ABSTRACT
This chapter provides descriptive definitions of political ideology and leadership and a consciously eclectic theoretical framework through which both can be critically analyzed in terms of their functions within the social structure in which they arise. There are certain disturbing problems affecting black people that appear to be variables totally independent from black leadership. As with most leaders, leaders of the black movement—with the possible exception of those who were still students at the time—were usually from the black community's middle class. At the end of the 1960s, with major civil and voting rights victories having paved the way, blacks began the rapid—literally explosive—replacement of their traditional protest leadership with a group of elected officeholders. The critical role of the intellectual community, academic and otherwise, to inform and urge members of the political establishment to challenge existing structures that are oppressive or neglectful has not gone entirely unfulfilled or unnoted by black intellectuals.
