Cornel West’s View From Ferguson

The orator, activist and scholar Cornel West is summoning brave voices of black leadership from our past in his new book, Black Prophetic Fire.

I asked him if he wanted us to see Birmingham in 1963 in the protests that got him arrested in Ferguson, Missouri this fall — after the long and troubled investigation of the killing of the black teenager Michael Brown by a police officer — and whether at a time when our politics feels less relevant and more strained than ever, his might be a voice that people need, if only to answer to the Sean Hannitys of the world.