Long written off by many Americans as a bigot and a thug, Louis Farrakhan is still somehow in contention for the title of the nation’s number-one black leader. Indeed, in the year and a half since his original Million Man March in Washington, D.C., most moderate civil-rights spokesmen have endorsed the event. Farrakhan’s trip to Libya and Iraq to pay court to two of the world’s most unsavory dictators has done little to dim his luster. On the contrary, he has been profiled favorably in the New Yorker and included among Time magazine’s 25 most important Americans. This past fall, as the Republican party strove to reach out to black voters, even vice-presidential candidate Jack Kemp spoke admiringly of Farrakhan and urged Jewish leaders to meet with him.

Unsettling as it may be, Farrakhan’s ascendance is only a symptom of a larger problem: an ever-worsening crisis of black leadership. Try as one might to write off the Farrakhans, the Al Sharptons, and the Marion Barrys, the fact is that more effective and judicious statesmen seem in short supply. Why is this so? Why do black Americans seem so ill-served by their representatives—and why do they appear unable to replace them with better? A raft of recent books offers some tentative answers.

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Not all disappointing leaders are disappointing in the same way, and today’s black establishment is no exception. The common shorthand view divides the field into two opposing camps—one angrily separatist, the other accommodating and integrationist—represented respectively by Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. Each camp is seen to have its own style and core beliefs: the separatists rebellious, defiant, sometimes violent, urging followers to get their own house in order, largely indifferent to white perceptions; the integrationists pragmatic, compromising, concerned above all to work out a deal with the powers that be. On this view, Malcolm’s children would include Farrakhan, Sharpton, the former NAACP president Benjamin Chavis (now Chavis Muhammad), and a range of other, still angrier nationalists. King’s heirs would be a little harder to name, but the list presumably might include most members of the Congressional Black Caucus along with leaders of the major civil-rights organizations.

This shorthand typology makes a convenient crutch for the perplexed, but the true picture is more complicated. Among the activists profiled in recent books, the late Bayard Rustin springs preeminently from the integrationist tradition. Although an informative new biography of him by the New Yorker writer Jervis Anderson does not bring us close to the inner life of the man, it does paint an intriguingly complex portrait of the King heritage.¹ It also points to a better set of criteria for judging today’s black spokesmen.

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Bayard Rustin was present—often as a critically important player—at just about every major turn of civil-rights history. A one-time radical leftist turned pacifist, Rustin already in the 1940’s was pioneering the use of Gandhian techniques to resist segregation. An eccentric man—a flamboyant homosexual with a princely bearing, a cold, sharp analytical mind, and unlikely patience for the tiniest details of political organizing—he played a pivotal role in convincing King to adopt the methods of nonviolence, then later prodded him to found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and more or less single-handedly organized the 1963 March on Washington.

The picture of the Southern struggle that emerges from Rustin’s life does not exactly conform to the clichéd, romanticized view. In reality, the early pioneers of the movement were bonafide militants, and their eagerness to enter into the mainstream was accompanied by an equally strong, angry urge to protest its injustices. Rustin’s story makes the point most starkly because he was by nature something of a troublemaker: a defiant man who liked attention and was determined to confront the system, no matter what the personal cost. Indeed, it was the intensely proud, iconoclastic Rustin who inspired a generation of younger and even angrier radicals, including the black-power advocate Stokely Carmichael, who now goes by the name Kwame Touré. Nor was Rustin the only rebellious man in King’s entourage. Both his biography and a recent memoir by Andrew Young,² a man of very different temperament whose years as King’s lieutenant began in 1963, are filled with stories of the unending struggle in the ranks between those who saw protest as a means to an end and another, more zealous group drawn to resistance largely for resistance’s sake.

Today, for most black spokesmen and their partisans, it is this rebelliousness—and not the emphasis on nonviolence or integration—that is the “legacy” of the Southern movement. Anyone who takes it upon himself to stand up for blacks against whites, anyone who organizes a protest march or an economic boycott, cannot resist wrapping himself in King’s mantle. Even as he polarizes New York streets with racial epithets and violence, Al Sharpton claims he is repeating what the SCLC did at Birmingham and Selma.

