- Good afternoon everyone.
I'm Jacq Lapsley, I teach Old Testament
and I'm currently serving
as the academic dean
here at Princeton Seminary,
and it's my pleasure to welcome you
this afternoon for Princeton Seminary's
Reverend Doctor Martin
Luther King Jr. Lecture.
We are delighted to have Dr. Tamura Lomax
deliver this afternoon's lecture,
and I wanna thank Reverend Kermit Moss,
who I saw here a moment ago.
Thank you.
Reverend Kermit Moss,
our Interim Director of
Black Church Studies,
I wanna thank him, and also
the Association of Black Seminarians
for selecting Dr. Lomax as this year's
Martin Luther King Jr. lecturer.
Dr. Lomax received her PhD in religion
from Vanderbilt University.
Her work there focused on
black religious history
and black diaspora studies.
In 2011, Dr. Lomax
co-founded The Feminist Wire,
an online publication dedicated
to feminist, anti-racist,
and anti-imperialist
sociopolitical critique.
Dr. Lomax continues as The Feminist Wire's
visionary and CEO.
In 2018, Duke University Press
published her most recent book,
"Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing
the Black Female Body
"in Religion and Culture."
This critically acclaimed work explores
how black women and girls have been
stereotyped as jezebels
in the black church
and in popular black culture.
Quote, "Healing the black church
"will require ceaseless refusal
"of the idea that sin resides
in black women's bodies,
"thus disentangling black women and girls
"from the jezebel
narrative's oppressive yoke."
Dr. Lomax is currently
at work on a new book
to be published by Duke University Press,
entitled, "Parenting
Against the Patriarchy:
"Raising Non-Toxic Sons in
White Supremacist America."
Her title for this afternoon's lecture is,
"We Don't Need a Black Messiah:
The Crisis of Civilization
"and Aspirational Black Patriarchy."
Please join me in
welcoming Dr. Tamura Lomax.
(audience applauding)
- Whoa, that was a very long clap.
(Dr. Lomax laughs)
(audience laughs)
One longer than I have experienced before.
First and foremost, thank you so much
to all of you for being here,
thank you for that wonderful introduction,
thank you for inviting me,
thank you to my bestest friend
for being here coming off of sabbatical.
So I wanna take some time
tonight and labor through,
and I'm gonna tell you, I am
laboring through this work.
I've been working with this
idea of the black messiah,
and so I need you to travel
some deep and murky waters with me.
So yes, the title is, "We
Don't Need a Black Messiah:
"The Crisis of Civilization
"and Aspirational Black Patriarchy."
In my latest book, "Parenting
Against the Patriarchy:
"Raising Non-Toxic Sons in
White Supremacist America,"
I began by pouring my heart out
in an open letter to my teenage
sons, Michael and Martin.
Tears falls between each keystroke,
particularly as I let them know
that the primary genocidal threat
that endangers all life
is not black women,
but rather white supremacist, capitalist,
heteropatriarchal masculinity.
Now anyone who knows me knows
that I am not much of a crier,
that is unless we are talking about
Michael and Martin or their dad,
but Michael and Martin have a particular
tugging that they do on my heart,
and so I'm moved to tears every time
I reread the opening without fail,
and not only because I'm
talking to my children,
a love between this black
mother and those black boys
which knows no single boundary,
but because I understand
now more than ever
how the vulnerabilities around being
a black boy in America,
and eventually a black man,
will consistently beckon
them to root their humanity
not in the black feminist,
beautiful black feminist politics
that I raised them up in, but
in a unrelenting push and pull
between white supremacist
heteropatriarchy and a remix
of 1960s black messianic
nationalism, and so I cry.
I cry because I understand
that the permanence of
white supremacy in America
is just as undeviating
as racist oppression,
and more because fighting against
racial oppression for black
folks has historically meant
maintaining the simultaneous oppression
of black women, girls, and queer kin.
However, in her essay,
"Age, Race, Class, and Sex:
"Women Redefining Difference,"
Audre Lorde reminds us of the following.
