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7. Still Waters Run Deep: Synthesizing Ronald Walters’ Theses on Black Leadership and Black Nationalism
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159 7 Still Walters Runs Deep Synthesizing Ronald Walters’ Theses on Black Leadership and Black Nationalism ERROL HENDERSON Introduction The work of very few scholars occupies pride of place in both academic and applied settings; that is, in the domain of both theory and practice. It is even less likely when the area of academic interest is African American/black politics, given that scholarship on black politics for most political scientists is on electoral politics, while scholarship on grassroots activist politics typically has been the domain of historians and sociologists (Wilson 1985). Professor Ronald Walters’ scholarship comprises a body of work that consists of the informed analyses of a highly skilled and seasoned scholar as well as the passionate and committed concerns of a political activist. Dr. Walters ’ work represents a deep current in black politics and American politics, more generally. While his research spans issues from black electoral politics in the United States, to Pan-African thought in the African diaspora, to U.S. foreign policy and Africa, he has been particularly incisive in describing, explaining, and predicting the challenges and opportunities, successes and failures, occasioned by the struggles involving adherents and detractors of diverse ideological, theoretical, strategic, organizational, and institutional thrusts within the civil rights movement, the black power movement, and the subsequent era of “new politics” and “crossover politics.” 160 Errol Henderson While the current of Professor Walters’ work runs deep in political science, in this essay, I focus on the confluence of two particular research streams: black leadership and black nationalism. Walters’ analysis of black leadership is aimed at integrating a range of theses on the goals, methods, and rhetoric of black political leaders, and his major contribution (coauthored with Robert Smith in 1983 and revised in 1999) is an excellent engagement of this research (Walters and Smith 1999).1 This work, while proffering an analytical framework for evaluating black leadership is descriptive, analytical, and prescriptive, and represents part of an ongoing and evolving attempt to provide a relevant framework for understanding both black leadership and black politics within the intellectual hegemony of mainstream, predominantly white, academia. His earlier analysis of black nationalism is much more oriented toward theoretical synthesis (Walters 1973). Interestingly, this drive toward theoretical synthesis with respect to black nationalism emerged largely from the exigencies of his work with the National Black Political Assembly (NBPA), one of the most important political formations emerging from the black power movement, and his attempt to moderate the conflicting tendencies within the NBPA in the early seventies. Both areas of research speak to and reinforce each other and the broader scholarly and activist communities in interesting ways that I will outline in this essay. The remainder of this essay proceeds in five sections. First, I delineate several prominent contours in Walters’ framework of black leadership, which rests on his conception of black politics. Second, I discuss how Walters’ approach to black leadership in the context of his political activism led him to proffer a “modernized” version of black nationalism, which was intended to be more inclusive and to serve as a template for black political organizing in the NBPA. Third, I assess Walters’ attempt to synthesize several prominent tendencies within the activist community, namely, nationalist and integrationist orientations under a single rubric. While this early attempt was problematic, it pointed the direction for a richer examination of the prominent black political ideologies and it was suggestive of the need for theoretical synthesis of the dynamics of ideological differences and shifts among the national black leadership. Fourth, I wed Walters’ attempt at theoretical and pragmatic synthesis with Cruse’s “pendulum thesis” to show the usefulness of Walters’ explication [44.192.53.34] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:56 GMT) Still Walters Runs Deep 161 of black leadership and black nationalism for further study of both phenomena. Fifth, and finally, I conclude with a summary of the main points of this essay. Black Leadership For Walters (1992), black leadership is grounded in black politics, which is characterized by the African American’s struggle for power and racial uplift in a context of white supremacist institutions of power and privilege. Although white supremacy may take different forms, its consistency is rooted in its privileging of white power and its exercise of that power throughout the various communities within the United States. Black politics focuses on the competition for resources and adherents among black leaders and their organizations within black communities and in their interaction with other communities in the...