But in fact the movement was far more focused and disciplined than the actions of its would-be inheritors suggest. However strong his impulse to rebel, Rustin, for one, never lost sight of the larger goal: a better relationship with mainstream America. On a personal level, and in contrast to many prominent blacks today, Rustin liked and trusted whites, and clung to the idea of universality, what he called “the oneness of the human family.” Even more importanly, he believed implicitly that American society, basically decent, could change for the better, and on these grounds he rejected the black-power movement as isolating and divisive. “I agree with you about the importance of pride in being black,” Rustin once told some younger men, “but being black is not a program.”

That was the key word: program. King’s early confidants understood implicitly that effective black leadership had to be more than merely expressive. The movement had to go beyond rebellion for rebellion’s sake: it had to deliver, by enhancing race relations and opening up opportunity. No moment in Rustin’s life was more important—for him or for the movement—than his turn away from civil disobedience toward political action. His groundbreaking article, “From Protest to Politics,” published in COMMENTARY in February 1965, grew precisely from his conviction that the struggle’s traditional approach was no longer suited to achieving its goals. Demonstrations might lead to new laws or to a dropping of barriers, but they could hardly be expected to bring about deeper social changes of the kind that would be necessary if blacks were to take advantage of their new legal equality. For that, the movement needed stronger allies, and it had to frame its overall goal in a more broadly appealing way.

Morally compelling as Rustin’s integrationism may have been, even more important, hindsight shows, was his pragmatism. By example and through his writings, he set a standard for all black spokesmen who followed: would their tactics be effective, would they improve people’s lives?

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Most of today’s leaders, varied as they are, fail this test in one way or another. The most obvious examples are the angry outsiders who never took Rustin’s advice to come in off the street. As several new memoirs attest, the very success of the Southern movement actually deepened the militancy of young Northern blacks in the 60’s and 70’s. Where King saw Birmingham and Selma as moments of hope, these young men saw an all-out race war, and they reacted to the hate in the faces of a few Southern bigots with a hatred of their own that encompassed all of white America. “When those girls were blown up in Birmingham in 1963, I wanted to hurt somebody,” one of this generation, now a sports celebrity, said recently. “Any white person would have been all right.” Today, those young men and others like them fall under the sway of Louis Farrakhan and his bizarre, megalomaniacal personality.

What exactly is the appeal of Farrakhan’s brand of Islam, with its crazy explanations of history and its prediction of a coming racial apocalypse (complete with a flying-saucer-like “Mother of Planes”)? Why does he remain so popular among blacks, with one poll after the Million Man March finding 70 percent affirming that he said things the country needed to hear, 63 percent that he spoke “the truth,” and 53 percent that he offered a model for black youth?

Farrakhan’s latest biographer, Arthur J. Magida, does not know the answer to any of these questions. A former journalist from Baltimore, Jewish, and an earnest liberal, Magida is hard-pressed even to put together a credible account of Farrakhan’s life, let alone to explain it. Most of what is known about the Muslim leader’s past is mythology: stories he himself originated long ago, repeated so often by followers that they have taken on a life of their own. And Prophet of Rage,³ which gathers up the best-known of these chestnuts, is mostly another retelling of the story according to Farrakhan: a portentous tale of a Caribbean immigrant’s son who dabbled in calypso music before joining the Nation of Islam, then rose through the ranks and eventually took over, converting a largely apolitical, separatist religious group into the organization we know today.

Like all personal mythologies, Farrakhan’s is deeply revealing: he tells stories about himself in the third person, imagining that he is the center of all attention and at one point literally wondering why he was not chosen as the Muslim messiah. What emerges from the boasts is a portrait of a delusional personality with grandiose claims to leadership. That this allure should work for street youths is not surprising. It is harder to see what it offers middle-class blacks, increasingly integrated, educated, and powerful in their own right.

Magida’s chapters on the Nation of Islam only add to the mystery. Drawing on a variety of earlier journalistic accounts, he paints a sharply damning picture of the elusive sect: not just the wild theology and now-obsessive anti-Semitism, but also its history of corruption and terrifying internal violence. Farrakhan’s famous pronouncement shortly before Malcolm X’s assassination that “such a man . . . is worthy of death”—words widely thought to have licensed Malcolm’s killers—was not a departure from usual practice among black Muslims. As Magida chillingly shows, beatings, intimidation, and vengeful murder were common currency in that world until the late 1970’s, when Farrakhan evidently scaled back to mere death threats, still issued on a regular basis. (Recent targets have included the black scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and, earlier, the black journalist who first went public with Jesse Jackson’s “Hymietown” remark.) By the time he gets to the more recent rantings of Farrakhan’s lieutenant Khalid Abdul Muhammad, Magida has offered enough to horrify even the most jaded Islam-watcher.

