In the coming days, I will return to the red clay hills of Georgia to gather and celebrate hundreds of Black men who will graduate from Morehouse College, the nation’s only historically Black college or university dedicated to serving male-identified Black students. It will be an especially momentous occasion—and not just because I will celebrate my 30th reunion as a proud 1995 graduate.
The moment matters because graduates, families, faculty, and alumni alike will be challenged by a compelling and critically insightful commencement address by Dr. Cornel West. Dr. West is one of our nation’s leading public intellectuals and a scholarly activist. There might not be a better person for this moment than Dr. West. With his longstanding commitments to social analysis, historical understanding, cultural criticism, political engagement, and progressive faith, West offers both a personal and public narrative of human maturation that my young, newly minted brothers will need for this critical moment in our world.
When I was at Morehouse, some of the most important books I read were not books for classes, but books I read on my own. The authors that gripped me included poets and Black arts scholars Haki Madhabuti and the late Nikki Giovanni, theologian, the late James Cone, Black feminist, the late bell hooks, esteemed legal scholar and civil rights activist, the late Derrick Bell, and perhaps most importantly, Dr. Cornel West.
I recall denying another Morehouse student their copy of a required course text by buying Race Matters in the campus bookstore. As a freshman, I eagerly read this book by the Union Theological Seminary professor, then on his way to Harvard University. My mind, heart and vocabulary all expanded as West grappled with a set of ideas, social practices, and the historical unfolding of the intractable hegemonic conditions of political subjugation, economic exploitation, moral degradation, and cultural dehumanization, which produced the nihilistic conditions of lovelessness, meaninglessness and hopelessness for so many Black people—then and now.
Cornel West visited Morehouse in 1992, and he was honored by the college. He signed my book: “Stay strong in the struggle, dear brother!” Those words compelled me to years of study, service, and struggle at Morehouse. West’s book framed for me a life of the mind, committed to being a Black prophetic Christian intellectual rooted in grassroots movements, solidarity with other marginalized people, and deep and broad democratic commitments to serve, empower, and enable all to thrive with human dignity and possibility. While Race Matters may be West’s best-known book, one of his earliest, Prophesy Deliverance! An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity, might be his most important and most compelling for this moment.
A year ago, I openly criticized my beloved alma mater for inviting then-sitting President Joseph R. Biden to deliver the commencement address and to receive an honorary degree.
In an open letter to faculty, asking them to vote to deny the president an honorary degree, I said, “When I studied at and graduated from Morehouse College in 1995, I was deeply shaped by the lives of former President Benjamin Elijah Mays, and alums Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. While Morehouse monumentalizes those persons on campus, there is no better monument to their lives at this moment than the moral courage to challenge a sitting United States president.” Those words, true then, are especially true now that Donald Trump has been re-elected president.
Cornel West has been one of the most consistent and compelling voices highlighting America’s ongoing complicity in the triple evils Dr. King identified as racism, militarism, and hypercapitalism. Dr. West, in his own 2024 bid for the presidency, engaged in a campaign of truth, justice, and love. He boldly condemned the killing and capturing of hundreds of Israeli citizens by Hamas, and the United States’ unilateral arming of Israel to prosecute a war beset with atrocities of killing tens of thousands of Palestinian non-combatants, and displacing and starving hundreds of thousands of others.
West predicted that centrist civility and pandering to the middle class would not protect us from the rise of jingoistic, xenophobic, anti-Black economic oligarchy and state violence at home and abroad. More than 40 years ago in Prophesy Deliverance!, West told Black intellectuals and especially Christian theologians that if inclusion of the Black middle-class into a structurally racist capitalist economy and a racially constrained democracy was all we were seeking, we needed to long ago stop calling our training, leading, serving, and studying “liberation.”
After hearing from the apex of American power a year ago and seeing just how damaging that display of power has been, Morehouse Men would do well to listen to an organic intellectual from the streets of Sacramento, Calif., and the pews of the Black Baptist church; one who knows that success without sacrifice, money without morals, intellect without integrity, and power without empowering all may make these newly minted Morehouse Men mighty, but not worthy of our so-called mystique.
Though Dr. West is not a Morehouse Man, like Dr. Mays, he has indelibly shaped Morehouse Men. He has taught, mentored, or influenced intellectuals like the esteemed Morehouse trustee and Black Studies and Religion scholar Dr. Eddie Glaude, and Harvard Divinity School scholar, Dr. Terrence Johnson.
A bevy of Morehouse preachers were impacted by his years of teaching at Union, Harvard and Princeton, including such important prophetic voices as Morehouse trustee and pastor of Mt. Ennon Baptist Church of Maryland, Rev. Dr. Delman Coates; pastor of Olivet Institutional Baptist Church of Cleveland, Rev. Dr. Jawanza Colvin; pastor of the historic Abyssinian Baptist Church of New York City, Rev. Dr. Kevin Johnson; and pastor of the sanctuary of the civil rights movement, the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, U.S. Senator Rev. Dr. Raphael Warnock.
Beyond Morehouse, one only needs to recall 2014 when Michael Brown lay dead in the streets of Ferguson, Mo., killed by a racist rogue cop, as clergy and activists descended. New leaders emerged in the name of #BlackLivesMatter: Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, Michael McBride, Traci Blackmon, Starsky Wilson, and Charlene Carruthers, among many others. And early on, locking arms in solidarity, but not seeking the spotlight was Dr. Cornel West.
Now, as an elder, senior scholar, veteran activist, and decades long dedicated progressive Christian, this humble brother can help let the voice of the suffering, marginalized, locked up, left out, and least of these speak—so that in a new generation of Morehouse Men, we can understand that our mystique remains in a moral tradition, ever expanding and evolving, challenging us to grow deep roots, and produce bountiful fruit of justice, love and equity.
Dr. Marlon Millner is a visiting assistant professor of Religion and African American Studies at Wesleyan University, and a 1995 graduate of Morehouse College.
SEE ALSO:
Dear Old Morehouse: Can We Not With Cornel West?
The Tragic Case of Rodney Hinton Jr. And The Trauma Of Black Grief In America
Prophesy Deliverance—Why Morehouse Men Need To Hear From Dr. Cornel West
was originally published on
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