to talk to you, professor book that you've written. we are the leaders. for. and i think that the first place to begin this conversation on is the urgency of the moment, because so much about what you write in this book is a look of leadership.■;my ing to use a word that's a word that you don't necessarily use very often in the book, but it certaiy of the. so much of what animates this

leadership, and you have real concerns abouls pd put words moment. so maybe just start this conversation about what is it in this moment that has caused you to trgen of the task of writing this particular book? well, first of all, it's such a in conversation with you. first, mohammed, and let's let's just the names of professors, and let's brother kahlil and brother eddie. ri think, you know, i must adm quite right of you kno, i feel like i feel a little bit broken if that makes sense to you. so part of my looking back has everything to do with picking up thece i am to use the title of toni morrison's wonderful documentary. and it has something to do with trying to figure out how tndmy h of covid, trying to find my feet

cal moment. and so i think it's really an effort on my part to write myself into some kind of stability, as it orientation to. and so that's just the personal side of it. the political side of it, i think, outsoced our responsibility for democracy for too long. you know, democracy requires particular kinds of people to work, not struggling every singe day to make endsabove the watery can attend to their civic onsibilities, you know? so i'm thinking what i what i'm trying tonsist upon in this moment is that politicians aren't going to save and so that theydty■t traditional leads aren't going to save us. we're going to have to save this. how? succinct you describe the challenge in this moment.

and i think that one of the things that's most striking ou stories that you tell in this book, which is framed by essentially three towering figures in the black freedom le, ey are dr. martin luther king jr. malcolm x■ important. ella baker, who helped organizen the 1940s, was part of the southern christian leadership conference. dr. king's organization, help the student nonviolent coordinating committee gain its footing and e■dssentially have e wings that it needed to sort in the moment of the black freedom let's just talk a little bit about the timing of this book, the book opens essential as a consequence of a series of lectures that you gave in 2011. so let me just set the backdrop to what is the core analysis of this book andhy wwhy you

were in particular interested in those three towering black freedom struggle figures during the obama era? en i delived those lectures, michael brown was still alive. was still blogging. you know, and sandraed from houston to minneapolis. yet, you know, the west baltimore wasn't on fire. you know, the writinge cvs was still there. that that quiktrip ersonf hadn't been attacked to burn down, you kw, in many ways. i was trying and in 2011 to figure outw president obama's ascendance hadn-america, trying to hold back this youthful area where folks reading the obama administration as the fulfillment of thelack freedom, you know, the black freedom tradition so

when i think about it, kahlil, you know, obama was kind of, you know, the kind of anchorthose l. but looking back on them for books came out o them, you know, democracy in black. i was writing at the same ti lectures begin again. my my meditation on baldwin as you can see, elements of n lec'e reflections on reln,e ■2 our politics there in the lectures. an is this was the kind of this thisw. these you know, these lectures were the lab where i was trying to work sothortantly, i think it was the moment in which i was trying to find my own voice as an intellectual. you know, i was trying to find my own kind of rhythm to kind of distingu myself from my teachers, like cornel west and ot so it became a really

important, important moment to to kind of assess in light of where we stand what i found as i returned to the lectures that much of what i was saying was still still very much salient for our current moment. i just want i just want to say, you two of those books, which i've read, democracy in black fabulous for the ways in which address the political and the personal through particularly the life of baldwin and begin again. question about what it means to cede one's capacity for political change, to political elites, which animates much of what democracy and of course, you talk about a values gbuhúparticular book, yoo thingst pertinent and interestin

this moment. the first of those things that yoattention to the fact that w'e been looking to the civil rights era for a source of inspiration for the kind of mobilized nation around anti-po bru for example, or what became known as the black lives matter and you're particularly concerned about the way in which the election of barack obama and his presidency begig in 2009 seemed to sap much of the democraticpirit of the very period in the 6050s, sixties and seventies, in which ose young people took to the streets to make change in america.in talk a little bit about that tension. it's a word you used toescribe people who who pick up on obama's success as the embodiment of that era. you call them black moralists. and so ihis conversation to

