Black leadership gap: eyes on the prizes, not the people.

For black politics, Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins's mayoral primary victory is an invigorating sign, resembling the kind of multiracial, progressive coalition built by the late Harold Washington in Chicago. Sadly, aside from Dinkins's win, these are hardly jubilee days for black politicians wanting to challenge entrenched powers. In Detroit's mayoral primary Coleman Young managed to snuff out the opposition - notably Congressman John Conyers - to his indifferent reign. The Atlanta municipal race looks like Back to the Future, with no visible opposition to former Mayor Maynard Jackson. And too many of those supporting Jesse Jackson's moves to run for Mayor of Washington are Democrats seeking a convenient way to contain or defuse his presidential potential.

In February 1988, radical writer and theologian Cornel West provided a taxonomy of contemporary black American leadership in the pages of Zeta magazine, and declared a crisis in the making. There has not been a time in the history of Black people in this country when the quantity of politicians ... was so great, yet the quality ... has been so low," West wrote. "Just when one would have guessed that Black America was flexing its political ... muscles, rigor mortis seems to have set in. How do we account for the absence of Frederick Douglasses, Sojourner

Truths, Martin Luther King Jrs., Malcolm Xs, and Fanny Lou Hamers of our time?' West's role models were

outsiders, troublemaking movement leaders-not elected officials and certainly not career politicians. But it is the sorry doings of just such prominent black career politicians that have recently dominated public attention.

The names of Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley; Washington Mayor Marion Barry; Detroit Mayor Coleman Young; Atlantic City Mayor William Espy; Illinois Congressman Gus Savage; Betty Dixon, the wife of House Ethics Committee chair Julian Dixon; former HUD chief Samuel Pierce; Commissioner Reginald Eaves in Fulton County, Georgia; and former Cleveland Mayor, now Judge, Carl Stokes are among those who have been the subject of scandal, criminal investigations and charges of conflict of interest. Others such as California Assembly Speaker Willie Brown, former Chicago Mayor Eugene Sawyer and his challenger, Alderman Tim Evans, have escaped outright scandal but have been charged with complacency and the pursuit of their own narrow interests.

Dismal as the picture is, corruption and complacency among a handful, even a hundred, of the black political elite does not a crisis make. The real crisis in black politics today is based on the widening chasm between the ambitions of black officeholders and the needs of their urban constituents, particularly the poor. Eighty-two percent of black Americans now live in urban areas. David Swinton, an economist at Jackson State University, writes in the National Urban League's State of Black America 1989 report that "fully one third of black persons live in households with incomes below the poverty level. The proportions were even higher for black children, who experienced a poverty rate of 45.1 percent."

Like other incumbents, black public officials seek to maintain their grip on elected office. Most of them have paltry records for organizing in the black community on vital issues, and few are visible in the community except at election time. The result is that twenty-five years of black electoral gains from the civil rights movement have produced a shortage of political leadership for black constituents.

With one or two notable exceptions, black political representation has peaked. According to the Joint Center for Political Studies in Washington, at present there are 6,829 black elected officials nationwide, including 301 mayors. That is a great many, especially considering that before the 1965 Voting Rights Act there were only 500 such officials. But, as Clarence Lusane wrote in the January/ February 1989 issue of The Black Scholar, "the rate of growth of black elected officials has slowed to a crawl" because "blacks have nearly exhausted the political jurisdictions where a black majority voting population exists." This is significant because there are too few blacks who have been elected in districts where blacks were less than a majority of the voters-Tom Bradley being the best-known example.

Barring some change in public attitudes, white majorities simply won't elect minority politicians. And the rapidly shifting demography of some regions promises to erode further the ability of blacks to get elected.

Black politicians gained office as a direct result of the civil rights movement. But the moral engine that helped drive a generation into public office has stalled, leaving these officeholders and the communities they represent adrift. In the post-civil rights era the black community has become essentially demobilized. The dubious ethics of some politicians is a sign of this decline.

Few black leaders are willing to grapple publicly with the legitimate issues raised by the charges of corruption and complacency. Instead, many have reacted defensively with cries of "racism" and "scapegoating." Such responses ring true because historically U.S. political life has been an exercise in racial exclusion. So these leaders, and the political establishment they are a part of, insulate themselves. They tiptoe around the phenomenon of black politics as if it were a newborn. As a result, the concerns of the community become subordinate to their own electoral shelf life.

