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[MOTIVATIONAL MUSIC] - Hi everyone, Steve Adubato.

For the next half hour.

A really important conversation with our longtime friend back by popular demand, Professor Eddie Glaude Jr.

Author of the book, "We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For," and also a professor of African-American Studies at the Princeton University.

Professor, good to see you.

- Great to see you, Steve.

Thank you for having me again, man.

Appreciate it.

- Thank you for being with us.

"We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For."

Love this book.

Has me thinking about all kinds of things I wasn't thinking of before.

The main message you want people taking away is?

Please.

- We can't outsource our responsibility for democracy any longer.

We have to take responsibility for it.

If American democracy is to be saved, we're gonna have to save it.

So we can't look to political leaders, we can't look to so-called prophets or heroes.

We have to find that within ourselves.

And, you know, that means in a sense, Steve, that if we're the leaders that we've been looking for, we have to become better people.

We have to work on ourselves.

We have to deal with all the things that make us who we are so that we can release ourselves to higher forms of excellences.

So it's a hard book, but what I'm trying to do is to urge people through my own story, through the story of the Black political tradition to understand their power.

And I think that's especially needed in these times.

- This book is based on a series of essays, 2011, professor.

- Yes.

- W. E. B.

Du Bois lecture series, if you will.

- Yep.

- Where did that take place?

- At Harvard.

- Oh, that little school up there.

- Yeah.

I don't wanna mention, that place up in New England.

- Yeah, I got it.

But you revisit those essays and what's so interesting to me is as you start this conversation, you said, "We need to be our own leaders.

We need to preserve democracy, protect, preserve democracy moving forward."

But as you read the book and you examine leaders like Dr. King, like Malcolm X, like James Baldwin, like Ella Baker, who we'll talk about in just a bit, like President Obama, is the we, the African-American community or the we, all of us?

- It's all of us.

But how I talk about all of us is through the specific experiences of Black folk in the United States.

Because in some ways what I'm trying to do, Steve, is to answer certain questions to myself or for myself, right?

And how do I exemplify what I'm calling for?

And that requires of me grappling with my heroes, grappling with the people who sit so large in my imagination.

And, you know, it's like reading Russian literature or Irish literature.

We don't get the specifics or the specific, you know, I don't understand the particular jokes in Gogol's dead soul, right?

I don't quite get some of the references by Joyce or Keats, but they're saying something about the human endeavor that speaks to me nevertheless.

And so what I'm trying to do in the text by way of this particular interrogation of African-American politics, is to get to this more generalized claim.

And that is, you know, if democracy is to be saved, all of us have to become better people.

If we're going to actually get to the other side of this thing.

- Tell everyone who W. E. B.

Du Bois was and why he still matters.

- Oh, Du Bois is is perhaps the most important African-American intellectual of the early 20th century.

He's the first graduate of Harvard, Black graduate of Harvard.

He received his PhD from Harvard, the first Black PhD from Harvard.

He's one of the founding members of the NAACP.

He edited The Crisis Magazine He's written extraordinary works ranging from the souls of Black folk to his autobiography, "Dusk of Dawn," to books about Africa and the like, and African-American culture.

He's written novels, he's written plays.

And you know, he was also one of the founders of the Pan-African movement, this global movement at the end of the 19th century dawning of the 20th century.

So he's this figure that sits at the center of American intellectual life.

He gave us the language of the color line, right?

And he gave us the language of this sense of double consciousness as he drew on the work of his teacher William James.

So he's perhaps one of the most extraordinary minds the country produced.

I should say this too, Steve, he's actually the founder, one of the founders of American sociology, because he worked over in Germany before he finished his graduate degree in history at Harvard.

He came into and he encountered the methods that would turn out to be foundational for the field of sociology.

And he wrote the first American sociological study, and it's called "The Philadelphia Negro," which was a study of the Black community in the city of Philadelphia.

- And so the W. E. B.

Du Bois lecture series 2011 revisited in this book, "We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For" So, Eddie, lemme try, professor, lemme try this.

- Please, Eddie, please.

- Eddie, lemme go through Dr. King.

- Yeah.

- He's described in the book as "a romantic prophet."

Are you describing, being critical of, questioning?

What?

- You know, let me just say this.

First of all, I appreciate you working through the book.

I know I'm asking my readers a lot.

I'm stretching.

- What does that mean to ask a lot?

I guess there are parts that were challenging for me, but does it mean to ask a lot of us?

