Black America Does Not Need Another Political Savior.

Black America Does Not Need Another Political Savior.

(ThyBlackMan.com) The most persistent weakness in our political tradition is no shortage of talent or courage, but a habit of waiting on one anointed figure to carry an entire race across the finish line.

I have been voting since Carter, and I have watched this cycle spin around more times than I care to admit. Somebody rises. Cameras find him. He can preach, he can quote scripture and Baldwin in the same breath, and when he speaks at a funeral the whole country stops chewing for a minute. We gather up all our grief and hand it to him like a collection plate. Then we wait.

What exactly do we expect that man to do? Explain every crisis on Sunday morning television. Show up in whatever town the latest tragedy happened. Defend more than fifty million of us against whatever slander is trending. Sit across from senators and governors and somehow negotiate with a system that took three hundred years to build its defenses. A single human being. One phone, one calendar, twenty four hours.

Nobody survives that job description. Dr. King was thirty nine and exhausted and under federal surveillance the day they killed him. Jesse could not carry it in his prime either, and none of the ones who came after have managed the trick. Some get bought. Others turn bitter. A few get caught with their hand somewhere it should not have been, and cable news runs the footage for a week straight. Plenty simply burn down to the wick doing work that ten thousand hands should have been sharing.

Here is the part that stings. When our chosen figure stumbles, the whole thing goes quiet. Problems did not solve themselves; we simply never built anything underneath him. Rallies stop. Listservs go cold. Folks who drove four hours to hear him speak cannot name a single person on their county commission. We invested everything in a personality and got no equity in an institution.

Go back and read the history honestly. Montgomery did not happen because a young pastor gave a good speech. Jo Ann Robinson and the Women’s Political Council had leaflets running off a mimeograph machine before most people knew what had happened to Rosa Parks. E.D. Nixon had been building labor and civil rights networks through the Pullman porters for nearly three decades. There were carpools, dispatch stations, insurance workarounds after the companies canceled policies on the cars. That boycott ran three hundred eighty one days on logistics, not eloquence. Preaching helped. Logistics won it.

Ella Baker understood this better than anybody, and she said it plain: strong people do not need strong leaders. Her organizing philosophy often pushed her to the margins, because the men around her were building a pulpit model in a moment that called for a network. Young folks in SNCC listened to her, though. They went into Mississippi with no cameras and no charisma to speak of, and they registered voters in counties where doing so could get you shot before supper.

Television changed our appetite. A movement of ten thousand quiet organizers will never be booked for a four minute hit, but one man in a good suit can. Social media took that appetite and put it on steroids. Now we measure influence in followers, and we mistake a viral thread for a base. A hundred thousand likes will not stop a school closing. Forty parents in a boardroom, showing up every month for a year, might.

Politicians love our arrangement, and you should understand exactly why. When a mayor wants cover, he does not have to answer to a thousand organized constituents with a written list of demands. He calls three reverends and a state representative, takes a photograph, and reports that he consulted the community. Consultation with a handful of individuals runs cheap. Accountability to an organized body costs something. Guess which one they prefer.

Political maturity begins the day a community stops confusing inspiration with organization. That confusion is comfortable. Inspiration feels like progress. You leave the auditorium with your chest full, you tell your cousin about it, you post the clip. Organization feels like nothing at all for a long time. It looks like a Tuesday night meeting with eleven people and bad coffee, arguing over whether to endorse in the district attorney race.

Yet the district attorney’s office has broad discretion over which cases get prosecuted and what charges are pursued in your county. School boards decide which buildings get renovated and which get shuttered. Local governing bodies and utility commissions approve water rates. Zoning boards and elected councils decide whether the warehouse goes up next to the elementary school. Far too many sheriff’s races across the South run unopposed. Those seats get filled by whoever bothers to show up, and for decades that has not been us in the numbers it could have been.

I am not dismissing the young folks doing mutual aid and bail funds and tenant work. Much of it is sharper than what my generation built. My caution is different. Horizontal structure without durable infrastructure has its own failure mode. Everybody talks, nobody decides, the group exhausts itself in eighteen months and the landlord is still the landlord. Distributed never meant unorganized. Somebody has to keep the membership list, file the paperwork, and answer the phone in year four when nobody is watching.

Churches carried this load for generations, and some still do. But a congregation of two hundred with a food pantry and a van is doing charity, which is holy work and still a far cry from power. Charity feeds a family this month. Power changes who writes the budget that made the family hungry.

So what would it look like to grow up? Stop asking who the next great figure will be. Start asking what your organization can survive. Can it lose its founder and still function? Does it have money that does not come from one foundation with opinions? Are there folks under forty being trained to run it? Do you have a written agenda that a candidate can be measured against, so that endorsement means something more than fondness?

Build a bench, not a throne. Twenty capable heads in a county with real assignments will outlast any single voice, however golden. And when that voice inevitably says something foolish, gets indicted, or just gets tired, the work keeps moving because the work never belonged to him.

No savior is coming down that road. Never has been one. Everybody we canonized was a mortal doing their part inside a machine that thousands of anonymous hands were feeding every single day, and those folks are the reason anything changed at all.

We should stop looking for someone to follow, and get busy being somebody worth joining.

Staff Writer; L.L. McKenna

Politics explained through the lens of justice and equity. Offering perspective that informs, challenges, and empowers.

One can contact this brother at; LLMcKenna@ThyBlackMan.com.