Biography
Warren Lattimore is a Th.D. student at Duke University. His research focuses on Black Lutheran history, particularly the life and work of Dr. Rosa J. Young, the "Mother of Black Lutheranism." Having completed two terms as president of the Black Clergy Caucus of the Lutheran Church, Warren currently serves on Duke University's Racial Equity Advisory Council and works with The Christian Century as a Sacred Writes Fellow.
Paper Abstract
In 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois published Darkwater, a collection of semi- autobiographical writings. The book ends with a piece of speculative fiction entitled "The Comet." In it, Du Bois depicts the end of the world, brought about by a toxic gas-emitting comet killing everyone but a Black man and wealthy white woman. Believing they were the last people on earth, "the two, flying and alone, looked upon the horror of the world, [and] slowly, gradually, the sense of all-enveloping death deserted them." With humanity's survival depending on their procreation, their racial enmity began to subside. Between Afropessimism's ontology and Afrofuturism's possibility, the two imagined new possibilities. Joseph Winters describes this as melancholic hope, a "broken predicament [that] exists in a space between melancholy and hope, disappointment and possibility." At the same time, Rosa Young, the "Mother of Black Lutheranism," reflected on the devastation brought about by the invasion of the boll weevil. Like Du Bois, she experienced melancholic hope. While Young grieved the possible closure of her school due to economic collapse, she observed that the 'discontinuation of the credit system' made possible a new world. In her autobiography, she writes, "Prior to this time... [many] depended wholly upon white landlords to provide clothing, shoes, food, medicine, and so forth.... Cotton, King Cotton, was their greatest aim in life. Now that they had to depend upon themselves, they all went about in deep mourning." Arguably an accelerant of the Great Migration, in commingling ecological grief with melancholic hope, a new world was imagined. This paper places Du Bois and Young in conversation to consider how melancholic hope might emerge from ecological grief. Such hope depends on our ability to "call a thing what it is," grounded in the lament of the Anthropocene.