get an appreciation for what y are particularly concerned about. you know, part of what i'm trying t■no work my way throughn that moment, kahlil, and thank you for for pointing itut relate have to what i take tbe the greatest generation america ever produced? what i think about tho persons who risked everything in the f[■denabout the second reconstrn he walls of jim crow, to open up ities to make you and me possible. they are i mean, they are extraordinary examples of what it means to to just world. now, i happen toimmediate aftere folks. too youngo vepated in in the civil rights and black power movements and too old to be considered a millennial in the like. so, you know, i came o age under the shadow of of the civil

rights movement in the greatest generation america produced. and i came of age in the age of reagan. so what are the political languages available to me? so that's one question that's animating this analysis. another is that oftentimes, particularly in our current momente movement of the mid 20th century is often invoked to discipline forms of political dissent. in our current moment. so, you know, when youam heard e mayor, the former mayor of atlanta, saying to black lives matter activist dr. king would not take over highway, you just kind of whis that? right. how is the narrow the range of what constitutes legitimate forms of political dissent? and so there's a particular story being told of the black freedom struggle of the mid 20th century. it's ahat begins, as you know, with 1954 and brown v board, the montgomery march in 1955. you know, the students it ends in 1 organization of

snick in 62, the march on washington in 63, selma 65. king 68. that's the or declension. black powern 66. and then, you know, that's where we lost our way. esactuly used that formulation. and the 50th anniversary of the march washington. right. and so part of what i've been trying to do is to disrupt the way in which the story of our struggle7&+x justify as a partir leadership class on the one hand. right. the legitimacy of othernot in sd absorbed by the democratic party. now, this is just. just to be quick, just to be clear, this is just a kind of story is not anack politics alo. it's about it's happens when ory people political

elites. yeah, i want to dwell on this for a moment, because i think this is a really important some people in the black community most certainly, they get their backs up. they are criticisms of president obama. but of the things that i think illustrates the point you just made very clearly, i speeches to the graduating cla e hbcu all men school. that, of course, counts its alumni. martin luther king jr himself. so this probably in 2014 or 15. i've lost track of time. but i remember him saying to that year's graduating class that no matter what struggles that they see in front of them. and he was making particular reference to the

animating a racial justice he said, your lives are. infinitely better than those who came before you, that the sacrifice faces of those who fought against slavery in the sacrifices and blood ande civils era, far outweigh today. and so all you have to do is ■=essentially to stay the cours, work hard, andhe future is yours. and i remember her personally, personally feeling very dis satisfied with what the president said at that moment, because to illustrate your point, itas disabling. it essentially told these young graduate it's that essentially their problems were not as big . and so they had no excuses to complain about ath probably thet important thing they should do is just go out and be successful in they worked. they didn't have the requiremeff

democratic practice. i right in terms of conversation should have a have a granular sense of what the what the criti i think so. that speech particularly annoyed me because 'and, you know, befoo that particular point thou alsot absent fathers. and in that moment, you$n like, he's not talking to those young men. he's actually talking to a broader audience that have that has a host of assumptions about who black men but i think you're absolutely right. in that moment, a reason why occupy wall street emerged during the obama years. there's a reason why black lives matter emerged in the obama years. , obama in some ways became the object of a lot of the grasts organizing izing that happened before he became there was organizing on the ground around police brutality d

chicago. and there was also this obama emerged. and then people gcreeend it. they made him this progressive of candidate. and when he got into office, you know, he did what he had to do symbolically, we can never take away the significance of the first black presidency. you can never deny the importance of that. inhese moments, he became this kind of arc. how can one t ithis of containing voice? right. you know what happens if obama o go back to the court, right. how how far do they pushand so'g to suggest early on in the book, but again, it gets beyond it ghnow, we can't read him as the struggle, because when you do so, you you narrow the complexity of that struggle.