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In the year and a half since the Million Man March, some of the black spokesmen who endorsed it have made a point of downplaying Farrakhan’s personal importance. He does not figure in Get on the Bus, Spike Lee’s movie about the event, and several black columnists have chastised whites for focusing on Farrakhan’s demagoguery rather than on the self-help efforts spurred by the gathering: voter-registration drives, youth-mentoring programs, neighborhood crime watches, and the like. To the degree that Farrakhan is responsible for these initiatives, he is “delivering” for his people. But that is hardly the main reason for his popularity. On the contrary, as his interpreters have long pointed out, his appeal—and that of other race men like him—lies largely in his ability to speak for the alienation of his community. As an expressive voice and gadfly, he is without peer.

To be sure, this too may seem a way of “delivering.” The cliché that there is a little bit of Malcolm and a little bit of Martin in every black is as apt today as it ever was. This, the men at the Million Man March made vividly clear. Mostly middle-class, they were drawn to Washington at least in part by assimilationist impulses, including a need to show that they are not the unacculturated outlaws they feel white America thinks they are. Yet very few of them were willing to denounce Farrakhan. If anything, they, like mainstream civil-rights leaders, have reacted to appeals to distance themselves with an even stronger show of support. Not only have large numbers rallied around the Muslim leader, but the more vitriolic he has grown, the more successfully he has eclipsed more moderate spokesmen.

This is not a new pattern: if anything, it is a law of black political history that more extreme leadership upstages—and often drives out—moderates. It happened with Malcolm X and Dr. King. It happened more recently in New York, when Al Sharpton and Sonny Carson outflanked David Dinkins, the black man who was then mayor.⁴ Farrakhan himself has done it to Jesse Jackson, and Farrakhan’s lieutenant Khalid Muhammad has done it to Farrakhan. The angrier man makes the moderates—or relative moderates—sound as if they lack guts, and shifts the range of acceptable black opinion toward the extreme. Never mind that Malcolm’s anger rescued no blacks from poverty, that Farrakhan’s and Sharpton’s speeches only frighten and enrage whites. Their bitter alienation somehow trumps even middle-class blacks’ pragmatic impulses, the same impulses that should draw them in turn to a more pragmatic leadership.

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Whether or not Rustin lost the battle for the hearts and minds of many blacks, he still had a formative influence on the shape of the later struggle. In 1965, “From Protest to Politics” was denounced in movement circles as a contemptible surrender: a tired old man’s betrayal of the race and its justified grievances. Yet by the time the decade drew to a close, it was clear that, tactically at least, Rustin had called the future. Electoral politics, biracial coalitions, and a far-reaching economic agenda were by then the hallmarks of black activism. As American society opened its doors—at all levels of schooling, in business, and in politics—young blacks began making their way into the system, and soon there were enough black representatives on Capitol Hill to form the Congressional Black Caucus, which was started in 1969 with nine members and which, by 1993, had grown to more than 40.

But the result, 25 years later, is a strange hybrid—what Robert C. Smith, in his useful though distractingly polemical book, We Have No Leaders: African Americans in the Post-Civil Rights Era,⁵ calls “caucus separatism.” Most blacks who aspire to leadership now play an ostensibly mainstream game. All but a few have forsworn active protest; most earn middle-class salaries, often paid by “the system” they once denounced so bitterly; the best serve in Congress or city hall, or in largely white-funded bodies that lobby the government for the kind of fundamental economic change Rustin said was necessary to heal the ghetto. Yet most could not be farther from Rustin’s spirit. Clinging to the notion that what matters most is their color, and devoted to advancing what they see as the interests of the race—interests they perceive to be inalterably different from those of whites—they place supreme value on solidarity, and push an agenda of items from a far-left-wing inventory now repudiated even by many liberals: wholesale economic restructuring, a more indulgent welfare system, more extensive racial preferences, a less punitive approach to crime, and a grandstanding, race-driven foreign policy.

Kweisi Mfume exemplifies the new generation. A former street tough from Baltimore who was radicalized by the Southern movement and his own sense of powerlessness growing up in the ghetto, Mfume went through a conversion experience that helped him give up “the life” and get into college. His earnest but somewhat wooden memoir, No Free Ride: From the Mean Streets to the Mainstream,⁶ retraces these early years and what followed: radical student politics (the issue was Black Studies), a stint on local talk radio (a vehicle to advance black consciousness), the Baltimore city council, Congress, and, since 1995, the presidency of the NAACP.

