Marginalized black communities can and should lead their own liberation

Evidence

The idea of politics I’m suggesting here assumes a different kind of leadership. It insists on the capacities and responsibilities of everyday, ordinary black people and urges them to reach for a higher self even in opportunity deserts. Those deserts are fertile ground to be politically creative. They are the places in which we can think, reflect, and act anew. They provide opportunities to expand the very idea of who matters in the context of struggle with others and let us see ourselves as our own saviors. Ferguson showed us that. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee did this in the bowels of the Deep South at the height of Jim Crow segregation. Its members dared to claim that black sharecroppers in the Mississippi Delta were not only worthy of participation in the democratic process, but they could lead themselves in doing so. — Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Democracy in Black, 624

Categorization

• XREF: The SNCC precedent echoes SNCC leader Bob Moses’s organizing philosophy; also resonates with the Parable of the Sower themes of self-organization in opportunity-scarce communities. — connects to: Cone’s Black liberation theology frames Civil Rights era primary texts for students — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 491; White philanthropists recognized only Black leaders could move Black communities — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 144; Black institutional separatism aimed at transforming, not escaping, America — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 245 (+7 more)
• SEED: A possible piece: why the ‘opportunity desert as fertile political ground’ inversion matters — comparing Glaude’s SNCC reference to contemporary mutual-aid models post-Ferguson.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Cone’s Black liberation theology frames Civil Rights era primary texts for students — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 491; White philanthropists recognized only Black leaders could move Black communities — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 144; Black institutional separatism aimed at transforming, not escaping, America — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 245 (+7 more)

Broader Connections

• Nonviolent mass action handed Black liberation back to bourgeois mediators #complicates (0.76) — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1282
• The demand that minorities speak for their whole community reinforces their marginality #complicates (0.75)