Even the most progressive and energetic black leaders have remained silent on the issue of black political corruption. Consider the case of Jesse Jackson. The current situation provides him with an opportunity to challenge the complacency of his compeers and distinguish himself. But it remains to be seen whether Jackson will raise this issue if he runs for Mayor of Washington. Jackson's silence is not entirely surprising. He has become entrenched in the brotherhood of black leadership, a traditional hierarchy that has learned to shield itself through hostile racial times. He cannot attack this hierarchy directly because he is a product of it.

Jackson's two presidential campaigns were the offspring of twenty-five years of maturing black voting strength. The thousands of black elected officials already in place made the Jackson campaigns possible. Without this sturdy infrastructure, his efforts would have been inconceivable. His unprecedented presidential campaigns were the civil rights movement's electoral pinnacle.

Jackson and other progressive black politicians (like California State Assemblywoman Maxine Waters, Representatives Ron Dellums and Major Owens) live, as it were, in two worlds. There is the centuries-old habitat of the black struggle for equality and enfranchisement, rooted in the South. And there is the new environment in the cities of poverty, community demobilization and political improbity which is still evolving.

Because the South was the bulwark of black oppression in this country, it has set the agenda of national black politics for two centuries. Black political leaders knew that as long as Southern white supremacy prevailed, black life everywhere was precarious. Because of this necessary Southern emphasis, the fight against racial terror and segregation and for civil rights-through the peaceful method of "moral suasion"-became the overriding themes of black politics.

There have been repeated challenges to this theme. At the National Negro Convention in Buffalo in 1843, Henry Highland Garnet stunned the traditional black leadership by

advocating armed uprising for the Southern slaves. "Your condition does not absolve you from your moral obligation.... If you must bleed, let it all come at once - rather die freemen, than live to be slaves.... let your motto be resistance!" Garnet's proposal to emulate Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and Joseph Cinque failed by one vote. By the early twentieth century, black socialists, communists and nationalist economic thinkers also challenged the central racial theme of black politics. Their arguments remained marginal until the extreme dislocation of black life during the Depression made it seem possible that the black historical project would take a turn toward new considerations. The Amenia Conference was held by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1933 to discuss the critique of its program by disaffected young leaders. Disillusioned with the group's approach to black betterment," a new generation of black intellectuals, including Ralph Bunche, economist Abram Harris, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier and writer Sterling Brown criticized the N.A.A.C.P.'s program as inappropriate at a time when "economic, political and social values are rapidly shifting, and the very structure of organized society is being revamped." The Amenia Conference suggested that the N.A.A.C.P. alter its "middle-class" pursuit of civil rights to an economic campaign for "the downtrodden mass." Participants strongly advocated building closer ties with organized labor to develop joint economic efforts. However, the N.A.A.C.P. did not change its course. The only concrete result of this discussion was that it escalated the philosophical brawl between W.E.B. Du Bois and Walter White, leading to Du Bois's resignation from the N.A.A.C.P. journal, The Crisis.

Following the Depression and especially during World

War II, the black population migrated to the cities at a tremendous rate; this relocation would continue for a generation. Even as the civil rights movement reached its zenith in the dramatic Southern confrontations of the 1950s and 1960s, black urban resettlement continued. This exodus and the accumulation of blacks in the cities led to a period of transition as the movement's Southern-based concerns came into conflict with the urban North's realities.

That period may have begun in California in 1965, when Martin Luther King visited Los Angeles in response to the Watts riot - the largest and bloodiest uprising at the time. Although King had succeeded in transplanting the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to Los Angeles two years earlier, that did not prevent the poorest in the black community from igniting and stoking the Watts conflagration. When King was heckled at the Westminster Community Center, and when an unemployed rioter told a stunned King on a devastated ghetto sidewalk that we won,' the Southern premise of the civil rights movement became obsolete. In the words of Bayard Rustin, King himself was undone." After Watts, the burning continued in U.S. cities.