struggle is not just simply a black liberal ambition.politi. you're historian, kahlil. e turn of the 20th century. you know, the 1920s. u maound black nationalists running around, you know, black libels black internationalists running around. you have this complex that's international in its in its in its in its in itse like. that gives the vibrancy of black politics.th th■ sets the stage for what pops off in the mid 20th century. and so part of what i'm trying to do in this moment is to open up our understanding so that when people when elites invoke that movement to disrupt in our political imaginations, that we have resources to fi back. we have resources to imagine ourselves and tone our expansive terms. so so you just said something about obama embodying kings

legacy as a fulfillment of the litany that emerged shortly after he was elected president. and i'm going to paraphrase it, but essentially that rosa said so martin could march and obama could run. and and so that all the children could fly. this this was a litany attributed■ñ to jay-z in the moment. and so, as i said to start this conversation, you you make this narrow wing of black politics. and in the big sense of the word, i'mthat we understand ande he legacies of three black freedom struggle figures. so let's start himself and to open this up, i just wantaccount of attending an luther king breakfast celebration. i was teaching at indiana university beginning in 2005. i think it was the first year that i attended. and the theme that year was the

power of one. and i remember then thinking to myself, this is not the right message for dr. king's legacy, because essentially it tells everyone one, there's no role fr you to play. now, i think that the organizers and so many others who have taken the similar theme a leader. but you see that something in dr. king's exceptionalism, what you call a kind of prophetic tradition that positions black preachers as particularly powerf either god's sanction or narrowf black politics. so tell understand dr. king's legacy and how we might actually be misreading him in terms of how we are to understand leadership. well, you know, when you read the mid-twentieth many a great',

let's put it that way. you lose sight of all of the everyday, ordinary people when the movement becomes in effect, a story of dr. kg's witnessing courage. he becomes a larger than lthen t in supplication in relion to it. i just fundamentally disagree with that view. i think, a, theovemt was more complex and b, that dr. king was more complex. that's decidedly human, all too human, just like we are. and so part ofh'm doing in that moment, khalil, is trying to open up spa f myself. and of course, that has implications fhat i'm commending to the reader, to to approach dr. king,ith a posture of supplication, but to see him as an example that the that the prophetic is notom whod

or authorized by a force divine force apart from our living, whose voice has been given the example, who's come to deliver a message. but the prophetic is really evidence in our decisions of ou and i decide to look beyond the arrangements of n to imagine a future that's different and use that imagining arrangements. so we all can do capacity. and so this is my way of of reading. dr. king, as someone who's calling all of us to be prophetic, you know, when he gives that that sermon in 1957 of remaining awake during a he's not asking us to drop our him. right. he's asking us to to understand what we're capable of ourself. eachf ually and

together, what we're capable of world.hting and imag and i think this is really important in terms of this side of this partf f the book. you know, if we are the leaders that we've been looking for, kahlil, it seems to me that we got to become better people. it sounds cliche, but it' true. if i want to say tt everyday, we got to do the hard work of ac ourselves to become the kinds of people that can those hard choices. and when the moment calls nd e'e done it. those examples, againou just sin and wish for them. they should forc to what's wha'y capable of. ust a little bit further, particularly on the better hat is clearer when you start talking about ella baker. i think one of the things that would be helpful, at least in

sharing the insights of the book, is the degree to which dr. the movement.empowered people that's one issue. the second would be the gr whicf king's success erases the community that that supported the work that he essentially became the titular head of. i mean, one of the things that, you know, havingead many biographies of dr. king was his profound with what prophetic sense of his calling that that that he in many wanten down. share it with others so that it would diminish the weight that fell on his shoulders. absolutely. and, you know, see that over the course of his of hisitrigh but, you know, you've got to talk about folks like in , eddie nixon and

julianne robinson. you got to talk about, you know, inissspih sneak. you know, people like amc, moore and others, there werlk the ground doing ordinary work everyday, ordinary pkahlil. and i think when we tell the sstory of the civil rights movement in such a way where it just simply focuses on dr.his fs we lose sight of the capacities of everyday folk. and in some ways, it might be purposeful that we tell the story in that way. for some. right. because some people don't want us to see what we're capable of, you know? and so they want us to outsource our our are our courage to others. right. but, you know, democracies can't survive if we're doing that constantly. and and i think more importantly, our our politics are just distorted and disfjyiguredhen woman is at thef

gravity. and so i think it's important to understand how a too was right. and and once w make that clear, then his exam bill becomes all powerful for us. yeah. yeah. u and let me just say so there's a lot of close readings of various theorists, including john dewey thoreau gets a shout out and many, many others. contemporary of ours at nyu, a ■f so i want to talk a little bit about the context problem of individualism. so if iexperience i had with kit of being captured in this idea of the power of one. there's atrappings of neo liber.