Much concerned with values and character-building, the Mfume who looks back here on his early life comes across as an impressive and able man: serious-minded, determined, generally clear about what makes a difference in people’s lives. Add to this his understanding of the alienation that rules in the ghetto, and it is easy to feel that this is a young leader of great potential. All the more disappointing, then, is the politician who emerges in later chapters.

On the Baltimore city council, by his own account, Mfume did little but defy the powers that were. In Congress, though he relinquished overt provocation for provocation’s sake, he remained committed to a largely oppositional agenda: the by-now standard black demands for radically “progressive” tax reform and vastly increased social spending, among other ideas. That bigger government might not be the answer, that there might be better ways than racial preferences to open up opportunities, that an all-out war on crime might actually be a good thing for the inner city—these in his view were and remain inherently anti-black ideas, outside of consideration. Finally, Mfume was among the first supposedly reputable black spokesmen to reach out to Farrakhan, refusing to criticize him even after an infamous, anti-Semitic tirade by Khalid Muhammad at Kean College in New Jersey. Only under pressure from fellow members of the Congressional Black Caucus, of which Mfume was then the head, did he belatedly and half-heartedly distance himself.

Since becoming president of the NAACP, Mfume has taken a somewhat more encouraging approach. He now embraces the concept, advanced both by local black leaders and white conservatives, that the best hope for the ghetto lies in a mix of self-help, self-sufficiency, and moral renewal. The problem is that, like Farrakhan, Mfume wants to have it both ways: to go on blaming white people for blacks’ troubles even as he encourages followers to take responsibility for their own lives. Unable to let go of the idea of white oppression, Mfume still finds it easier to give angry speeches about the “reactionary Congress” and “our enemy . . . the Supreme Court” than to think hard or honestly about the tangled pathologies of the ghetto.

Not surprisingly, given their out-of-sync redistributionist views and often unrealistic legislative agenda, black representatives like Mfume have not been able to deliver very much for their constituents. As Robert C. Smith shows at some length, caucus separatism on the Hill has yielded little but empty symbolism: largely ignored “alternative-budget” proposals and ever more affirmative-action programs—derided by even the militant Smith as an overrated stratagem that helps only a few and “diverts attention away from the real remedies.” The caucus hardly seems to be serving its backers by encouraging unlikely hopes for a government-sponsored miracle in the ghetto. Nor does its platform represent most constituents’ views on social issues: a majority of black voters favor the death penalty, for example, while the caucus is unanimously opposed, and even larger voter blocs favor tougher sentencing of criminals and added requirements for welfare recipients.

Still, black voters reelect these representatives by incredible margins. After their first election to Congress, half of all caucus members run unopposed in either the next primary or general election, and their average margin of victory falls in the 80-percent range—yet another example of the trumping of practical by expressive politics.

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Is there no alternative, inside or outside the “system”? It is telling in this connection to contrast two larger-than-life figures in American politics and black American consciousness, Jesse Jackson and Colin Powell. To the degree that black politics is now largely a symbolic politics—a matter of rhetoric, gestures, and moralistic preaching—no one takes the game farther or has played it better than Jesse Jackson. The recent biography of Jackson by Marshall Frady,⁷ a former Newsweek reporter, makes no apology for this, or for Jackson’s decision to remain on the margins of the political system, ever running for but never taking on the responsibility of office. On the contrary, Frady, a proud liberal and repentant white Southerner, glorifies Jackson and everything he stands for, seeing his subject as a desperately needed voice and the country’s only true tribune of the poor and downtrodden in the era of Newt Gingrich.

Neither Frady nor Jackson seems overly concerned about what kind of practical initiatives—government or other—the reverend’s “prophetic” message could or should inspire. As the book’s extensive quoting of Jackson makes clear, much of his preaching about the importance of compassion and society’s responsibility for “the least among us” is indeed powerful. Particularly impressive and ahead of their time were the speeches he gave to young black audiences in the mid-70’s as part of the program known as PUSH Excel: speeches encouraging self-respect and self-reliance and an honest effort to deal with attitudinal handicaps. But even then, and boosted by federal grants in the $4.5-million range, Jackson proved incapable of translating his talk into an effective program. As for his bullying entry into Democratic presidential politics, his forays into race-baiting and anti-Semitism, the polarizing results speak for themselves.

