long's image greets commuters. The caption reads "Live like him, Lead like him, Love like him." The him is presumably a reference to Jesus Christ, but it's Long's image drivers see, not the Nazarene carpenter. The church campus sits on 250 acres of land in suburban Lithonia but it is inescapably linked to Atlanta's religious culture.

Long is arguably the pre-eminent black proponent of the prosperity gospel and his message of financial deliverance dovetailed neatly with Atlanta's credo of visible black success. More than a handful of his critics have seen New Birth as a counterpoint to Ebenezer Baptist, the church co-pastored by Martin Luther King, Sr. and Jr. Where King led an inner-city congregation and emphasized the biblical mandate to pursue social justice, Long's sprawling compound is miles outside Atlanta and he is more likely to exalt the possibilities of grand financial success.

Nor are the connections to MLK merely metaphorical. Bernice King, the youngest daughter of Martin and Coretta Scott King is a minister at New Birth. She and Long stirred controversy in 2004 when they led a march demanding that the legislature amend the state Constitution to forbid gay marriage - which was already illegal in Georgia. (It was particularly incendiary given that Long began the event by lighting his torch in the eternal flame at Martin Luther King's crypt.) In 2004 Long endorsed George W. Bush in all but name, charging that John Kerry would not protect the nation from the looming menace of same sex unions.

Against that history, the charges that Long coerced teenage boys in his youth foundation (ineptly dubbed the "Long Fellows") into gay sex acts detonated like a concussion grenade. On some level the homophobic pastor who is secretly engaging in gay sex is the most fatigued of clichés. But Long's allegations differ if for no other reason than the scale. It also has to be mentioned that the black church had perfected its own version of Don't Ask, Don't Tell long before the military dreamed of such a compact.

Read the Full Essay @ The Atlantic

Interview with William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Black Leadership

The historian and author of an important meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic talks to The Root about the meaning of President Obama's 2008 election, the problems of black leadership and black self-definition.

The Root Interview: William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Black Leadership
by Abdul Ali

Dr. William Jelani Cobb, one of the country's most visible African-American intellectuals, is an associate professor and chair of the history department at Spelman College in Atlanta. His meditation on the hip-hop aesthetic, To the Break of Dawn, is one of the most important texts on this cultural phenomenon.

In his latest book, The Substance of Hope, Cobb turns his attention to the 2008 election, the political climate preceding the election and his own involvement as a delegate for the state of Georgia. (He blogged for The Root from the Democratic National Convention in 2008.) His training as a historian comes to bear as he asks, What does this all mean? And where do we go from here?

The interview was conducted via Google Chat.

The Root: In The Substance of Hope, you play both historian and participant as a delegate in the 2008 election. How did these distinct roles help shape your book?

William Jelani Cobb: Initially they made it more difficult because I'm accustomed to writing about things that are more static. This was an attempt to place the election into a context in terms of history, and in some ways in terms of irony. But this was also a rapidly changing subject. The result was that I wrote about three-quarters of the book and then threw it all out and started again from scratch. It was much more difficult to decide what story I wanted to tell.

Read the Full Interview @ The Root.com

Hubert Harrison, Black Public Intellectual

A New Biography about Hubert Harrison Offers Insight Into Black Public Intellectualism in America
by Felicia Pride

Debates have been circling lately regarding black leadership and public intellectualism. Princeton professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell recently wrote a piece for CNN that slams Tavis Smiley's inadequate critiques of Obama's treatment of race. She also gets at Smiley's "soul patrol"-which includes Cornel West, Michael Eric Dyson, and Dick Gregory-for their roles in his documentary "Stand." She feels Smiley and friends appropriate Martin Luther King's legacy and "implicitly claim that they, not Obama, are the authentic representatives of the political interests of African-Americans."

Spelman professor William Jelani Cobb, chimed in on what he called the "Obama Wars" among intellectuals. He wrote on his blog, "Conflict produces progress. Or, more specifically, the competitive market of ideas forces everyone to step up their thought game."

All this talk aligns with a growing interest in Hubert Harrison, a figure not typically studied in school or talked about in contemporary discourse. A new biography, "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" (the first of two volumes) by Jeffrey B. Perry, a self-described "working class scholar," intends to rekindle the work, life, and politics of a forgotten thinker.

