Black leadership is dead. Long live black leadership.

This piece is the second in a special On Leadership series exploring different facets of the state of black leadership today.

Somewhere between the assassinations of Malcolm X and Dr. King and the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson, the ascension of Louis Farrakhan, and the rhetorical flourishes and marches of Al Sharpton, well-meaning Americans of all stripes got lulled into the notion that we could only have a few black mouthpieces at a time. And that is simply the farthest thing from the truth.

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A couple of years ago I wrote a piece titled “Black Leadership Is Dead” for Ebony , the venerable magazine that has documented African American life, culture and politics since the 1940s. As you can imagine, the essay caused a firestorm in black circles.

But it’s not so much that black leadership is dead, as that our standard notion of it is no longer useful.

It may look as though Black America has fallen into a terrible rut around our leadership today, but that’s in part because a faulty image—that of the singularly powerful national black leader—has been perpetuated out of the upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement. Yet Dr. King was never the lone leader of Black America in his day. There was Fannie Lou Hamer, Dorothy Height, Malcolm X, Ella Baker and a wide range of women and men of various ages and backgrounds.

A quick scan of American history finds many other national black leaders coexisting in the same eras, be it Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass during the abolitionist movement, or Ida B. Wells, Booker T. Washington and W.E.B DuBois during the anti-racism efforts around the turn of the 20^th century. But in the 1970s and 1980s, as integration and black class division began taking root, as the devastating effects of drugs began to plague our inner cities, and as conservatives began trying to erase the very minimal civil rights victories we achieved, black leadership became not only rooted in racial protest, but unable to be self-reflective or self-critical. Embarrassingly, black leaders latched onto this flawed notion of the need for a single national figurehead. They increasingly found themselves at each other’s throats as they jockeyed to be the grand poobahs of Black America.

In spite of this trend, or perhaps because of it, more and more younger black Americans began abandoning traditional approaches, traditional organizations and even the black church as a visionary force. Aided by civil rights legislation and a desertion of the black underclass by local governments and, yes, upwardly mobile blacks as they left urban American centers, the chasm between the black professional class and the black poor got even wider. Although we’ve never been a monolithic group, there were some very basic things we held in common when we were forced, because of segregation, to live in the same communities. Increasingly, with a fragmented set of problems or concerns, the desire (much less the possibility) of a single national black leader decreased.