She says, "The true focus
of revolutionary change
"is never merely the oppressive situations
"which we seek to escape, but
that piece of the oppressor"
that is within us, and that shapes
our relationships and practices.
She continues, "Change means growth
"and growth can be painful."
And so tears flow because I know
that in choosing the revolutionary act
of raising my sons against the patriarchy,
some will see that as
a betrayal of the race.
I also know given its force,
Michael and Martin may still
claim pieces of the patriarchy
for themselves despite my teachings.
But most of all I cry real tears
because Lorde serves as a reminder
that the work of the critic
painfully begins by looking in the mirror.
Thus after telling my
sons all that is wrong
with the patriarchy, the patriarchy,
in my opening letter, I
immediately turn to what is perhaps
my most important and difficult chapter,
tentatively titled,
"Leaving the Patriarchy."
And in that chapter, I
begin with these words.
"I am a black feminist and I am
"a recovering participant
in the patriarchy."
Sexism, as I understood it
in my adolescence, was always bad.
I learned this lesson
early on from my mother.
However, patriarchy for me was normalized,
and at some point in my childhood
I came to own it for myself.
Of course I know now that
patriarchy and sexism
are twin powers, but for many of us,
at least in our minds,
at least in my mind,
they were separate.
For example, I remember believing
that men were supposed to be leaders.
They were supposed to head households,
organizations,
institutions, and movements.
And black men in particular
were to be at the forefront,
not only by design, but to
right the wrongs of history.
Specifically, my thinking was this:
as long as black men led while being nice,
fair, and respectful to women and girls,
all else in the black world
would not only be all right,
but it would be as it should be.
I learned this lesson from my father.
To be clear, my father is one
of the greatest men I've ever known.
He taught me to burst
through glass ceilings,
however, while also tutoring me
on the lesson that real black men lead.
One way to look at this is
through the lens of patriarchy.
However, another lens that
we must take into account
is the psychohistory that
interpreted black men
as primitive and emasculated
and thus not real men.
For it wasn't long ago that
the men of daddy's generation
held handmade signs
exclaiming, "I Am a Man,"
or that those before him were denied
the right to establish patronymics,
blood lines, and entitlements.
And so truth be told, I
loved daddy's leadership.
In fact, I benefited greatly from it.
His towering presence offered
meaning in the midst of chaos
and made me feel seen, human, and whole.
My mother provided that, too,
but patriarchy makes it so us little girls
only see that which our daddies do.
But though my parents
never explicitly enforced
the patriarchy in our household,
by the time I was a teenager,
it was second nature to me.
So in short, as a teenager I was
a race girl, not a feminist,
and Martin Luther King and Malcolm X,
next to daddy, were my first loves.
They were savior-like figures for the race
and represented models
of black masculinity
worth duplicating again, and
again, and again, and again.
However, King in particular
reminded me of my father.
In fact, I grew up in a
conservative Christian household
that in many ways
resembled that of King's.
My father was a fiery
black baptist preacher turned theologian,
and my mother a beautiful homemaker.
And like King and many
others, I learned early,
even if perhaps unintentionally so,
to not only respect the voice,
role, and call of black men,
but to worship them, and more,
to aid and abet in the
necessity of a black messiah.
To be sure, daddy was our messiah at home,
but King, he was the
messiah to the black masses.
When writing this lecture, I was reminded
of the black church fans, anybody remember
those black church fans?
(audience laughing)
They're very interesting.
I was reminded of the black church fans
that meticulously place,
they were meticulously placed
throughout my grandmother's apartment
in the projects of the Bronx, New York,
when I was a little girl.
You've likely seen them.
Most of you have seen the ones
that I'm going to talk about.
They typically have, of course,
funeral arrangements on the back.
(audience laughing)
But on the front they often have,
particularly when I was growing up,
white Jesus and black King.
(audience chattering)
And what I remember most
is that my grandmother
juxtaposed those images on her walls.
She had all kinds of fans,
and it was in the projects of the Bronx,
so if you've been to the Bronx,
you know that there's no air
conditioning in the summer.
The fan is your air.
