democracy with the ukrainian civil rights activist. announcer: c-span your unfiltered view of government. we're funded by these television companies and more including netco. announcer: supports c-span as a public service. along with these oer television providers. giving you a front row seat to democracy. announcer: now on book tv's author interview program "after words," princeton university professor eddie glaude talks about his views on black politics and how the black community moves forward in america's democracy. he's interviewed by author and

harvard university professorkhalil gibran muhammad. "after words" a weekly interview program with relevant guest hosts interviewing top non-fiction authors about their latest work. khalil: i'm honored today to talk to you, professor glaude, about this fabulous new book that you've written. "we are the leaders we have been looking for." and i think that the first place to begin this conversation is the urgency of the moment. because so much about what you write in this book is a look back to examples of leadership, and i'm going to use -- that's a word that you don't necessarily use very often in the book. but it certainly frames the title of the book. so much of what animates this book is about leadership. and you have real concerns about models of leadership in the past that seem if i could put words in your mouth to be failing us in this moment. so maybe just start this

conversation about what is it in this moment that has called you to the urgency of the tank of writing this particular book? prof. glaude: well, first of all, such a delight to be in conversation with you, professor muhammad. and let's just dispense with the names of professors and let's -- khalil and brother eddie, right? khalil: that's right. prof. glaude: so i think -- i must admit in so many ways that i'm not quite right. i feel like -- i feel a little bit broken if that makes sense to you. and so part of my looking back has everything to do with picking up the pieces that i am to use the title of tony morrison's wonderful documentary. and it has something to do with trying to figure out how to find my feet post all of the death of covid, trying to find my feet in the morass of this political moment. and so i think it's really an effort on my part to write myself into some kind of stability as it were, some kind of orientation to now.

and so that's the personal side of it. the political side of it, i think, is that we've outsourced our responsibility for democracy for too long. you know, democracy requires particular kinds of people to work. not folks who are, you know, struggling every single day to make ends meet and keeping their noses above the water so that they can -- so they don't have time to attend to their civic responsibilities, you know? so i'm thinking what i'm trying to insist upon in this moment is that politicians aren't going to save us. khalil: that's -- prof. glaude: the traditional leaders aren't going to save us, khalil. we're going to have to save us. khalil: i really appreciate how succinctly you describe the challenge in this moment and i think that one of the things that's most striking about the stories that you tell in this book, which is framed by essentially three towering figures in the black freedom

struggle. they are dr. martin luther king jr., malcolm x, and lesser known but no less important ella baker who helped to not only organize naacp chapters in the 1940's, was part of the southern christian leadership conference, dr. king's organization, and perhaps most significantly helped the student non-violent coordinating committee gain its footing and essentially have the wings that it needed to soar in the moment of the black freedom struggle. so let's just talk a little bit about the timing of this book. because i think that's very important. the book opens essentially as a consuence of a series of lectures that you give in 2011. so let me set the backdrop to what is the core analysis of this book and why you were in particular interested in those three towering black freedom struggle figures during the obama era. prof. glaude: yeah. when i delivered those lectures, michael brown was still alive. you know, sandra bland was still

blogging. you know, sandra speaks, george floyd hadn't moved from houston to minneapolis yet. you know, the west baltimore wasn't on fire, and that -- the quik trip in ferguson hadn't been attacked or burned down, you know? in so many ways, i was trying in 2011 to figure tout what -- how president obama's ascendance had distorted african-american politics, trying to hold back this euphoria where folks were reading the obama administration as the fulfillment of the black freedom -- the black freedom tradition. and so when i think about it, khalil, you know, obama was kind of -- you know, the kind of anchor to those lectures. but looking back on them, four

book came out of them. democracy and black. i was writing at the same time that i was thinking about those lectures. begin again, my meditation on baldwin. you can see elements of it in these lectures. the reflections on religion, on the moral aspect of our politics. they're in the lectures. so in so many ways, this was kind of -- this was the -- these lectures were the lab where i was trying to work something out. and more importantly, 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 distinguish myself from my teachers, like cornell west and others. and so it became -- came at a really important moment to kind of assess in light of where we stand now and what i found as i returned to the lectures is that

much of what i was saying was still very much salient for our current moment. khalil: i just want to say two of those books of which i've read, democracy and black and begin again are just fabulous. prof. glaude: thank you. khalil: for the ways in which you -- both address the political and the personal through the -- particularly the life of baldwin and "begin again he's and also to wrestle with these bigger questions about what it means to feed one's capacity for political change to political elite which animates much of what democracy and black is about and of course you talk about a values gap. but with this particular book, you do two things that i think are really pertinent and interesting in this moment. the first of those things that you do is that you call our attention to the fact that we've been looking to the similar rights era for a source of

