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The Failure of Negro
Leadership
By
Benjamin Woods
The New York
Times printed a revealing article on February 13,
2010 titled “In
Black Caucus, A Fund-Raising Powerhouse.” The
article discusses the large donations the Congressional
Black Caucus receives from corporations, foundations,
and wealthy individuals. Moreover, it demonstrates the
ongoing intergenerational failure of negro leadership in
the United States.
I assert there are
three crucial periods in African leadership: 1) the
emergence of a “free” northern based leadership in the
early 19th century 2) the white appointment of
Booker T.
Washington as the leader of African America in the
late 19th century and 3) the
cooptation and incorporation of negro politicians in
the post-Black Power era. This essay uses a theoretical
framework of domestic colonialism. According to this
theory, within a colonized nation, such as Africans in
the United States, a portion of the indigenous colonized
population is recruited to collaborate with the imperial
power.
At the turn 19th
century, a free primarily middle class northern African
leadership emerged in the United States. At the same
time, a new debate among African leaders developed
concerning the identity and direction of the African
community in the U.S. Unlike previous periods of the
movement which advanced militant resistance such as
maroons, insurrections, and emigration these leaders
began to appeal to the liberal values of the U.S.
founding documents and “moral uplift.” Dr. Leslie
Alexander, who examines this issue in her book,
African or American?
Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City,
1784-1861, recently stated on
Jazz and Justice radio:
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Black leadership in the
1830s and 1840s embraced a particular
political strategy known as moral
uplift…which states the way for Black people
to gain freedom justice equality citizenship
etc. is to present to white society the best
possible face of the Black community to
convince white people of their humanity and
worthiness. |
A few decades
later, Booker T.
Washington echoed these statements preaching a
doctrine of political passivity, moral uplift, and
industrial education. Schools that taught industrial
education such as Tuskegee Institute were funded by the
leading Northern industrialists such as the Rockefeller,
Carnegie, and Vanderbilt for the explicit purpose of
producing a conservative negro leadership class.
By the late 1960s
and 1970s, African leadership in the U.S. boldly moved
in the direction of Black Nationalism, Pan Africanism,
and Socialism. Unfortunately, due to their
uncompromising stance several visionary leaders were
assassinated, imprisoned, and forced into exile by the
F.B.I.‘s COINTELPRO. During this same period,
philanthropic foundations such as the Ford Foundation
under the leadership of McGeorge Bundy financed a
moderate to conservative negro leadership.
Today, the result
are negro leaders such as President Barack Obama and
Mayor Adrian Fenty in Washington D.C. Obama received
$745 million in campaign financing, more than any other
candidate for U.S. President in history. Although he is
virtually silent in response to state terrorism against
Africans (ex: police brutality), Obama is vocal in the
defense of racist Zionist Israel who murders known
pacifists delivering aid to poor, colonized people in
the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, Fenty, who raised $3.9
million as of March for his upcoming mayoral race,
breaking his own campaign donation record, promotes
privatization of schools (charters) and homeless
shelters in the U.S. capitol. Privatization has been
shown to assist elites, who financed his campaign, to
accumulate more capital.
The utter failure
of negro leadership in the U.S. not only affects
political leadership but also African America’s most
revered civil rights organizations. Although the NAACP
was primarily started by white liberal Jews and, at one
point, was used to watch “negro dissidents“ by the U.S.
government during World War I, it is known more for its
numerous civil rights victories.
Today they
collaborate with companies such as Wells Fargo that
target Africans in the U.S. for unaffordable home loans
thereby causing one of the single biggest losts of
wealth in the African community’s history due to home
foreclosures. For example, although the NAACP initially
sued the lending company for targeting African
borrowers, they later dropped the lawsuit and made Wells
Fargo a lead sponsor for their 101st national convention
in July of this year. For this and other reasons, in
1920 Harlem radical Hubert Harrison referred to the
organization as the National Association for the
Advancement of Certain People.
Several scholars
such as Jacob Caruthers, Cedric Robinson, and Sterling
Stuckey have discussed the intergenerational failure of
negro leaders. However, the U.N.I.A. in the 1920s and
the Black Power Movement were periods when Africans had
an ideologically and financially independent leadership.
In the 21st century the African Freedom Movement must
adopt three principles espoused by the esteemed African
freedom fighter Ella Baker: 1) working class leadership
2) youth leadership and 3) participatory democracy.
These three principles can help us to overcome our
current crisis of negro leadership and move in the
direction of national liberation and self determination.
Notes
Alexander, Leslie.
(2008)
African or American?
Black Identity and Political Activism in New York City,
1784-1861. Chicago: University of Illinois
Press.
Allen, Robert.
(1992)
Black Awakening in Capitalist America. Trenton,
NJ: African World Press.
Lipton Eric &
Lichtblau, Eric. “In Black Caucus, a Fund-Raising
Powerhouse.”
New York Times. February 13, 2010.
Ransby, Barbara.
(2005)
Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical
Democratic Vision. Chapel Hill, NC: University
of North Carolina Press.
Robinson, Cedric.
(1997)
Black Movements in America. New York: Routledge.