- I want you to, typically Steve, when I've been the public domain, I'm often read as a historian, right?

As a person who could tell these thick stories about our past.

But I'm actually a philosopher by training.

And so here I'm thinking through the philosophical commitments that inform my moral voice, my ethical orientation to politics.

And so there's all of this stuff about John Dewey and Ralph Waldo Emerson and Sheldon Wolin.

I'm making all of these philosophical moves and I'm asking my reader to hold my hand to walk with me.

Whether you get some of the references or not, I want you to get to the essence of what I'm saying.

And at the heart of my engagement with Dr. King to go to the question, it's not a dismissal, right?

It's what does it mean that Dr. King came to me as a young kid growing up in Mississippi as this larger than life figure.

I was introduced to him by my eighth grade teacher, Ms. Mitchell.

And, you know, she taught the Civil War in such a way that I found myself loving Stonewall Jackson.

What the hell?

But she also got to the civil rights movement.

And she asked me to deliver the speech, "I Have a Dream."

And I remember going to the library, getting the vinyl, I'm dating myself, putting it on the stereo, and going back and forth.

And from that moment on, King was in my bloodstream.

And he was always larger than life, someone well beyond what I was capable of.

And what I wanted to do in the book was to bring him down, bring him close to the ground.

- Why?

Why can't we romanticize Dr. King, his life, his legacy?

Why do we have to bring him down?

- Because oftentimes, Steve, we will outsource our responsibility to him.

What do I mean?

Oh my God, if only we had a Dr. King here today.

- Yes.

- Oh my God, Dr. King, gave voice to these issues and somehow we are just supposed to live in that voicing as opposed to understanding the power of our own voice.

Think about Ralph Waldo Emerson's classic book "Representative Men."

And what he does in that text, he looks at all of these extraordinary figures, and he looks at them not to simply take them down a notch, but to see how their greatness exemplifies the greatness that I can find in myself.

- Flaws and all?

- Flaws and all.

Flaws and all.

So part of what I'm trying to think about here is that Dr. King is not someone to follow, he is someone to emulate.

He's not someone to whom I should engage in supplication, but someone who exemplifies what human beings are capable of.

And the moment we think of him apart from us, we lose sight of how human and frail and finite he actually was.

And so we lose sight of the lesson that his life actually brings to you and me.

- Malcolm X.

- Oh, wow.

- Oh, wow, I was right.

Listen, there's some, I'm cherry picking.

- Sure.

- Descriptions here.

Malcolm X, assassinated in 1965, the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.

Check out our programming about Malcolm X, his life, his legacy.

Important programming.

Just go on our website, it'll come up.

A wounded, vulnerable Black man.

But so much more than that, but why is he important, Malcolm X in the context of "We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For?"

Please, Eddie.

- So Steve, it's really about my attempt to deal with these men who were so important to my own imagination.

You know, I began that chapter with a very hard story, a very difficult story with my father.

I was a young kid, I was, I think I was in the fifth grade.

I was playing hopscotch down the street with this gorgeous young woman that I thought was the cutest girl on the planet.

- Is it Mississippi?

- Yeah, this is in Moss Point, Mississippi.

And my objective was to mess up in hopscotch.

I was gonna step on every line, I was gonna fall out of the squares 'cause I wanted her to show me over and over and over again.

And then I hear this call from down the street, and it's my father, yelling for me to come back home.

And I run back to the house, and I walk into the foyer and he's standing there, and my father is this huge man, at least he was when I was little.

And my uncle is sitting on the couch and he says, "What are you, a fag or something?"

And, you know, I can only express at the age of 55 how broken I was in that moment.

My father had deposited fear in my gut from an early age.

And right now, I should say, we have an extraordinary relationship.

This man is amazing.

I don't know, some days I don't know who he is.

But that journey has been a loving journey, but a difficult one.

But he scared to live in daylights at him.

A glance could make me cry.

And my brother, my older brother would tell me, "Don't look at him when he's yelling," and I would always look and I would always cry.

So Malcolm, when I was introduced to him, when I went to Morehouse.

I went to Morehouse, Steve when I was 15, 16 years old.

And Morehouse College is the alma mater of Dr. King.

So there's a big statue of king pointing at the campus.

And I remember this man my freshman year, this senior, this upper, upperclassmen saying, "You know, you're really smart, but you're incomplete, you don't know who you are."

And he gave me Malcolm's autobiography.