inspiration, for the kind of mobilization around anti-police brutality, for example, or what became known as the black lives matter movement. and you're particularly concerned about the way in which the election of barack obama and his presidency beginning in 2009 seemed to sap much of the democratic spirit of the very period in the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's in which those young people took to the streets to make change in america. so just talk a little bit about that tension, a word you used to describe people who -- who pick up on obama's success as the embodiment of that era. you called them black moralists and those watching this conversation to get an appreciation for what you are particularly concerned about. prof. glaude: you know, part of what i'm trying to work my way through in that moment, khalil, and thank you for pointing it out, is this kind of

relationship we have to what i take to be the greatest generation america ever produced. when i think about those persons who risked everything in the mid 20th century, to bring about the second reconstruction, to tear down the walls of jim crow, to open up possibilities to make you and me possible. they are stunningly courageous, extraordinary examples of what it means to commit one's life to a more just world. now, i happen to be a gen-xer and i'm born in the aftermath of these folks. too young to have participated in the similar rights and black power movements and too old to be considered a millennial and the like. so i came of age under the shadow of the civil rights movement and the greatest generation america produced. and i came of aiming 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 moment, the movement of the missed 20th century is often invoked to discipline forms of political dissent in our current moment. so, you know, when you heard the mayor, the former mayor of atlanta saying to black lives matter activist dr. king would not take over a highway, you go what in the hell is that? right? how is the movement being invoked in order to 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 a story that begins as you know with 1954 in brown v board, the montgomery march in 1955, you know, the student sit-ins of 1960, and the march on washington in 1963, selma, 1965, king, 1968. that's the narrative and then a story of decline or decredential. black power emerges in 1966 and then that's where we lost our

way. president obama actually used that formulation in the 50th anniversary of the march on washington, right? and so part of what i've been trying to do is to disrupt the way in which the story of our struggle justifies a particular leadership class on the one hand, right? and denies, right, the legitimacy of other forms of political engagement that are not in so many ways co-opted and absorbed by the democratic party. now, this is just -- just to be quick, just to be clear, this is just a kind of story -- it's not an insular story about black politics alone. it's about -- it's just -- an example of what happens when ordinary people hand over their responsibility to political elites. khalil: yeah. i want to dwell on this for a moment. because i think this is a really important point. and i know that, you know, some people in the black community most certainly that get their

backs up, they are uncomfortable with criticisms of president obama. but one of the things that i think illustrates the point you just made very clearly, i remember one of his last speeches to the graduating class at morehouse college, the hbcu, all-man school, of course counts among its alumni martin luther king jr. himself. so this is probably in 2014 or 2015 i 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 killings of unarmed black people which were animating a racial justice movement at this moment, he said your lives are infinitely better than those who came before you. that the sacrifices of those who fought against slavery and the

sacrifices and blood and tears of those of the civil rights era far outweigh any struggle that you have today. and so all you have to do is essentially, you know, stay the course, work hard, and the future is yours. and i remember personally, personally feeling very dissatisfied with what the president said at that moment because too to illustrate your -- because to illustrate your point it was disabling and essentially told these young graduates that essentially their problems were not as big as those who had come before and so they had no excuses to complain about anything. and that probably the most important thing they should do is just go out and be successful in the world, that they worked -- they didn't have the requirement of engaging in a kind of democratic practice. defensive that right in terms of your own critique of obama just so that people watching this conversation have a granular

sense of what the criticism is? prof. glaude: i think so. that speech particularly annoyed me. i'm a morehouse alum. and before he got to that particular point that you made, he also talked about absent fathers and in that moment, you're like, he's not talking to those young men. he's actually talking to a broader audience that has a host of assumptions about who black men are. but i think you're absolutely right in that moment. see, there's a reason why occupy wall street emerged during the obama years. there's a reason why black lives matter emerged during the obama years. remember, obama in some ways became the object of a lot of grassroots organizing that happened before he became the president of the united states. there was organizing on the ground, around police brutality in los angeles, in new york, in chicago, and there was also this massive anti-iraq movement. and obama emerged and then people green screened him. they made him this progressive 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. but in these moments, he became this kind of -- how can pun one put it, this containing voice. what happens if obama doesn't tell the nba players to go back to the court, right? to play basketball. how far does -- do they push the matter in so many ways? and so part of what i'm trying to suggest early on in the book, but again, it gets beyond -- it goes beyond obama, right? is that we can't read him as the fulfillment of the black freedom struggle. because when you do so, you -- you narrow the complexity of that struggle. that struggle is not just simply a black liberal ambition. you know, you think about the politics, you're an historian, khalil, and think about the politics of the turn of the 20th century, the 1920's.

