The Violence of Leadership in Black Lives Matter

Since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, the United States has seen the coalescing of black protestors and activists along with their multiracial collaborators under the banner of Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). This struggle against racialized violence, police brutality, and white supremacy has been witnessed in myriad ways, with two of its most prominent “reactions” occurring in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland. Within this struggle, the organization Black Lives Matter (BLM) has chosen to follow a “leader-full” model that replaces traditional hierarchical forms of leadership for that of collaboration and decentralization. This chapter thus seeks to highlight the competing notions of centralized and decentralized leadership within black liberation movements to better understand this model. Using the works of Barbara Ransby, Patrisse Khan-Cullors, and Frantz Fanon, this work will explore forms of black leadership that articulate alternative modes of accountability, service, and well-being within the struggle for black livability.

Teacher Leadership for Love, Solidarity, and Justice: The Invisibilized and Contested Practices of Teacher Leaders of Color

Despite widespread acknowledgment of teachers of Color as critical agents of change, white supremacist, colonial, and cis-heteropatriarchal ontologies of “teacher leadership” marginalize the counterhegemonic leadership they embody. Guided by critical leadership and feminist of Color scholarship, I develop and employ an embodied raciolinguistic analysis to examine how a Latina teacher leader of Color facilitated organization-wide action in the educational interests of Black students. My analysis demonstrates that her discursive and embodied practices as a non-Black woman of Color and “official” teacher leader were simultaneously (re)constructed as catalysts and hindrance for racial progress within and across social spaces. Grappling with these possibilities and tensions at interpersonal, institutional, and societal scales, she reflexively adapted her practices to recenter Black leadership while facing professional consequences. Arguing for radical social change by amplifying the multi-faceted and contested nature of counterhegemonic teacher leadership, I offer implications to foster the critical ingenuity needed to lead in love, solidarity, and justice for and among communities of Color.

One Hundred Years of African American Economists: Difficulties and Prospects for Black Political Economy in the 21st Century

The challenge set before Black economists in 1967 by Harold Cruse in his seminal work The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual: A Historical Analysis of the Failure of Black Leadership, to create new economic theories, methodologies, and institutional forms, from a Black community point of view, is still with us, and growing more urgent by the day. Mainstream economics has failed to shine much light on fundamental problems of inequality, poverty, and financial and productive stability, particularly as these problems intersect with racial disparity. After 100 years of African American economists, perhaps it is time to strike out on our own behalf and search for the solutions to our community's problems by creating and employing our own lamps.

Basketball, Books, and Brotherhood: Dewitt Clinton High School as Scholastic Model of Postwar Racial Progression and African American Leadership

In 1950, the City College of New York (CCNY) became the first racially-integrated team to win the national championship of college basketball. Three of the players on that team attended DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, New York. At the time Clinton high school was one of the most academically-rigorous public schools in the city and the United States. During this postwar period Clinton annually sent nearly a third of its graduates to college, this at a time when the national average of high school completion stood at twenty percent. The unofficial school motto etched in yearbooks and the student paper was “college or bust.” Needless to say, DeWitt Clinton strongly encouraged its student body to attend college and for those who did not, they were pushed to excel beyond the limits of their chosen professions. This intellectually competitive academic environment was integrated and more than twenty-percent black. Like their contemporaries, black students were encouraged to pursue opportunities that seemed unthinkable in an era of racial stratification. As a result, Clinton produced a number of black students armed with the skills to navigate the terrain of prejudice and circumvent a number of social barriers. DeWitt Clinton high school was a model for interracial brotherhood while also fostering black leadership. Like Jackie Robinson, whom integrated Major League Baseball in 1947 with the Brooklyn Dodgers, the three black athletes who competed on the CCNY team were prepared for the transition of competing on a racially integrated college team, can be partially attributed to their secondary schooling at DeWitt Clinton. This article examines the racial climate of DeWitt Clinton during the postwar years when the three young men were in attendance and how it fostered a culture of Basketball, Books, and Brotherhood.

