The Crisis of Black Leadership: Introduction to an International Symposium

‘‘Power’’ in the realm of politics is the capacity of a group to realize its specific, objective interests. ‘‘Leaders’’ are the principal agents to craft strategies and tactics to achieve power for their constituencies. In the context of recent Black history, both within the United States and transnationally, there has been a marked decline in the political effectiveness and accountability of ‘‘Black leaders’’ to Black constituencies. Political scientists and public policy analysts have debated the complicated reasons for this breakdown of Black leadership, but few disagree with the view that Black political movements are less effective in achieving concrete objectives than a half century ago, during the classic struggles to overturn colonialism, Jim Crow segregation, and South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime.

From the vantage point of contemporary Black history, modern African–American
leadership inside the United States emerged with two critical events. The first was a legal victory—the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the legality of racially segregated schools in Brown v. Board of Education in May, 1954. The high court declared in its ruling ‘‘that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.’’ The following year, the Supreme Court urged the adoption of desegregation plans by public schools ‘‘with all deliberate speed.’’ The Brown victory was the culmination of decades of legal and political efforts by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and other civil rights groups. Finally, over ninety years after the Emancipation Proclamation, African Americans could demand of the federal government their Constitutional right to a quality education for their children, without the barriers and material inequities of ‘‘Jim Crow,’’ the U.S. version of racial apartheid.

The second political event occurred in Montgomery, Alabama, on 1 December 1955, when Rosa Parks, a respected seamstress and a NAACP local activist, refused to relinquish her seat to a white man, while riding on a segregated public bus. Local Black labor union leader E. D. Nixon, outraged by Parks’ arrest, urged the African–American community to stage a one-day boycott of Montgomery’s buses. A Black professional women’s group, the Women’s Political Council led by educator Jo Ann Robinson, was largely responsible for the successful city-wide mobilization to protest Jim Crow regulations in public transportation. On Monday, 5 December, over 95 percent of all Blacks refused to ride the buses. Six thousand Black people gathered that night at Montgomery’s Holt Street Baptist Church, and reached a consensus to continue the nonviolent protest indefinitely. A Black coalition, the Montgomery Improvement Association, was created, which selected a young, little-known Baptist minister as its chief spokesperson—Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. For nearly one year the boycott continued, despite hundreds of Blacks being fired from
their jobs for supporting civil protest. The homes of King and other African Americans were firebombed; local police harassed and jailed boycott organizers. On 13 November 1956, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the boycott, and struck down the city’s segregation ordinance for public transportation. The modern Black freedom movement had achieved a decisive victory, and the struggle had found a new spokesperson in the powerful and charismatic Dr. King.

Historians who study and document the lives of political leaders frequently make the mistake of telling a story from the vantage point of ‘‘great’’ people’s (usually men’s) lives. To be sure, an unusual number of talented and extraordinary Black women and men came into the public arena to push forward measures to outlaw American apartheid: Dr. King; the Reverend David Abernathy, King’s closest friend and confidante; the brilliant tactician Bayard Rustin; Medgar Evers, the leader of Mississippi’s NAACP branch who was brutally assassinated in front of his home and family in 1963; Septima Poinsette Clark, who created the Citizenship Education program, which taught thousands of poor and illiterate Blacks to read, write, and to register to vote; Robert Moses, a young mathematics teacher, who went into Mississippi to organize voter education and registration campaigns; the Vanderbilt Divinity student, James Lawson, who trained civil rights activists in civil disobedience techniques and taught them the philosophy of nonviolence of Mohandas Gandhi; the courageous Ella Baker, veteran of civil rights organizations, who inspired the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960; the legendary Fannie Lou Hamer, a former cotton field laborer, who co-founded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and challenged the whites-only state delegation at the 1964 Democratic National Convention; John Lewis, who in his early twenties participated in ‘‘freedom rides’’ to desegregate interstate bus
routes, and led nonviolent ‘‘sit-in’’ demonstrations at whites-only lunch counters;
Thurgood Marshall, lead attorney of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and later the first Black Supreme Court Justice; and Gloria Hayes Richardson, who led the desegregation campaign in Cambridge, Maryland.

