Revisiting The Dream

Leutisha Stills

February 16, 2007

Leutisha Stills is a faculty member and equal opportunity specialist at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., and the researcher of the Congressional Black Caucus Monitor Report Card. This is an excerpt of an article in the Black Agenda Report.

Black America's leadership structures are in disarray. Such was evident and, in various ways, widely acknowledged at media entrepreneur Tavis Smiley's State of the Black Union event, held last weekend at Hampton University in Virginia. The forum has evolved into an annual substitute for genuine politics in a black polity that is bereft of institutions of accountability. By default, Smiley fills the void with his road shows and media exhibitions. But Smiley is not the problem: He is simply a businessman, who sees a hole in the market where a movement used to be.

"Are you enjoying this conversation?" Smiley asked the crowd during the forum's afternoon session. "Are you empowered by this conversation?" As expected, the audience roared back in the affirmative, despite the obvious fact that they would leave the predominantly black university campus no more empowered than when they arrived.

Again, this is not Smiley's fault. He had assembled an impressive group of activists, educators, politicians, clergy and businesspersons to discuss the state of affairs in black America in 2007. However, the most important lesson learned was the awesome absence of coherence in current black politics—much less a plan to revive a movement as an engine for progress.

Dr. Julia Hare, a founder of The Black Think Tank located in San Francisco, asked the question, "Do we have black leaders? Or do we have those who are leading blacks?"

Smiley's self-assignment, for which he is hugely competent, is to assemble luminaries offering a variety of viewpoints, allowing African Americans to pick and choose among divergent opinions. But, when it comes to implementing any of the items on the eclectic menu through mass or elective action, the requisite mechanisms are either missing (the absence of a movement) or broken (incoherence within black electoral political formations such as the Congressional Black Caucus).

Tavis, the impresario, can't fix that, but he does put on a good show—which, at present, is all we've got. I think he anticipated the collapse of black political leadership some time ago, and for that reason initiated the Annual State of the Black Union back in 1998. His panel members, themselves, seemed to confirm that confusion and frustration are the order of the day.

"Does it mean anything that we have more African Americans holding elected offices?" than ever before, asked L. Douglas Wilder, the former governor of Virginia and current mayor of Richmond, Va. "Does it mean anything to most of us? Yea, sometimes nay."

Newly elected Minnesota congressman Keith Ellison, an African American, said he was weary of listening to meaningless moaning and moralizing from black folks who should be formulating real policies and plans, and wanted to hear less about "generational debates" and more about universal health care. "I wish we could talk more about it today rather than whether black kids are acting right or not," he said. Ellison urged panel members and the audience to concentrate on issues of peace, ways to provide working-class and middle-class prosperity and voting rights.

On the subject of Sen. Barack Obama, who the same day was officially declaring his presidential candidacy in Springfield, Ill., Ellison asked: "What's the agenda—that's the question!" The crowd gave him a huge ovation. Although Obama was a thousand miles away presenting an essentially race-less message to a mostly white crowd, questions attached to his candidacy seemed to hover over the auditorium. The conversation at Hampton, Smiley later told reporters, was "more Ba-rack than I-raq."

Hare had already warned us about allowing the corporate-owned media to pick black leaders. We were reminded that Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and Dr. Martin Luther King so believed in equality and social justice for all, they died for their convictions. But what are Obama's beliefs? And, as emeritus historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wondered, is he willing to die for them? 

The very term "New Black Leader" is a code word for "Non-threatening Negro who will keep other blacks in their place if they're in charge." Many of these so-called leaders threw their lot in with the "first black president," Bill Clinton. The result was passage of trade legislation that sent more jobs out of this country than the Great Depression; no universal healthcare; "welfare reform" that allowed for no meaningful transition for recipients and left them flat out hanging when the benefits dried up; and a penal justice system that has sent more brothers to the joint for non-violent offenses than to college.

"When can we have a Million Man March on New Orleans, to assist our people in need?" read a question to the panel from the audience, transmitted by radio personality Tom Joyner. The answers were less than satisfactory.
"Twenty-thousand marched in April," said Rev. Jesse Jackson, Sr., who was one of the leaders of the New Orleans demonstration, "and maintained (black mayor C. Ray) Nagin in office. That's why they still control their politics."

Rev. Dr. Otis Moss, Jr. urged "black conventions, sororities, fraternities, to hold their meetings in New Orleans ... Every black organization ought to turn their meetings to New Orleans."

But what about a million-person march on the city? There could be no forthright response, because no combination of persons on the panel, or anywhere else in black America, is prepared to mobilize millions to descend on New Orleans with comprehensive plans and demands suited to the scale of the catastrophe. Katrina represents an indictment of a "black leadership" that lost its moorings when the black movement was allowed to atrophy—a failure of epic proportions, for which putative leadership must be held accountable.

Brother Tavis is correct when he says, "When you get black America well, all of America gets well." Tavis Smiley's fortunes have risen in direct proportion to the decline of black leadership, which today is largely a gaggle of media-dependent personalities and elected officials contemptuous of their own constituents. No amount of showmanship can conceal the vast, empty space that separates the people and those who claim to speak for them.