and i'm traphrase here that insists that individuals are only responsible for themsees. and in an essentially saying responsible for themselves. you write, this is a conti the c good. it's an anemic view, ywo obligad ultimately, at least to selfishness as virtue and narcissism, as standard practice. yeah. let's talk a little bit about wahich the distortion of king's legacy leaves us in threse me@t, notion of individualism that is itself funnt tanti-death socratt we're trying that y are trying to solve for. yeah. you know, i should say a word out l heand writers that i thate in been introduced, kahlil, to the broader historiaa pundit, as an africanricastudie.

most folk don't know that i was trained in the philosophy of lion, at i'm a john dewey scholar. and so part of what i've been trying to do is to bring to idge world, to ask my reader, i'm aski a book to0> coo understand that that's what i do. right. so i'm doing the a different side of my bibliography is at work in thex philosophical than historical in some ways. and that that is, you know, my momma said this is a hard one. okay. that's okay. but she's still reading i i'm tg to do with with regards to this, the context of neoliberalism and in the way in which individualism gets just kind of warped by its logics or its internalized objects. right. is i have to make that move in light of what i'm calling for. i want to've got to become better people right.

and if we'reve to reach for higher forms of excellences in our individual lives. so in pursuit of a more just world. and here i use i invoke the, you know, jamepeon's, the fugitive blacksmith. pennington was the first ca to a n yale. he didn't they wouldn't let him in class. he had to sit outside the classroom. the rsreceive an honorary degrem heidelberg university in 1849. and wrote in the you know, i'm paraphrasing here, but he wrote in the fugitive he said, this describes slavery as this vile monster.l never forgive slavery for is that it robbed me of my education. ■rit robbed me of my ability to kind of engage in it. ongoing self-development in some ways, right? he says. he says, i've spent a lifetime trying to read my tongue of the certain things that i cannotare recoup because i just i wasn't exposedhe says. all i tried to do is to make

myself more efficient for good. and so here pennington expresses what you know emerson and others might describe as that self-loathing, that sense is inadequate. as he tries to reach for a hi self. but he can't because the world is organized in such a wayblocke kind of human being he imagines himself to cultivation can't bea narcissisticto be. it can't be as enterprise that its it it has to in some way be self ation in pursuit of a more just world, because the wldt iss being better people. hmm. ows king fit into this? when we give over to ourselves, a leader, we stop the work of lf cultivation. mm hmm. we just engage in imitation. hmm. you see, so when we. when we follow a leader, as

opposed to work with people, as to the ground, we actually arrest the hard work of becoming better hmm. if that makes sense. i don't. don't so i don't want to. i'm not demonizing dr. king or i'm de demonizing malcolm x and ella baker. what i'm trying to do is to get us to stand in right relation with ourlars so that we can continue to find our voices ■becafollow them, we stop the hard work of excellence. well, i want■ t to take this point one step further and apply something you don't but i think it's so relevant to what you just said■% and there'm you use in the book you use this term in the chapter on

dr. king. how do you understand or interph the backlash against the tth history, the backlash as the which the work of being better peles actu on their full scale assault? abutely. absolutely. you know, richard slotkin has a new book tibes this moment as a second lost cause. hmm. and, you know, we know what the lost cause and redemption was all about,about the violence on the ground. and right from colfax to on and across the south. right. we understand that. but it was alsri our. everyone, these are posts. slavery. instances of a massacre as a

black people who were standing up for their democratic rights and freedoms that they had earned. and as a result, the 13th, 14th, 15th amendment right. so we know about about the the the all out assault on the reco. right. and the lies that became a part of, you know, instruction in schools, prima school, the histories that are being read. the william dunning school out columbia, and the kinds of first hits, the first histories arou called into question black folks capacity to becitizenship. that talked about, you know, the carpetbaggers anacinherently cot t process. and you know what's interesting to me, khalil, is that when we and the first redemptionl of the children educated in that lie, they turned out to be the the 1.

