Kenja McCray, "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)

Summary

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Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Sullivan Sommer
Guest: Dr. Kenja McCrae, Associate Professor of History, Clayton State University
Subject: "Essential Soldiers: Women Activists and Black Power Movement Leadership" (NYU Press, 2025)
Date: September 22, 2025

This episode explores Dr. Kenja McCrae’s groundbreaking book Essential Soldiers, which reframes our understanding of women’s activism and leadership within Black Power and Pan-African cultural nationalist organizations in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. McCrae uncovers the “Kazi leadership” model and demonstrates how Black women’s grassroots work, often overlooked, was both innovative and central to movement success.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Personal Origins and Influences

• Connection to Ta-Nehisi Coates (03:12–07:25)
  • Dr. McCrae explains how reading Coates’s Between the World and Me illuminated the contrast between men's and women's paths into Black activism, and how her own experience at Spelman College informed her focus on Black women’s interpretations of nationhood and leadership.
  • “My similar experiences were through the lens of my womanhood… we thought we were inventing the proverbial wheel.” (05:40, McCrae)

Defining Central Concepts

• Kawaida—Philosophy and Practice (07:38–18:20)
  • Pronunciation correction: “It’s ‘ka-wa-ida.’”
  • Kawaida, developed by Maulana Karenga and the US Organization, is an African-centered value system that gave rise to Kwanzaa.
  • Cultural nationalism vs. revolutionary nationalism: Swahili’s adoption as a lingua franca, unity through aesthetics and folkways.
  • Explains how Kawaida philosophy focused on tradition and reasoning, providing an everyday value system for living.

Quote Highlight

• “Kawaida philosophy was a larger value system that had other elements that included Kwanzaa… a framework intended for African Americans to use in freeing themselves from oppression.”
  (10:36, McCrae)

The Four Kawaida-Influenced Organizations

• US Organization, Committee for Unified Newark/Congress of African People, The East, and Ahediana (18:20–22:52)
  • US Organization as vanguard (founded 1965, California); others from Newark, Brooklyn, and New Orleans.
  • Organizational definitions are contested, but inclusion is based on direct embrace of Kawaida principles.

Quote Highlight

• “Sometimes an organization… said we disavow Kawaida and cultural nationalism… but if people are interested and pick up the book, they’ll see my rationale.”
  (22:17, McCrae)

Research Methodology – Oral History

• Importance of Interviews and Archival Challenges (24:23–33:47)
  • Emphasis on oral history owing to a paucity of written archival materials.
  • About 30 interviews conducted, mostly with women whose contributions are often not visible in traditional documents.
  • Dr. McCrae reflects on her mentor’s generosity with archives and her desire to similarly preserve her interview materials for future researchers.

Quote Highlight

• “I knew I’d have to dust off my oral history, you know, chops and get to work… the value would be in interviewing all these women… their contributions often didn’t show up in the written archival documents.”
  (29:56, McCrae)

Kazi Leadership: A New Model

• Definition and Impact (34:06–43:12)
  • “Kazi” means “work” in Swahili.
  • Kazi leadership is described as a collaborative, service-oriented leadership enacted by women, often unofficial but vital.
  • Draws on parallels with “servant leadership,” yet distinct owing to its African-centered commitment and feminist context.
  • Women led by “doing the work,” frequently without formal recognition, focusing on cause over title.

Memorable Moment

• “Twice I come across this idea. No, I was just… a soldier, like sleeping in the barracks and getting up and just… doing what needs to be done.”
  (41:28, McCrae)

Notable Quote

• “They’re leading because the work needs to be done… not leading to ‘be the leader,' just to serve the people, to serve the cause.”
  (39:58, McCrae)

Media and Movement: The Black Press

• Black News & Women’s Voices (43:12–50:45)
  • Black News, run from the East organization, was a neighborhood paper, not an official organ, but a key outlet for activism and culture.
  • Oral histories illuminated the contributions of specific women, their activism around hair politics, and support networks invisible in official documents.
  • The newspaper’s activist role went beyond covering news—documenting incidents ignored by mainstream media and fostering political action.

Art, Culture, and Self-Determination

• Centrality of Arts, Education, and Bookstores (50:45–58:16)
  • Explains why art, culture, and literacy were considered as essential (not “frivolous”) to Black Power and Cultural Nationalist agendas.
  • Arts linked directly to community integrity, political mobilization, and literacy—especially through women’s organizing of schools and theaters.
  • Names Amina Baraka for pivotal role in integrating art, education, and critique of exploitative practices.

Notable Mention

• “The art was very central to asserting a sense of personal integrity and group integrity and self determination… the art and the culture and the politics are all inseparable to these activists.”
  (54:13, McCrae)

Contemporary Lessons: Kazi Leadership Today

• Epilogue Application (58:16–68:11)
  • Dr. McCrae calls for a reconsideration of hierarchical leadership in favor of a “service leadership” model grounded in African-centered communal values.
  • Kazi leadership’s emphasis on doing—“don’t talk about it, be about it”—balances individual and collective responsibility, prioritizes decentralization and resilience.
  • Advocates for models focusing on care, accountability, and sustainable community rather than top-down control.

