Albert Murray’s Message to Today’s Promising Youth

In his opening remarks to honors students at Howard University in 1978, found in the essay “Academic Lead Sheet” in From the Briarpatch File: On Context, Procedure, and American Identity, Albert Murray places the occasion within a cultural context and ancestral continuum, using the idiomatic particulars of his audience to extend his ideas and images to universal application. The points he made forty-six years ago, especially his descriptions of the social and cultural role of elites, artists, and intellectuals, hold wisdom for us today.

Here are the main themes in his short talk to the Howard University youth. 

Leadership

Murray is an unabashed elitist, a word which in the camps Eric Weinstein calls Wokeistan and MAGAstan holds negative connotations. Indeed, Mary Schmidt Campbell once shared with me that Murray declared that they were cultural “aristocrats.” As we related in our blog a year ago, in the essay “In a Democracy, Can Elitism Be Good?,” Murray counseled the young people on that day not to fall for academic or activist foolishness and to substitute, if necessary, the word “specialist” for “elite,” but to embrace an elite mission nevertheless.

Can any group, based on whatever distinction, even survive, let alone develop and fulfill itself (to say nothing of transcending itself), without the benefit of its own elite corps of highly competent and dedicated intellectual, professional, and technical specialists? Obviously such an elite was what W. E. B. Du Bois had in mind when he advocated the development of what he called the Talented Tenth. Nor were Booker T. Washington’s agricultural, technical, and normal school missionaries expected to add up to anything less than an even larger elite corps that was to include the big moneymakers.

The function of the elite is to provide the rest of society with equipment for living which is commensurate with the complexity and possibilities of the time in which they live. You have to be specialists in order to do that. And we hope that at least some of you are also geniuses.

—Albert Murray

In South to a Very Old Place, Murray’s legendary teacher and head of the Mobile County Training School critiqued Du Bois and Washington:

Booker T. Washington sacrificed too much to expediency. Dr. Du Bois in his up-north bitterness spends too much time complaining. The youth of today must find the golden mean.

—Dr. Benjamin F. Baker

In this case, however, Murray emphasized a concord between Du Bois and Washington as regards the pragmatic need to develop specialists to advance a group whose members were mainly a peasant class of the formerly enslaved. 

Intellectual and Artistic Elite: Rooted Cosmopolitans

Murray made clear that by “elite” specialists, he was not referring to “doctors, lawyers, scientists, engineers, and so on.” Intellectuals and artists were his focus because they provided “the context for the so-called spokesman and civic leaders (self- or otherwise elected).”

The function of the artist is to create images or the musical equivalents thereof that are commensurate with the complexities and the possibilities of life in our time. Whereas the intellectual or so-called thinking person has a responsibility to formulate questions, issues, and definitions that adequately reflect the problems of the times and thus form a basis that adequate specialized technicians can build on.

So our intellectuals must try to be sure that they are defining problems and issues in the most comprehensive terms. The intellectual’s very first step should represent an effort to approach life in universal terms. Sentimental provincialism is out! Your ambition should be to become as cosmopolitan as possible. Now, you reach the universal or the cosmopolitan through the particular.

So obviously you do not have to abandon your idiomatic roots. Indeed the more you dig down into yourself and deal with your personal problems against the richest possible background (and thus in the broadest context), the more universal the implications of your most casual personal gesture is likely to become.  

—Albert Murray

Chaos and Disjuncture: The Blues Idiom

Murray argues that the blues idiom is the existential equipment for living that our enslaved American ancestors left for us as a wisdom tradition.

Many people seem to think that all the slaves left us was a legacy of misery. I don’t agree. They also endowed us with an attitude toward life that the blues idiom embodies. Which is in essence a disposition of affirmation of continuity in the face of adversity. The basic dynamics of the blues idiom are predicated upon confrontation or acknowledgment of the harsh facts of life. The fact that not only is one’s personal plight sometimes pretty awful and unpromising, but also that life itself often looks like a low-down dirty shame that shouldn’t happen to any creature imaginable. The blues require you to confront chaos as a fact of life and improvise on the exigencies of the situation, however dire, on the opportunities or the options that are also always there.

—Albert Murray

The manner or style of the confrontation is important, too; Murray emphasizes the orientation to elegance by our ancestors, both in terms of creating elegant solutions to problems in the mathematical sense as well as:

. . . the disposition (in the face of all of the misery and uncertainty in the universe) to refine all of human action in a direction of dance-beat elegance. I submit that there is nothing that anybody in the world has ever done that is more civilized or sophisticated than to dance elegantly, which is to state with your total physical being an affirmative attitude toward the sheer fact of existence.

As far as I know, those who tout “embodied cognition” don’t quote Albert Murray, but the above statement demonstrates that they should.

Outchorus

In February 2024, a month in which we acknowledge the import of the history of Afro-Americans in the United States, perennial wisdom from Albert Murray points a way forward for not only members of his idiomatic tribe but for American college students overall, who too often today are caught in the grip of social science cliches, undigested progressive ideologies and slogans, and social media. Murray wasn’t a reactionary conservative; in an interview with Russell Neff in Murray Talks Music, he called himself an “experimental writer; I’m an avant-garde person who tries to keep his own values.” But if the wisdom he shared nearly fifty years ago makes so much sense, why isn’t it central to the education of young Americans in universities?

Having to ask that question demonstrates how far off-track we are as a nation.