It then becomes impossible to hold a civil dialogue or seek common ground among different approaches. Many of these individuals spend their time treating other African-American people as enemies, but have very limited track records of making a difference for the community in which they purport to reside. Unless bridges can be built to move from transactional zero sum relationships to transformation solutions, many low income African-Americans will remain in a prisoners dilemma trapped in the vicissitudes of poverty.
The role of religious leaders is a critical component of leadership within the black community, historically and currently. This is true whether one focuses on African-American leadership that developed out of slavery, the civil rights movement, the black power movement, or on the present day issues of racial profiling and disparities.
At the same time, there has been a significant rise of African Americans who have moved into the middle class over the past two decades. Unlike prior decades, African Americans now hold prominent positions in nonprofit organizations, government, arts, business, education and philanthropy. This is certainly an opportunity to be seized by combining the historic leadership of the clergy with the emerging leaders in government, business and the nonprofit sector.
This could be a potent force in building bridges toward a common agenda within the African-American community. Being a leader does not necessarily mean being loved: loving one's community means daring to risk estrangement and alienation from that very community, in the short run in order to break the cycle of poverty, despair and hopelessness that we are in, over the long run.
For what is at stake is nothing less than the survival of our country, and the African-American people. For over 20 years, Gary Cunningham has served as the top leader of philanthropic, health care, public policy and educational organizations. Currently, Gary serves as vice president, chief program officer for the Northwest Area Foundation.
He is responsible for carrying out the foundation's mission to support efforts by the people, organizations and communities to reduce poverty and achieve sustainable prosperity. Home All Sections. Log In Welcome, User. Coronavirus Minneapolis St. Paul Duluth St. Study: Mpls.
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Book Releases. Exclusive Entertainment. News Entertainment. High School. History Sports. News Sports. Antonio Moore. Ardena Joy Cota. ASK DR. Charlene Crowell. Ben Chavis. Firpo W. Maulana Karenga. It is very likely impossible to get them off. The national civil rights organizations supported the Black Belt voting rights campaign, but in this instance too local leadership played crucial roles in mobilizing black communities.
Once again, these organizers were effective only to the extent that they secured the support of indigenous leaders. This gulf became evident at the Democratic National Convention of when Lyndon Johnson's supporters indicated that they would seat only two MFDP delegates rather than displace the entire all-white regular delegation.
King and other national civil rights leaders argued in favor of this compromise, but Fannie Lou Hamer spoke for the majority of MFDP delegates when she responded, "We didn't come all this way for no two seats!
By the time of the Selma to Montgomery march in , civil rights protests were already declining in significance within the larger African-American freedom struggle. The Los Angeles rebellion of August accelerated the ongoing shift in the focus of African-American politics from issues of legal equality toward broader political, economic, and cultural concerns.
Nevertheless, as during the period of civil rights protests, a pattern of autonomous grassroots activism characterized black power advocacy. Indeed, mass mobilizations in black communities often took the form of inchoate racial rioting that did not respond to centralized direction.
During the mids, black power advocates and black nationalists insisted that they, rather than established civil rights leaders, spoke for the black masses, but few of them actually led mass protest movements or insurgencies. Black power advocates, like civil rights advocates, gained national prominence less through mobilizing movements than through skillful manipulation of media.
Black leaders could more easily deliver intangible gains, because such gains did not involve fixed-sum values and thus could be achieved without decreasing the amount possessed by non-blacks. In contrast, tangible goals, such as jobs, housing, services, and representation on decision-making bodies, could not be increased rapidly for African Americans without decreasing the amount available for other groups. Black power proponents and black nationalist leaders challenged civil rights leaders to transform the living conditions of the black masses, but all black leaders found it easier to transform the status and esteem of African Americans than to change racial realities.
As a result, the black consciousness movements of the s and s achieved psychological and cultural transformation without having much impact on the living conditions of poor and working-class blacks.
The black masses acquired an ideological vocabulary to express their anger and frustration but still lacked the political awareness necessary for effective collective action.
However, his intellectual legacy did not bridge the divide between black leaders and mobilized black masses. Despite his rhetorical support for black militancy, Malcolm himself did not lead a protest or insurgent movement. Indeed, Malcolm's principal contribution to the black nationalist tradition was to link that tradition with the mass movements of his time.
As Malcolm observed the intensifying civil rights demonstrations of and , he moved from harsh criticisms of nonviolence and integrationism to a more subtle critique that distinguished between national and grassroots civil rights leaders. Although Malcolm continued to challenge King and other established civil rights leaders, he also became increasingly critical of the Nation of Islam's apolitical orientation: "I felt that, wherever black people committed themselves, in the Little Rocks and the Birminghams and other places, militantly disciplined Muslims should also be there for all the world to see, and respect, and discuss.
It could be heard increasingly in the Negro communities: 'Those Muslims talk tough, but they never do anything, unless somebody bothers Muslims.
In October , while on a tour of Africa, he met with SNCC representatives, convincing them to cooperate with his newly- establish group. During February he traveled to Selma, Alabama, to address young voting rights activists. While there he attempted to meet with Martin Luther King, Jr. By the time of his assassination on February 21, Malcolm's variant of black nationalism emphasized militant political engagement rather than racial-religious separatism. Many of Malcolm's posthumous followers continued to quote his speeches as minister of the Nation of Islam, the group whose leaders condemned Malcolm as a traitor "worthy of death.
Malcolm's intellectual legacy became a diverse set of ideas that had both conservative and radical implications - ideas that encouraged generalized pessimism about the future as well as revolutionary enthusiasm. Black power advocates, such as Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, and Black Panther leaders popularized Malcolm's brand of rhetorical militancy, but they had little success in building politically effective mass movements. Black power militancy produced lasting ideological and cultural contributions but also fomented destructive ideological and cultural conflicts within the black militant community.
Intending to create a unified and revolutionary black movement, black power advocates instead competed with one another to determine which ideas should become the basis of racial unity. In retrospect, the assassination of Malcolm X can be seen as the prototype of subsequent deadly and demoralizing black-against-black battles that made black militancy more vulnerable to external manipulation and repression.
Rather than serving as "organic intellectuals" 11 building on the emergent ideas of ongoing grassroots struggles, some black power advocates, assuming that ideological conversion and cultural training were necessary preconditions for effective racial struggle, arrogantly sought to "raise" the black masses to a predetermined level of consciousness.
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