Explorations in Black Leadership

Co-Directed by Phyllis Leffler & Julian Bond

Leadership philosophy – Empower We the People

BOND: And what about philosophy?

MOSES: Yes. So, philosophy, I mean, in some sense, philosophy is trying to figure out the big big questions and I think the big question in this country has been whether or not the idea of constitutional people— I mean, we're a constitutional democracy. In the end, it's the written constitution and the concepts in it that really sort of frame the idea as a democracy in some sense, so the philosophy that's underneath that I find is in the Preamble, the idea that the class of people called the We the People class should actually be the ones who are framing the context for what happens and so the crisis as I see it in our country now is that that class is almost completely dormant, silent. And if I think about the movement, what happened was the movement actually enabled a We the People moment which was able to force, because you have— I mean, the forces are the national federal government and then the states, but without a We the People force, there's no way to get the feds to actually act on things that overcome what the states want to do which are regressive. The philosophy in this country that it needs is the philosophy about the expansion, the ongoing expansion of the We the People force in the country.