Memorable Quote

• “Kazi is the blackest of all, right, do the work… models of leadership that center care… not only inspire us to be much more resilient… but foster community building and provide models of excellence, rather than just rhetoric.”
  (65:45, McCrae)

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Notable Quotes & Timestamps

• On the gendered experience of Black activism:
  “While Ta-Nehisi Coates was talking about his manhood… my similar experiences were through the lens of my womanhood.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (05:40)

• On the scope and meaning of Kawaida:
  “Kawaida philosophy was a larger value system… intended for African Americans to use in freeing themselves from oppression.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (10:36)

• On the rationale for oral history:
  “I knew I had to get in the trenches and interview, interview, interview, and really learn oral history methodologies to even get at the subject.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (29:33)

• On Kazi leadership:
  “They’re leading because the work needs to be done… not leading to ‘be the leader,’ just to serve the people, to serve the cause.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (39:58)

• On women as unrecognized leaders:
  “A lot of times women were remembered as a leader, but… they weren’t formally appointed to a leadership role… they just did the work.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (41:07)

• On the integration of art and activism:
  “The art was very central to asserting a sense of personal integrity and group integrity and self determination… the art and the culture and the politics are all inseparable.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (54:13)

• On lessons for today:
  “Models of leadership that center care for people, accountability… foster community building and provide models of excellence, rather than just rhetoric.”
  – Dr. Kenja McCrae, (65:45)

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Timestamps for Major Topics

• Book’s Roots and Coates’s Influence: 03:12–07:25
• Definition and Origins of Kawaida: 07:38–18:20
• The Four Organizations in Focus: 18:20–22:52
• Research Methods and Oral History: 24:23–33:47
• Introducing Kazi Leadership: 34:06–43:12
• Women, Press, and Black News: 43:12–50:45
• Art and Cultural Activism: 50:45–58:16
• Epilogue: Kazi Leadership in Contemporary Context: 58:16–68:11

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Conclusions and Takeaways

• Essential Soldiers reframes the narrative of Black Power through women’s collaborative, service-driven, unheralded leadership.
• Kawaida and Kazi leadership provide models for contemporary organizing—centering care, resilience, and accountability.
• Dr. McCrae’s oral history work offers a vital archive that reclaims voices and stories left out of more official histories and demonstrates the ongoing relevance of women’s grassroots leadership for present-day movements.

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Transcript

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[Sullivan Sommer]

During the late 1960s, advocates of the Los Angeles based US organization could leaf through a $1 booklet to read the pronouncements of the group's chairman, Milana Karenga. The quotes covered topics ranging from the fundamental nature of blackness to the importance of family in the struggle for African American liberation. Karenga's ideas about gender were included in the booklet and stress that a man has to be a leader. The women's limited roles focused on inspiring her man and educating their children. According to Quotable Karanga, which was published in 1967, gender equality is false. It's the devil's concept. Our concept is complementarity. Complementarity means you complete or make perfect that which is imperfect. During the US Organization's early years, ideas that emphasize female subordination formed the bedrock of the group's guiding doctrine. It is that guiding doctrine that is challenged and expanded by the work of Dr. Kenja McCrae, Associate professor of History at Clayton State University, in her book Essential Soldiers, Women Activists and Black power movement leadership. Dr. McCrae, welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Thank you so much. Happy to be here.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So this book is about 1960s and 1970s era Black women's activism. And yet the preface opens with a nod towards Ta Nehisi Coates.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Yep. Talk.

[Sullivan Sommer]

Talk about this.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

So when I read between the World and Me, the description that Coates included of going to these spaces, activist spaces, bookstores, media stores, where there are these events that were conducted by battle weary black power or former Black power activists, black art movement stalwarts that really stoked the energy of a new generation in the 1990s of activists, youthful Afrocentrists. Right. Students interested in Afrocentric ideas who were really, their minds were opening up. And that that energy that we could have when we're 19 or 20 was directed toward changing the world, or at least we believed it really resonated with me. And I this is where I got my first sort of inkling that I wanted to study the women that I studied and wrote about in this book, Essential Soldiers. And what was really interesting to me was that the thread was there in terms of the spark of interest, but there was a contrast there. And while Ta Nehisi Coates was talking about his manhood and how those years shaped his sense of self in terms of his manhood, and then how he was really explaining that and mapping it out for his son and other people through the lens of masculinity and how often I'd read about black nationalism, about Afrocentricity through that lens, my similar experiences were through the lens of my womanhood. And so while Ta Nehisi Coates experiences were in and around Washington, D.C. and Howard University, my mine were in and around the Atlanta University center, particularly Spelman College, where I went to undergraduate while I was an undergraduate student. And there I joined a sisterhood called Auset, and we did something together. It was called a rite of passage. And that rite of passage was specifically called the Journey to African Womanhood. And so I was interpreting what it meant to be a black woman, an African woman, a woman of the African diaspora, really, and learning it with my cohort amid the Rodney King case and those subsequent uprisings and the fall of apartheid and a lot of South African sisters around us. But we thought we were also inventing the proverbial wheel. And by the time I got to writing Essential Soldiers, researching it, really, I learned, wow, how much more would we have known if we knew what these women in the groups that I was writing about knew, because they actually had outlined the concept of African womanhood two decades earlier. So it all sort of came full circle to me and resonated with Ta Nehisi Coates's work.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So I think we need to start off with a couple of definitions that you talk through in the book. And you're also going to make sure that my pronunciation stays on point as well.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Okay.