Read the Full Review @ The Root

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William Jelani Cobb on Obama and Same-Sex Marriage

Commentary: Obama Absent on Gay Rights
by William Jelani Cobb

(CNN) -- Last week Gov. John Lynch signed a bill making New Hampshire the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage.

It was a paradoxical moment. The new law is a reminder that same-sex marriage is the civil rights issue of our era and just how far the movement for marriage equality has come. It also highlighted the unexpected and remarkable silence from the White House on this issue.

During the campaign, Barack Obama assured gays and lesbians that he supported repealing "don't ask, don't tell" as well as adoption and anti-discrimination rights for the gay community. Those kinds of promises carry a particular weight when made by a man whose very capacity to run for elected office is the yield of another civil rights struggle.

That lineage and the high expectations that come with it gave Obama an amazing degree of latitude, allowing him, for instance, to remain relatively unscathed even when he placed the Rev. Rick Warren on the Inauguration Day program.

But to date he has taken no significant action on this front and, more critically, his administration is actually being outpaced by state legislatures around the country.

Read the Full Essay @ CNN.com

Hating the Message or Hating ON the Messenger?

William Jelani Cobb on the Black Left: "Obama and the Suicidal Left"

***

Not a response, but this from my Vibe colleague Jalylah Burrell gets to the heart of something at the root of some displeasure with Obama:

Rev. Jeremiah Wright proved himself to have some foolish tendencies at his wild press conference, but damn it, he will always have a special place in my heart and my psyche and that of so many African Americans for cultivating a space in which we can be UNASHAMEDLY BLACK. We don't have to shrink from our color, our names, our musical tastes, our everything.

ATL Reflections

from The Washington Post

The New South's Capital Likes to Contradict Itself

By William Jelani Cobb
Sunday, July 13, 2008; B01

ATLANTA

This past January, Sen. Barack Obama delivered a speech on Martin Luther King Day at Ebenezer Baptist Church here. The symbolism was obvious. Appearing in King's home church just a few weeks after winning the Iowa caucuses, Obama was a visible embodiment of the boldest aspirations of the civil rights movement. When he returned to the Atlanta metro area last week to speak and raise money for his campaign, the moment was less symbolic but possibly even more significant: The first African American with a reasonable chance of becoming president is fighting for the "New South." And he could win it.

It's no coincidence that Obama has visited Atlanta at least three times in the past year. The capital of the New South, Atlanta is a small town trapped inside a big city, a place firmly committed to putting the past behind it and a place where history shows through like paint under primer. To understand how -- and whether -- the Illinois senator's "Southern strategy" might have a chance, take a look at this Bible Belt city where the visibility and political clout of gays rivals that of New York or San Francisco. This is the place where King's vision has been most fully realized. In these early days of the 21st century, Atlanta has become a microcosm of black America.

And we have the contradictions to prove it.

You enter the city via Hartsfield-Jackson, the busiest airport in the country. It's named after two mayors -- one white, one black -- tethered together by a hyphen, a history and a commitment to progress. In fact, if there's any single obsession that binds the city to its past, it's this idea of "progress."

More than a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois lamented that the passion for progress was ruining Atlanta, replacing charm with ambition and faith with lucre. Atlanta's symbol is the phoenix, and almost since the city's 1847 founding, change has been a constant. (It had three names in the first 20 years of its existence.) In its most recent incarnation, the city has been reborn as "ATL," a locale that is to blacks of this era what Harlem was in the 1920s: the destination for a critical mass of highly educated and talented blacks in search of a better life.

Though I was born and raised in New York, my family history in Georgia dates back to the days of slavery. Frustrated by the lack of educational and employment opportunity for blacks in the state, my father left for Harlem at 17, just before World War II. Six years ago, I moved to Atlanta to take a job as a history professor at Spelman College, a highly regarded historically black college for women.

That's progress: A generation later, Georgia lured me for the precise reasons my father left it.

Read the Full Essay

***

William Jelani Cobb is an associate professor of history at Spelman College and the author of "The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays."

