Cornel West says his two closest soul mates are giants of the past, the great jazz saxophonist John Coltrane and 19th century Russian writer Anton Chekhov, but West is very much connected to the present as well, from teaching to writing to high-profile social activism. NY1's Budd Mishkin filed the following One on 1 profile.
Whether we see Cornel West getting arrested, appearing on television or speaking publicly, he's always in one of his black suits, what he calls his cemetery clothes.
Mishkin: You can tell us. We won't tell anyone. Are there occasions when you'll go into a store and look at, say, a purple shirt or a purple tie or a multi-colored scarf?
West: (laughs) No, not one.
Cornel West is an orator. He's an author. An activist. He was a radio host with his friend and colleague, Tavis Smiley. And he still appears frequently as a pundit on television. But to his students at Union Theological Seminary, he is professor.
After a much-heralded career teaching at Yale, Harvard and Princeton, West is back at the Union Theological Seminary, the school where he first started teaching in the late '70s.
"There is an intense intellectual dimension, but there's also a personal dimension, or what I'd call a pastoral dimension, which is to say that you're touching minds, but you also want to touch hearts and souls," West says.
West's most recent book, "Black Prophetic Fire," re-tells the story of Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois and other black civil rights activists.
"This market-driven culture tends to generate a historical amnesia, which is a loss of memory, a loss of connection to the best of the past," West says. "And especially now with Ferguson, the black prophetic fire is spilling over. How do we insure that it's channeled through a quest for love and justice and not hatred and revenge?"
His words elicit passionate reaction, never more so than in his condemnation of President Barack Obama. West says he made 65 campaign appearances for presidential candidate Barack Obama. But when inauguration time came around, West says, "I just assumed that I'd be able to get a ticket for my mother, and when I couldn't get a ticket for my mother, I said, 'This is something wrong here.' I felt like I, it was unjust to me."
His critics say that is at the core of his criticism of the president, that it's personal. West says it's about policy.
"I would say the same thing about any president of any color," West says. "They say, 'No, brother West, don't you realize when you're calling him a war criminal, you're feeding into the Fox machine that's demonizing him?' No, no, you got to tell the truth. You have to separate the truth you tell and the lies that they tell."
The response, especially from other prominent African-Americans in the media, has occasionally been vitriolic.
"Sometimes, they were right. Someitmes, my language became hyperbolic. There's no doubt about it," West says. "When I said he's a black puppet of Wall Street oligarchs, I still think I was telling the truth. But the language itself tended to give too much attention to the language as opposed to what was actually being said in regard to meaning and substance."
Long before his words sparked such debate, Cornel West was a young boy growing up in Sacramento, surrounded by books.
"Mom was a schoolteacher, principal of that school. There is a school now named after her. So she was a reader. She would read poetry to us every night," he says. "My father was crazy about education, too."
West's grandfather was a preacher. Though it seems West inherited his grandfather’s oratorical skills, he says he never felt the calling to preach, in part because he saw the sacrifices made by the pastor in his local Baptist church.
"I knew I could never aspire to that level of service. Every minute, he's concerned about his flock, hospitals, school, working on the church," West says. "And so when you look at what it means to be a preacher in that context, and a pastor in that context, you say, 'No, let me write my books, run my mouth, bear witness.' And I like the nightclubs too much."
West's history of activism began in third grade. He was thrown out of school for not saluting the flag. It stemmed from a story he heard during a summer trip to visit his mother's family in Texas.
"My great-great uncle was lynched one summer, and they wrapped his body in the flag. When I heard granddad talking about it, my perception of the flag shifted radically," West says. "So when I went back to Sacramento and I saw the flag, and I thought, all those images flashed, I knew I couldn't get up and salute it. I got in deep trouble."
But nothing got in the way of West's education.
"Those were the days in which little black kids, our minds were taken much more seriously than too many young black kids today," West says. "Diane Ravitch says rich kids get taught and poor kids get tested. When I was coming along, we got taught. We were poor kids, but we got taught."
He developed a lifelong love of literature and music.
"I call myself a jazzman in the life of the mind and a bluesman in the world of ideas," West says.
He went to Harvard and then Princeton to earn a PhD, experiences West calls "intellectual feasts." He would go on to write books that made him a public figure. Suddenly, he was not just a professor, but a pundit speaking on television and all over the country, with a schedule much like his beloved itinerant jazz and blues musicians.
"It comes at a tremendous cost," West says. "Personal relationships. I've been married three times to three magnificent women. Got to stay on the move in terms of staying in contact, not just with my son and daughter. but with my grandson."
"So I don’t really get the kind of, it would be the kind of time that our Buddhist brothers and sisters would talk about, meditation, very soft, silent contemplation. I wish I had more time for that."
In his public speaking, he is, as always, provocative. In his private ruminations, Cornel West asks himself the questions his father first asked him many years ago, questions that are still relevant today.
"What kind of person are you? What kind of person?" West says. "I don’t care what college you go to. I don’t care what kind of job you have, I don’t care how much money you have, how big your house is, how sharp your car is. Who are you as a human being? Character virtue."