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THE UPRISING MARCHES ON
Why the Black Liberation Movement Needs to Be Leaderless
A revolution needs longevity more than it needs martyrs
This piece is part of The Uprising Marches On, a package on what’s next for the movement for Black lives.
At the dawn of my tenure as a community organizer in Atlanta nearly seven years ago, the people with whom I organized all agreed that it was important that we create a nonhierarchical leadership structure: shared resources, more room for collaborative projects, no formal leadership roles, and collective power for all. We were, as we thought, committed to creating spaces wherein everyone who cared to have input had the room to do so. We were trying to move away from what we saw as flaws in former movements while adding to the collective Black liberation movement. What we did not realize, however, was that because of the ways that capitalism teaches us all to work vertically — with rigid tiers of authority within an organization — there would be a lot more work required for us to effectively cultivate spaces that were actually unranked.
We have witnessed the horrors of more vertical leadership structures in previous movements.
In 1968, during what would become the eventide of the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. — who had tacitly and explicitly been deemed the leader of the movement — was assassinated by the U.S. government. Much of King’s work was centered around voting rights in the South, but after the signing of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, that changed. The Watts Riots, which according to James R. Ralph Jr. was the turning point for King’s organizing focus, transpired just days after the Voting Rights Act was signed. From that moment until his assassination, King demonstrated a commitment to a politic that was in direct opposition to the politic that had been assigned to him for so long — effectively making him a threat to the state.
Two years prior to King’s assassination, Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party. Newton and Seale ushered in the Black Power era, which would serve as the next iteration of the overall Black liberation movement. The Black Panther Party (BPP) grew, and in 1968, shortly after transitioning out of the…