And so we'd have those
fans, they'd be on the wall,
you'd pull them down,
they were everywhere,
but always white Jesus, black King.
And I always wondered what is grandma
trying to communicate by this image
of white Jesus and black King?
What did this proximity mean?
It was as if one was the first coming
and the other had been the next.
And my grandmother was not alone.
White Jesus and the adjacent black King
was evidenced in many black households
and churches of my youth.
Ella Baker argued that King personified
the black messianic leadership trope
for the 1960s civil rights movement,
thus informing multiple generations
of black religious and
political leadership.
Now, I should pause here because
in talking about the
black messiah recently,
I realized that there
was a bit of confusion.
So I'm gonna pause here and be very clear
that when I talk about the black messiah,
I am not talking about Jacqueline Grant's
and James Cone's black Jesus.
What I'm referring to is the paragon
for aspirational black patriarchy,
the one that black
feminists like Ella Baker,
Michele Wallace, Toni
Cade Bambara, bell hooks,
and many others warned us about
in black communities, social
movements, and churches.
And so I also wanna be clear
that when I talk about the black messiah,
I am also not coming down or
trashing black men and boys.
I am, however, offering
an unapologetic critique
of the concerted efforts to make
a blackened form of patriarchy,
and not only a blackened
form of patriarchy,
but to make it so that the
blackened form of patriarchy
is our only option for survival,
our only option for thriving,
and our only option for seeing humanity.
Or more specifically, what I'm critiquing
is the concerted effort to make
King's manhood in particular,
and his messianic leadership,
the definitive and descriptive example
for proper masculinity and leadership.
But most of all, what I'm trying to say
is that we don't need a black messiah.
What we need is a revolution of values,
and such a revolution,
I want to argue tonight,
requires the specific
task of demythologizing
the symbols of civilization
and patriarchy,
first and foremost so that they may
no longer possess ontological prestige,
but second so that little girls like me
don't grow up normalizing patriarchy
or believing it has a capacity
to be nice and/or fair.
And third and perhaps most importantly,
so that we may free up little
boys like Michael and Martin,
and your boys, from the crushing weight
of thinking they have to man
up into superheroic tropes,
charged with saving the race.
This in mind going forward,
I wanna make four brief
moves, I think they're brief.
(Dr. Lomax laughs)
(audience laughs)
First, I will engage what we still
have yet to learn from King.
Second, I will explore some of Baker's
and other black feminist
critiques of King,
the black church, and the
1960s social movement,
and thus what King and others
could have learned from them.
Third, I will turn to Charles Long,
Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman
to explore the role of
civilization and patriarchy
in the making of the black messiah.
And then finally, I will
turn towards a question
I've been wrestling with
for months, and that is,
what if Martin Luther King Jr.
had listened to Ella Baker?
In a speech delivered at The
Riverside Church in 1967,
"Why Am I Opposed to the War in Vietnam,"
King argued for a revolution of values
that would soon look uneasily
on the glaring contrast
of poverty and wealth with
righteous indignation.
Many black feminists have argued
that King's turn towards
a critique of capitalism
highlighted his potential
for one day adding
a critique of sexism and
patriarchy to his repertoire.
Such a suggestion makes sense,
particularly when thinking about the work
that Dr. Keri Day does in her
book, "Unfinished Business:
"Black Women, the Black Church,
"and the Struggle to Thrive in America,"
when she asserts the
necessity of centering
black, poor women in
discourses and movements
engaged in critiques of economic
alienation and injustice.
Personally, I'd like to believe that King,
had he lived long enough,
he may have listened
to women like Dr. Day,
as well as his contemporary and,
dare I say his mentor, Ella Baker.
Not withstanding, the truth is King,
whose life was cut short by
the bullet of an assassin,
had in fact not made it there yet.
Though his thinking had had a head start,
his live, sex, and gender
politics were often far behind.
But yet it is the distance
between King's headstart
and our present reality that still
gives me a little bit of hope,
because King, even on his worst day,
was in some ways, not all, but some ways
still leap years ahead of most of us.
