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Respectability and Representation: Black Freemasonry, Race, and Early Free Black Leadership1

Chernoh M. Sesay

in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology

This chapter traces the discourses of African Lodge No. 459, the first Black Masonic lodge in the US. It argues that as part of the ‘first generation of Black leadership’ in the post ... More

This chapter traces the discourses of African Lodge No. 459, the first Black Masonic lodge in the US. It argues that as part of the ‘first generation of Black leadership’ in the post American-Revolution US republic, Black Freemasons took up a ‘paradoxical and pivotal epistemological question’: how Black Americans should argue ‘not just for freedom but also their humanity’. The chapter illustrates how this question was framed by the denial of ‘equal’ incorporation of Black Americans as both ‘free’ members and ‘full’ citizens of the post American-Revolutionary US republic and by the correlated exclusion of early Black Freemasons from an already established and mainstream tradition of ‘White’ US Freemasonry. It shows how this founding generation of Black Freemasons were compelled to challenge not only these institutional exclusions, but also the correlated epistemic dehumanizations/exclusions derived from the dominant religio-secular narratives of the Western/US Enlightenment. It reveals the way this formative generation borrowed from, adapted, and/or re-imagined these dominant religio-secular narratives on behalf of both their ‘public culture’ struggles/mobilizations against their population's enslavement and overall subjugation/condemnation during the post-Revolutionary period, as well as within their related ‘private’ struggles/mobilizations against the already-established tradition of ‘White’ US Freemasonry.Less

Black Nationalism and Interracialism in the Young Women's Christian Association

Kate Dossett

in Bridging Race Divides: Black Nationalism, Feminism, and Integration in the United States, 1896-1935

This chapter examines the Africa American women who worked within the assumed interracial Young Women's Christian Association at both the local Colored Branch in New York City and the national ... More

This chapter examines the Africa American women who worked within the assumed interracial Young Women's Christian Association at both the local Colored Branch in New York City and the national Colored Committee levels. This chapter examines how the national YWCA leader and the YWCA workers of one of the most prominent Colored Branches operated within the context of relationships with black women, white women, and the YWCA including their involvement in the World War I relief programs. While working at purportedly interracial organization of the YWCA, black women often pursued policies in line with the thought of racial solidarity and the black leadership of black women. Their experience in segregated organizations such as the YWCA provided grounds for them to develop black feminist ways of thinking. The unending disputes between black women and white women in the early decades of the twentieth century also pushed black women to develop black nationalist feminism and black separatism. The chapter also discusses the impact of the pressure brought about by the proposal of the YMCA on the national level to merge with the YWCA in the 1920s.Less

The Black Church Confronts the HIV/AIDS Crisis

Andrew Billingsley

in Mighty Like a River: The Black Church and Social Reform

This chapter discusses the participation of the black church in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Some churches, such as the First A.M.E. Church of Los Angeles, actively promote the use of condoms as part of ... More

This chapter discusses the participation of the black church in the HIV/AIDS crisis. Some churches, such as the First A.M.E. Church of Los Angeles, actively promote the use of condoms as part of their prevention programs. The personal nature of the HIV/AIDS crisis is further illustrated at the New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta and the Brookland Baptist Church in South Carolina. After some initial hesitation, the black church is responding nationwide to the crisis by reaching out to the community, secular agencies, families, and individuals caught up in the epidemic. Specifically described are the National Black Leadership Commission on AIDS, Southern Christian Leadership Conference Initiatives, and black churches in Washington. Furthermore, the health objectives for the Year 2000 are presented.Less

Restaging the Charismatic Scenario: Fictions of African American Leadership

Erica R. Edwards

in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership

This chapter situates the twentieth-century cultural complex of black charismatic leadership within the making of post-Reconstruction black political culture. In African American political culture ... More

