Black Leaders on Leadership: Conversations with Julian Bond by Phyllis Leffler (review)

Historian Phyllis Leffler has compiled a uniquely valuable compendium of the insights that the late Julian Bond elicited in his recorded interviews with fifty influential black Americans. A founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) before being elected to multiple terms in the Georgia legislature and becoming national chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Bond was well positioned to identify and recruit other leaders to participate in this ambitious project, conducted while he taught at the University of Virginia.

The individuals Bond interviewed during the period from 2000 to 2014 were idiosyncratically chosen—individuals willing to accept Bond's invitation, often because of, Leffler remarks, "the respect and even veneration that interviewees had for him" (xxiii). Although only seventeen women were interviewed and only a few interviewees were from the western United States, the group was diverse in many respects. It included political activists, elected government officials, political appointees, academics, journalists, creative writers, and artists. Like Bond himself, many of these leaders (for example, Mary Francis Berry, Floyd Flake, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Bobby Lee Rush, and Roger Wilkins) assumed multiple, varied roles in their long careers. The oldest interviewees—civil rights lawyer Oliver Hill and National Council of Negro Women head Dorothy Height—were born before World War I. The youngest, South Carolina legislator Bakari Sellers and playwright Katori Hall, were born in the 1980s. But more than 90 percent of those interviewed were born within a dozen years of Bond's birth in 1940.

The quotations selected from these interviews are carefully arranged in thematic chapters that shed light on the family backgrounds, educational training, African American network ties, and political involvement that shaped this group. African American civil rights campaigns and racial militancy of the period after World War II deeply affected most of the interviewees. "Leaders who directly lived segregation and came of age during the civil rights movement believe racial consciousness continues to be a reality," Leffler observes (215). Although Bond was unable to interview the many important civil rights leaders of the 1960s who died before he started his work, his conversations offer cogent insights about the transformation of black leadership styles during this tumultuous era. Leffler distinguishes the "prophetic leadership" of Martin Luther King Jr. (especially as discussed by interviewee John Lewis) from the "consensual leadership model" of Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (discussed by Robert Moses and Julian Bond) and from the "militancy of the Black Panthers and Malcolm X" (discussed by Angela Davis; 168).

Perhaps understating destructive internecine conflicts that resulted from these different conceptions of leadership and the related different ideological perspectives that were apparent after the achievement of landmark civil rights reforms, Leffler and Bond emphasize the positive long-term impact of the civil rights movement, because it "was a catalyst for transformational black leadership. The hope that some day a black person could be president of the United States, now turned into reality, is what has inspired both those who participated and those who followed. The power of that decade transcends generations" (204).

Black Leaders on Leadership certainly does not provide the last word on its subject. The voices that are included do not fully reflect the expanding role of black women leaders in recent decades or the enduring significance of black nationalist and pan-Africanist influences on grassroots activism. The inclusion of more such leaders certainly would have clarified the distinction between those who acquire followers as a result of their activism and those who do so because of their institutional roles. Noting the distinction between "direct and indirect leaders," Leffler comments that the former must understand "how to engage diverse needs and interests," while the latter "have followers by virtue of their ideas" (205-206). I would add that movement leadership constitutes a distinctive leadership type, in that it involves the ability to mobilize followers through exemplary activism. Especially during the past few years...