you got black marksists running around, black nationalists running around. you know, black liberals running around, black internationalists running around. you have this complex landscape that's international in its focus and the like that gives the vibe rancy of black -- vibrancy of black politics and what pops off in the mid 20th century. part of what i'm trying to do in this moment is to open up our understanding so that when people -- when elite invoke that movement to discipline our political imaginations, that we have resources to fight back. we have resources to imagine ourselves and to imagine our politics in more expansive terms. khalil: so for you just said something about obama embodying king's legacy as fulfillment of the dream and i want to share this litany that emerged shortly after he was elected president. and i'm going to paraphrase it essentially that rose set so martin could march and obama could run.

and so that all the children could fly. this was a litany attributed to jay-z in the moment. and as i said to start this conversation, you make this criticism about the narrowing of black politics and the key sense of the word to looking at the way that we understand and/or have evoked the legacies of three black freedom struggle figures. so let's start with dr. king himself. and to open this up, i just want to mention a brief account of attending a martin 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 that unless you are

that one, there's no role for you to play. now, i think that the organizers and so many others who have taken a similar theme is that each one of us can become a leader. but you see that something in dr. king's exceptionalism, what you call a kind of prophetic tradition that position black creatures as particularly endowed with the power of either god's sanction or message as part of this narrowing of black politics. so tell us particularly about how to understand dr. king's legacy and how we might actually be misreading him in terms of how we are to understand leadership. prof. glaude: well, you know, when you read the mid 20th century as a great man story, let's put it that way, you lose sight of all of the heroic and prophetic energies of everyday ordinary people.

when the movement becomes in effect a story of dr. king's witness and courage, he becomes a larger-than-life figure. and then we are supposed to sit in supplication and -- in relation to him. i fundamentally disagree with that view. a, the movement was more complex, and b, dr. king was more complex. that's the first thing. he is decidedly human, all too human just like we are. and so part of what i'm doing in that moment, khalil, is trying to open up space for myself and of course that has implications for what i'm commending to the reader, to approach dr. king not with a posture of supplication but to see him as an example, that the prophetic is not some, you know, authorized person who has been sanctioned or authorized by a force, divine force apart from our living whose voice has been given authority by god, for example, who's come to deliver a message,

but the prophetic is really evidence in our decisions of conduct. when you and i decide to look beyond the arrangements of now, to imagine a future that's different, and use that imagining as a way of critiquing the current arrangements. so we all can do that. we all have prophetic capacity. and so this is my way of reading dr. king as someone who's calling all of us to be prophetic. you know, when he gives that sermon in 1957 of remaining awake during a revolution, right? he's not asking us to drop our shovels and follow him, right? he's asking us to understand what we are capable of, ourselves, each of us, individually, and together, what we're capable of in fighting and imagining a new world. and i think this is really important in terms of this side -- this part of the argument of the book. you know, if we as the leaders have been looking for, khalil,

it seems to me that we goto become better people. it sounds cliche but it'srue. if i want to say that everyday ordinary folks are actually the leaders we have to do the hard work of actually working on ourselves to become the kinds of people that can make those hard choices when the moment calls us. and we have examples of folk who've done it. those examples again shouldn't force us to just simply bow down and wish for them. they should force us to see what's -- what we're actually capable of. khalil: now, i want to unpack this just a little bit further. prof. glaude: sure. khalil: particularly the better people part of it. because i think that 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. king himself empowered people in the movement. that's one issue. the second would be the degree

to which the misreading of king's success erases the community that supported the work that he essentially became the at this time what are head e titular head of. reading the many biographies of dr. king was his profound uneasiness with what you might say in a prophetic sense of his calling, that he -- in many ways wanted to reject it. he wanted to lay that burden down and maybe even more particularly, he wanted to share it with others so that it would diminish the weight that fell on his shoulders. prof. glaude: absolutely. and, you know, i mean, and we see that over the course of his witness, right? but, you know, you got to talk about folks like in montgomery, edey, nixon and joanne robinson. you got to talk about in mississippi, not with dr. king but people like m.z. moore and others. there were folk on the ground doing extraordinary work, everyday ordinary people,

khalil. and i think when we tell the story of the civil rights movement in such a way where it just simply focuses on dr. king, his faults and foibles, his power, his courage, his witness, 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? khalil: right. that's right. prof. glaude: so they want us to outsource our responsibility. they want us to outsource our courage to others, right? but, you know, democracies can't survive if we're doing that constantly. and i think more importantly, our -- our politics are distorted and disfigured when the great man or woman is at the center of gravity, right? and so i think it's important to understand how all too human dr? and once we make that clear,

then his example becomes all the more powerful for us. khalil: yeah. and you do a move here, and let me just say -- prof. glaude: sure. khalil: there's a lot of close readings of various philosophers and political theorists, including john dewey, ralph waldo emerson, that row gets a shout-out and many others, wendy brown who is a contemporary of ours at n.y.u., a professor. so i want to talk a little bit about the context in which you treat this problem of individualism. so if i evoked this early experience i had with king sort of being captured in this idea of the power of one, there's a package in the book where you talk about the trappings of neoliberalism. and i'm going to paraphrase here that insists that individuals are only responsible for themselves, and in -- and essentially saying that individuals are only responsible