It is a fitting vindication of the civil rights movement that the most dramatic restructuring of race in electoral politics took place in the South. The largest number of black elected officials (4,400) is concentrated in that region. According to the Joint Center for Political Studies, most are in the Deep- South states of Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama. And, although it was unthinkable a generation ago, it will probably be the South that elects the first black governor, most likely Lieut. Gov. Doug Wilder in Virginia or outgoing Atlanta Mayor Andrew Young in Georgia. Sadly, the civil rights movement in the 1960s, like the N.A.A.C.P. in the 1930s, was unable to make the transition from its focus on civil rights and the South to the fight against poverty and for economic empowerment. The S.C.L.C.'s attempts to mobilize an urban base through the Poor People's Campaign, the War on Slums in Chicago and Operation Breadbasket failed. And as the urban industrial base declined and whites fled the inner cities, leaving behind a concentration of black voters, blacks were elected just in time to inherit the urban crisis.

It is this urban crisis that presents the major challenge to black politics today. The inquiry and method of the black movement must shift from the South, race and moral suasion to reflect the profound changes in black existence. This, not charges of political corruption, is the fundamental consideration for contemporary black leadership, elected and otherwise. For we-and our ancestors who first embarked on the black historical project - did not have the vote or integrated public transit or the presidency of the United States as our aim. Rather, our aim was to achieve "the glorious idea of human brotherhood," as black abolitionist Frances E. Watkins wrote in 1859. This would, as the leaders of the S.C.L.C. said when the organization was founded in 1957, "redeem the soul of America." No lesser goal could have called forth the Civil War or the twentieth-century struggle against the Old South.

Unfortunately, the civil rights movement has now been

diverted into a struggle over its byproducts - the legal remedies for discrimination and access to the economic system - which have for the most part been designed by the middle class, the chief beneficiaries of the movement. As early as 1940, while he was a young political science professor at Howard University, Ralph Bunche was compelled to write that fights for civil rights - for the right of Negroes to serve on juries, for equal salaries for Negro teachers, for the admittance of Negroes to white colleges, and even for an anti-lynch bill - do not carry an appeal to the Negro in the mass.' Instead, Bunche asserted, they meant more to "the Negro middle class who boast relatively secure positions, homes, cars, and a glittering social life, and who resent any implication of inferiority." Even today affirmative action, fair housing, integrated education and voting rights have become the means for only the most privileged or ambitious minorities to gain access to the limited "opportunities' within the system.

The legal and statutory standards that were won by the black freedom movement, as besieged as they are today, are the result of a profound compromise by mainstream black leaders, who withheld any deeper criticism of the economic structure of the nation as long as blacks were "equally" represented in it. Representation, however, pertained only to qualified" blacks. That compromise, with all its class bias, is the hidden reality in black politics today.

If there is a black political crisis, it is to be found in the conflict between continued inequality for the black poor and traditional black political concerns. Of course, corruption must be rigorously condemned, but the deep, worsening poverty of generations of urban blacks is the singular commanding issue of black life today, and that is what our politics must address. Gangs, drugs, AIDS, the massive inchoate boycott of the schools we call the dropout rate, unemployment and infant mortality are the unrelieved, vivid products of a century of black migrants settling in urban centers. Like the Old South, this urban reality makes black life everywhere precarious. The response from established black leaders is hardly commensurate. It has been limited to the courtesy of conventional politics, to reports and documents, to the administration of the dwindling number of relief programs. What is missing is a sustained articulation of the demands of the poor and "pressure from below" to build a genuine mobilization against poverty.

If there is to be a renewal of black politics, it will depend upon the ability of leaders to embrace the cause of the poor, and in so doing, challenge the economic order, which creates poverty as casually as it amasses wealth. The insurrectionary core of the gospel that has guided the black movement proposes "putting down the mighty" in order to "exalt them of low degree." Such an effort, however, is not likely to come from complacent or corrupt black politicians preoccupied with their own political survival. There is currently a leadership void created by the crisis in black politics, but it just might be an opportunity for new leadership to emerge from the community struggles taking place far from legislative halls. The civil rights movement, after all, was launched from the seat of a bus, not the seat of political power.

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Author:	Anderson, Susan
Publication:	The Nation
Date:	Oct 16, 1989
Words:	2554
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Topics:	African American politicians Political aspects Race relations History