Guest Post! William Jelani Cobb on The Reverend Jeremiah Wright

Jeremiah's Failed Crusade
by William Jelani Cobb

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, Jeremiah Wright has just been awarded a construction contract. And that's the best case scenario -- in light of his weekend blitz of media appearances there are many doubting that Wright's intentions were benign. Assuming they were, the reverend's appearance before the National Press Club highlighted his naive belief that he could redeem his reputation by talking to the same people responsible for distorting it.

Let's be clear: Wright has been wildly mischaracterized and defamed. His comments may have been incendiary but the were largely taken out of context. Even his more controversial views coexist with a generally well-informed view of American society. It's also natural instinct to respond to the kind malice that has been directed at him for the past six weeks. You see a fire, you want to throw water on it. But this situation is more akin to a grease fire, which means that you have to respond to it in a way that runs counter to your instincts. Instead, Wright opened the faucets and the flames have spread far beyond their original boundaries.

In the wake of his press club appearance you heard disparate rumblings that are growing into a chorus of condemnation. The difference is that these jeers are now coming from black people. He started out with the enmity of misinformed whites who knew him only through the manipulated soundbites that had been looped ad nauseum (but which were, until now, dying down.) But now he has done nothing to diminish their scorn and has gained the contempt of a growing number of black folk who feel that he has single-handedly ruined our chance to have a black president.

That perspective isn't accurate, but it is increasingly common only a day after that appearance. Writing in the NY Times, Bob Herbert accused Wright of vengefully sabotaging Obama with the press conference yesterday; Errol Louis in the Daily News gave Wright the benefit of the doubt and said that "He couldn't have done more damage to Obama if he tried." I received an email from a friend who referred to it as "black-on-black crime" another speculated that he was secretly on Hillary Clinton's payroll. And then there are the innumerable crabs-in-a-barrel references cycling around the internet. I'm not prepared to say that Wright was out to destroy Obama's candidacy (though that may well be the outcome) but it was entirely predictable that people would draw that conclusion.

It has to be unspeakably difficult to hear oneself lambasted and defamed for weeks on end but Wright entered that conference with a flawed agenda: the commercial media exists to exacerbate controversies, not defuse them. The degree of truth in his words was nearly irrelevant; what matters is the way in which those words would inevitably be consumed, filtered, repackaged and distributed. If the mainstream media operated on the basis of people's good intentions we would probably have far more mutual understanding and they would have far less money. This might have been minimized had Wright called Roland Martin, Ed Gordon, Gwen Ifill and done a roundtable of responsible black journalists or sat down with Amy Goodman or even given it a rest after the Bill Moyers interview he did days earlier. But in addressing the National Press Club the reverend was like a man who had already lost $1000 to a card hustler but decides to play again – double or nothing.

Wright was also likely buoyed by a false confidence in his own communication skills. He is a brilliant preacher but a podium is not a pulpit. He has spent the last 36 years in an arena where people literally say "amen" to your opinions, one where your credibility is virtually unquestionable. But yesterday he was talking to journalists, people who are, by definition, skeptical and start with the premise that if someone in public is talking, there's a good chance they're telling a lie. Anything Wright said was grist for the machine. He was playing an away game without recognizing that he lost home field advantage the minute he left his pulpit. Anything he said beyond "Jesus loves you" would be used against him.

It's been argued that Wright felt Obama threw him under the bus with his Philadelphia race speech, but a moment's reflection would reveal that those words constituted anything but a political stiff-arm. In Philadelphia Obama offered as subtle and daring a defense of Wright as he could have and far more than any other politician would have given in the situation. (Jocelyn Elders and Lani Guinier were dispatched by Bill Clinton for offenses far, far less damaging than Wright's video clips have been to Obama.)

The irony is that less than twenty-four hours later Wright got to see what a real denunciation looks like. Obama has been painted into a corner, in large measure a victim of his own attempt to place Wright into context. It looks all but certain that Wright will be looked at by a large segment of black America as the man who tried to ruin a dream. It will be a vast distortion of Wright's distinguished legacy but its what people will believe.

And, as any one of the media in the room could have told him, perception is reality. Jeremiah Wright has a lot of explaining to do. And that probably means that the worst is yet to come.