for themselves, you write this is a contraction of the public good. it's an anemic view, your words, of mutual obligation, and ultimately the selfishness as virtue and narcissism as standard practice. prof. glaude: yeah. khalil: talk a little bit about the way in which the distortion of king's legacy leads us in this present moment with the notion of individualism that is itself fundamental to this anti-democratic problem that we're trying -- that you are trying to solve for? prof. glaude: yeah. you know, i should say a word about all of the philosophers and writers that i invoke in this book. you know, i've been introduced, khalil, to the broader public as a historian of sorts, as a pundit, as an kasir can american studies scholar. most people don't know i was trained in the philosophy of religion, a john dewey scholar and part of what i've been trying to do is bridge my worlds, to ask my reader, i'm asking a lot of my reader with this book.

to stretch. i think my readers have come to understand that that's what i do, right? so -- a different side of my bibliography is at work in this text, more philosophical than historical in some ways. and that -- that is my mama said this is a hard one. so, you know. that's ok. that's ok. but she's still reading it. i think part of what i'm trying to do with regard to this -- the context of neoliberalism and the way in which individualism gets kind of warped by its logic or its internal logics, right? i have to make that move in light of what i'm calling for. i want to say that we got to become better people, right? and if we're going to become better people, we have to reach for higher forms of excellences in our individual lives. but we have to do so in pursuit of a more just world. and here i use -- i invoke --

james w.c. pennington the fugitive blacksmith, pennington was the first african-american to attend yale. they wouldn't let him in the class and had to sit outside the classroom. first african-american to receive an honorary degree from heidelburg university in 1849. and he wrote in the -- i'm paraphrasing but wrote in the fugitive blacksmith described slavery as this vile monster. he said what i will never forgive slavery for is it robbed me of my education. it robbed me of my ability to kind of engage in ongoing self-development in some ways, right? he said i spent a lifetime trying to rid my tongue of the sound of slavery. but there are certain things that i cannot recoup because i -- i wasn't exposed to it. and all i've tried to do is make myself more efficient for good. so here pennington expresses what emerson and others might describe as that self-loathing, that sense of shame that a certain sex is inadequate as --

self is inadequate as he reaches for a higher self but he can't because the world is organized in such a way that blocks him from becoming the kind of human being he imagines himself to be. so self-cultivation can't be a narcissistic enterprise. at least it ought not to be. it can't be anent prize that is solely self-interested. it has to in some way being self-cultivation in pursuit of a more just world because the world as it is gets in the way us being better people. now, how does king fit into this? when we give sofer ourselves to a leader, we stop the work of seem cultivation. -- self-cultivation. we engage in imitation. you see? so when we follow a leader as opposed to work with people, as opposed to doing the work close to the ground, we actually arrest the hard work of becoming

better people if that makes sense. khalil: yeah. prof. glaude: and i don't -- so i don't want to -- i'm not demonizing dr. king or i'm definitely not demonizing malcolm x and ella baker. what i'm trying to do is get us to stand in right relation with our exemplars so that we can continue to find our voices. because when we stop to follow them, we stop the hard work of reaching for higher forms of excellences. khalil: well, i want to take this point one step further. prof. glaude: sure. khalil: and to something you don't actually write about but so relevant to what you said about being better people. and there's a term you used in the book called critical intelligence. and you use this term in the chapter on dr. king. how do you understand or how would you interpret the backlash against the humanities, the backlash against the truth

telling of american history, the backlash against books as the context in which the work of being better people is actually understand full-scale assault? prof. glaude: absolutely. absolutely. you know, richard slotkin has a new book that's coming out. and he describes this moment as a second lost cause. and, you know, we know what the lost cause and redemption was all about, right? we know about the violence on the ground, right, from koufax to wilmington across the south. we understand that. but it was also -- khalil: for everyone, these are post-slavery instances of massacres of black people who were standing up for their democratic rights and freedoms that they had earned as a result of the 13th and 14th and 15th amendments. prof. glaude: right. we know about that. we also know about the all-out

assault on the way we told the story of reconstruction. khalil: right. prof. glaude: and the lies that became a part of, you know, instruction in school, primary school, the histories that are being -- the william dunning school out of columbia and the kinds of first -- the first histories around reconstruction that called into question black folks' capacity to bear the burden of citizenship, that talked about, you know, the carpet baggers and black folk as inherently corrupt and corrupting, the democratic process. what's interesting to me, khalil, is that when we think about the first lost cause and the first redemption, and we think about all of those children educated in that lie, they turned out to be the adults in the 1940's and 1950's. they were the ones who were shouting racial epithets. they were the ones who are lynching. they were the ones who are engaged in the violence, in the