I devoured it that night.

And then I found the language from my father's rage.

Suddenly he made sense.

But I also found the language and a hero to reimagine my manhood, to begin to think about myself in a very different way.

So Malcolm's pose, his posture, to this day, Steve, my goatee is a testimony to that conversion experience.

He gave me a sense of courage, right?

- Different from Dr. King?

- Yes.

Dr. King gave me the language of love, Malcolm gave me a language to understand my rage and to be able to understand it as reasonable that I didn't have to engage in this kind of superhuman effort to put my rage aside, that I had to think about it constructively, if that makes sense.

To watch more Think Tank with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- In the book.

- Yeah.

- Even though you're revisiting lectures from 2011, the W.E.B.

Du Bois lectures up at Harvard in 2011, Eddie, do you still feel a significant degree of that rage?

And I wanna make it clear, we are taping on July the 16th, a few days after an assassination attempt of former President Trump.

A lot going on.

A lot going on.

Do you still feel the rage you just described, A, and B, how do you channel it?

- Oh, absolutely.

I'm one of the most rageful people you could possibly meet.

But I'm always, we talked last time about, "Begin Again" and James Baldwin.

And what Baldwin taught me is how to be angry and loving at the same time.

So there's King on one hand and there's Malcolm on the other.

And my encounter with Jimmy Baldwin, this queer Black man who was frail, who was afraid for most of his life, taught me how to be angry and to be loving at the same time.

So I can despise the positions that Donald Trump takes.

But I can also be loving in my hope that he's not harmed because of the nonsense of politics.

- But can you?

And I'm so sorry for interrupting.

- No.

You posted on X.

- Yeah.

- A couple things.

And the day after the President was shot, and tragically in Pennsylvania, a man was killed and others were shot at that rally of President Trump.

On X you posted, "There is a moral rot at the heart of this country.

We have to admit it and do everything in our collective power to rid ourselves of it."

Connect it back to the book, please.

- Yeah, I mean, I think part of what the book tries to do is to say we have to look ourselves squarely in the face.

If we're going to become better people, reach for higher forms of excellences.

Right?

Because what I'm trying to suggest is that the hard work of becoming better people is in fact a radical politics.

'Cause that hard work of trying to become a better person requires that we have to make the world better.

Because the world as it's currently organized gets in the way of us being better people.

And so part of what I'm suggesting here is that if we're going to be better people, then we're going to have to deal honestly with who we currently are.

It's like saying, you have trouble in your marriage and we're gonna work on our marriage, but we don't tell the truth about the lie that's at the heart of the problem.

And so part of, if I'm going to be a better human being, I have to deal with my daddy issues.

I have to.

If we're gonna be a better country, Steven, we have to deal with what is at the heart of MAGA Republicanism.

- You realize how deep this is, Eddie?

You go from MAGA Republicanism to dealing with your daddy issues, to understanding Dr. King, to understanding and appreciate and being empowered by Malcolm X.

And we're about to ask you by about Ella Baker and who she was and why she mattered.

This is deep.

- We are.

That's what, the world as it's organized.

- Do wanna be?

Do most, I'm sorry for interrupting, Eddie.

- No, please.

- Do you think most of us in the age of social media algorithms, I'm gonna look for stuff that tells me I'm right.

Things I like, things that distract me, cat videos, dog videos, people falling off whatever, and ideological and political things that tell me how right I am.

Do you think most of us wanna be that deep?

- Whether we want to or not, we need- - Why do we have to?

- Because the country, its existence depends upon it.

- Make the case.

- Steve, if we stay at the surface of things, if we don't deal with the ghosts that haunt, those ghosts will choke out the present and suffocate any future possibility.

America's always been a future-driven country.

It's all about our progress towards perfection.

If we don't deal with the ugliness that's at the root of who we currently are, that ugliness is going to choke the life out of this nation.

- But Eddie, respectfully, people view the ugliness differently.

Here's what I mean.

- Yes.

- I asked you this the last time you were with us.

Please go on SteveAdubato.org, check out the previous half hour with Eddie Glaude.

(Eddie chuckling) Slavery.

- Right.

- Affirmative action, civil rights, DEI programming, et cetera.

There are different views, and I'm not saying they're all the same thing, but the issues of race, racial differences, racial relations, racial advantages, racial disadvantages, they are viewed differently by different people based on their different backgrounds, orientations, the algorithms on social media.

- Right.

- So when we say deal with it, the it is different.

