Cornel West Quotes
We will not allow this day of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial to go without somebody going to jail.
West, Cornel. Speech at the Supreme Court, Washington, D.C., 16 Oct. 2011.
His strategy was to fill the jails of Birmingham, and asked the young people to help. The next days saw virtually all the Birmingham high school students our of school and in the streets protesting which was then against the un-Constitutional laws of Birmingham and Alabama. The students were arrested by the droves and the white authorities, believing that they were being firm against “radical lawbreakers”, fell into the trap, and became a travesty to most of the country and the rest of the world and the hundreds of jailed students beaten and assaulted raised the consciousness of whites as well as Blacks.
In the early 1950s, most of the South was racially segregated. Though hard to believe today, the Alabama law then required a Black man or woman to sit in the back of the bus. Rosa Parks, a black woman, sat in a seat in the middle of the bus and refused to give up her seat to a white man. She just quietly sat in her seat. She was arrested, and this triggered the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1955 which was a major event in the Civil Rights struggle. Alabama was not the only state where this type of outrage occurred. The South at that time was relatively backward educationally, commercially, and legally and racial segregation was a huge problem in most of the South.
Cornel Ronald West is an American philosopher, political activist, social critic, and public intellectual. The grandson of a Baptist minister, West focuses on the role of race, gender, and class in American society and the means by which people act and react to their "radical conditionedness." A radical democrat and socialist, West draws intellectual contributions from multiple traditions, including Christianity, the black church, Marxism, neopragmatism, and transcendentalism. Among his most influential books are Race Matters (1994) and Democracy Matters (2004).