The Politics of Interdependent Independence in Black Religion: The Case of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal Priest

In the Reconstruction period, Black religion and politics intersected and fostered ideas about black interdependent independence in predominantly white churches. We see this form of black religious politics exemplified in the experiences and ideas of the Reverend George Freeman Bragg Jr., a Black Episcopal priest who was educated at the Branch Theological School (BTS) in Petersburg, Virginia. It was upon the foundation of Bragg's experiences at the BTS, established as a racially segregated alternative to the Protestant Episcopal Theological Seminary (in Alexandria, Virginia), and in the Readjuster Movement (a biracial political coalition that controlled Virginia's legislature from 1879–1885), that he wrote histories of Black people in the Episcopal Church, histories that extolled black leadership, the need for (white) economic support for but also autonomous action of black churches and black leaders, and the efficacy of the Episcopal Church as a political training ground for black church members. Bragg's case both demonstrates how broadening the definitions of black religion reconfigures studies of religion, reconstruction, and Blackness, and expands our notions of Black political critique as deriving from more than the familiar binaries of protest and accommodation.

4. Confronting change

‘Confronting change’ describes how the American South became a major player in the national mobilization for World War II. The war pushed the South far along the path of modernization. Democracy became a watchword during World War II, as the nation fought against fascism and emphasized that democratic values had to be affirmed by all as the reason for fighting. Ultimately, the war produced an assertive black leadership within the South, and the continued reform spirit of the New Deal led to aggressive campaigns for organized labor and for urban efforts to improve African American living conditions and opportunities. The rise of the civil rights movement was crucial to defining this period of American history.

Working together to survive and thrive: The struggle for Black lives past and present

This article examines Black leadership through the generations as a multifaceted struggle for Black lives led by ordinary Black people working together to end anti-Black violence and systemic racism for the affirmation of their humanity. At the center of this examination is the latest phase in a long struggle for Black lives, which has been branded as a Black Lives Matter movement. This new movement for social justice developed from past struggles and during the aftermath of the 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, 2014 Ferguson uprising, and 2020 George Floyd uprising. For the author, this new struggle is Black Americans most recent “walk of life” that stretches back to the movements for self-determination, anti-enslavement, and civil rights during the American Revolutionary period (1764–1789). Central to this new struggle is the blending of nonviolent direct action tactics with the use of digital technology and the inclusion of people who previously functioned on the margins of the civil rights agenda. This struggle is addressed, first through an exploration of where Black-led community organizations have been since Trayvon’s death, and second, by examining what is currently being done during the aftermath of the death of Breonna Taylor up to mid-September 2020.

Compositions of No Ordinary Merit and the Struggle for Black Rights

This chapter studies the process by which Robert Douglass Jr. and Patrick Henry Reason expanded their activist networks through their artistic production during the 1840s. Reason joined the campaign to secure voting rights for free black men in New York, and both he and Douglass protested plans for black colonization. Douglass returned from Haiti and traveled to England, where he strengthened his antislavery networks and developed his artistic skills. The images and lectures resulting from Douglass’s trip to Haiti celebrated it as a model for black leadership, self-determination, and the building of black cultural institutions in the United States. The paintings he completed in Haiti communicated the possibilities of black rights, leadership, and political organization that might serve as an example for those in the United States. Likewise, Reason created prints of black leaders to highlight domestic black achievement and commemorate role models who worked to overcome and eradicate racial prejudice. Douglass and Reason’s adoption of different business strategies and new visual technologies provided avenues to critique and correct racial inequalities.

Black Men Loving Black Men Is a Revolutionary Act

This chapter describes the work of Gay Men of African Descent (GMAD), the leaders of which argued that Black gay men suffered from low self-esteem due to both racism and homophobia, which made them more likely to put themselves at risk for HIV through drugs and unprotected sex. As a remedy, GMAD offered up affirming images of Black gay men, often looking to the past to do so. Discussion topics frequently included homosexuality and queer identity in African and African American history, including Egyptian and Yoruba culture, the Harlem Renaissance, and the life of gay civil rights activist Bayard Rustin. At other times, the group highlighted literary and artistic work by luminaries in the Black gay renaissance, such as Joseph Beam, Essex Hemphill, and Marlon Riggs. The group also sought to claim a place for Black gay men within Afrocentric ideology, at one point collaborating with the Black Leadership Commission on AIDS to produce an AIDS education and prevention program based on Kwanzaa principles. GMAD leaders argued that these interventions helped equip members with the self-esteem necessary to protect themselves from HIV by practicing safer sex.