The crisis of black leadership in fact and fancy

by Fred Logan

Black music is in crisis. Black youth are in crisis. And so is Black everything else.

Slavery, by definition, is always a crisis. And so are racial oppression and exploitation in the United States dominated, as it is, by White racism.

Black people have always been in crisis. The names of the crisis have changed over the long years, because the United States has changed from an agrarian society, to an industrial society, to a post-industrial society; and equally because, as scholars like Vincent Harding and Lloyd Hogan have vividly recorded, African American people fought back and defeated slavery and post-slavery de jure racial segregation.

African American life today remains in crisis. And the Black women and men who dare take the lead and challenge the status quo place themselves in grave danger.

Instantly, they become the prime targets of the establishment’s persecution, in all of its infamous variations. Look back at this for just a minute.

Medgar Evers, to name just one, was shot down and assassinated. Fannie Lou Hamer and countless others were beaten, jailed, and slandered. Yet, the very fact they were arrested by the police, sentenced by the courts, or slandered in the media said they were doing something right and defending Black people.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s COINTELPRO program, under its most celebrated leader J. Edger Hoover, said the FBI would not “permit the rise of a Black messiah” to lead the Black Freedom Movement. By “messiah”, the federal government surely meant Black organizations just as much, if not even more, than Black individuals. This is obvious by the numerous Black organizations that have been disrupted or destroyed over the past 60-plus years by local, state, and federal agencies working with the eager support of the mainstream news media.

We know all of this. So, it sounds very odd, doesn’t it, when some Black people talk about a “crisis of Black leadership” as though we should expect Black leaders to be exempt from the crisis that has always dominated every facet of African American life?

Hour-by-hour, and minute-by-minute, we have to monitor Black life. We also must criticize Black leaders when necessary, either behind closed doors, as Malcolm said, or in public when need be–and often is. We must let the world know the Black community will not let Black individuals or organizations get away with any and everything, because they “just happen to be Black” and the community will not take them to task in public. So what if the Tea Party hears it? That’s what we should want!

We must have constructive Black criticism that moves the collective struggle forward. Not all Black criticism serves this end.

Some critics get carried away and argue nonsense. Some even claim the Black community is still not free, which is absolutely correct. So, they conclude Black people do not have any leaders, which is incorrect.

It’s not just Black people who are still subjugated and oppressed. This is also true of Native Americans and other people in this country and around the world. According to our Black critics’ fallacious arguments these people also do not have any leaders because they are not free.

Another logical conclusion to draw from this illogical argument would be in that 1964 the White folks in the KKK were free and had leaders, but Black people in SCLC didn’t have any leaders back then, because they weren’t free.

You and I can disagree all we want to with the Nation of Islam, National Action Network, or any Black organization. But whether you or I agree with them or not, Minister Farrakhan, and Reverend Al Sharpton, our two examples, have followers and are leaders.

Too often, we parrot what we get about Black leaders from the liberal, moderate, and conservative mainstream news media. Even though, we should know by now that liberal, moderate, and conservative white racists do not and cannot tell us what we need to know about any facet of African American struggle. We must do this for ourselves.

Unfortunately, mainstream Black newspapers and Black talk-radio seldom provide enough pertinent information on Black life for us to evaluate if what Black leaders are doing is positive or negative.

Several years ago, the prominent African American scholar-activist David Covin made some important observations about Black and White leaders that we should always keep in mind. White people, he said, are influential “leaders because they control or direct extraordinary resources—human and material—and dominate national and international agendas, not by virtue of any outstanding personal characteristics.” (Emphasis added).

“Please,” Covin asked us, “what are the extraordinary merits of George W. Bush… (or)  Dan Qualye? (here we add, Donald Trump?)” We can ask this valid question about all ‘em, for real.

“There is no dearth of Black leaders,” Covin reminds us. That’s true; Black people have leaders in politics, religion, the arts and any other endeavor you can name. Many are outstanding leaders. Many are not. Some are misleading.

We are all confronted with the same mammoth social problems. But often times Black people including many Black leaders and their critics refuse to accept or acknowledge the magnitude and complexity of these problems. These problems are endemic to the American economic system. Nothing short of an on-going mass social movement will even begin to resolve them.

We still have poverty, housing, education and the other perennial problems all intensified by racism. In 2019, we also have over 9,000 Black elected officials across the US, compared to 105 in 1965, and numerous Black people occupying prestigious positions in major public and private institutions. This is by no means parity. But such developments have substantially altered our overall struggle with the status quo.

Many of the victories Black people won yesterday complicate the present. In the past, Black people were always eager to take their legitimate grievances to Democratic or Republican American presidents.

The US was at the very pinnacle of its post-WWII global power five decades ago during the most intense years of the civil rights struggles. Today, it is in the grips of a persistent post-Vietnam decline. The glaring growing poverty in the Black community is a leading indicator of the increasing poverty of the larger multiracial, multiethnic US populace. Race and class conflict over dwindling resources is on the rise. The Tea Party is one of countless examples.

The mammoth problems Black people confront here in Pittsburgh alone are infinitely much more difficult to solve than the Pennsylvania state budget. Yet, all of the Ph. D.’s in the USA cannot resolve the crisis of mainstream White leadership that brought both Barack Obama and Donald Trump to the White House.

Some of us argue in our fancy that all Black people need are some more band-aid social service programs baptized in the name of moral, religious, and family values and blessed by the establishment. This reduces Black leadership to little more than bureaucratic proficiency. It is also wrong. Very, very often, we have seen, people with administrative, clerical, and other bureaucratic skills run away from the battlefield as soon as the water begins to warm up. They deathly fear “a crisis.”

Martin Luther King Jr. was in a crisis from the Montgomery bus boycott all through “The Turbulent Sixties” until he was murdered. That crisis—white oppression versus Black resistance—made King the “Black leader” the world reveres today. This is the hallowed tradition of Black leadership. And we must always be sure to separate the fact from fancy.

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