Moses, Monster of the Mountain: Gendered Violence in Black Leadership’s Gothic Tale

The three of us arrived at Los Angeles’s Leimert Park about halfway through the Jena 6 rally and noted with some mixture of surprise and apathy the scarcity of the crowd and the appropriation of the park’s fountain for this September 2007 Michael Baisden-inspired uprising. Fruit of Islam security guards were posted as sentinels around the fountainturned-dais, elevated high enough to watch over the rally’s proceedings and, at the same time, shield the small group of politicos from Southern California’s setting sun.

The rally, meant to raise consciousness about the six black rural Louisiana high school students who were being charged with the beating of a white student in a town that had grown tense after nooses were hung from a tree at the school, was part Black Family Reunion and part fascist spectacle: one black man after another ascended to the microphone to instruct us in how to “take back our communities” while rally participants meandered through the park, pausing here and there to exchange pleasantries, or snack on fried chicken, or cop a T-shirt that asked, “Is it a criminal act, being black?” One of my friends stalked away at the first mention of the invasion of “our communities” by “faggots” and “sissies”; my other friend and I lingered, imprisoned by a masochistic sense of ethnographic responsibility and an unshakeable racial filiation. The fiery speeches from the fountaintop were punctuated by halfhearted fist-pumping from the crowd and by a couple of unlikely appearances by young women: one read a poem she had written about unity; another begged us to raise our political consciousness while deferring to her “elders”—the rally’s emcees and the other charismatic young men clamoring for the mic.

It wasn’t until the rally found its sacrificial victim that it reached its climax. A young Chicana caught our attention—we had paused to sign an anti-war petition and note the pathetic irony of two black women holding up an American flag next to a sign that pleaded, “We are American, too”—when she introduced herself as an organizer soliciting support for an upcoming anti-war protest in L.A. Her insightful linking of the Jena 6 case to her cause and her impassioned plea for an intersectional critique of imperialism, racism, sexism, and homophobia were met with repeated disavowals from the crowd. Some simply ignored her; some laughed out loud; one woman in front of us announced, “Those aren’t our issues!” The emcee approached her for the mic and followed her speech with this reminder to the crowd: “We got to deal with us before we take on anybody else’s issues,” repeating, “Let me be clear” until the crowd pumped its collective fist in affirmation of his authority.

It was fitting that we were dressed in all black. As the New Black Panther Party marched military drills up and down Degnan Boulevard, we ambled away from the rally mourning the state of black politics and looking for some good comfort food, wondering aloud why no one bothered to mention that black woman who had been kidnapped and tortured in West Virginia in all their talk of hate crimes and shaking our heads in agreement to the pronouncement my friend had dared to bellow in the face of the rally’s performance of black leadership: “Patriarchy is not the answer.”

One of the most compelling fictions of twentieth-century black political culture is the fantasy of charismatic leadership, the idea that political advancement is best achieved under the direction of a single male leader believed to be gifted with a privileged connection to the divine. It is a fiction that is staged in real time and in media playback: its narrative thread is woven into the fabric of what might be called the charismatic scenario¹, which has throughout the twentieth century taken forms as diverse as the Jena 6 rally I described in my ethnographic description above, United Negro Improvement Association parades, the Million Man and Millions More marches, and the various scenes...