Stewart, Nikita.
“D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty surpasses 2006 fundraising
record.”
New York Times. Friday March 12, 2010.
Stuckey, Sterling.
(1987)
Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of
Black America. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Watkins, William.
(2001)
The White Architects of Black Education: Ideology and
Power in America, 1865-1954. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Benjamin Woods
can be contacted at
benjaminwoods1@yahoo.com.
Source:
BlackAgendaReport. This article originally
appeared on Mr. Woods’ web site,
FreeTheLand
posted 14
June 2010
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Unedited video supports Sherrod’s claim she wasn't racist—The
full, uncut video of a federal agricultural official's NAACP
speech purporting racial scheming, told a different story than
the barely-three-minute snippet that cost her her job. Despite
admitting in the
edited version of the taping that she once withheld help to
the couple on the basis of race, Shirley Sherrod was defended
Tuesday by the wife of a white Georgia farmer. Sherrod, "kept us
out of bankruptcy," said Eloise Spooner, 82, of Iron City in
southwest Georgia. Spooner, in an interview with The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, added she considers Sherrod a "friend
for life." She and her husband, Roger Spooner, approached
Sherrod for help in 1986 when Sherrod worked for a nonprofit
that assisted farmers.
Sherrod, who is African-American, was asked to resign Monday
night by a USDA official after videotaped comments she made in
March at a local NAACP banquet surfaced on the Web
Atlanta Journal
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NAACP /
Politico /
Politico 2 |
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jayne cortez and the firespitters—there it is
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Alexander
Crummell
A Study of Civilization and Discontent
By
Wilson Jeremiah Moses
The
third, and most egregiously neglected Pan African
intellectual black nationalist is Alexander Crummell
(1819-1898). Born in New York, brought up as an
Episcopalian, as a youth he was introduced to Greek,
Latin, and biblical languages thanks to the support
of his father, who was born in Africa, a member of
the Temne ethnic group. |
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He received his bachelors
degree, and passed his examination in classical Greek at
the University of Cambridge in England. In 1853,
he took up missionary work in Liberia. His sermons
and addresses are classic illustrations of the Christian Afrocentrism that later characterized
the Garvey Movement. He was a solid advocate of
African American political rights. Gravitating
towards high church ritual, he anticipated Elijah
Muhammad’s hostility to grass roots black religion,
which he viewed as a plantation survival and part of
a slaveholder’s conspiracy to undermine the moral
and intellectual development of African Americans.
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A gifted grassroots
organizer, Baker shunned the spotlight in favor of vital
behind-the-scenes work that helped power the black
freedom struggle. She was a national officer and key
figure in the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, one of the founders of the Southern
Christian Leadership Conference, and a prime mover in
the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee. Baker made a place for herself in
predominantly male political circles that included
W. E.
B. Du Bois, Thurgood Marshall, and
Martin Luther King
Jr., all the while maintaining relationships with a
vibrant group of women, students, and activists both
black and white.
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A Hubert Harrison Reader
Edited by Jeffrey B. Perry
The brilliant writer, orator, educator,
critic, and political activist Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) is one of
the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early
twentieth-century America. Considered "the foremost Afro-American
intellect of his time," Harrison, "the father of Harlem radicalism,"
combined class consciousness and race consciousness in a coherent
political radicalism which stressed the revolutionary importance of
struggle for African American equality, emphasized the duty of all
workers to oppose white supremacy, and urged Blacks not wait on
whites before taking steps to shape their future. His efforts
significantly influenced A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, and a
generation of activists and "common people."
Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism,
1883-1918 (By
Jeffrey B. Perry) |
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Guarding the Flame of Life
(Kalamu ya Salaam)
/
Toni Morrison Presses For Writers' Freedoms (audio)
Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights
Era
Reviewing Houston A. Baker's
Betrayal
of
Black Intellectuals
New Orleans Jazz Funeral for tuba player Kerwin
James /
They danced atop his casket Jaran 'Julio' Green
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Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays
Edited by
Miriam DeCosta-Willis
Blacks in Hispanic Literature is a
collection of fourteen essays by scholars and
creative writers from Africa and the Americas.
Called one of two significant critical works on
Afro-Hispanic literature to appear in the late
1970s, it includes the pioneering studies of
Carter G. Woodson and
Valaurez B. Spratlin, published in the 1930s, as
well as the essays of scholars whose interpretations
were shaped by the Black aesthetic. The early
essays, primarily of the Black-as-subject in Spanish
medieval and Golden Age literature, provide an
historical context for understanding 20th-century
creative works by African-descended, Hispanophone
writers, such as Cuban
Nicolás Guillén and Ecuadorean poet, novelist,
and scholar
Adalberto Ortiz, whose essay analyzes the
significance of Negritude in Latin America. This
collaborative text set the tone for later
conferences in which writers and scholars worked
together to promote, disseminate, and critique the
literature of Spanish-speaking people of African
descent. . . .
Cited by a
literary critic in 2004 as "the seminal study in the
field of Afro-Hispanic Literature . . . on which
most scholars in the field 'cut their teeth'."
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Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
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The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
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The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
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Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
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January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
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