***

William Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of History at Spelman College. He specializes in post-Civil War African American history, 20th century American politics and the history of the Cold War. He is also a contributing writer for Essence magazine, an essayist and fiction writer and the author of To The Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic (NYU Press 2007) as well as The Devil & Dave Chappelle and Other Essays (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2007). He is editor of The Essential Harold Cruse: A Reader, which was listed as a 2002 Notable Book of The Year by Black Issues Book Review. Cobb is a delegate to the Democratic National Convention from the 5th Congressional District in Georgia.

Is John McCain an Option? Two Views

If Limbaugh can register a protest vote for Hillary, why can't we look at the GOP?

Why Blacks Should Consider McCain
By William Jelani Cobb/TheRoot.com

The Clintons have thus far run one of the most underhanded and bitter political campaigns in recent history. And while there is no reason to suspect that they are racist, they are clearly willing to play upon the sympathies of whites who are--which is probably worse. This was evident by the twin "accidents" in which Clinton staff member Billy Shaheen and that pillar of the booty-shake community BET founder Bob Johnson attacked Sen. Obama for his youthful dalliances with drugs. Any lingering doubt about who they were playing to was erased when Bill Clinton essentially dismissed Obama's South Carolina victory by comparing it to Jesse Jackson's wins there in 1984 and 1988.

Apparently none of the high-profile black leaders who are backing Hillary Clinton have been able to prohibit the kind of cynical race hustling that marked the South Carolina primary. (This recalls the old saying that the problem is not that black leaders so often sell out, but that their asking price is so pitifully low.)

But in the wake of the Sister Souljah episode (not to mention Bill Clinton's stiff-arming of his black nominee for the Justice Department (Lani Guinier) and his short-lived Surgeon General (Jocelyn Elders) it must appear that there is nothing the black community won't forgive you for provided you show up at one of our churches and hum a spiritual every so often. As a matter of principle, no candidate, no matter how deep their alleged ties to the black community, should be allowed to race-bait a black politician and still receive the majority of our vote.

All this points to one clear – if unlikely – conclusion: if Hillary Clinton receives the Democratic Party nomination, African Americans should consider voting for John McCain. But before you fix your lips to call me a sellout consider this: Carter G. Woodson once remarked that any race that consistently gives its vote to one political party is asking to be taken advantage of.

Read the Full Essay

***

We don't have the luxury of a protest vote.

The McCain Option? Pul-eeze.
By Jack White /TheRoot.com

Feb. 8, 2008.

Memo to William Jelani Cobb.

Re: Your proposal that "if Hillary Clinton receives the Democratic Party nomination, African Americans should consider voting for John McCain."

Knee-grow, pul-eeeze!

Your column on The Root ranks as the most ridiculous political idea any Negro has put forth my since my brother-in-law decided to support Clarence Thomas on the grounds that, after all, he's a brother. So ridiculous, Dr. Cobb, that at first, I thought you were kidding… and I still hope that you were. But on the odd chance that you were serious—or that some people let themselves be swayed by your cockamamie idea—I thought I'd better inject some common sense back into the discussion.

The last thing black people need is to take your advice to emulate right-wing extremists like Anne Coulter, who claims she hates McCain so much she'd rather vote for Clinton. Even thinking about following that course is a self-destructive diversion. We've already wasted enough time this year on a Negrofied version of the medieval debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin: how many of us can buck-and-wing on the bi-racial chromosomes of Barack Obama? Now that we've finally got that settled and have thrown in behind the brother, there is absolutely no rationale for unearthing the age-old questions about our relationship with the Democratic Party. Way too much is at stake.

Read the Full Essay

On-Line Dating with The Great Debaters and the Jena 6: A Bloggers' Roundtable

News & Notes, January 2, 2008 · Denzel Washington's latest movie, The Great Debaters, is stirring up controversy about how much it actually sticks to the historical record. Plus, members of the Congressional Black Caucus are seeking a pardon for the Jena 6.

Our panel of bloggers debate that and more; they include Casey Lartigue of The Casey Lartigue Show!, Jozen Cummings of Broke Thoughts, and Mark Anthony Neal of Critical Noir.

Listen Here


Also, William Jelani Cobb on Richard Pryor and Mudbone