The following essay, originally delivered as part of the W.E.B. Du Bois Lectures at Harvard in 2011, is excerpted from We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For (Harvard University Press, 2024).
Ella Baker (1903-1986) believed, and enacted this belief in the way she organized, that what the Black freedom struggle needed most, what America needed most, was “the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people,” as she would tell historian Gerda Lerner. She had come to understand that the model of leadership represented by King and the preachers around him inclined people to a kind of hero-worship, which blinded them to their own capacities and responsibilities. Baker voiced then a deep-seated suspicion of the work of charismatic leadership—not to deny its productive potential (after all, she was a charismatic figure of sorts), but to be mindful of how charisma can short-circuit democratic energies. “Instead of the leader as a person who was supposed to be a magic man,” she argued, “you could develop individuals bound together by a concept that benefitted the larger numbers and provided an opportunity for them to grow into being responsible for carrying out a program.”
The challenge was to help others develop their unique selves and to bring to the fore their potential as problem-solving agents. As Baker noted, “My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice,” she told Lerner. “People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves.” This realization depends upon encounters through critical participation that can generate self-trust, which enables collective efforts among the most unlikely of agents to transform unjust conditions. This view undermines traditional models of prophetic and heroic leadership that condition us to look through the eyes of others. Instead, we come to hold the view, as Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted in an exquisite riff on the Parable of the Talents, “that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.”
Baker commends a view of leadership commensurate with my efforts to reconstruct our understanding of the prophetic and the heroic. Speaking with Lerner, she put the point quite powerfully:
In … political life I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him, and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don’t do the work of actually organizing people.
Our attention must turn from the glare of the supposed gifts of the prophet and hero toward the cultivation of dispositions requisite for genuine democratic life. For Baker, each of us has a moral imagination; each of us can in fact, no matter our material circumstances, engage in reflective efforts to reach beyond the challenges/constraints of the current moment and grasp undisclosed opportunities that can, without guarantee, upend the order of things and make possible new ideals and ends. We do not need “the prophet” or “the hero” for this. What we need, above all, and this is not always self-evident, is trust in ourselves—at least this is how I understand Baker’s famous dictum: “Strong people don’t need strong leaders.” The cultivation of self-trust—resulting in a robust sense of individuality within community—becomes the basis for democratic collective action and allows for a multitude of prophetic and heroic moments.
Our attention must turn from the glare of the supposed gifts of the prophet and hero toward the cultivation of dispositions requisite for genuine democratic life.
I want to offer a reading of Baker that extends the reach of my peculiar embrace of pragmatism. My view is indebted to Cornel West’s understanding of prophetic pragmatism. West has it right when he writes, in The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (1989) that a consequence of the Emersonian evasion of philosophy is a culture of creative democracy “where politically adjudicated forms of knowledge are produced in which human participation is encouraged and for which human personalities are enhanced.” What was once the purview of philosophers now becomes the work of each of us, and, for West, “the populace deliberating is creative democracy in the making.” This does not mean that professional elites are always the object of scorn or that mob rule is the order of the day. “Rather,” he argues, “it is the citizenry in action, with its civil consciousness molded by participation in public-interest-centered and individual-right-regarding democracy.” Prophetic pragmatism thematizes the political implications of the “Emersonian swerve.” It yokes pragmatism more closely to the philosophy of John Dewey by insisting that it be understood as a form of cultural criticism and that its idea of politics make central the experiences of everyday, ordinary people.
I have resonated with this view ever since I first heard it as a graduate student, but I remain suspicious of West’s use of the word “prophetic” and the view of leadership it often presupposes (perhaps, the problem rests with the ghost of Kierkegaard that seemingly haunts West’s embrace of pragmatism and leads him to ask certain questions that I believe are best left aside). I have sought to read the prophetic in a register shorn of its romance with genius and released from its indebtedness to a certain view of the Hebrew prophets. I locate the prophetic function in the very exercise of critical intelligence—to see it as the work of the moral imagination envisioning beyond the immediate circumstances of our living (a dramatic rehearsal in the service of justice).
