Of Cain and Abel: African-American Literature and the Problem of Inheritance after 9/11

Abstract

In November 2011, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution traced the career of Republican presidential hopeful Herman Cain back to his college years in the 1960s at Atlanta's prestigious historically black institution, Morehouse College. Assimilating Cain into the image of the race man most often conjured in relation to other Morehouse luminaries—Martin Luther King, Jr., Maynard Jackson, Howard Thurman, Benjamin E. Mays—the article presents Cain as evidence of the widening variance in social and political perspectives in post-civil rights black American culture, even as it firmly anchors him in a kind of modern black political masculinity. United Negro College Fund president Michael Lomax tells the reporter, for example, “The elements of what you see in Herman Cain today were seeds planted, developed and nurtured at Morehouse[. … ] He is vintage Morehouse, as far as I am concerned. Strong personality. Forceful. Engaging. A supercharged ego. … Those are all elements of Morehouse.” A current Morehouse student and black Republican tells readers, “So often we're given this media stereotype of a black Republican as someone who is outside mainstream black America, but Cain's run does away with all these stereotypes. … He was born in the South, went to Mother Morehouse … and is still very much so connected to Black America” (Suggs).