Take for instance his beloved community
where agape served as
not only a methodology
for enacting social change,
but an ethics for black
radical liberation,
and more, his ideas that black folks
are sacrosanct bodies with
inherit dignity and worth
and that black love is
liberative and just.
These are the radical ideas of Dr. King
that we have not yet lived into.
King maintained, "Power
at its best is love,
"implementing the demands of justice,
"and justice at its best is love,
"correcting everything
that stands against love."
What a lesson.
Who would we be if we had
taken up King's lessons?
Who would King be if he had
lived up to his lessons?
Because simultaneously to
teaching these wonderful,
or imagining, envisioning
these wonderful lessons,
according to Baker and others,
King's deep sense of community was flawed.
For example, though King often said
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth
were the forerunners of
the civil rights movement,
and that women were just as smart as men,
in an oral interview with
Eugene Walker in 1974,
Baker reminds us that
he ultimately thought
women's place was better
served in domestic roles.
She posits that though
King and others drafted her
to set up the initial
Southern Christian Leadership,
also the SCLC, office,
given her previous experience
with political activism
which began in Harlem in the 1930s,
not only did they not
give her an office space,
they didn't see any
significance in her role.
Baker, who mentored the SCLC
ministers on direct action
says the assumption was that she was there
to carry out the orders from
King and the other leaders
despite their lack of experience
and understanding around movement needs.
In fact, she posits that she was given
no designation of authority,
and there was no conscious effort
to provide input from a woman.
Baker asserts the SCLC's
attitudes towards women
was that they were nice to talk to
about how well they cooked particularly,
or how beautifully they looked,
or how well they carried out
one of the minister's programs,
but they would not tolerate
one who was independent
and whose creative ideas
upon which they had to rely.
She refers to this as
the baptist hierarchy,
noting how the SCLC was
ultimately run like a black church
with King at the top and then
the other prominent ministers,
depending on the size of
their congregation, next.
(audience laughing)
Mind you, she had 30 years of experience
that she mentored them on.
It's amazing.
She said in this model,
women were to be secretaries,
fashion plates, or useful in terms
of male/female interests, not
in terms of their knowledge.
In her essay, "Living Out Loud,
"Martin Luther King Revisited:
"A Black Power Feminist
Pays Homage to the King,"
Gwendolyn Simmons writes the following.
"It is ironic that both the SCLC
"and the Student Non-Violent
Coordinating Committee,"
also known as SNCC, "owe their founding
"and early development to Miss Ella Baker,
"that brilliant trailblazer, strategist,
"and builder of local leaders.
"The fundi, who was the
midwife at SNCC's birth,
"who had also been the birth attendant
"at the founding of the SCLC
and its first staff person.
"A fact known only to movement
insiders and historians,
"it is not an over-exaggeration to say
"that Baker did more than
anyone else to create
"the two most important movements
of the civil rights era."
Simmons continues, "Baker
and King's relationship
"was an uneasy one at best,
"even though she worked her heart out
"to get that organization moving
"and able to carry out
its civil rights agenda."
The relationship between King and Baker
provides several clues
about the relationships
between black women and men
in not only social movements,
but as Baker notes, the black church.
Specifically, it notes the push and pull
between Baker, between black patriarchy,
or in this case, a black messiah,
and the demand for a submissive
and ultimately invisible
black feminine ideal.
In her 1970 anthology, "The Black Woman,"
Toni Cade Bambara wrote the following.
"When a few tough-minded,
no-messing-around,
"political sisters began pushing
"for the right to
participate in policy-making,
"the right to help compose position papers
"for the emerging organization,
"the group leader would drop his voice
"into that mellow register
"specifically reserved for the incontinent
"and say something about
the need to be feminine,
"quiet, and supportive,
and blah, blah, blah."
(audience laughs)
Nine years later in her book,
"Black Macho and the
Myth of the Superwoman,"
Michele Wallace argues that the 1960s
black political movements propagated
a vicious view of black
women as emasculating,
aggressive, and unnaturally independent.
These kinds of representations and beliefs
enabled movement leaders and others
to ignore black feminist challenges
to their political agendas
and to suppress black women's ideas
and ambitions for political leadership,
thus limiting the scope, ultimately,
and the success of the movement.