face of the attempt at second reconstruction. khalil: right. prof. glaude: so what we see now is this -- this all-out assault on the story that we tell ourselves, to produce particular kinds of people, right? and, you know, at the heart of we are the leaders we've been looking for, at the heart of my work, is the moral question, it is the beating heart of my work, is the moral question. what kind of human being do you aspire to be? what kind of human being are you? and so i think this is a second lost cause. and we're seeing it at the level of knowledge production. and we're seeing it at the level of our politics more broadly, yeah, absolutely. khalil: so on one hand, if this is a second lost cause, i also want to say that the attack on learning, the freedom to learn, to read, to speak, to study, and ultimately the broader attack on the humanities, also means that we are destroying the infrastructure that makes possible a certain kind of

knowledge which is required for the kind of betterment of the social good, of the public good, of the commitment that we are all in this together. and just to put a finer point on this, we're constantly reading in the newspaper that the humanities are a waste of time and money, people ought to focus on job-ready skills. but if you extend the argument that you make to this point, essentially the concentrated power, the monopoly power, the kind of power that produced the occupy movement, the kind of power of the guilded and robert barron age of animated dewey's own work, the philosophy that you write about, it is absolutely essential that our philosophers, our historians, our thirst, our poets are empowered with the ability to

educate those to ask the questions, what is the meaning of life? prof. glaude: oh, absolutely. khalil: what are we here for? what do we owe each other? and i want to emphasize that. because i think that's the point that you are really hammering when you talk about critical intelligence and you really emphasize the degree to which people have this capacity, but that capacity has to be nurtured and nourished. prof. glaude: absolutely, doc. i mean, how can one put it? if we -- democracy is -- requires certain kinds of people to work. madison talked about this in the federalist papers, right? there's a reason why he wants us to focus on virtue. we have -- there's a particular kind of human being necessary for this thing to work. but what we have always witnessed since the founding and it's not about black folk being -- slavery being original sin because it's not quite the original sin. the original sin is the belief, the practice that some people

because of the color of their skin are superior to others, of more value than others. and then you build a world based upon that, that lie. but, you know, it seems to me that if we're going to become better people, we got to address that -- you know, repped what did douglas call it in july 5, 1852, his address at the old corinthian hall in rochester, new york? he called it this dirty reptile in the nation's beautiful, this -- bosom, and it's slavery and its aftermath. we have to address the beliefs and practices that lead us to throw democracy into the trash bin repeatedly. we have to address those assumptions that distort and disfigure our characters. what gets in the way of us becoming better people? and i think asking that question, right, takes us to the

heart of the conundrum. because, you know, america is a riddle after all, you know? and if we figure that out, maybe we can open ourselves up to a different future. khalil: yeah. so, speaking of a different future. prof. glaude: certainly. khalil: you made -- in moss point, mississippi, that you come from. and you spend time in chapter two talking a bit about your father, your relationship to him, one who you deeply admire. maybe tell us a little bit about why you opened chapter two, a chapter that's in many ways about malcolm x as a hero of yours with the story about your father. prof. glaude: you know, i think i learned this lesson from baldwin, khalil, that the messiness of the world is actually a reflection of the messiness of our interior lives. and if we're going to change the world, we have to deal with ourselves. we have to deal with the wounds. and, you know, my father is the most important man in my life.

he's the most responsible human being i've ever met. but he's scared to live in -- scared the living daylights out of me. and he deposited a kind of fear in my gut that led me to believe at least in the quiet of night thai wasn't quite courageous -- that i wasn't quite courageous. i was afraid. that i had been trying to prove to myself that i wasn't a coward. and so what you see in the book, right,n that chapter, is my reaching for this heroic figure. it used to be that i would read the -- i played dungeons and dragons and i was a nerd, right? so the norsk gods, thor was my guy and reading the comic books and i transitioned and as i aged i transitioned to the heroes of the mid 20th century, malcolm and the black -- oh, my god, i wish i could be -- and then then when i got to morehouse and i read the autobiography of malcolm x, suddenly everything made sense. i had a language for my father's

rage. i had a language for what i was feeling inside and then i could construct a notion of what it meant to be a black man. right? by way of this adoption of malcolm's pose, of his posture. so, you know, i had -- my first conversion experience, really. i got my goatee. this is -- khalil: yeah. prof. glaude: this is in honor -- i will never shave it off. right? and so -- but also -- it's also the way in which i'm reaching for a notion of man hood that's bound up with this sense of wound. and so the book, though, the chapter then says, but what does it mean to think of malcolm as someone apart from my own wounds, as someone who's not wounded himself? khalil: uh-huh. prof. glaude: and so here, i move from the notion of the heroic to emerson's notion of the representative man and