shouting racial epithets. they were the ones who were lynchi.ged in the violent is ine so what we see now is this this this all out assault on the story that we tell ourselves to produce particular kinds of people. right. of we are the leaders we were looking for at the question. it is the beating heart of my work is the do you aspire to be? atum you? and so i think this is a secon't at the level of knowledge production and we' sinat the level of our politics more broadly. yeah, absolutely. hand, if this is a second loss, cause i also want to say t the attack on learning, the freedom to learn,

to read,nd ultimately the broader attack on the humanities also means that that we are destroying the infrastructure that makes possible a cerinknowledge whichr the kind of brmsocial good, of , p5 we are all in this together. anthis, you know, we're constany spaper that the humanities are a wa people ought to focus on on job ready skills. but if you extend the argument that you make to this point, it essentially the concentrated power or the monopoly power, the kind of atrod occupy movement, f power of the gilded and robber age, that animated dewey's own work philosophy that you writeessential so that our

philosophers, our historians, our thinkers, our are empowered with the ability to educatehos, what is the meaning of life? what are we f owe each other? that you are really hammering when you talkbo critical intelligence and you really emphasize the degree to which opacity. but that capacity has to be nurtured andabsolutely not. i mean, how can one i we you know, democracies work? din talked about this in the federalist papers, right? there's a reason why he wants us toto focus on virtue. we have this is a particular cessary for this thing to work. but wh wd since the founding and

it folk being, you know, slavery being original sin, because it's not quite orn is the belief, the practice that some people, becauseth superior to others of more value than others. ab that, that lie. but you know, it seems to me that if we're going to become better people, we got to addres you know, what did douglass it in july 5th 1852 in his address it ath old corinthian hall in rochester, new york. he called it thisile in the na', this horriblebosom. right. which is slavery and its aftermath. right. set of beliefs and practicest lead us to try to throw the democracy into the tra repeatedly. we got to address destroy and

disfigure our characters. way of us becoming better asking that quen right takes us to the heart of the conundrum, because, you know, america is a riddle after l. you know, and if we figure that out, maybe we can open ourseesf. yeah. so speing of afenly made future than the moss point. come from. and you spent chapter two talking a bit about your father, your relations who you y admired. so maybe tell us a little bit about yd chapter to a chapter that is in many ways about malcm as a hero of yours with a story about your father. you know, i think i learned this lesson from baldwin carlyle that the messiness ofactually a refle messiness of our interior lives.

and if we're going to change the world,e ourselves. we have to deal with the wounds. and, you kw, my father is the most important man in my life. he' the most responsible human being i've ever met. but he scared the living daylights out of me. mm hmm. and he deposited a kind of fear in my gut that led me tovb belie at least in the quiet of night, i wasn't quite courageous. i wasfraid. and i had been trying to prove to myself that i wasn't aí5y1 coward. and so what you see in the book. right, is in that chapter is my reaching for this heroic figure. it ud to be that, you know, i would read the norse, you know, i played dungeons and dragons. i was a nerd. thor was my guy, right? reading the comic. on, as i aged, i transitioned to the heroes of the mid-twentieth

century. you know, malcolm and the black planet, you know, oh, my god, i morehouse and i read the autobiography of malcolm x, suddenly everything made sense. i had a language for myther's. i had a language for what i was feeling inside. and ild construct a notion of what it meant to be a black rit by of this adoption of malcolm'sso, you kn, really. i got my goatee. you know, is is this is in honor of malcolm. i would never shave it off right. and so but also, it's also the way in which i'm reaching for a notion of manhood that'sith thi. d so book, though, the chapter then says, but what does it malcolm as someone a pt fr+a own