This chapter situates the twentieth-century cultural complex of black charismatic leadership within the making of post-Reconstruction black political culture. In African American political culture since the Reconstruction, charismatic leadership can be described as a fraught discursive compact—a narrative and performative regime—that has had to contend repeatedly with the contestations of performing artists, writers, social critics, and activists. Charisma, as a political fiction or ideal, forms assumptions about authority and identity that structures how political mobilization is conceived and enacted. This fiction is staged in real time and in media playback: its narrative thread is woven into the fabric of what might be called the charismatic scenario, which has throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries taken form in ways as diverse as the United Negro Improvement Association parades, the Million Man and Millions More marches, and the various scenes that make up the historical imaginary of the civil rights and Black Power movements.Less

“Cyanide in the Kool-Aid”: Black Politics and Popular Cultureafter Civil Rights

Erica R. Edwards

in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership

This chapter presents how curiosity, manifested in particular through parody, weds the conceptual work of contesting charisma to the playful questioning embedded in the formal workings of African ... More

This chapter presents how curiosity, manifested in particular through parody, weds the conceptual work of contesting charisma to the playful questioning embedded in the formal workings of African American humor. At the turn of the twenty-first century, American popular culture witnessed an explosion of millennial refashionings of spectacular black political leadership, even as postmodern black fiction and film contested the scenario of charismatic black political leadership as the primal and primary mode of political belonging and performance in the post-civil rights black cultural repertoire. The chapter examines Paul Beatty’s novel The White Boy Shuffle and the film Barbershop as revisionist counterstories, whose characters embrace an intuitive way of seeing that grapples with those “phantom subjects” of civil rights protest. These subjects are both the leaders they lack and the players in the drama of black political history that the leadership spectacle necessarily pushes out of sight.Less

The Origins of the Black Student Leadership Network

Sekou M. Franklin

in After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation

This chapter examines the activities of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) from 1991 to 1996. It first describes the BSLN's parent organizations, the Black Community Crusade for Children ... More

This chapter examines the activities of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) from 1991 to 1996. It first describes the BSLN's parent organizations, the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC) and the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), and looks at the BSLN's leadership development and popular education programs. The BSLN represented an extensive effort on the part of post–Civil Rights student and youth activists to develop a federated youth formation that could address poverty, racism, and public health crises in low-income black communities. Through its Ella Baker Child Policy Training Institute (EBCPTI) and Advanced Service and Advocacy Workshops (ASAWs), the BSLN trained over six hundred black students and youth in direct action organizing, social movement building, voter education, child advocacy, and teaching methodology and developed freedom schools in dozens of urban and rural jurisdictions.Less

Black Mayors and Black Progress: The Limits of Black Political Power

Tom Adam Davies

in Mainstreaming Black Power

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s ... More

This chapter assesses how African Americans fared under black political leadership during the 1970s. After first exploring the upsurge in the number of black elected officials from the mid-1960s onward, the chapter turns to developments in Los Angeles and Atlanta, cities that in 1973 both elected their first black mayor (Tom Bradley and Maynard Jackson, respectively). An in-depth analysis of Bradley and Jackson's campaigns and first two terms in office focuses on the various factors that shaped their respective political philosophies and mayoralties. Confronted by broader national economic problems, and with limited city resources at their disposal, both Bradley and Jackson deferred to white downtown business interests and pursued pro-growth policies that ultimately reinforced the disadvantages facing their poor and working-class black constituents. For the black middle class and elite in both cities, however, African American city leadership proved to be a wellspring of opportunity.Less

Organizing for Change

Sekou M. Franklin

in After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation

This chapter extends the discussion of the actions of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) by highlighting the group's activities from 1993 to 1996. It specifically analyzes three organizing ... More