woman. and what does it mean to think of malcolm as my good friend imani perry said after we read manny marble's biography on malcolm together, oh, my god, when you read him, like after he leads the nation he's flailing and failing. and so suddenly malcolm becomes this wounded witness, not the shining black prince. i bring him down to the ground. and i am able to be critical of the hypermasculine politics that black nationalism presented me if that makes sense to you. khalil: no, it makes perfect sense. you know, it's interesting that for malcolm, you are able to position yourself in ways that you're not with dr. king at least to some degree. dr. king perhaps more because of your training as a philosopher religion, through a prophetic tradition that surrounds both your own experience as a student of cornell west but also the towering figure of james cone and so much the way king has

loomed large and how we even developed an understanding of black liberation theology, for example. in this case, the story of malcolm's failings give license to a kind of appreciation for the fact that any one of us as you write can make the impossible possible. and you criticized yourself essentially that by looking to malcolm as a surrogate father, that you almost swallowed up yourself and degenerated into a kind of idol tri. prof. glaude: yeah. khalil: and i wanted you to -- so if we critique the prophetic by giving over our power to a single -- a singular exceptional individual, and now we're concerned at least in the way that you're telling us, challenging us to understand leadership, that heroes also can disable us and narrow my politics. aren't we rubbing up against kind of the oldest tradition of

the human condition which is to -- it's to tell stories with pro taggists in and antagonists, with heroes and villains? at what -- at what point do we lose our bearings in terms of even what psychologists might say like our brains are wired for these stories? prof. glaude: yeah. but our brains aren't just braden for mellow drama, though -- melodrama, though. and melodrama defined by clear-cut villains and clear-cut heroes and the like, right? i mean, there's also tragedy. there's also the tragic comedy, in the highest sense of the word. we can talk about the variety of ways of thinking about how human beings inhabit story and inhabit narrative, right? and so part of what i'm trying to do is to kind of disrupt the melodrama, right? i don't -- we don't need heroes in that sense because as a person who's committed to democracy, small d, heroes can be dangerous. because again, the hero comes in, resolves matters, and the

like, and then give over their responsibility to them and the hero can become a tyrant at the blink of an eye. right? that's all you got to do is think about mugabei in the context of zimbabwe, right? so the point i'm trying to make is for me, i don't want the hero, the hero. i want heroic acts. you know, and this is why i went to emerson in this moment. and i got a very vehiclessed -- i have a very vehiclessed relationship with the man from concord. but i think part of what i'm trying to do here is to say, you know, when you read representative men, emerson is looking to -- he's looking to shakespeare, he's looking to these folks. but he's not looking to them to give himself over to them, to become a sycophant. he says we must not become saxon

stomachs and says imitation is suicide. what does he mean there? i don't want to read self-reliance in this adolescent way where we're free to be who we are with no responsibility to others. that's silly to me. but i am convinced, though, right, that emerson is right when he says great people come into our lives such that they make possible even greater people. they become examples of what we're capable of. sometimes we -- and most human beings don't see it. but that's ok. but what malcolm's courage can be my own. not that he's some unique figure, right? that has some quality that i can't approximate in my own life. why? so part of what i'm trying to suggest here is that the man that meant so much to me and king did as well. you know, i remember in the eighth grade reciting -- i had the i have a dream speech in mismitchell's history class verbatim. and going to morehouse, dr. king's statue is pointing at

us from king's chapel, right? we're baptized in king's waters as it were. so he's important, critical to my own self-formation. but what does it mean to engage in the search for my own voice? and i say that not in a narcissistic way but i'm trying to commend it to my fellows, what does it mean for you to search for your own voice? khalil: yeah. prof. glaude: and what are the examples in your life that mean so much to you that oftentimes clearly your voice? i'm sorry. khalil: no, no. you have this very simple line in reference to what your journey through malcolm means to you today and what you're passing on to us, the reader, is that malcolm compels us to think for ourselves. and i think it's a very powerful reminder again connecting back to critical intelligence -- prof. glaude: yeah. khalil: that, you know, there's

a kind of drug, a sedative, and you use the-term sedative at some point in the way so much of the black political class has played a part in anesthesizing people to look to it to solve its problems and of course the most extreme form of this which you can talk a little bit about in this final chapter discussion is the democratic party itself. but there's one person in this book who actually disrupts this problem. so it's a prophet on one hand is a problem, the hero is a problem on the other. then ella baker's life helps to demonstrate leadership that cultivates leadership in people or as you say, that people have the ability not to be saved by elites or moralists or preachers but to save themselves. prof. glaude: yeah. yeah. ms. baker, man, you know, she's

everything to me. and i think it has something to do with what it means to have a pew-centered focus as opposed to a pulpit-centered focus and focused on the people as opposed to these so-called great men, the leaders themselves. you know, you mentioned earlier, without her, the 20th -- mid 20th century doesn't make sense politically for black america. she's organizing. she's a field secretary in the 1940's for the naacp and those connections matter because if wasn't for those connections, bob moses would not find his wan the coordinating committee would not find himself to anze moore in mississippi, her connections make that happen, right? you know, first executive director of -- there's a reason why organizes itself as -- at shaw university is ms. baker's alma mater. there is this insistence on affirm the capacity of everyday ordinary people. she has this wonderful formulation of strong people don't need strong leaders.