wounds, as someone who's not and so here i move from the noemerson's notion of the representative aqm woman. and what does it mean to think of malcolm as my good friend ani perry says after we read manny marvel's biography of malcolm together, she said, oh my god, when you read him, he's like, after hejú leaves the nation, he's flailing and, failing. mm hmm. o suddenly malcolm becomes this wounded witness, not the shing acg him down to the groun, and i'm ablebe hypermasculine pt that blackmakes sense to you. no, it makes perfect sense. you know, it'■wfor malcolm, youo position yourselat you're not with dr. king, at least to some degree, do you? ke of your training as a religion a

prophetic tradition that surrounds your own experience as a as a student of cornel west, butng figure of ja. and so much of the way in which ■even developed an understanding b theology, for example. mm hmm. in thise, story of malcolm's failingto a kind of ar thexlact at any one of us, as you write, can make the im you criticize yourself essentially, tmalcolm as a surr, that you almost up your self and degenerated into a kind of idolatry. to, too. so if we critique the prophetic by giving over our power to a singleeptional individual, and now we're ay that you're telling us,

challenging us to understand also can disablepolitics. aren't w the oldest traditionsns to tell stories with pr■fts itagonists, with heroes and villains? i mean, at what? right at wha terms of even what psychologists mightay?rainr these stories? yeah. i mean, but our brains aren't just wired for melodrama, though, right? clear cut villains andd by, you clear cut heroes and the like i mean, there's also tragedy. there's also the tragic comic. e's in the highest sense of the word. there's there's epic. i mean, we can we can talk aut g about how human beings inhabit story, inh narrative. right. and so part of what i'm tryingm.

right. i don't we don't edthat, becau's cotesmall d heroes can be dangerous because again, the hero comes in, resolves matters and and the like, and then f over their responsibility to them and the hero can a tyrant in the blink of an eye and right. that's all you got to do right. the context of zimbabwe. right. make here is that for m dnt the hero. you know, and this is why i went to emerson in this moment. and i got a veryex vexed relatih but but i think, you know, part of what read representative men,

shakespeare, he's looking to montaigne, and he's looking to e folks, but he's not looking to the to to himself over to them to become a sycophant. right. he says, we■7 must not become sx and stomachs. you know, emerson says imitation is suicide. well, what does he mean there? right. he's, you know, i don't want to read self-reliance in this adolescent way where we're just free to be who we are with no responsibilities i am convinced, though, right, that emerson is right when he says great people, come into our lives such that they make ssible even greater people, they become■ct we're capable of. sometimes we and most human beings don't see7 it. but that's okay. but what malcolm's courage own. not that he's some unique some quality that i can'tpproxiten my own life. why? right. so part of what i'm trying suggt th man that meant so much to me and

king did as well. you know. i remember in eighth grade reciting, i had the i have a dream speech in miss mitchell's history class verbatim. you know, and morehouse, dr. king's statue is pointing at us from king's chapele're baptized in king's waters, as it were. so he's important, critical to. but what does it mean to engage in the search for my ownd i saya narcissistic way,■b but i'm tryg to commend it to my fellows. what does it mean for voice? yeah. ■p■2your life that mean so mucho you that oftentimes quell your voice? i'm sorry. good. no, no. you have thith simple line in reference to what your journey through malcolm means to toda passing on to. to us, the reader is that

malcolm comp us to think for ourselves, and i think it's a ve■ powerful, again, connecting back to critical intelligence. yeah, that, you know, there's a kind of a drug, term sedative at some point in the way in which so much of the blacks played a n anesthetizingto it, to solve itu can talk a little bit about in this final chapter discussion, . book who actually disrupts this th p of if the prophet, on one hand, is a problem, the hero is the problem on t other. then ella baker's like helps to demonstrate a leadership that cultivateap pl say, that peoplee thebility n t be saved by

elites or moralists or preachers, but to save themselves. yeah. yeah. ms. baker, man, you know, she's she's eth it has something to do with what it means to have afocus as opposed to a pulpit centered focus. know what does it mean to be pposed to these these so-called great men, the you mentioned earlier she's without her. sense politically for black she's organizing. she's a field in the forties for thetions matter because if it wasn't for those nn moses would not find way. bob moses of student nonviolent codinang emcee more in mississippi. her connections make that happen. right. you know, first executive director of schools. there's a reason why snick

