Black liberal leadership coincided with declining material conditions for black Americans

Evidence

These three historical moments—the black liberal compact of 1946, the strategy of deracialization of 1976, and the Jesse Jackson campaigns of 1984 and 1988—illustrate how black liberalism became the dominant, if not the only, political game in town. The triumph of black liberalism happened even as the material conditions of black life deteriorated and as the institutional life of black America collapsed. In other words, traditional and now post-black liberals have been on watch in all phases of black life—as elected representatives in statehouses and in Congress, as mayors, as protest leaders, as members of long-standing civil rights organizations, and now as president—at the very moment black America is suffering a slow and agonizing death. We should free our political imaginations from their stranglehold. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 475