My intent has been, and it remains, to insist on those conditions that enable us to step out from under the shadows of past giants in order to address imaginatively the challenges of our day in voices uniquely our own. My concern about West’s use of the prophetic, beyond its supplemental function, is that it threatens to undo the insight: that the prophet’s voice all too often drowns out the deliberating populace and simply calls us to drop our spades and to follow him. Much more is required in the pursuit of worthwhile ends and in the cultivation of capacities for the exercise of deliberative and practical reasoning.
I want to read Baker as an exemplar of prophetic pragmatism shorn of the anxieties that haunt its initial articulation. Her life’s witness helps me reconstruct what we might mean when we invoke the phrase and, more important, it makes explicit a view of Black democratic perfectionism I want to commend—that is, an embrace of self-cultivation in the pursuit of justice. Of course, as Barbara Ransby notes, “Baker never wrote an organizing manual or an ideological treatise[;] her theory was literally inscribed in her daily work—her practice.” This is precisely the strength of Baker’s view; it is tested in the context of lived experience and in the light of actual problems faced. Hers is a view that cannot be accused of failing to take seriously the operations of power, precisely because it was developed (and enacted) in the throes of power’s exercise. In this sense, Baker’s pragmatic witness escapes some of the concerns about pragmatism more generally: that it is naïve about self-interest and corporate power, or, more generally, blind to the agonistic dimensions of democratic life.
Ransby reaches for theoretical frames elsewhere to account for Baker’s philosophy: Antonio Gramsci, C. L. R. James, and Paulo Freire help her make sense of the radically democratic thrust of Baker’s practice. I prefer to place her in conversation with Sheldon Wolin and his politics of tending, not only to amplify her views but to correct the blind spots in Wolin’s account. I also want to suggest that Baker’s insistence on the capacities and responsibilities of everyday, ordinary people and her tireless work on behalf of what I take to be creative democracy is best understood in pragmatist terms. Three slogans guide my efforts to read Baker in this way: a chastened voluntarism; a morally motivated experimentalism; and a view of democracy as an ethical way of life.
At the heart of Baker’s philosophy rests a chastened voluntarist impulse that informs a militant egalitarianism. I say “chastened” because Baker, like James Baldwin, fully understood that human capacities take shape in contexts and situations that often dash dreams and deny individuals dignity and standing—contexts that socialize individuals into doubting themselves and their abilities. Baldwin’s words in “The Uses of the Blues” (1964) come to mind:
I’m talking about what happens to you if, having barely escaped suicide, or death, or madness, or yourself, you watch your children growing up and no matter what you do, no matter what you do, you are powerless … against the force of the world that is out to tell your child that he has no right to be alive…. In every generation, ever since Negroes have been here, every Negro mother and father has had to face that child and try to create in that child some way of surviving this particular world, some way to make the child who will be despised not despise himself.
Baker’s is not a view of Promethean powers deployed in a naïvely romantic act of self-creation. For her, the reach for a higher self entails a struggle, not simply with the dangers of conformity but with the conditions that block the way to our understanding of who we can be and what we are capable of. The conditions that keep us from flying. The primacy of human will and practice remains but is shadowed by the persistence of evils that frustrate our self-realization. The task is to develop one’s unique talents within community and to understand those talents as gifts capable of transforming the circumstances of one’s living with others in the face of such evils. Baker insists on the value of each human being and their ability, if acknowledged and cultivated, to contribute to making a better world. This is not a position of an undifferentiated mass; her view is a naturalized understanding of the dignity and worth of each individual and the sanctity of their capacity to do good in a world shot through with ugliness.
The task is to develop one’s unique talents within community and to understand those talents as gifts capable of transforming the circumstances of one’s living with others in the face of such evils.