Simultaneously, in an effort to avoid
tropes of angry, domineering,
and unfeminine womanhood,
black women were discouraged
from demanding equal consideration
for their social, political,
and economic needs
within black political
discourse and movements.
Ultimately, black women's
legitimate frustrations
with their unequal
circumstances and treatment
were seen as irrational, pathological,
controlling, and out of natural order.
I find Charles Long's "Significations:
"Signs, Symbols and Images
"in the Interpretation of Religion,"
Hortense Spillers',
"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe:
"An American Grammar Book,"
and Saidiya Hartman's "Lose Your Mother:
"A Journey Along the
Atlantic Slave Route,"
particularly insightful here.
A critical reading of these power dynamics
highlight not only the blatant
and prevalent sexism and heteropatriarchy
between black social movements
and the black church,
but their rootedness in Western
symbols of civilization.
More, such dynamics underline
how the grasping of Western symbols
also serve as a source of resistance
to the colonial situation
and the primitive othering
that happened during that time.
That is, King and others
could preach beloved community
while disempowering the
members of that community
because the political project
of becoming rational and real men,
and thus undoing the
demonic deeds of history
became not the only, but the primary
initial goal for black freedom.
Long posits that Western
ideological biases
invoked a structure of
civilized-primitive dialectics,
with the West presupposing itself
as the locusts of intelligence
while projecting onto the Africans,
along with their cultures and religions,
innate savagery, inferiority, immorality,
pathology, and irrationality.
He refers to this as the
crisis of civilization,
specifically the burden of being
made over into primitive
others under the white gaze,
and more, the ceaseless
attempt by black folks
to prove their humanity,
rationality, order, and morality.
Yet, though black communal, religious,
and political responses to
these projections were many,
they also included
appropriations of Western biases,
specifically hegemonic gender ideologies,
sexual politics, and puritan ideals
in which the black church
and the black nuclear family project
played especially significant roles.
As I write in "Jezebel Unhinged,"
after North American slavery,
the symbol of the black
heteropatriarchal family
became not only a signifier
of Western civilization
and natural order, but
a civic and moral duty
for establishing intercommunal,
institutional, and
organizational hierarchy roles,
and thusly real black manhood.
In "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,"
Spillers asserts that the degendering
and sexual assault of captured fathers
denied them the right to know,
parent, raise, protect,
or name their children.
That is, while the name of the
father established property,
captive fathers were property.
Spillers argues that
masculinity constituted through
the African father's
banished name and body,
and the captive father's mocking presence,
hence, "Papa's Maybe,"
led to enslaved children
and their heirs having a
distinctive relationship
to the patriarchal model on one hand,
and a crisis of identity on the other.
Concurrently, the patronymic, right,
the familial line through
the father's name,
was ultimately an empty
category for the enslaved.
The heritage of the mother
both claimed and denied
personhood, hence, "Mama's Baby."
The point here is not to
establish a matriarchy
or the significance of a matriarchy,
as the enslaved mother
could not claim her child.
It is to note, as Spillers writes,
"The African American
male has been touched
"by the mother, handed by her in ways
"that he can not escape, and in ways
"that the white American male is allowed
"to temporize with with
a fatherly reprieve."
That is, black male identity
was not only dependent on the
recognition of the mother,
but it was imprinted by
her, and thus the feminine,
and in ways he could not evade.
But though the latter,
femininity, is a social construct,
what Spillers is getting at here
is not a notion of
black male feminization,
but rather a hopefulness
that there is something
within black men and boys to help them
recognize and love black women and girls
rather than further othering
or marginalizing them.
But what I'd like to note, however,
is how the absence of the patronymic,
along with the inescapable
presence of the mother's touch,
and the denial of personhood
through the maternal line,
are in fact foundational
to not only certain
performances of black masculinity,
but to tensions and subordinations
between genders and sexualities.
This is particularly
interesting to think about
in terms of the work Hartman
does in "Lose Your Mother."
If Spillers is right, it seems to me
that the touch of the mother came to serve
as a sight of resentment.