Colin Powell is an entirely different type—different not only from Jackson but from the other establishment figures portrayed in recent books. What distinguishes him is his view of color: he is less a black leader than a mainstream leader who happens to be black. In his hugely successful autobiography, My American Journey,⁸ Powell offers a tantalizing vision of a world where race hardly matters: a society where the very notion of “black leadership” seems almost anachronistic.

In his own unemotional way, Powell is a proud black man with a keen sense of history and an appropriate indignation about what it has meant for his people. But his color-consciousness is balanced by a larger vision of common humanity. When he describes friends, black or white, or muses about policy toward Haiti, race never seems to enter his mind; at most, it is one loyalty among many. In his book, at least, Powell is also firmly opposed to racial preferences. (One can only surmise that his sense of political utility has since gotten the better of his principles on that score.) He also argues against racial redistricting, “unhealthy” self-segregation, and the tendency among young blacks to dwell so much on the African past that they never learn how to “make their way in an American world.”

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Utopian as it may sound, the logic of Powell’s example leads to an inevitable question: does America need a black leadership whose main qualification is its blackness? In a better future—even a somewhat better future—why should a growing black middle class, rising into the system, continue to rely on messianic mediators riding on their color? As for the notion of color-coded black interests, might not that racist idea eventually die a natural death, along with the self-serving spokesmen who depend on it and the constituency it creates? And when it comes to the poorest blacks, alienated as they may now feel, might even they not some day realize how much more men like Powell have to offer them, lighting the difficult way into the system, than those who feed the anger that does so much to keep them out?

Meanwhile, and in the shorter term, two non-establishment groups are already attempting to address the problems of American blacks in new and different ways. First, far more than in the political sphere, the world of black intellectuals today makes room for ferment and dissent, some of it conventionally conservative, some better described as searching. The early generation of dissident black thinkers—men like Thomas Sowell, Glenn Loury, and Shelby Steele—has succeeded in shifting at least some of the terms of debate, opening the way for a newer cohort of label-resisting writers and scholars. This is a varied and still uncertain group—some of them rethinking, others merely trimming—and just what they might produce in the way of a nuts-and-bolts political program is not yet clear; so far, none has come up with a political agenda to rival the Congressional Black Caucus’s tired redistributionist demands. Still, they point the way toward the only set of solutions that seems to hold much promise for the worst-off blacks—solutions that chart the path to social progress less through government action than through personal and cultural change.

Secondly, along with the talk, the past decade has spawned a mushroom crop of grass-roots experiments in self-help: mentoring networks, job-training programs, small-business incubation, counseling of various kinds—all intensive, retail efforts to save people, as Loury puts it, “one by one from the inside out.” The mostly selfless local “leaders” who have pioneered these initiatives—sometimes ministers, but also businessmen, educators, elected officials, and others—are genuine heroes, by far the best candidates around to replace the community’s tired high-profile spokesmen. But the work they have done, and much of what will be done in the coming decade, still falls in the category of emergency therapy: the kind of short-term remedial help that is marshaled on a case-by-case basis to repair specific damage.

How to create a cultural climate that can provide such encouragement and support on a permanent basis—or, better yet, one that makes it unnecessary—is a tougher question. Also unclear is just what role a political establishment can play in bringing about this kind of change. But future leaders could surely do no worse than the present generation, which has only helped make the task ahead more formidable and the obstacles, especially the inner obstacles, more intractable.

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¹ Bayard Rustin: Troubles I’ve Seen. HarperCollins, 400 pp., $28.00.

² An Easy Burden: The Civil Rights Movement and the Transformation of America. HarperCollins, 550 pp., $27.50.

³ Basic Books, 264 pp., $25.00.

⁴ Al Sharpton’s autobiography, Go and Tell Pharaoh, written with the able reporter Anthony Walton (Doubleday, 276 pp., $23.95), gives chapter and verse on how and why this pattern persists.

⁵ State University of New York Press, 352 pp., $46.50.

⁶ Written with Ron Stodghill II. Ballantine, 373 pp., $25.00.

⁷ Jesse: The Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson by Marshall Frady. Random House, 552 pp., $28.50.

⁸ Reviewed in COMMENTARY by David Frum, January 1996.

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