[Sullivan Sommer]

The first is kawaida. Did I pronounce that correctly?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

It's kawaida. But don't look, don't feel badly, because the first time I heard, I shouldn't say the first time I heard of, but the first time I really focused on Kawaida was in a graduate course in the PhD program. I was taking a social movements course with Dr. Akin Nyele Umoja. And I knew. I came into the, the, the history Ph.D. program knowing I wanted to study African American women in the black freedom struggle. I just, I wasn't sure what. I knew. I wanted to study Black nationalist women. I was deeply interested in telling their stories because of what I said before. I just didn't know. I didn't know what exactly I wanted to really focus on. So for Dr. Umoja's class, we had to do review essays. So I was reviewing the literature on Black nationalist organizations and Dr. Umoja, I said, Dr. Moja. I went to the, the librarian, the research librarian, and I told her I wanted to look at particularly Black power organizations within this black nationalist framework. And when I came back, the librarian had pulled Black Panther organizations. And I thought, maybe I'm onto something. People are conflating Black Panther with Black power and black nationalism, and I know that they're not one in the same or three and the same, I guess. So he said, oh, okay, you are onto something. Well, why don't you look at women in kawaida organizations? And I, he said it so quickly, and I didn't know what he said. I said, what? Can you spell that for me? His whole, you know, when I first started, I couldn't, I couldn't pronounce it. I couldn't spell it. So I've learned, I've gotten comfortable with it through the research. Yeah, well.

[Sullivan Sommer]

And hopefully some listeners now will also say, maybe it's a new word for listeners. It was a new word for me. In reading your book, talk about what you just touched on there a little bit. You said, hey, look, the librarian was saying Black Panther. I was maybe saying Black Power. My professor was saying kawaida. Talk about kawaida. And maybe how that relates or doesn't relate to, to Black power movements. And, and I will also say the Black Panthers because I know that that's a group that is probably very familiar to a lot of listeners.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Oh, yeah. So. So kawaida is the larger philosophy that produced Kwanzaa. So for those who are listening and who are familiar with Kwanzaa, Kawaida philosophy was a larger value system that had other elements that included Kwanzaa. There were other holidays, there were other principles and the like. So it was developed initially in the mid-60s, 1960s by Ron Karenga or Malana Ron Karenga, alongside the US organization in California, in Los Angeles. It was conceived as an African centered framework that was intended for African Americans to use in freeing themselves from oppression in amid this larger liberation struggle. A lot of people call this the era of the civil rights movement. Some people will break it up. And this is the period where the civil rights movement is giving way to what we call Black power. So if we look at the time frame of, say, about 1954 until about 1965 or 66, as the Civil rights movement, Black power is coming on the scene around 1965. And so Kawaida and Kawaita influenced organizations come up in 1965 alongside the Watts uprising. And one of the aims is to address the types of challenges that African Americans are facing, particularly in urban environments outside of the south, where they're facing issues that are a little bit more tricky to get at than overt Jim Crow type segregation. The Black Panther Party is forming in these spaces too. Right. If you think about California. Right. And, but. And initially the US Organization and the Panthers work together, but there are some major conflicts internal to the Black Power movement and then external, like government surveillance and intervention that cause conflict, that make them oppositional in certain ways, major ways. So sometimes we know, sometimes people know about the US Organization and Kawaida as something antithetical to the Panthers. That's not how I came to know it. Initially, I had no idea about the conflict until I started to study, read and write for this book. And. But this may ring a bell for some people. And so that's why it was surprising to me when I went to the research library and fishing around for something and she says, panthers. And I knew there was more to black power and black nationalism than the Panthers. But I was also surprised that even I, as a student of the era, didn't know enough. Right. So there's a lot more to learn. So kawaida philosophy, literally? Well, kawaida, let's just say, is a Kiswahili term or Swahili, a lot of people say. And so that's a language that's spoken in eastern Central Africa and that was adopted by black nationalists, particularly black cultural nationalists. This is a False dichotomy, but it's a way to categorize black nationalists. Some people would say black cultural nationalists differed from black revolutionary nationalists because black cultural nationalists leaned in to this idea that black people have a unique aesthetic, right. That is a marker of their unique, distinct values and their sense of community that comes from their African heritage and the way that heritage influences their folkways within the diaspora or their scattering away from their African homelands. So that people would even within this conflict, sort of narrative between the panthers and the US Organization and other Kawaida and Kawaida influenced organizations say that Panthers would be prototypical revolutionary nationalists. And then US Organization and other Kawaii organizations would be a prototypical, stereotypical, typical, just say cultural nationalists. But cultural nationalists would adopt the Swahili language as a sort of lingua franca in particular because they perceived it as a trade language that wasn't really specific to just one ethnic group. So that kind of fostered the kind of inter communal conversations, right. Communication that would be important for diasporic Africans who came from a lot of different ancestral ethnic groups. And it also reflected their active engagement with countries like Tanzania who were in the process of, you know, sort of anti colonialist movements. So a lot of the, the words that we are, you and I are struggling with are Kiswahili. And in Kiswahili, kala' iida meant something ordinary, an everyday thing. Karanga. Dr. Karenga interpreted though kawaita to mean tradition and reasoning or tradition and reason. Tradition and reason. And larger Kawaida influenced organizations like the east interpreted kawaida to be a value system for living their everyday lives.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So you've mentioned two different Kawaida influenced organizations so far. We've talked about us. You've just introduced the East. The book actually focuses on four of them. Can you talk a little bit about the four and why those four in terms of your focus?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Okay. So the U.S. organization, as you probably could tell from what I was saying, was the vanguard. Kauaita organization. It's the first, founded in 1965 and exists in a sort of iteration to this day. It wasn't an unbroken existence, but, you know, it does exist in a form to this day. These are large categories. The Committee for Unified Newark is a second group that I looked at. And then there are larger umbrella organization, the Congress of African People. I looked at them. They were headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. They ran from about 1967 until 1976. Even though they weren't always a Kawaida influenced organization, they disavowed Kawaita and cultural nationalism in the 1970s. So it gets a little complex and it's contested. This is also a slippery kind of definition, set of definitions. And I'll come back to that. As you said, the east organization, which ran from 1969 until 1986 and east members still keep in touch and they had a school, Uhuru Sasa Shule and Uhuru Sasa had a graduation ceremony, fundraiser, festival. And that festival still exists and takes place every year in the form of the International African Arts Festival in Brooklyn, New York for people who have heard of that. And then the fourth organization that I looked at is Ahediana in New Orleans, Louisiana. And that organization lasted from 1972 until about 1986. Seven and I selected these organizations. Like I said, us was the Vanguard. And then the others, either Dr. Kinger wrote that they were standard bearers at some point or they embraced kawaida and carried on the values of kawaida or the organization in their literature at some point said we are a kawaita organization. So like I said, that's contested. Sometimes an organization, the, you know, the leadership said we disavow kawaiira and cultural nationalism. And maybe they embraced socialism of some form in some form or sometimes there was some coalition or group subgroup that said, no, we are not a kawaida organization or never were. Somebody else said, yes we were. We love kawaida Kawaita till we die. So it's contested, but if people are interested and they pick up the book, they'll see my rationale and the documentation as to who, what, when, where, why, you know, in terms of classification, classifying these organizations as kawaii or kawaida influenced.

