The Characteristics Of Proper Black Male Leadership

Somewhere between the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King and the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, the ascension of Louis Farrakhan, and the rhetorical flourishes and marches of Al Sharpton, well-meaning Americans of all stripes got lulled into the notion that we could only have a few black mouthpieces at a time. And that is simply the farthest thing from the truthIt may look as though Black America has fallen into a terrible rut around our leadership today, but that’s in part because a faulty image—that of the singularly powerful national black leader—has been perpetuated out of the upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet Dr. King was never the lone leader of Black America in his day. There was Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, Malcolm X, Ella Baker and a wide range of women and men of various ages and backgrounds. A quick scan of American history finds many other national black leaders coexisting in the same eras, be it Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass during the abolitionist movement, or Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B DuBois during the anti-racism efforts around the turn of the 20th century. But in the 1970s and 1980s, as integration and black class division began taking root, as the devastating effects of drugs began to plague our inner cities, and as conservatives began trying to erase the very minimal civil rights victories we achieved, black leadership became not only rooted in racial protest, but unable to be self-reflective or self-critical.