Black Leadership

This work is a statement on black political, intellectual, and religious leaders of 20th-century America, from W.E. Du Bois to Louis Farrakhan. With portraits of the personal styles, strategies, triumphs, and failures of black leaders to advance their agendas, the author charts an intellectual map of the continuing struggle for racial equality and economic progress in modern America. Manning Marable identifies three major traditions that have defined American black political culture: integration, nationalist separatism, and what he terms democratic transformation. Throughout the book, he profiles the century's most vital black leaders, delving into significant aspects of their careers. The book opens with an examination of America's political institutions: an examination of the racial contours of the US constitution is followed by a chapter on the central motif of slavery, the black family community, and political life in the century since its demise. This chapter presents Marable's personal family history during slavery and the Reconstruction era, and their efforts to achieve full equality. At the heart of the book are critical portraits of four leaders whose legacies speak to the challenges of race, class, and power: Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Harold Washington, and Louis Farrakhan. Marable seeks lessons in each life: Booker T. Washington's conservative strategy of black vocational education and accommodation to racial segregation undermined that struggle for civil rights for several generations; equally conservative, Louis Farrakhan's autocratic nationalism serves to reinforce racial discrimination; and mayor Harold Washington's failure to uproot Chicago's political machine points to limits of even the most charistmatic personality. For Marable, it is Du Bois - the engaged intellectual who struggled for peace and justice from inside and outside of white society - who embodies the movement for a multicultural society, where racial equality is linked to economic and political democracy for all.