organizes itself as a university and, you know, there's this insien affirming the capacities of everyday, ordinary people. she she has this wonderful formulation of strong people. don't need strong leaders. mm hmm. right. she would tell the young organizers of snick shut up. and you might learn and it's that model of leadership that gave us a you nnie lou hamer. right. that produced the conditions under which sharecroppers that folk were dismissing. right. even as laborers. right. found themselves. right. really pushing what? who mattered in thems. baker, for me and this is really important3q to kalu. so you come out of the hyper masculinist politics of black malcolm. these men, as my heroes and then i end up in the lap of the tics politics of care and love.

cs that really isn't about a certain kind of performancez oe, b a performance. but but. but in enactment of love. hmm. and so now you see the arc of the move, right? in this context that ms. baker, for me, becomes a resource to imagine the kind of politics i think we need. so because i'm sure actually far with ella baker, let's just talk a little bit more about actually what she's what role she's playing for. snick and so i'll just start off you, you have a line that you say she engaged in a kind of militant egalitarianism that that teaches that each individual has the capacity to do good in e world shot through with ugliness. now some of our viewers will, of course, recognize the role of john lewispa perhaps the most famous them who went on to serve asman from froa for many years until his passing not too long ago.

ha milant egalitarianism actually mean? so it's not, you know, kind of helicopter approach where you kt happens. jimmy lee jackson is murdered, slc comes in, organizes a march or tries to organize a march, selma. andn you have three successive marches and they try to bring pressure to bear. now it's really■ within the community. what's the context around. the these these moments of marches. what's happening before you■ ths under which local people become e ership within that particular community? so k who became kwame turei, courtland cox, dorie ladner andk who are in the bowels of the h and their approach is not to come in as saviors.

and create the conditions or help create thetions with others for the indigenous leaderip temge. give you a story, bob moses who who was the famed leader of fre, mississippi freedom summer, and a critical partner of personality in snick. he told me this story when he was at princeton. he said, to go register voters in sunflower driving into. they knew violence awaitedn was in the back of the bus singing every him in the■1 i singing, jt would not stop saying it. and folk were like, what is going on here? and then somebody, somebody mentioned, oh,'s trying to fortify the spirit. i understand what she's doing. they didn't know who the woman was. it td hamer. right. context leadership emerges. not just simply a sharecropper,

not someone who doesn't have education, but someone who's willing to put their body, their mind, their heart, their soul on the line for freedom and justice. think that the way that a lot of advocates, organizers, activists today use the language of people who are closest to the problem, closest to the solution is a contemporary manifestation of baker's militant, egalitarian ism. absolutely. absolutely. i think, you know, throughout the tght using the phrase close to ground, close to the ground. d at is this kind of insistence on the importance of a kind local indigenous leadership. and right now, you know, we all know that the local isn't local anymore, is local in some ways. so kahlil it makes all the sense in the world for those folks who want to create the conditions under which indigenous

ing their work, networked with other resources righ oher locales doing their w. you know, we have to sn■zk lled the student nonviolent coordinating committee. right. had everytng to w those wildfire sit ins, whether it was in nashville or atnta in in north carolina or or and in washington, d.c. ate their activism. and we can see that as, a key pe politics i'm commending. yes, absolutely. one of the things that i think is striking in sort of revisiting baker and snick through the is the degree to which thekitself h create of democracy as it02 was the outco. and we often think today about outcomes only. yeah. is it in the direction of an electoral outcome? is it he dirtion of a

referendum? is it in the direction of chiefe prosecutionlled an unarmed black person? but ofemphasize under baker's leadership is that the work wasn't just outcomes directed. the work wasro it was about building something sustainable where people would feel level to understand, to come together and hav sustained, able way of living that would improve their own lives. you got me about to jump out of th sink a ttle because that's such an important point. i mean, it is critical,■d actually. you know, if you try to achieve democracy ends by way of undemocratic means, you undermine your effort by told me one time he said, and, you know, god rest hiswe came to realize s