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[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

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[Sullivan Sommer]

The book has a very helpful table in it that is very helpful in this above. I want to talk a little you I want to talk a little bit more about your research before we go back into substance. Because, you know, I I'm a good reader. I always read the bibliography at the back or, you know, maybe not word for word, but I, I always flip, flip through because I want to see, you know, what, what's out there and what are the sources. And like, you know, like many books, you've got a litany, a litany of books, a litany of the secondary source material. Of course you have a lot of primary source material, and most of them are interviews. And I wanted to talk to you about that about when you when you sat down to start this book. As you've shared with us, it sounds like the seeds were planted when you were still an undergraduate at Sports Spelman. But when you sat down to begin working on this book, did you know ahead of time, did you have an idea ahead of time that so much of your research was actually going to be interviewing people?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

I did. I did. I am. I at some point decided I'm in oral history methodology. Person I don't know because I like, because I feel an obligation, I think, or a calling to write about and research black nationalist organizations. So for my master's degree, I wrote about Oatunji Village in South Carolina. And it is also a black nationalist organization of sorts. And I had to interview people because the archival documents are few and far between on these groups. And there was one dissertation on Ayatunji Village that was done in like maybe 1979, 1980, something like that. It was older and it centered on the head of this village. And I knew I wanted to, instead of taking a top down look at what was going on with this village and its history, I wanted to look at it from the bottom up. So why would the ordinary people come here who didn't have the promise of being the king, Right. Of this village? Why would someone sign up to be a subject in this village? Right. I knew I was highly interested in that perspective. And so I knew that would take interviewing people because often when I went to archives and libraries around in South Carolina, the low country of South Carolina, like Beaufort, Hilton Head area, this was in the 1990s, the attitude was, oh, no, not those weirdos. No, we wouldn't collect anything. So I could find newspaper articles, but that was about it. And the village itself had a fire and it destroyed a lot of their records. So I knew I had to get in the trenches and interview, interview, interview, and really learn oral history methodologies to even get at the subject. So when I became interested in black nationalism and then trying to figure out how I could learn more about kabu I to influence organizations and hear more of the voices of the women who joined these organizations, which had in the literature gotten a reputation for being notoriously masculinist, male dominated. And I had a similar question like, well, one would understand maybe why somebody would sign up where these organizations volunteer, be attracted to them if they were a man. But why would a woman sign up for these organizations, particularly when there are alternatives? I'm just very curious. So I knew I'd have to dust off my oral history, you know, chops and, and, and get to work. And so I went into it knowing. And of course I did do the digging to see what archives were there. But yeah, I knew I had to do lots of interviews. Camozi Woodard, he was wonderful in that. For his book on the Congress of African People and the Committee for Unified Newark, he did archive his research, his papers. So his papers were housed at the Auburn Avenue Research Library in Atlanta, the Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American History in Atlanta. And they were on microfilm at the time, so they were accessible. But beyond that, you know, I kind of had to fish around. So Kwesi Konadu had published a book on the east organization. And when I reached out to him, he was very generous. He had not archived his materials, but he did allow me to fly into New York and meet him and get them and spend time at, I think it was a kinkos, like in Harlem, I think, just, you know, like copying. And he was so nice. And I just really appreciate him for that, you know, scanning them, I think, and. And then, you know, I did that kind of yeoman's work. But ultimately, I knew that the value would be in interviewing all these women because still, when I got those, you know, papers, they didn't always show up on. In the paper, in the archival. In the written archival documents, in the ways that they showed, in the ways that I heard people speak of them in terms of their contributions to the movement.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So your interviews, then, that you did. And how do you know how many you did do? Did you count them?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