This chapter extends the discussion of the actions of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) by highlighting the group's activities from 1993 to 1996. It specifically analyzes three organizing initiatives, the first of which is the Summer Freedom School program. Freedom schools, or alternative educational institutions for poor children, were utilized as pedagogical tools of protest for promoting children to challenge inequality. The second organizing initiative is the campaign against gun violence, a problem which became rampant during the 1990s. Together with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC), the BSLN developed a strategy to reduce gun violence among youth, while connecting this effort to ameliorative juvenile justice policies. They lobbied for harsher prison sentences, putting more police officers on the street, and the death penalty for juveniles. The last initiative examined are the organizing activities in three regions: New York Metro, North and South Carolina, and California.Less

Racial Violence and the Crisis of Black Elite Leadership

Preston H. Smith

in Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago

This chapter examines the crisis of black civic leadership in Chicago over its failure to stop whites’ violence against black citizens seeking housing in white neighborhoods. Housing-based racial ... More

This chapter examines the crisis of black civic leadership in Chicago over its failure to stop whites’ violence against black citizens seeking housing in white neighborhoods. Housing-based racial violence, which coexisted with and reinforced the city’s slum clearance and public housing policy decisions, gives further credence to the view of black elites that a racial lens was the only legitimate one for analyzing and evaluating housing policy in the city and that racial democracy was the only legitimate political goal. The chapter then explores the growth of the militant approach to suppress racial violence, comparing it to the more moderate approaches of white-led race relations agencies and the cautious leaders of the National Urban League.Less

“All He Gave Me Was a Foot”: Black Technocrats, Richmond’s Urban Woes, and the Crisis of the Crusade for Voters

Julian Maxwell Hayter

in The Dream Is Lost: Voting Rights and the Politics of Race in Richmond, Virginia

Chapter 5 describes how structural forces beyond the realm of politics led to fissures in black leadership. Urban retrenchment, rising poverty and crime, and the persistence of residential ... More

Chapter 5 describes how structural forces beyond the realm of politics led to fissures in black leadership. Urban retrenchment, rising poverty and crime, and the persistence of residential segregation had taken their toll on Richmond, the black-majority council, and the Crusade by the 1980s. As the Reagan administration put New Federalism into action, cities struggled to pay the bills. Black leaders struggled to meet these challenges; they also no longer agreed on how to solve their communities’ mounting problems. Women such as Alma Barlow led the charge against the black establishment. Yet Roy West defeated Willie Dell more soundly in 1984, and his victory symbolized the arrival of technocratic, middle-class black politicians. Technocrats such as West supplanted the first wave of civil rights–era black politicians—a phenomenon that was not specific to Richmond. West, who was Richmond’s second black mayor, became the cause célèbre when he secured 30 percent set-asides for minority business contracts. These contracts did little, however, to address the poverty that enveloped Richmond. By 1986, the Crusade failed to challenge West’s approach to black governance. After allegations of discrimination in municipal employment rocked city hall, African Americans realized that the Crusade’s strictly political approach to the freedom struggle had fallen short.Less

Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Zora Neale Hurston’s Gothic

Erica R. Edwards

in Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership

This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain as an example of African American narrative fiction which uses an arching of contestation that restages the charismatic ... More

This chapter discusses Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Moses, Man of the Mountain as an example of African American narrative fiction which uses an arching of contestation that restages the charismatic scenario. Literary restagings of the charismatic scenario place the ideals of black leadership forged over the course of the twentieth century in dialogic tension with gender critique, historical revision, and a radical reconceptualization of black politics. The novel shows how a woman’s erotic power confronts the masculinist strictures of charismatic authority by repeatedly interrupting the charismatic relationship between leader and people—even at the risk of violent reprisal. The chapter argues that the Hurston rewrites the biblical Exodus story, which Hurston defines as a generative myth of the mystical foundations of political authority in the African diasporic world. For Hurston, Moses provides the paradigmatic instance of charisma, an authority legitimated by receiving treatment of having exceptional powers or qualities.Less

The Collapse of the Black Student Leadership Network

Sekou M. Franklin

in After the Rebellion: Black Youth, Social Movement Activism, and the Post-Civil Rights Generation

This chapter examines the intergroup tensions among the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC), and Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN), as well as the ... More

