Black leadership and the second redemption

A t least a million of us," the minister proclaimed, "have found out that this nation is a failure, that it either cannot or has no disposition to protect the rights of a man who is not white." Indeed, he cries. "Not a court in the nation has given a decision in faww of the black man in twelve years." This biting analysis of American society was not voiced by Minister Louis Farrakhan or by any of the host of orators fi'om the Million Man March crusades. Nor were these views expressed to convey the bleak predicament that African Americans face from a conservative Supreme Court and a Republican majority in Congress. It was over a century ago, in 1890, when Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church charged the nation's governing institutions of crass negligence. Labeling the Supreme Court "an organized mob against the Negro" and noting that "not a bill has been offered in Congress in fifteen years that even contemplated any relief for the Negro as a race," Bishop Turner 's remedy for the nation's betrayal of African Americans was resettlement in Africa, an exodus that would allow blacks, once and for all, to purge themselves of America's failing democracy. Feelings of betrayal, abandonment, or neglect can often foster a sense of withdrawal, mistrust, and a desire to rely on oneself or others in a similar fix. Voices of political withdrawal and self-help gained currency during the post-Reconstruction era and were popularized by Booker T. Washington's homily on self-help and respectable serfdom in his "Atlanta Compromise" speech in 1895. At the turn of the twenty-first century, these writes of withdrawal and self-help are gaining currelTcy once again. Charles Johnson's comments on the recurring "'crisis" of black men, a gendered characterization of the plight of the race that has its roots in black nationalist and conservative thought, is only the latest campaign on black self-correction in an era of rising economic inequality and conservative politics. Johnson tells us that the crisis of black men and black families "is not merely an economic and political problem," but "also a cultural, spiritual, and moral" one that reflects "behavior and attitudes." From Johnson, we get antidotes of the cultural, spiritual, and moral failings of black men (with the exceptions of CEOs and well-mannered professional athletes), but virtually no insights into what exactly are the economic and political conditions that account tot this most recent "'crisis." What lurks beneath the conservative drift in American politics and the most recent versions of the moral uplift ideology of black intellectuals and leaders should cause the thoughtful among us considerable alarm. Today African Americans confi'ont disturbing (re)currents in America's body politic that chal lenge--much like the forces that ruined Reconstruct ion-the economic and political gains of the modern civil rights movement. By way of judicial interpretations that countered the intent of Reconstruction's constitutional amendments, the compromises made by the Republican party to become electorally competitive with Democrats for the white male vote, and through outright neglect, the institutions of national governance converged into an all-out assault on the limited, though important, gains Reconstruction wrought for African Americans. The combined forces of economy and national gove r n a n c e i n c l u d i n g partisan swings in congressional power, the erratic actions of Lincoln's successors in the White House, and t ransformat ions in the nat ion 's economy--brought about, as historians mark this period, the so-called "Redemption" of the white South's economic and political hegemony over African Americans. But shifts in economy and governance were not the only culprits. Institutions of civil society, such as the press and the academy, also legitimized the politics of retrenchment. Through the southern and northern press's demeaning caricatures of black politicians, academic research "confirming" black inferiority, and black self-help advocates encouraging anti-politics as a strategy for group progress, the politics of retrenchment went beyond the nation's governing institutions. And the consequences of that retreat were swift. Within the modest span of a quarter of a century, "'freedom" for African Americans had been accomplished; by the beginning of the twentieth century, Jim Crow had become embedded in the nation's social norms and practices. A remembering of the forces that led to the collapse of the nation's first Reconstruction is instructive for what is currently taking place within American politics and