It was about 30.

[Sullivan Sommer]

Okay. So your 30 interviews, of, of course, the substance of them are in the book, and anyone can, you know, read those in the book and the quotes in the book. But the actual interviews themselves, are they. Are they living somewhere? Now, I'm curious about your own. Like, this is. Now it sounds like not only is it archival material, but it's material that doesn't exist elsewhere.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Right? Yeah, they are. They. People have asked me that before. I'm like, yeah, yeah, like, they're living on my thumb drive. They're living on the cloud. In the cloud, you know, from, you know, at my university. Right. But, you know, I'm. I'm taking a little tiny breather. But I am looking for a home for them in terms of archiving them, because I do want to give that gift to the world that, you know, Kwesi Konadu and Kumozi Woodard especially gave. Because I don't want, you know, if somebody reaches out and says, can I get things? I'll give them to the. I will share like Kwesi Conadou did with me. But I mean, like, Kumozi Woodard, you know, gave them the ultimate gift, which is, you know, I could go to the library. I could go. I could go to Emory. I could go to, you know, because they were on microfilm if I needed to, if I was out that way, or, you know, I could go to Auburn Avenue. So I did approach Auburn. Auburn Avenue about having them live with Kumozi Woodards, since they're. The subjects are close. So hopefully I can get back with you and tell you, yeah, Auburn Avenue took them or, you know, the Schomburg took them. Yeah.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So, well, hopefully somebody is listening and we'll reach out and say, hey, they should live here or be here. I'm thinking about, you know, because none of us is going to live forever also.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Right.

[Sullivan Sommer]

And so, yeah, they should be somewhere. I want to talk about another definition that really Undergirds so much of the book in the work that you did. And we'll see if I get this one right. Kazi leadership.