Many of the veterans of the Black freedom movement of the 1950s and the 1960s would later successfully move into electoral politics, such as King lieutenant Andrew Young, who was elected to Congress in 1972, subsequently appointed U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations in 1977, and then was elected mayor of Atlanta, Georgia, in 1981. Another prominent example of public leadership is that of civil rights attorney Marian Wright Edelman. Born in South Carolina in 1939, Edelman earned her law degree at Yale University, and worked with various civil rights groups. In 1968, Edelman was the Congressional liaison for King’s Poor People’s Campaign. Five years later, she founded the Children’s Defense Fund, a nonprofit agency that today is the most prominent advocate group advancing the interests of American’s children, regardless of their race or ethnicity.

How has the challenge of Black leadership changed over the past half century? African–American politics in the twenty-first century is defined by what I call the ‘‘paradox of integration.’’ At no previous time in American history have there been more influential and powerful Black elected officials and government administrators serving in the nation’s capital. Back in 1964, the year that the Civil Rights Act was signed, which outlawed racial segregation in public accommodations, the total number of Blacks in Congress was five; the total number of African–American mayors of major U.S. cities, towns and even villages was zero; the combined total of all Black officials throughout the United States in 1964 was a paltry 104.

This meant, in practical terms, that the voice of Black political leadership largely
emanated from two sources: the African–American Christian religious community, such as the Progressive Baptist Convention, and its representatives, including leading Civil Rights clergy like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Ralph David Abernathy, Wyatt T. Walker, Fred Shuttlesworth, and others. Secondly, there was the mainstream Civil Rights community, represented by NAACP national secretary Roy Wilkins, NAACP Legal Defense Fund director Thurgood Marshall, the Congress of Racial Equality leader James Farmer, and Urban League director Whitney Young. These individuals possessed radically different approaches and tactics in their efforts to challenge Jim Crow segregation. But what they all had in common was a strategic understanding about what the fight was about. Few of them entertained any illusions about trying to get themselves elected to Congress. Their goal was the vigorous advocacy of what they perceived to be Blacks’ interests, and to use a variety of means—nonviolent demonstrations, economic boycotts, lobbying Congress to pass legislation, etc.—to pressure white leaders and institutions to make meaningful concessions.

The passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act, and the widespread exodus of white
racist ‘‘Dixiecrats’’ into the Republican Party, led to the rise of the African–American electorate as a central component within the national Democratic Party. The number of African–American officials soared: from about 1,100 in 1970 to 3,600 by 1983. The Congressional Black Caucus was formed in 1971 to bring greater leverage within Congress for African–American demands. In March 1972, thousands of Blacks met in Gary, Indiana, to form a ‘‘National Black Political Assembly,’’ with the explicit idea of constructing a comprehensive ‘‘Black Agenda’’ of public policy issues that would guide the actions of newly elected Black officials across the country. Some of us involved in the Assembly even anticipated the establishment of an all-Black Independent Political Party, where Blacks could exercise the greatest possible freedom in negotiating deals
between white parties and institutions.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, political events triggered a fundamental transformation in the internal dynamics of Black leadership nationally and in the agendas it pursued. First, the rise of a powerful, assertive Congressional Black Caucus largely superseded the political influence of the NAACP and other civil rights organizations as the chief formulators of national Black public policy. Second, the dramatic electoral campaigns of Harold Washington, running successfully for Chicago’s mayor in 1983 and 1987, combined with the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition presidential campaigns of 1984 and 1988, illustrated that Black social protests (aimed chiefly against President Ronald Reagan’s conservative agenda) could use electoral politics as a vehicle for mobilizing masses of people of different races and classes behind a Black progressive agenda. Jackson did not win the Democratic presidential nomination, but his dramatic success in garnering over seven million popular votes in 1988, and in winning numerous primary elections and caucus states proved that a Black or Latino presidential candidate could, under the right set of circumstances, win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination. Although Jackson was himself a Christian minister, his electoral campaigns shifted the focus of Black politics away from the Black church and civil rights groups firmly into the secular electoral arena. In the quarter century following the civil rights marches of Birmingham, Selma, and Memphis, ‘‘Black politics’’ had been redefined from economic boycotts, street demonstrations, the establishment of ‘‘Freedom Schools,’’ Septima Clark’s ‘‘Citizenship Academies,’’ and from Black Power–inspired automobile workers creating their own revolutionary union movements in Detroit, to electoral
participation within the system.