Baker’s militant egalitarianism stands alongside her morally motivated experimentalism. Her practice involved efforts to select future experience with the understanding of the possibility of error when we act. Nothing was settled beforehand, and what was required was a willingness to experiment—to tinker—with an inheritance while understanding that the future is implicated in the present. In this light, ideals were pursued in the context of receptive practice close to the ground. She encouraged listening, adjusting, and adapting in the pursuit of collectively shared ends. Drawing on the insight of Charles Paynes’s I’ve Got the Light of Freedom, Romand Coles notes that “Baker sought to cultivate a profound ‘openness to experience’ on the part of the organizers she helped teach: a strong sense that this was a chief quality that they themselves should seek to practice and engender in their efforts to organize radical-democratic communities of struggle.” Openness to experience placed in the foreground the necessity of process or method. For Baker, the ends for which they struggled required a similar commitment to the means by which those ends would be attained. If the means by which we seek a more expansive democratic life are in fact authoritarian, the seeds of the undoing of any good are present from the beginning. Means matter. Otherwise, those who fight for good today turn out to be the tyrants of tomorrow. Processes that are liberating today end up tightening the vice grip of our domination. Baker insisted that democratic and participatory values be the basis of Black political struggle for this reason. As Dewey stated in his 1937 essay “Democracy Is Radical,” “The fundamental principle of democracy is that the ends of freedom and individuality for all can be attained only by the means that accord with those ends.” Otherwise, we end up with tyrants dismissive of democratic virtue or browbeating moralists who treat most like the herd.
Baker rejected top-down models of leadership and encouraged a patient, inclusive deliberative process that embodied the militant egalitarianism noted above. Each voice was valued. Every thought warranted recognition and attention. As SNCC organizer Mary King put it: “We had a stern insistence that our conceptualization, our thinking, our framework, should grow from engagement with the people that we were working with rather than from doctrine or any ready-made philosophy.” Or, as Barbara Jones recalled, “There was no room for talking down to anyone. There was never the expressed attitude that a person who was illiterate had something less to offer.” An openness to the possibilities inherent in experience characterized their practice. At the heart of this form of organizing were “quotidian rituals engendering individual and collective cultivation of responsive democratic character.”
Finally, Baker understood that democracy is more than a body of procedures and certainly is not reducible to the principles of liberalism. Instead, democracy carries with it the radical notion that every individual, no matter their station in life, is capable of exercising responsibility. Democracy, on this view, is an ethical ideal bound up with a particular idea of self-cultivation and rooted in a faith in the capacities of human beings for intelligent judgment and action. Individuals need only be empowered to look within themselves and to their experiences with others to grasp fully ideas of value that orient them to social and political realities.
The late Bob Moses, the famed SNCC organizer, insisted that the revolutionary work of SNCC resided not simply in its efforts to dismantle Jim Crow, but principally in whom they brought into the political process. He recounted the story of SNCC field secretaries in a federal courtroom in Greenwood, Miss., “packed with black sharecroppers … hushed along its walls, packed onto its benches, and [attending] to the question put by Federal District Judge Clayton: ‘Why is SNCC taking illiterates down to register to vote?’” Those illiterate Black sharecroppers brought to that courthouse and to the ballot box a wealth of experience that shaped their demands of the state, informed their embrace of democratic ideals, and expanded, if only for a moment, our understanding of who we take ourselves to be as a nation. Moses, like Baker, understood that genuine, creative democracy called not only for the pursuit of worthwhile ends but for the pursuit of the ends in ways that enlisted those often pushed to the margins and who lived in the cracks and crevices of our society. The language echoes Dewey’s, but the words are given depth and power, I believe, in a practice shaped by Baker’s view.
Dewey held that democracy understood as an ethical ideal entails the deliberate work of forging bonds of association in such a way that the capacities and powers of every individual are realizable in full participation in political and cultural life. Democracy extends beyond the mere exercise of public reason. It is not just the act of deliberating with our fellows about important matters or participation in elections informed by a flood of talk. Democracy requires a richly textured democratic culture close to the ground, where the habits and dispositions necessary for its flourishing are alive in the experiences of everyday, ordinary folk. Much of American life, especially under neoliberal conditions, frustrates these ends: from the destabilizing currents of rapid modernization that “dislocate and unsettle local communities” to the attitudes and practices rooted in white supremacy and patriarchy that often “made shambles of American democracy.” What is needed—required even—under such conditions are innovative and creative ways of revitalizing local communities and fostering “the development of multiple publics where citizens [can] engage in debate and deliberation together.”