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Yeah, so Kazi leadership was my contribution. I guess it's my intervention in terms of the whole Essential soldiers, what essential soldiers does. In terms of the literature, when I was reading about in particular black cultural nationalist, Pan African cultural nationalist organizations in the Black power movement, the leadership models that I was reading about really all talked about this authoritarian, masculinist, top down leadership style that Black power movement organizations left that they operated within. And Ashley Farmer in particular comes along and really talks about, maps out how women remade Black power so that it was much more inclusive in terms of gender and how women contributed to Black Power. So it isn't as masculinist, but I'd noticed that she doesn't codify. Nobody really redefines how this remapping of Black power, remaking of black power redefines leadership models. And so I said, this is a unique leadership model that these cultural nationalist, Pan African cultural nationalist women in Kawaida influenced organizations demonstrate that they embody because they don't. They're often not out front because they are in these secondary gender roles. Right. And so they're not secondary because they're lesser, but they're secondary because there's this gender hierarchy that's assumed. But they're doing all this hard work and in fact in adhering to these feminized gender roles where women should only care for the children, home and hearth, support men in their agendas and deal with what they called the social life of the nation, the social organization. So teaching, maybe some communication pursuits, right? So writing some columns in the newspapers or helping with the bookstore or things like that, that they had very, very important roles in fostering the next generation of good black nationalists. And they had very important roles in educating the populace. But rarely were these defined in the moment as leadership roles. But it was interesting because when I would say, for instance, talk to someone who was a young person at the time, who grew up, went to one of the schools as a middle schooler or something like that, got into their teens and then they're middle aged and I'm coming to interview them in the 2000s, you know, I said, okay, so you went to, you know, Uhuru, Sasha Shule, for example. Okay, and how old were you? Okay. And who led that school? Oh, it was a woman, you know, and you know, I say, oh, wow, okay. So when I look at the papers, I just don't see that there is Ever a woman leader? No, I'm sure it was Ms. Such and Such. You sure? What did Ms. Such and Such do? She opened it. She did it up. She did the curriculum. She did. Right. And so I don't see them on the paperwork, but they're remembered as leaders and, you know, interview this person. This person? Oh, she was. She was a powerhouse. She did this, she did that. A lot of times women were remembered as a leader, but they weren't. Didn't hold formal leadership roles. They weren't written down as a leader. They weren't formally appointed to a leadership role informally. Sounds like they were. They just did the work. So I. One of my advisors, one of the people who I really wanted to study with at Georgia State, Jacqueline Rouse, Dr. Jacqueline Rouse was one of those early. Those pioneers of the subfield of black women's history. And she and a scholar, Vicki Crawford, really helped me understand that this is common with black women in the black freedom struggle. With black women as leaders, often they'll just roll up their sleeves and do what has to be done, right? They'll organize things. They'll get the thing done and even consciously back the masculine leader because of a cultural belief that leaders should be men. And then we should support men in being leaders. All the while, they're leading, right? So then I'm like, well, how do you write about this? And so, you know, I just grapple with it, and I do the interviews, and I think so I say, it's some kind of leader. It's some kind of leadership. But it's not. It's not formal leadership. It's not. It's informal leadership. And I had a godmother. She has passed. You know, you said people won't. You know, we won't live forever. Jacqueline Rouse has since passed. My godmother, Greer, Charlotte Greer, has passed. My godmother was in a PhD program in leadership and change. And she was like, oh, yeah, I'm reading about that in Leadership and Change. We're reading about Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership. They sound like servant leaders. You should check that book out. So I read Robert Greenleaf's Servant Leadership. It was a book that was published in 1977, and it's really talking about business, the field of business. But I'm like, yes, that's what they are. They're just leading to serve. They're leading because the work needs to be done. They're not leading to say. To say, oh, you know, I want to run for a leadership position. They're not leading to Say, I want to be the leader. They were not leading to say, I like to see my picture up there. They're not leading to be leaders. They're just getting in and doing the work to serve the people, to serve the cause. And so when I go through my interviews. Why did you do this? Because I believed in the cause. I wanted my people to be free. And even. Why did you join these organizations where you had to adhere to this belief that gender equality is the devil's concept? I believed in the cause. I thought that's what we needed to get our people free. And why did you get into an organization that practiced, essentially, polygamy by some other name? I did it because I thought that's what we needed to grow families, to grow our nation. Well, why did. Once I started to see this is a form of leadership, to get in here, roll up my sleeve, do something, even if I thought it was distasteful, because I thought it would help us to become free. And with leaning into these gender roles, start the school to raise the babies, to teach the babies, to teach the children, to be good nationalists. And the school becomes, in many cases, the longest running organization of the larger group. I say, well, did you think of yourself as a leader? No. And twice I come across this idea. No, I was just, you know, I thought of myself as a soldier, like sleeping in the barracks and getting up and just, you know, doing what needs to be done. And so it just, I don't know, it came together with all those people's voices in the mix. Yeah.

[Sullivan Sommer]