This chapter examines the intergroup tensions among the Children's Defense Fund (CDF), Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC), and Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN), as well as the intraorganizational tensions that existed inside of the BSLN which led to its collapse in 1996. There was increasing skepticism among BSLN members, particularly among its leadership, about the commitment of the BCCC and CDF in supporting the youth formation's agenda and programs. Their skepticism increased after the CDF announced plans to launch the Stand for Children campaign in 1996 that targeted welfare reform legislation being deliberated by Congress at the time. Although the campaign had good intentions, it may have highlighted the challenges of institutional leveraging. The Stand For Children campaign neutralized the BSLN's program, which, in turn, encouraged its leaders to push for greater organizational autonomy. After the BCCC resisted the BSLN's attempts at exercising greater control over its agenda, the youth organization disbanded in August 1996.Less

“Our elevation must be the result of self-efforts, and work of our own hands”: Martin R. Delany and the Role of Self-Help and Emigration in Black Uplift

Beverly C. Tomek

in Colonization and Its Discontents: Emancipation, Emigration, and Antislavery in Antebellum Pennsylvania

This chapter focuses on Pittsburgh's Martin R. Delany, who advocated a black-led back-to-Africa movement much like the one proposed first by James Forten and Paul Cuffee, and then developed by ... More

This chapter focuses on Pittsburgh's Martin R. Delany, who advocated a black-led back-to-Africa movement much like the one proposed first by James Forten and Paul Cuffee, and then developed by Benjamin Coates. Like his predecessors, Delany hoped that a successful colony under black leadership would create the conditions for both self-rule and economic independence, proving black equality while combating both slavery and racism. Like Forten, he was convinced that this could be achieved only under genuine black leadership. Delany's emigrationist vision was actually an extension of the self-help and racial uplift agenda created by the gradualists and Forten. Based on the premise of select emigration, it can best be described as a “City on a Hill”—an intended showcase of black self-sufficiency and achievement. It was part of, rather than a departure from, his lifelong efforts to gain a legitimate place for blacks in American society.Less

From the Courtroom to the Street: Black Activism in Prince Edward

in Southern Stalemate: Five Years without Public Education in Prince Edward County, Virginia

This chapter investigates the strengths and limitations of legal mobilization strategies to forge social change. It evaluates the gap in the use of directaction techniques by Prince Edward blacks ... More

This chapter investigates the strengths and limitations of legal mobilization strategies to forge social change. It evaluates the gap in the use of directaction techniques by Prince Edward blacks from 1951 to 1963, exploring the obstacles that hindered the launch of a sustained protest campaign in the county. As the Prince Edward case showed, it was even more difficult to use outsider tactics to reopen schools than to desegregate them. The erasure of public education had contracted the ranks of black leadership and potential movement participants and forced black community members to resort to crisis management as they sought to secure education for their children. Protestors in Prince Edward did not have the capacity to pressure the county board of supervisors and school board to reopen schools.Less

William Melvin Kelley’s A Different Drummer and the Silence of Blackness

Stephanie Li

in Playing in the White: Black Writers, White Subjects

This chapter examines Kelley’s first novel, which describes the spontaneous mass exodus of the entire black population from an imaginary southern state. A Different Drummer explores how whites ... More

This chapter examines Kelley’s first novel, which describes the spontaneous mass exodus of the entire black population from an imaginary southern state. A Different Drummer explores how whites understand black behavior and specifically black leadership. The chapter analyzes the various narratives whites construct to account for this radical event and how representations of blackness reflect white needs and desires. The novel also presents silence as the most transformative tool to effect social change. Tucker is a notably silent leader who inspires others not by calling for mass social change but by liberating himself from the oppressive cycles of the past. Even as the novel affirms the power of silence and exposes the deceptions of discourse, it reifies racial binaries and oppressive gendered hierarchies. Silence proves to be a limited form of resistance that works to segregate black and white communities while depending on a distinctly masculine form of self-reliance.Less

