Thinking Out Loud: Frances Cress Welsing in the Tradition of Bold Black Intellectualism by Bakari Kitwana

The recent death of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing set off a vibrant conversation on social media about her legacy as a scholar and her contribution to discourses of homophobia in the Black Community. In this remembrance of Dr. Welsing, longtime journalist and activist Bakari Kitwana recalls being a young editor at Third World Press and working on Dr. Welsing’s The Isis Papers.
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Thinking Out Loud: Frances Cress Welsing in the Tradition of Bold Black Intellectualismby Bakari Kitwana | @TheRealBakari | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
I first became aware of Dr. Frances Cress Welsing in the late 1980s when I joined the editorial staff at Third World Press. Her name and reputation as a fearless intellect and her pamphlet, The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation, which had initially been published in 1970, were wildly popular in African centered circles that applauded and celebrated independent Black intellectualism.
Some time in 1989, Haki Madhubuti, the publisher of the Chicago-based Third World Press, who as a mentor had perfected the art of dramatic entrances, walked into my office without saying hello. I had barely looked up from the manuscript I was reading when he dropped a medium sized cardboard box on my desk.
“What’s this?” I ask.
“Frances’s book.”
I paused. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Edit it,” he said exiting the room as dramatically as he’d entered.
The cardboard box was filled with essays that Dr. Welsing had sent Madhubuti, which needed to be transcribed before the project would begin to approach book form. Some were photocopies of previously published pieces. Some were handwritten on yellow legal pad and stapled together. As a young editor and an aspiring writer, I went to work on this just as many other amazing projects that landed on my desk in those days (including books and essays written by Jacob Carruthers, Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Ishmael Reed, John Henrik Clarke, Gil Scott Heron, Marimba Ani to name a few).
One of the interesting things about the project was the trust that Dr. Welsing placed in her sister Barbara to meet with me and go over edits in her place. Of course this was before the Internet explosion and video conferencing and at the time Dr. Welsing lived in DC. But it was also indicative of both the sibling love and trust between Dr. Welsing and her sister as well as a nod to the fact that she came out of a highly educated and accomplished family of educators and thinkers, including parents, grandparents and siblings. I would periodically meet Barbara at her home of the Southside of Chicago and we would spend hours pouring over the manuscript. She would then discuss and review/ approve edits with Dr. Welsing.
It wasn’t until after we finished the project that I met Dr. Welsing for the first time in person, moments before she presented on the book to a standing room only audience at a book release party hosted by Third World Press and the African American Book Center, an event which took place at the adjoining storefront of space of the New Concept Development Center. The space was known as the Institute of Positive Education in the late 60s and early 1970s.  Frances presented on the same stage where she and countless Black intellectual luminaries had presented only decades earlier, in a gathering similar to the community settings where she lent her voice around the country.  
I would see her publicly speak on the book several more times over the next few years at the National Black Wholistic Retreat Society gatherings organized by a group of Black radical thinkers and activists among whom she was a regular fixture: in the summer of 1991 at the Peg Leg Bates Country Club, a resort created for Blacks in upstate New York in the Catskill mountains; and again in the Georgia Sea Islands in 1992 during a weeklong Kwanzaa retreat.
Moments and places like these epitomized Black political thought and intellectualism of those days. So it was no leap when I got the call from Harry Allen, dubbed the Media Assassin for the legendary rap group Public Enemy asking for permission from Third World Press to republish the Cress Theory on the jacket of Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet album. As an avid hip-hop head and a Black political junkie who had yet to make the leap to The Source Magazine, I was ecstatic.     The book was a runaway success, and was one of the two major projects, along with Haki Madhubuti’s book Black Men Obsolete, Single, Dangerous?, that helped move Third World Press as a force into the next two decades. The success of both books put the company in the position to make the transition from the storefront to a former Catholic church rectory blocks away on 79th Street and Dobson Avenue, which remains the current home of Third World Press.
Dr. Welsing represents a tradition of bold Black intellectualism in which our thinkers didn’t pretend to have all the answers but dared to ask tough questions, theorize and think out loud. Using Einstein’s unified field theory and Neely Fuller’s work The United Independent Compensatory Code/System/Concept (“if you don’t understand white supremacy . . . everything you think you know about racism will only confuse you”) as well as her own research as the starting point, she argued that White supremacy was a global system of domination and control. She, in many ways, popularized the term “white supremacy” as an expression that prior to her work few beyond radicals dared to utter, even in hushed voices. Likewise, she liberated many of the erroneous notion that moral suasion was an effective strategy for defeating it.
Although her Cress Theory is the work that most remember, The Isis Papers, the book, also included her thoughts on “The Inferiorization of Black Children” in which she theorized that American public policy toward Black folks if continued unchecked would effectively contribute to Black youth inferiorization to the extent that many would not be able to compete.
It was an honor and a privilege to be her editor during my tenure at Third World Press and to work closely with her sister Barbara Cress Lawrence and publisher Haki Madhubuti to bring her book to publication. It was a magical time to move in those circles, a time when Black intellectuals considered independent Black institutions to be paramount and saw them as an extension of what it meant to be a Black intellectual. That she chose Third World Press as her publisher was not only in keeping with that tradition, for her, it was logical.
Though she will be missed, her work and impact remain examples of the bold, fearless intellectualism that Black folks must galvanize in order to secure a future that our children deserve. We best honor her memory by finding this tradition within ourselves. It was a practice that she perfected into a lifestyle.  
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Bakari Kitwana is the curator of the essay series "Change the Perception of Black Men by 2020," executive director of Rap Sessions and the author of the forthcoming Hip-Hop Activism in the Obama Era (Third World Press, 2016).