Baker’s radical democratic philosophy entailed what I want to call her “networked democratic localism.” The phrase is a bit awkward, but I think it captures the approach to democratic politics based in encounters in multiple, local publics. Such encounters expanded possibility through critical participation in challenging Jim Crow and in the cultivation of democratic dispositions and habits among those who struggled together. But this view should not be read as conceding the national political terrain to others: the invocation of localism was not to deny the relevance of the national scene (although it certainly indicated suspicion). Instead, actions in one local setting link up practices elsewhere that, together, had national implications. Just as Ella Baker’s organizing for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People took her all over the South, establishing pathways, connections, and conduits that connected her practice across geographies, a more generalized understanding of democratic localism presumed the circulation of practices and ideas along a network of efforts to address particular problems in light of specific situations. Collectively, such efforts constituted loosely a national thrust. Separately, the substance of the practice was evidenced in the receptive orientation close to the ground, in what I call the “readying of the self” to engage courageously and intelligently for transformative action (revealing an idea of democracy as an ethical way of life).
I agree with Barbara Ransby when she says that Baker’s “political praxis reflected a deliberative model. Interaction, discussion, debate, and consensus building were key components of that praxis. In contrast, voting, lobbying the corridors of power, and getting favored candidates elected were secondary considerations.” But Ransby doesn’t identify the Black democratic perfectionist strand of Baker’s localism: that her practice entailed a radical commitment to the cultivation of democratic individuality among Black people in the service of justice. Baker’s politics cannot be contained by a deliberative model alone. Much more is going on: the aim is for the emergence of an indigenous cadre of leaders capable of finding salvation in and for themselves and who, by extension, would constitute a wholesale assault on a particular model of Black leadership that resists accountability by those perceived as an undifferentiated mass.
Baker’s practice involved aspirational claims (i.e., claims about what kind of society we hoped to live in and what kind of persons we aspired to be) as well as historical claims, rooted in care, about the context of where we now stand (i.e., claims about the enduring legacy of white supremacy that deforms self-formation and about the history of struggle against white supremacy that constitutes the backdrop of current efforts). Her democratic perfectionism is situated in the histories of Black life, stories that narrate the litany of events, and the chorus of Black voices struggling for freedom and resisting domination. These histories carry with them an ethical ought: that the struggle and sacrifices of so many require of those who are its immediate beneficiaries a commitment to treating one’s fellows justly and to ensuring a society where all can flourish. To act otherwise is to risk the troublesome label of race traitor.
Invocations of that history can spur or constrain. They can serve as wind beneath our wings in the context of imaginative engagement with the present or they can limit the range of actions to an ossified set of practices that no longer best represent our efforts. Baker’s Black democratic perfectionism commended the former. Just as she resisted efforts to absorb the student movement into older, established civil rights organizations, Baker insisted on the space for the young people of SNCC to find their own voices and to make their unique contributions to a tradition of struggle. Here the citation of the past, not a nostalgic longing for origins, gave shape and contour to their imaginings. It did not readily deform and distort.
Baker’s attentiveness to the cultivation of democratic dispositions among the least of these is best described, following the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, as a politics of tending. As Wolin writes, in The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (1989),“The idea of tending is one that centers politics around practices, that is, around the habits of competence or skill that are routinely required if things are to be taken care of.” He goes on to say “that tending is tempered by the feeling of concern for objects whose nature requires that they be treated as historical and biographical beings. The beings are such as to need regular attention from someone who is concerned about well-being and is sensitive to historical needs.” Imagination as an act of empathy is central to the politics of tending in that it opens us up to the wounds and joys of strangers, enables habit formation that affirms the dignity of our fellows, and encourages a willingness to embrace receptive practices of listening and of “being still” as critical features of a mode of democratic struggle.
Tending gathers politics around rooted, knotted practices—doings and sufferings that evidence habits and dispositions forged over a life lived. To be open to such experience is to tend to roughly hewn hands that mark a life of toil, to bloodshot eyes that signal too much drink, to raucous laughter that offers a glimpse of the depths of joy, and to tend to the blank stare that reveals either defeat or possibility. Tending can be expressed in Ella Baker’s powerful question she often asked when meeting someone, even when her memories had long faded: “Who are your people?” The question subverts a sociology, as Ralph Ellison would put it, that reduces the depth of Black experiences to flat statistics of pathology by, instead, seeking an account of love and wound that constitute the ground beneath one’s feet and set in place the conditions of possibility for a higher self.