Persona Non Grata: Jane Bolin and the NAACP, 1931–50

Jacqueline A. McLeod

in Daughter of the Empire State: The Life of Judge Jane Bolin

This chapter considers Jane Bolin's service within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her relationship with the NAACP's national leadership, and how she became ... More

This chapter considers Jane Bolin's service within the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), her relationship with the NAACP's national leadership, and how she became “persona non grata” to an organization with which she was affiliated since childhood. By examining Bolin's membership and leadership in the New York branch, the chapter uncovers her philosophy of leadership and its authority over her abrupt resignation from the NAACP in 1950. Such an examination would enrich any analysis of a NAACP leadership model and even complicate the tendency to essentialize early black leadership. The key point here is not about how an independently vocal female African American jurist rose to prominence in the NAACP, but how and why she plummeted to the depths of its disregard.Less

Politics and Policing in Pagedale

Jodi Rios

in Black Lives and Spatial Matters: Policing Blackness and Practicing Freedom in Suburban St. Louis

This chapter focuses on the City of Pagedale, which represents an extreme example of how discourses of race and space are deployed in North St. Louis County. City officials in Pagedale pass and ... More

This chapter focuses on the City of Pagedale, which represents an extreme example of how discourses of race and space are deployed in North St. Louis County. City officials in Pagedale pass and enforce ordinances that promote “suburban aesthetics” and white cultural norms, as well as targeting circumstances of poverty and Black culture. They do so using a consistent rhetoric of public safety and property rights, which began soon after the first developments began to appear in this area. Whereas traffic violations make up the vast majority of policing-for-revenue practices in North St. Louis County, Pagedale has historically policed space and property. Pagedale, which made history as the first municipality in the United States to elect an all-Black, all-woman leadership in 1982, troubles many of the popular explanations for the “Ferguson uprisings” and complicates the idea that predatory policing by Black leadership is simply a result of power, greed, or corruption. As the chapter details, the Black women leaders who came into power in the 1980s used visibility to push back against the limits placed on their bodies—as Black and female—yet worked within the terms that had been set by previous administrations and the historical structures of racism and sexism that construct blackness-as-risk.Less

Growing Up Church

Darius J. Young

in Robert R. Church Jr. and the African American Political Struggle

This chapter focuses on Church’s early years by providing an overview of Robert Church Sr. and Anna Church. In particular, it discusses the strategies the black elite used to nurture a new class of ... More

This chapter focuses on Church’s early years by providing an overview of Robert Church Sr. and Anna Church. In particular, it discusses the strategies the black elite used to nurture a new class of leaders during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This chapter discusses Church’s educational background, his initial dealings with his father’s Solvent Saving’s Bank, and his early interest in pursuing a career in politics. Church’s early life serves as a window into the history of the era’s black entrepreneurs, black leadership, and black businesses, all considered against the legacy of slavery.Less

Selecting the FDP Candidates from Holmes, January–June 1967

Sue [Lorenzi] Sojourner and Cheryl Reitan

in Thunder of Freedom: Black Leadership and the Transformation of 1960s Mississippi

Sue and Henry pushed for the black leadership to take over election strategy. A policy was established for candidates to declare their willingness to run rather than waiting to be recruited. Weeks of ... More

Sue and Henry pushed for the black leadership to take over election strategy. A policy was established for candidates to declare their willingness to run rather than waiting to be recruited. Weeks of indecision ended when a school teacher, Robert R. “Bob” Smith, with no prior Holmes Movement experience, announced his intention to run for sheriff. Other candidates stepped forward. Finally, one week before the deadline to file, Robert G. Clark declared his bid to run for state representative, bringing the number of offices blacks were running for to 12 out of 22. Sue Lorenzi and Alec Shimkin wrote and drew comic-book style political education materials. The leaders planning election strategy debated whether to run as Democrats or Independents, finally deciding to run as Independents. Robert G. Clark describes his family history.Less