This may be particularly
so as the touch conflicts
with the patriarchal project,
the latter of which is a primary lens
through which black liberation
efforts have been imagined.
Thus it should make sense why it has been
a political priority to
establish real manhood,
however, while making other needs
within the black collective
body unimportant,
irrational, or pathological.
Hartman asserts the slave trade
forced slaves to lose their mother,
or more specifically
to lose their country,
kinships, ancestors,
identities, and history,
meaning to lose your mother was to become
an orphan and transaction in the market
which established which persons
would be expendable and which would not.
Concomitantly, however, it was the market
that determined that
the stamp of commodity
would haunt the maternal line.
Thusly in freedom,
establishing gender roles,
patriarchy, and patronymics
became aspirational.
In the matriarchy, mother-led homes
were seen as deficient
and for some delinquent.
Robert E. Park, Patrick
Moynihan, E. Franklin Frazier,
and others dominated the literature
on the black family and freedom,
noting how it was weakened during slavery
because of the absence
of the black father.
They argued that the
family, the black family,
when I say the, I mean that they had
a very specific, it's
the church family, right?
Daddy up here, mama,
they're not talking about all the ways
that black people have made families,
but the black family,
produced when the father
was not present, it produced weak males.
And so these sources, though
anti-black and heterosexist,
tell us something about
the perpetual quest
to establish not merely black fathers,
black fathers are significant parts
of the collective black communities,
so no, they don't establish
anything about that.
But what they establish is, or
they help us to think about,
is this desire to create a certain kind
of messianic, all-powerful,
strong black man
and black communities,
but it also tells us why,
when we see other models of masculinity,
folks lose their minds.
In short, Long, Spillers, and Hartman
presents an opportunity for us to explore
not only the seduction of
patriarchy in the Western project,
but the particular loss of the mother,
and specifically the
displacement of black women
and ultimately the feminine post-slavery.
Whereas the mother serves as a reminder
of the colonial situation
and its projections
of irrationality, otherness, permativity,
weakness, and inferiority,
accessing the patriarchal
most of all, or ultimately,
the messianic suggest
transcendence and moral order.
The permanence of sexist oppression
in black families, communities,
political movements, and churches
requires going through these layers
and demythologizing this framework.
More, it requires not only going back
and getting our mothers,
and all others on the margins
of black social movement,
but reimagining the latter not in terms
of resurrecting a new black messiah,
but instead in terms of
black feminist politics,
or more in terms of what
Baker had already taught us,
namely, and again, that we
don't need a black messiah,
more that black social movements
require we start from the margins,
thus making room for
all the different ways
of being, knowing, living,
and working together.
And also that the legitimacy and relevance
of the Black Freedom Project
rests not in a black messiah,
but rather in our collective breaking up
of the oppressive world that we inherited.
Had King only listened,
had King only listened to Ella Baker,
he would have known this.
He would have realized
that strong movements
don't need strong leaders,
and that Baker's notion
of power to the people
was in fact in line
with his radical vision
of love, power, and
justice when at their best.
He would've also discerned
that the baptist hierarchy
contradicted his beloved community
and also his personalism,
and that the black church's trappings
and male-centric pastoral and
social visions of leadership
require immediate critique
and deconstruction.
Finally, he would've discovered
that revolutionary change
must begin within the painful
work of ridding ourselves
of the oppressor's
tactics and relationships.
To this end, Baker might have registered
in his mind as a potential mentor
rather than a glorified
yet emasculating secretary,
and more, the women of the movement
could have possibly been seen
as more than order-takers,
cooks, and/or fashion plates
or people to have relationships with.
Yet even with all of that notwithstanding,
there is still something
for us to learn from King,
but only if we read him through
the black feminist lens of Ella Baker,
and not because we need to
swap a king for a queen,
I don't do those kinds of politics,
(audience laughing)
but rather because Baker is the embodiment
of the collective hand of the mother,
but more, because she
is sacred recognition,
she is King's beloved community,
and most of all she personifies
a revolution of values.
Thank you.
(audience applauding)