khalil: uh-huh. prof. glaude: and she would tell the young organizers, shut up and listen you might learn something. right? and it's that model of leadership that gave us anita blackwell and gave us a fanny lou hamer, that produced the conditions under which sharecroppers and folk were dismissing, right? even as laborers found themselves really pushing what -- who mattered in the demos. so ms. baker for me, and this is really important, too, khalil. so you come out of the hypermasculine, this politics of black nationalism, king, malcolm, these men as my heroes. and then i end up in the lap of a politics of attending, a politics of care, and love. right? a politics that really isn't about a certain kind of performance of courage but a performance -- but an enactment of love. and so now you see the arc of the move, right?

and so it's in this context that ms. baker for me becomes a resource to imagine the kind of politics i think we need. khalil: so because i'm sure that fewer people are actually familiar with ella baker, let's just talk a little bit more about actually what she's -- what role she's playing for snic. i'll start off, you have a line that you say she engaged in a kind of militant egalitarianism that teaches that each individual has the capacity to do good in the world, shot through with ugliness. now, some of our viewers will of course recognize the role of john lewis as a part of a snic, and perhaps the most famous of them who went on to serve as a congressman from georgia for many years until his passing not too long ago. so what does militant egalitarianism actually mean? prof. glaude: right. especially in organizing, right? so it's not kind of helicopter approach where you have -- you know, some event that happens, jimmy lee jackson is murdered.

sclc comes in. organizers a march or tries to organize a march in selma, and then you have three successive marches and they try to bring pressure to bear. no, it's really about organizing within the community, what's the context around these efforts, right? the spectacular moments of marches, what's happening before you see it, right? how do we create the conditions under which local people become the leadership within that particular community? so sophie carmichael, cortland cox, dory ladner, these are indicate cal young folk who are in the bowels. south and their approach is not to come in as saviors, khalil, but to come in and create the conditions or help create the conditions with others for the indigenous leadership to emerge. give you a story. bob moses who's the famed leader

of mississippi freedom -- mississippi freedom summer, and critical partner or personality in snic, he told me this story when he was at princeton. he said, we were driving the bus to go register to voters in sunflower county. and folks knew what they were driving into. they knew violence awaited them. and this one person back in the bus singing every hymn in the hymnal. just singing. wouldn't stop singing. just would not stop singing. and what is going on here? and then somebody -- somebody mentioned oh, she's trying to fortify the spirit. i understand what she's doing. they didn't know who the woman was. it turned out to be fanny lou haimer. 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. khalil: do you think that the way that a lot of advocates,

organizers, activists today use the language of people who are closest to the problem are closest to the solution? is it contemporary manifestation of barb's militant egalitarianism? prof. glaude: absolutely. absolutely. i think -- you know, throughout the book, i keep using the phrase "close to the ground." khalil: uh-huh. prof. glaude: close to the ground. and that is this kind of insistence on the importance of a kind of local indigenous leadership. and right now, you kw, we all know that the local isn't local anymore. it's glocal in some ways, right? so absolutely, khalil, it makes all the sense in the world for those folks who are -- who want to create the conditions under which indigenous leadership is doing their work, networked with other resources, right? other folks -- in other locales doing their work. we have to remember snic was called the student non-violent coordinating committee, right? had everything to do with those

wildfire sit-ins, whether nashville or atlanta or in north carolina or in washington, d.c., right? young folk trying to coordinate their activism and we can see that network localism as a key part of the politics i'm commending, yes, absolutely. khalil: one of the things that i think is striking in sort of revisiting baker and snic through the lens of your book is the degree to which the work itself under baker was as much about the process of creative democracy as it was the outcome. and we often think today about outcomes only. prof. glaude: yeah. khalil: is it in the direction of an electoral outcome? is it in the direction of a referendum? is it in the direction of the removal of a police chief or the prosecution of a police officer who's killed an unarmed black person? but one of the things that you

emphasize under baker's leadership is that the work wasn't just outcomes. the work was processed as well. it was about building something sustainable where people would feel empowered at the local level to understand, to come together, and to have a sustainable way of living that would improve their own lives. prof. glaude: you had me about to jump out of this seat, khalil. because that's an important point. i mean, it's critical, actually, you know? if you tried to achieve democratic ends by way of undemocratic means, you undermine your effort. bob moses told me one time, he said -- and god rest his soul, he said, you know, we came to realize, and he was talking about the mississippi freedom democratic party at this point. that when elections are the object of your struggle, you have built in demobilization. because if you win, you