But the third and most unexpected political development, was the striking emergence of what can be termed ‘‘post-Black politics’’ or ‘‘race-neutral politics.’’ Prior to the late 1980s, the vast majority of white American voters, regardless of their party affiliation or ideology, simply would not vote for a Black candidate for public office. There existed an ‘‘invisible glass ceiling’’ limiting Black upward mobility within the system, where African Americans could be elected to Congress, but only so long as their districts contained at least strong pluralities of minorities. Dozens of Blacks won election a mayors with cities containing white majorities, but these were nearly always cities containing substantial and highly mobilized Black and brown electorates, and traditional allies like liberal unions, Latinos, and women’s organizations.

In the multicultural nineties, as ‘‘hip-hop’’ began to define urban youth culture, and
as President William Jefferson Clinton proudly jogged after donning a Malcolm ‘‘X
Cap,’’ this racial barrier eroded. A new generation of African–American politicians—most of whom were lawyers, corporate executives, city administrators, and foundation officers—began to emerge, first in municipal politics and then at the national level. With few exceptions, they had no alternative except to advocate the interests of their constituencies—who happened to be white and Latino as well as African–American, middle-class as well as working class, unemployed and poor, those without high school diplomas as well as those with professional and graduate degrees. Michael White, the mayor of Cleveland, Ohio, in the 1990s was in many ways the archetype for post-Black politics; an African–American mayor who was far more comfortable discussing tax abatements and incentives to attract corporate investment to the inner city, than leading a public protest.

Today, the two most ‘‘successful’’ practitioners of post-Black leadership are Illinois
Senator Barack Obama, and Newark, New Jersey Mayor Corey Booker. Both men are proudly, assertively self-identified as ‘‘Black,’’ as an ethnic identity. But both pursue strategies for public policy change that are not ‘‘race-based.’’ They consciously cater to audiences that are broadly multiracial, and draw the majority of their financial support well outside of the Black community. Despite their prominence, they do not play organic roles of interest group advocacy for all-Black groups, partially because their perceived electoral mandate is ‘‘color-blind.’’ The reality of their electoral successes paradoxically limits their ability to advocate on behalf of the specific problems of structural racism that continue to devastate and destroy Blacks’ lives.

What is required is the construction of a new, dedicated, organic Black leadership of advocacy, that is linked to institutions and non-profit organizations that are intimately engaged in struggles attacking the New Racial Domain of mass unemployment, mass incarceration, and mass political disenfranchisement. This in no way to minimize the significance of electoral politics, voting, and using all the tools of electoralism. But it is to suggest that when we abandoned ‘‘protest’’ for ‘‘politics,’’ we lost our way; it is to suggest that effective leadership that interrogates systemic racial inequality must isolate problems of racial disparities within employment patterns, within sentencing and parole patterns that highlight the continuing reality of white supremacy in American life. Only a mass protest movement dedicated to Black empowerment and human equality can produce the principled leadership necessary to ‘‘speak truth to power.’’

Noted political scientist David Colvin has organized a symposium of international scholars to examine the crisis of Black leadership, both in the United States and transnationally. The contributors in the symposium reflect different theoretical and ideological perspectives. But what they share is a critical commitment to the necessity for people of African descent to construct new innovative models of political advocacy and empowerment. In order to accomplish this, a reexamination of Black political praxis since the end of the Civil Rights Era is absolutely essential.