Some of the work that you just touched on, that women were doing was, as you said, around. Around writing. You have a chapter that talks quite a bit about the press and protest politics, which I found really interesting. And again, very sort of resonant with our current times. And you talk about black news. Can you talk some about Black news?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Yeah. It was a publication that was the work of the east organization. It was not the east organization's specific newspaper, though. It wasn't their mouthpiece. Right. It was produced out of the east organization, but it was a neighborhood newspaper for Bedford Stuyvesant, and it was by people in Bedford Stuyvesant. So it was stewarded by the East. But if you look at it, writers would be from the neighborhood, and you didn't have to be an east member to write or buy it. And their circulation was even wider than Bedford Stuyvesant at times. The East, I'm sorry, Black news went even overseas to, like, the Caribbean and things like that. People subscribed there. So it was very interesting. I had to be careful with it because initially when I said, oh, I could look at the blank black news, some other scholars were like, well, no, you can't, because it's not specifically an east newspaper. But because I had the interview piece, I knew. I. The people historians question oral history methods because eyewitness testimony, particularly eyewitness testimony about something that happened four or five decades ago is really questionable. Right. But we have. Oral historians, have ways to approach that. And one of the things that I did was put the oral history testimony in conversation with the textual archival documents or the textual documents. So I let the oral history testimony talk to black news and vice versa. So how oral history helped me with black news is that the oral histories told me who was who a lot of times when the written documents didn't. So I would know who an Eddie Rimmer, Martha Bright is. And so when I saw their name, then I would know, okay, this person is actually in the East. And so then I could glean that the article is actually about something that's happening about the east. And it's coming from an east perspective. So that's one thing that's happening. So it's actually black news is a mixture of neighborhood news and east sort of news and views. So that's one thing about black news. So I perceive it as being in the larger tradition of the black press. So it's talking about things that are important to the black community or black communities that are sometimes overlooked or omitted in the mainstream press. And it is actually looking at it from perspectives that are interesting and important to African Americans. Right. So something that maybe never was picked up by the mainstream press or has fallen out of favor within the mainstream press is still in black news or is picked up by black news. Right. Some issue, such as there was this issue where a local business owner shot a black. A young black man or boy because he stole, like, less than $20, if I recall, from a register. From his register. Shot him in the back as he was running away. And that was covered and carried in the black news. And, you know, there was a call to boycott and all kinds of stuff that just wasn't in the mainstream press. So I was able to find out a lot from black news. And how it helped me was that some of the women in the east would write for black news. And so I could find out things like, in particular, things about hair politics that didn't necessarily come up in some of the other archival information. And that was really important, especially to Black women. So when the black women were trying to go natural and not chemically straighten their hair in particular, and now we know how harmful that is, not only just to the psyche, but health wise, how did they support each other? And black hairstylists. Right. It would be in Black News, but you wouldn't know what to look for if you didn't also talk to them. Right, right. Because this is just an ad. Black Rose will be at the east, you know, cutting hair from this time to this time. Like, what does that mean? I don't know. But when you talk to them, it's like, it's a big deal. And we had to make space for her. We made time. And she was a hairstylist who. It was a long story. And it took some organizing, and it was a way that they worked together to make space for themselves and each other to get their hair done in ways that were feminized. Right. And so it would be hard to explain to an outsider what it meant to be able to get your natural hair for someone who would treat you well and with care and cut your hair in a way that is feminized, not just kind of give you a masculine. What would be considered a stereotypically masculine square haircut, you know, that kind of thing. So I was able to glean a lot from the east, and then I was able to see how the women used. I'm sorry, the Black News. And I was able to see how the. How the women use Black News as an activist outlet beyond their stereotypically feminized roles and within them.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So we talked before about schools. And one of the things that I noticed in reading the book, I'm going to conflate a couple of, or sort of bring together a couple of different things that I noticed in the book is. And you pointed out, the women were running these schools. There was also a lot of discussion around affiliations with bookstores, libraries, theater programs. And so I. I took a lot of note of all of the discussion of art and the importance of art to these movements, it seemed to me. Can you talk a bit more about that?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Yeah, so. So if I understand your question correctly, you're raising a question about the centrality of art and culture to their movement. And this can sometimes be seen as frivolous because people can tend to see economics or politics as much more concrete than art. But to understand the place of art in the movement, you have to go back to one, this idea that culture was important to this group of activists. And in a way, this is why people Labeled them the way they did as cultural nationalists who had this belief that aesthetics and certain values, certain sense of a certain communal communalism, a rootedness in an African heritage, a rootedness in certain diasporic folkways, in common diasporic folkways, a common heritage, a common struggles that can be seen in artistic and felt in artistic expression, like the blues, jazz, mark our difference, our uniqueness as a people, and make us a nation within the larger United States, a distinct nation. Right. Our proof of that and should be fostered, preserved and developed. So the art was very central to asserting a sense of personal integrity and group integrity and self determination. So that's, I think, what you were seeing, reading about. But it's also important to remember that this is about the Black power movement. So it's not just about black nationalism, which is its own expression of, like I said, self determination, self definition, but it's also a movement within the black freedom struggle. And like I said, the, you know, many people define it as some as a movement that went from 1965 to 1975 with certain leadership, including, you know, Malana Karenga, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis. Right. But then many people will say it is a. It overlaps with and is a sister, a sibling, not only to the civil rights movement, but to the black arts movement. So the art is. Is just. It's ubiquitous. And some of the leaders have a foot in the. Many of these movements. Right. So in politics, in arts and culture. So if you're looking at someone who has a foot in all those, look toward the leader of the Congress of African People and Committee for Unified Newark, Amiri Baraka. We hadn't talked about him, but then who would I be writing about? His wife, Amina Baraka. And, you know, many people have heard of him. Not so much of Amina, but Amina. As you know, when I started to read Amina's, the one who is rooted in Newark, New Jersey. You know, for many, Amiri had gone off to New York. Amiri had gone into the beat poet movement. And Amiri had a, you know, had gone outside of the local community and married, you know, a European American. And once he goes home to his native Newark after Malcolm X's assassination. Malcolm X is slaying. It's Amina who brings him back into the community. He's reconnected through Amina's connections. She's the lifelong artist. She is the one who, you know, in a lot of ways tells him, hey, this cultural national thing is nationalist thing is okay. But the. The piece about multiple Wives is export exploitative. She's the one who forms the women's group. She's, you know, so she's the one who says the kids can't read. You're bringing them to perform your plays, but they're written down, they can't read. We need to have a school. So the art and the bookstore and you know, Maisha Fisher, she came out of the east, as far as I can remember, writes about these literacy hubs and it makes, it resonates, right. Literacy traditions that come out of these kawaii to influence black culture. Pan African cultural nationalist organizations help you understand how integral the performance of the play, the poem, the poetry is the self determination, the expression of self determination to the. To the. And so the. The child, in order to express self, a sense of self, has to learn to read. And then to learn to read, they have to have the literature. So to have the literature, someone has to be, you know, fostered. And there has to be a press and there has to be a store. There is a book by Katie Mitchell called Prose to the People that digs down into the black. He has a traditional black bookstore. And she can, if you get that book and if you, you know, listen to Katie talk, she tells you all about that. So I'm not going to reinvent the wheel on that front, but you know, certainly there is overlap there and you see that the art and the culture and the politics are all inseparable to these activists.