talking about the mississippi freedom demoatic partyions are the of your struggle, you have built in demobilization. because if you win, you demobilize. and if you lose, you end up demobilized. right. how? yes, please. i want to hear more. yes. and so. so part of what we have to rstand is that elections are important, but they're not the endgame. mm particular kinds of people. and is, in effect, part of that me procs as much as ends. if you don't, then you're going to end up with who claim to be revolutionaries. it has to beratic all the way down. it seems to me. and that's the lesson i've learned from her. andit's out not just

simply ends, but a be as human beings? with other in our struggle for more jt and as we manifest that relation with each other, we become better people. yeah, you see. and that's the key. that's thkee.it's such a powerfd i want to share a of election. it was a kind of closed door gathering where i won't say everyone belafonte, whose artistry activism shaped half a decade or moreof all the people we've talked about and who had a very capacious37 democracy. he in a talking about what had t occurred in the electioged in ts the way in democratic

consultants and strategists swooped into red states and purples trying to mobilize and get out the vote and then go a it was a crystallizatn ofha is the failue of investment in infrastructure e lack of commitment to encouraging own diagnosis of what ails them in their local spaces, even if those local spaces connect us both tol and the global. and it was a kind of predatory politics that ultimately only wanted from thesen a box and nog more. right. and i'm■ñ little evidence right now with the resounding exception of the work of black voters matter with latosha brown and of course stacey abrams work out of georgia g the 2024 election that i'm not sure that

the democratic party has learned this lesson or that local leaders are■? themselves challenging this practice in ways that will foretell a different future. yeah, i would add i would add bishop barber poor people's campaign and there are others that we're not mentioning, but i think you' right. you know, but you know, every is a conjuncture, a moment. it's a moment of in the so wt it does, it frees us up to imagine the world differently. imagination as shey as shelly put it, is, you good, right. and so i think it's for us to be able to understand that the conflicts we've we confront today is th'=+going toe political leaders who hold positions of power in this moment. there's rit w,ahlil, i don't know if you would agree.

our politics is soaked with oh, yeah. a longing for something, whether it'a longing for the 1950s or the lost cause in the you know, in the at the end of the 19th century or it's ag you know, te democratic leadership council or something. i don't know. for something in the past when in fact, what is required of us is a kind of imaginative to put democracy, american democracy, on a new footing, on new ground, to tur■?n the over. what other metaphor could i use right? or image i cal■áld yeah. so we're in that moment. i'm sorry. go ahead. yeah. as as we. as we finish this conversation, which i've enjoyed, i've been in those same question, if i agree where so many people have said to me, you knowo r le today? and i think to end this co■6 mistake, not to mention how many

young people, notllennials and o have learned sorly from ella baker, who dissented leadership, who sometimes in their own queer sexual ity choue pathways of leadership. and i think in so many ways, eddie, we we gen-xers and baby ers d them by not nurturing and giving them the space to fail. whereas, you know, business leaders were say literally to fail up, right. in so many ways that we are our own worst enemies on this point of leadership by not empowering those young people. they're still out there and i think we have a lot of possibilities that, as you write in the end for your own optimism. but i sure that we didn't leave this conversation without recognizing that we those leaders that as you write, you know, we first of all, thank

you so much for this wonderful conversation. thank you for taking the time out to to read the book so t, you know, young are reaching. they know the world isroke knows aren't working. they know describe their experiences are no longer ap way. and they're reaching for something different, something new. so■íme of them are. some of them are reaching for old languages. you know, dylann roof was'u kno. that's right. and so we need to understand and that the future that is in front of us is:]t■= actually in our h, all of us. and if we're going to build a tu■wre can experience the digniy and standing, that will allow th dreams and to make that dream a reality, if that's going to happen, we all f cultivation in pursuit of a more just world. and at thend■bda that that leads us to the conclusion that if the world is going to be a betterla, 're going to have to be the leaders to make it