demobilize. and if you lose, you end up disheartened and demobilized. khalil: wow. prof. glaude: right? khalil: yes. please. i want to hear more, yes. prof. glaude: so part of what we have to understand is that elections are important, but they're not the end game. khalil: uh-huh. prof. glaude: we have to become particular kinds of people. and how we struggle, right, is in effect part of that work it seems to me. process matters as much as ends. if you don't, then you're going to end up with tyrants who claim to be revolutionaries. it has to be democratic all the way down it seems to me. and that's the lesson i've learned from her. and again, it's about not just simply ends but about who do we take ourselves to be as human beings? how do we manifest the relationship with each other in our struggle for a more just world? and as we manifest that relation

with each other, we become better people. khalil: yeah. prof. glaude: and that's the key. that's the key to me. khalil: it's such a powerful insight. and i want to share a moment that came on the heels of trump's election. it was a kind of close door gathering where i won't say everyone that was in the room. but the late great harry belafonte whose artistry and activism shaped half a decade or more of all the people we talked about and who had a very today pairs vision of democracy -- a very capacious vision of democracy, he was in the room talking with what occurred in the election of donald trump and one of the insights that emerged in this conversation was the way in which democratic consultants and strategists swooped into red states and purple states tried to mobilize and get out the vote and then go home. i mean, it was -- it was a

crystallization of what you just described which is the failure of investment in building infrastructure, the lack of commitment to encouraging people to have ownership through their own diagnosis of what ails them in their local spaces even if those local sayses connect us, both to the national and the global. and it was a kind of predatory politics that ultimately only wanted from these people a ballot in a box. and nothing more. prof. glaude: right. khalil: and i'm afraid that there's so little evidence right now with the resounding exception of the work of black voters matter, with latasha brown and stacy abrams' work out of georgia going into 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. prof. glaude: yeah.

i would add bishop barbers, poor people's campaign, as well to that list. and there are others that we're not mentioning. but i think you're right. you know, but you know every moment of crisis as you know, is a conjutural moment and everything collapsing around us and a moment of possibilities. what it does is free us to imagine the world differently. imagination is -- as shelly put it is a species of the good, right? and so i think it's important for us to be able to understand that the conflicts we confront today, they're not going to be resolved by the political leaders who hold positions of power in this moment. right now, khalil, i don't know if you would agree, our politics is stuck in nostalgia, a longing for something, whether a longing for the 1950's or the lost cause and at the end of the 19th

century, or it's a longing for the height of the democratic leadership council or something. i don't know. there's a longing for something in the past in what is required of us is an imaginative leap to put american democracy on new footing, on new grounds, to turn the soil over, what other metaphor i could use or midge i could call forward. khalil: yeah. prof. glaude: we're in that moment. i'll sorry. go ahead. khalil: as we finish this conversation, which i've just tremendously enjoyed, i've been in those same conversations to answer your question if i agree, where so many people have said to me, you know, who are our leaders today? and i think to end this conversation, it would be a mistake not to mention how many young people, not gen-xers and millennials and younger who have learned so many of these lessons particularly from ella baker whn

queer sexuality chose queer pathways of leadership. and i think in so many ways, eddie, we, we gen-xers and baby boomers have failed them by not nurturing and giving them the space to fail and business leaders would say, literally to fail up. prof. glaude: right. khalil: 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 as you write in the end, for your i just wanted to make sure we didn't leave this conversation without recognizing we actually have some of those leaders that we've been waiting for. prof. glaude: absolutely. first of all, thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. thank you for taking the time to read the book so carefully. young people know the world is broken.

they know the old vocabularies are not working. the languages they are trying to describe, their experiences are no longer applicable and they are reaching for something different. some of them are reaching for all languages. dylan roof was not a baby boomer or gen-xer. we need to understand the future that is in front of us is actually in our hands. and if we are going to build a future where everyone can have -- experience the dignity and standing that will allow them to pursue their dreams, and that is going to happen, we have to do the hard work and pursue a more just world. at the end of the day, if the world is going to be a better place, we have to be the leaders to make it happen. khalil: i love it. well, brother eddie, this was a real pleasure. a pleasure to read your latest book and it was a pleasure to have this conversation. i'm hopeful those watching this

conversation will pick it up, learn for their selves and pass it on. prof. glaude: thank you. take care of yourself. >> the c-span bookshelf podcast makes it easy for you to make it easy to read all of c-span's podcasts. you can discover new authors and ideas. each week, we are making it convenient for you to listen to multiple episodes with critically acclaimed authors this. after words, book notes plus and q&a. listen to c-span's bookshelf podcast feed today. you can find it on the free c-span now mobile video app or wherever you get your podcasts. and on our website, c-span.org/podcast. >> c-span is your unfiltered view of government. we are funded by these television companies and more,

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