There are separate realities for so many people, no?

- They're separate interpretations.

- Not to mention resentments.

- Yes, yes.

- Please.

- I don't, I think, yes, there are different interpretations.

There are different understandings about the history of the country.

And we're gonna have to fight about it.

We're gonna have to argue about it.

- Can we do it peacefully without the Civil War that some of my friends tell me is inevitable.

That sooner or later we're gonna have to pick sides and decide who you're gonna be with.

- I don't know.

I don't know.

And Steve, I hear you and I feel you.

I have no idea.

From the very beginning, when the south, the southern colonies and the northern colonies were trying to found this nation, they had to put aside the question of slavery directly.

Because the south, the southern slave holders were clear that if we didn't, that the idea of the United States would've never come into being.

So we compromised, we put the fugitive slave clause in the Constitution.

We passed the fugitive slave law in 1793.

And what we saw was kind of runaways and kidnappers as Andrew Delbanco talks about it, the historian outta Columbia.

Kind of moving about in the borderland between two different nations pretending to be one.

And then of course it all came to a head in the Civil War and we left over 600,000 dead.

And we're still fighting it.

And what was at the heart of it?

Who do we take ourselves to be as a nation committed to freedom?

And up to me, and I'm gonna make this argument until I take my last breath.

Until we confront that, that's what Malcolm did, that's what Martin did, that's what we have to do together.

You and I, as we work our way through these very difficult things so that we can get on the other side of what Jimmy Baldwin would say.

We have to get on the other side of this because if we don't, we will remain in history's ass pocket.

- This is not a book solely for African Americans.

- No.

It's hard for people to believe that.

- It is.

- But it's like someone telling me that, Augustine's "Confessions" is not for me.

Or "War and Peace" isn't for me.

- So Eddie, you do this every time you join me.

There are more questions that I have.

- I love it, I love it, Steve.

- Our conversations are messy.

Our conversations are not linear.

Our conversations are complex.

But I wanna ask you this.

- Sure.

- And not that this is the answer, but you talk about Ella Baker and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, otherwise known as SNCC 1960s.

Can I get one?

Unfair.

Who was Ella Baker and why she's so important?

- Without Ella Baker, the Black Freedom movement of the mid 20th century wouldn't make any sense.

She's from North Carolina, she went to Shaw University.

She was a field secretary for the NAACP in the 1940s, Steve, so she's organizing in the south.

She was the first executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

So when King decided to start that organization of preachers who would do all of that work in the civil rights movement, he called on Ella Baker to organize.

And then when you had those student sit-ins in Greensboro in 1960, in Greensboro, in Nashville and in Atlanta across the south, those students decided that they wanted to get together and organize that energy.

And they met, guess where?

At Shaw University.

Why?

Because Ms. Baker was there.

- Were they the leaders they were looking for?

- Yes, because they were 18, 19, 20.

And she would tell these young people as they would go into the bowels of the south, sometimes only two of them, they were actually in my little hometown.

I didn't know it until I became an academic that Bob Moses and these folk had come to my little hometown in Mississippi to help desegregate the pools.

And she would tell them as they would go into the delta, Steve, shut up and listen, you might learn something.

That the task wasn't to helicopter in and lead people.

The task was to create the conditions under which everyday ordinary people would see themselves as the leaders that they've been looking for.

Her wonderful formulation is, a strong people doesn't need, they don't need strong leaders.

(Eddie laughing) - What, okay, first of all, most importantly, as we close, I cannot thank you enough for once again challenging us, making us think, challenging me as a journalist, as an interviewer, and most importantly as an American who hopes and prays for a better place for all of us to get to.

Professor Eddie Glaude, "New York Times" bestselling author.

Author of the book, "We are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For".

Eddie, my friend, thank you.

- Steve, I appreciate you.

And you know what?

Every time we get together, you make my heart smile.

Because we're working through this together, Doc, I appreciate you.

- It will not be, prayerfully, there'll hopefully be many more conversations.

Thank you Eddie.

- Appreciate you, Doc.

- That's Eddie Glaude.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] Think Tank with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Celebrating 30 years in public broadcasting.

Funding has been provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Let’s be healthy together.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

Wells Fargo.

The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

The New Jersey Education Association.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Newark Board of Education.

Johnson & Johnson.

And by The Turrell Fund, a foundation serving children.

Promotional support provided by NJ.Com.

And by BestofNJ.com.

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