100 Books Like We Have No Leaders

Journalist Wil Haygood’s 1993 biography of U.S. Congressman Adam Clayton Powell is an engaging portrayal of perhaps the most well-known Black American who ever served in the U.S. Congress.

Haygood’s writing is vivid and moving. He captures the flamboyant and publicity-seeking congressman on Capitol Hill, challenging the segregationist members of his party, at home in Harlem, touring in his fancy sports cars, in his pulpit at the Abyssinian Baptist Church, preaching about civil rights and racism, and traveling to Paris and other foreign destinations, often accompanied by attractive young women staffers.

From his arrival in Congress in 1945 until the early 1960s, Powell stood virtually alone as a national Black figure in taking a no-compromise position on civil rights and in challenging racial bigotry. Haygood provides a penetrating look at an interesting and complex Black American leader during a turbulent era.

Former Congressman William Clay, a founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus, provides a historical look at Black members in the U.S. Congress from Reconstruction to 1992.

Until the election of Barack Obama, the nation’s Black members of the U.S. Senate and U.S. House had been the highest-ranking Black federal officials. However, we know very little about them. Historians have largely ignored Black members of Congress.

Clay’s book is especially useful because it is partly historical and participant-observation. He chronicles and documents the experiences of America’s first Black congressional representatives who served during Reconstruction.

Readers interested in Black congressional leadership during the 1960s through the early 1990s will glean a lot from Clay’s first-hand perspective on the formation of the Congressional Black Caucus, Richard Nixon, the 1972 National Black Political Convention, and the expansion and maturation of the Black congressional delegation.

In 1972, Black politics was at a crossroads. Leonard N. Moore’s examination of the National Black Political Convention of March 1972 is a wonderful and comprehensive study of perhaps the most important political gathering of Black political leaders.

Moore’s concise and readable account of the convention is riveting and at times dramatic. The reader can feel the tension in the Gary, Indiana high school gymnasium between the disparate ideological factions of Black political leadership at the time – the Black integrationist and moderates versus the Black nationalists and radicals.

Black leaders convened in Gary to confront a central question about the future of Black politics: whether Black voters should work separately or in coalition with other racial minorities and liberal whites to advance their policy goals. 

Moore details how the coalition approach won out at the convention and connects what happened in Gary, Indiana in 1972 to the political incorporation… show more.

This biography of Louis Martin, sometimes called the “Godfather of Black Politics,” provides a brilliant portrayal of a Black political leader who worked as a close adviser to three Democratic presidents.

Louis Martin was a journalist who worked for the Chicago Defender and in 1936 became founding editor of Detroit’s Michigan Chronicle. Martin was an activist journalist. In 1944, he moved to New York to work as publicity man for the Democratic National Committee. Martin never left Democratic Party politics. He worked in the White House as a close adviser for John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Jimmy Carter.

Poinsett is a good storyteller. He explores what it was like for one of the first Black Americans to be close to power as a top aide in the White House to three U.S. presidents.

If most Americans are like me, Reconstruction is vaguely remembered from high school history classes as a time when corrupt and incompetent Carpetbaggers and Scalawags reigned while the South struggled to recover from the devastation of the Civil War. Historians have rescued Reconstruction from this neglect and misunderstanding, revealing it as a second American revolution – but one that failed. It was a time of stunning progress in the rights of Black Americans, a reconceptualization of the role of government in society, and staggering violence to preserve white supremacy. Pulitzer Prize-winning Historian Eric Foner’s book is the Bible for this era–lucidly written, carefully researched, and painful in its assessment of this lost moment in American history.

My God, the way this man writes. There is an unforced elegance to his sentence structure and word choice that never fails to leave me with my metaphoric mouth agape, whether I’m nodding along with his arguments or, as sometimes happens, debating with him in my head.

Either way, Ta-Nehisi Coates is a clear-eyed and unsentimental observer of the hypocrisies, betrayals, and stubborn resilience that have characterized the African-American sojourn.

Reading Anarcho-Blackness as a white cismale reader was an experience of discombobulation—a certain disorientation followed by a surprising re-orientation. Bey’s Black anarchism, “indebted to... Black queer and trans feminisms” dramatically reorganizes the priorities of an anarchist tradition that is sometimes still too indebted to hollow universalisms and pinched humanisms that don’t sufficiently include everyone. This is an anarchism specifically for Black queer and trans people which ends up—in a sense that is only “paradoxical” for those of us not paying enough attention—being for everyone. The prose is both philosophical and playful, inviting us to imagine a life that is by turns “ungovernable,” “unpropertied,” “uncouth,” “unhinged,” and “uncontrolled.”

Anytime I am ever asked about a book on my top list, Du Bois’s book is a staple. Is it over 700 pages? Yes. Was it written over 100 years ago? Almost! Still, Du Bois’ arguments are evergreen.

Written with accessible and some might argue biting language, Du Bois gets to the heart of what the Civil War was really fought over, not slavery, but labor. Before one can get free, you have to know why you were enslaved.

I first read The Undercommons in a virtual reading group during the early months of the COVID pandemic and was quite taken by its poetics and unfolding conceptual terrain. Beginning with an analysis of academia as a significant ideological state apparatus, Moten and Harney also discuss multiple forms of state violence and capture in racial capitalist formations. From the notion of the settler-capitalist garrison responding to “the surround” of the colonized and marginalized, to the connection between policy and policing, to the logic of reified colonial conquest, to logistics and professionalization, The Undercommons is a meditation on methods of state repression and forms of resistance. Arguing that recognition of the “general antagonism” that underlies the state is necessary for revolutionary politics, Moten and Harney end up echoing Lenin’s insights about class antagonism and false reconciliation in The State and Revolution.

During the Cold War, the propaganda battle between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was intense during the 1950s and 1960s. Communist leaders in Moscow constantly attacked America as hypocritical for promoting freedom abroad while treating its Black residents as second-class citizens.

Damion L. Thomas provides a fascinating look at how the U.S. government countered by sponsoring Black athletes on goodwill tours abroad. Thomas refers to government directives and other papers to shine a light on this diplomatic strategy.