Running For Leader Of Black America

Mark Bowden's 2004 article on Al Sharpton seems appropriate after Wright's showboating this week:

This brings us to Sharpton's broader problem: the death of the Negro Spokesman. I use this antiquated term because the concept itself is so dated. Throughout our history white America has recognized a certain few figures as "leaders" of the black communitya pattern that Michael Eric Dyson, a writer and a humanities professor at the University of Pennsylvania, has called "an old, abiding problem." They alone were considered able to speak for the whole race. This was true on a local level and also nationally, as prominent African-Americans from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King Jr. stepped up to serve as spokesmen for people otherwise excluded from public life. Sometimes, as with King, these figures had the enthusiastic support of black Americans; sometimes, as with Washington, they did not. In a country that increasingly accepts itself as multiracial, where blacks are no longer even the largest minority, the role of the Negro Spokesman is as outmoded as the Victrola. Most black intellectuals, particularly younger ones, are glad to be rid of it.

And Obama is trying to get beyond it. Hence the internal backlash.