Black civil-rights leaders gained nothing from Obama meetings and the trickle-down logic failed

Evidence

On February 18, 2014, a group of black leaders held a 90-minute meeting with President Obama. A lot had happened since Obama’s election. The Great Black Depression continued to ravage black communities. Conservatives in several states fought to pass voter ID laws that threatened to disenfranchise black voters. And Trayvon Martin’s death had triggered the conscience of young black people throughout the country. Marc Morial of the National Urban League; Reverend Al Sharpton of the National Action Network; Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights; Lorraine Miller, the interim president and CEO of the NAACP; Patricia Rosier of the National Bar Association; Melanie Campbell of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation; and Sherrilyn Ifill of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund were among those who attended the meeting. These were the big guns of the civil rights establishment. The topics ranged from voter suppression to income inequality and jobs to state laws that “threatened civil rights such as ‘stand your ground.’ ” During the meeting Morial presented the president with a document called “The 21st Century Agenda for Jobs and Freedom.” Morial and Sharpton reported that the meeting was substantive and that the president’s plans were aligned, for the most part, with the agenda of the group. … Almost exactly four years earlier, on February 10, 2010, Morial, Sharpton, and the then-president of the NAACP, Ben Jealous, had held a press conference on a snowy day in Washington, D.C., to report about a different (but decidedly similar) meeting with President Obama. Obama had convened what some dubbed an “urban economy summit” in the Oval Office. Black liberal leaders pushed to alleviate black unemployment, which at the time hovered around 15 percent. They wanted a stronger focus on communities with high unemployment, and they wanted $150 billion of the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds “to be redirected to state and local governments to hire workers to provide critical services in underserved communities.” … A lot has happened since 2010. One thing that hasn’t happened, however, is a full accounting of what actually resulted from that meeting. No one reported whether or not the TARP funds made their way to state and local governments for the purposes outlined. As for black unemployment—well, President Obama has consistently put forward the position that improving the economy generally will disproportionately benefit the communities most hit. The only thing we know for sure is that this has not been the case. Our “fearless” black leaders seem to have accomplished nothing when it comes to ameliorating the effects of the Great Black Depression. … Fast-forward to the aftermath of the meeting in 2014: many of the same so-called black leaders reported that their agenda was in alignment with the president’s, and offered little beyond the theatrics of racial representation—a press conference and black liberal bromides aimed at securing their place as spokespeople for all black folk. What does it suggest that their agenda aligns with the president’s plan? What have been the president’s plans for black America over the course of his presidency? Only the so-called black leaders know. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 479

Categorization

• XREF: This supports the later ‘trap not strategy’ thesis — the reader’s goal is assessing the claim that Democratic loyalty and access-based leadership is a dead end, so this is the empirical grounding.