[Sullivan Sommer]

So the epilogue invites the reader to examine Kazi leadership lessons in a contemporary context. Can you talk some about that?

[Dr. Kenja McCrae]

Yeah, I actually think I. My. I saw that I had an opera opportunity when I was working on the book because we are at such a watershed moment that within this context, the book is. Could be an opportunity to offer today's visionaries some glimpses into the trials and the triumphs of past activists, but also give them something to build on for their own strategizing and leadership. And so that's what made me think about, okay, here is this alternative perspective on leadership than the one that is very common that we know. That is command and control. That is top down, that's more regimented. Right here we have examples of service leadership, right? I looked into servant leadership, Greenleaf servant leadership. The women in these organizations very much embodied that servant leadership that Greenleaf talked about. But theirs was very distinctive. And I found that it was distinctive in its African centeredness because the women would ground the things they did in the reasoning that they were trying to get African descended people free African and Help African people and African descended people all over the world be free and equal. And they would ground what they did in African centered values to the best that they knew them and understood them. So that made them very unique. So these were their approach to servant or service. A lot of times people I think more recently call it service leadership to. I opted for that language to sort of distance it from any kind of notion that, that, that I was trying to reinforce this idea that they were, you know, servile and to reinforce this idea that they were devoted to service, their service led them, their devotion to service led what they did. So they were, they were, their style was very collaborative, very people centered, work centered. So this one is a little bit long, right? But it gives the Qazi leadership its name, right? That brand of leadership or that version of leadership that I saw within them and that Qazi is Swahili for work. And in the documents that they shared with me, the people in Kawaii influenced organizations and Kauaita organizations shared with me the interviews. Many, many people in Kabu eater influence organizations would talk about kazi a lot. And I said, well, you know, what's kazi? You know what's kazi? And I would look at what they wrote and I would ask them in the interviews, well, kazi means work. But there were other principles, right? These core principles of, of Kawaida are the core principles of Kwanzaa. And if anybody is familiar with Kwanzaa, Kwanzaa has seven principles. And there's a principle, a Kwanzaa principle, Ujima, which deals with work is called collective work and responsibility. It means collective work and responsibility. U J I am a ujima collective work and responsibility. So I'm trying to figure out, well, why are they referring to Kazi if they already have a principle that deals with collective work and responsibility? But a lot of the literature, the pamphlets, things like that that they've written, they'll say cause the is the blackest principle of them all. And then there'll be descriptions. People come in and they talk about all these principles. But kazi is the blackest principle of them all. People talk, talk, talk, talk, talk. But what are they going to do? What are you going to do? People say that the Black power movement is just about talk. It's all talk, it's all poems and literature and jazz songs. But what are we going to do? Kazi is the blackest of all, right, do the work. So I even kind of try and I associate it with this 90s sort of phrase, don't talk about it, be about it. But then I'm trying to make sense of it in relation to Ujima and how I see it is it's really emphasizing that there should be a balance between personal and collective action, personal and collective responsibility. And it's really emphasized. And the women really, I think, talk about it a lot as one of their reasons for doing the work that they do, joining the organizations that they did. And then they describe, you know, we did. What did you do when you went to this, you know, this country? To help them with their independence work. Oh, kazi. We did a lot of kazi there. And then they would describe what kind of work they did. So it was really important to them. And so that's why I said it drove their leadership. So it's almost like a Qazi leadership and work was out front, but together with the work and the people centeredness, those two values I think make it a very collaborative kind of leadership, you know, service leadership. But then that African centered nature of it makes it very unique. Yeah, so then what are our takeaways? That's very esoteric and it can really come across as being rooted in the past or very specific to people who are or were black nationalists or Afrocentric or what have you. So that's why I said, okay, so what are the Kazi leadership lessons that we can use in the current context? So some of them are, you know, I think they're, I think that they're common sense, but I think they also bear repeating. So like I said, make sure that you're fostering a good balance between personal and collective responsibility, personal and shared responsibility. Be sure to foster decentralization as well as centralized control because decentralization can be key to resilience and longevity, sometimes depending on the context. So take the temperature. Never, never forget to be creative. And it's important to know, to see these kinds of alternative examples to the command and control models, coercive, those sort of models of leadership that really perpetuate divisiveness, fear mongering, coercion. Because models of leadership that center care for people, accountability, personal accountability for leaders and collective action not only inspire us to be much more resilient and like I said, inspire sustainable work habits and sustainable workplaces, sustainable ways of living. They're not just, you know, short term or limited in terms of who gets included, but they foster community building and often provide models of excellence, you know, rather than just rhetoric.

[Sullivan Sommer]

All such important lessons for us to take away in our day to day. The book is essential Soldiers, women activists and Black power Movement leadership by Kenja McCrae. You can find Dr. McCrae at kenjamacrae.com and on Facebook and Instagram essentialsoldiers. And I am your host, Sullivan Sommer. You can find me at my website, sullivansummer.com on Instagram @thesullivansummer, and over on substack ollivansummer, where Dr. McCrae and I are going right now to continue our conversation. Thank you for listening to the new Books Network.