System Values and African American Leadership

Abstract

In my Book, We Have No Leaders, Published more than a decade ago, I concluded that African American leaders—both establishment and radical—were largely irrelevant insofar as developing policies, programs, and strategies to reconstruct and integrate black ghettos into the mainstream of American society.¹ The established black leadership—the civil rights leaders and elected and appointed government officials—were irrelevant because they had been incorporated into the system and co- opted. A major result of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, in addition to the enactment of major substantive legislation, was the integration or co-optation of the leadership of the movement into systemic institutions and processes. Co-optation is understood as the process of absorbing the leadership of dissident groups into a political system in response to mass discontent and threats (or perceived threats) to system stability or legitimacy. The process of co-optation was accelerated in the late 1960s and early 1970s as a result of the radicalism of the Black Power movement and the rebellions in urban ghettos. By the 1980s, virtually all of the talented leadership of black America was incorporated or seeking incorporation into the system, contending that “working within the system” was the most important—if not the only—means to achieve the post—civil rights era objectives of the black community. However, I concluded that as a result of this process, black leaders had diminished their capacity to pressure the system to respond to the demands of the black community, the most pressing of which was the need for employment opportunities in the context of some kind of overall program of internal ghetto reconstruction and development.