Nearly 60 years ago, Martin Luther King Jr posed a question that still haunts us. In his final book, published just a year before his death, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?, he argued that we were standing at a crossroads: one path leading toward chaos – deepening poverty, violence, and repression – while the other required us to collectively choose and build community.
Too few of us answered his call. At times, we chose distraction, comfort and complacency. At others, we turned away from the violence this country inflicted on the world, allowing the corruption of those in power to harden and accumulate. We can blame politicians and corporations, or those who remained neutral – but the truth is, we all carry some level of responsibility.
And still, the challenge remains: are we ready to do what is necessary to build community? To protect one another? To stop outsourcing our power?
This Black History Month, we must go beyond the passive commemorations that have become commonplace in our culture. We need to go beyond the hashtags, curated quotes, safe tributes, and parades and learn about how change was actually made – and take responsibility for continuing it.
Learning from those who didn’t wait
If we want a model for that responsibility, the activist Ella Baker is essential. Often working behind the scenes, she helped build some of the most important organizations of the civil rights movement. One of her most enduring contributions was her insistence on building strong people – so they would no longer need strong leaders.
Baker, who died in 1986, believed that people must organize where they are: in their neighborhoods, workplaces and schools. Not by waiting for charismatic saviors, but by developing leadership from below. She understood that young people and poor and working-class communities already possessed knowledge, strength and leadership – and that those capacities, when nurtured, could be mobilized for real social change.
That legacy is alive today in organizations like Students Deserve in Los Angeles. This youth-led group has organized students across race to win historic victories, including a $30m reduction to school police funding and the reinvestment of those resources into a Black Student Achievement Plan. These gains were not granted out of the goodwill of elected officials; they were won through struggle and disciplined, student-led organizing.
Just as important, Students Deserve understands that struggle does not end with a win. The organization continues defending these victories against white supremacist backlash, holding the principle Baker taught us: responsibility is ongoing, and the struggle is eternal.
Getting up and doing something
That same clarity lives in Fannie Lou Hamer, who fought for civil rights, voting rights and women’s rights in the 1960s and 70s and made it clear that neither wealth nor formal education were prerequisites for resistance. At some point, being “sick and tired of being sick and tired” had to turn into action.
That spirit remains today in organizations like Pillars of the Community, which organizes with people often written off as “unorganizable”: currently and formerly incarcerated people and others most affected by state violence.
Pillars leads police-watch efforts, coordinates legal defense work, and – when historic floods devastated parts of California in 2024 – provided disaster relief when government response fell short. This is Hamer’s legacy in practice: people deemed disposable by the system deciding to protect one another anyway.
Prayer was never enough. Today, scrolling isn’t either. At some point, we must decide to do everything within our power to become free and recognize that our freedom is bound up with the freedom of others.
Protection, power and imagination
I think, too, of the Black Panther Party, and their unapologetic commitment to protecting Black communities, even against the state. In a moment when masked agents detain people in public spaces without accountability, that legacy is not abstract.
In Oakland, organizations like the Anti Police-Terror Project, Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice and others are carrying that tradition forward – building community-led infrastructure to respond to violence, mental-health crises and emergencies without relying on policing or incarceration. We are also seeing communities build safety networks and protect one another in real time from ICE attacks.
But resistance must also be imaginative. Revolution is both an art and a science. Art that avoids struggle, or stays safely on the surface, is not neutral, it participates in the choice of chaos. And we need our writers, actors and artists connected to these fights, not necessarily to lead them, but to help people reimagine what is possible– to teach, to energize, to amplify the work and to refuse capitulation to the demands of the capitalist machine.
Staying in the struggle
There is another impulse we must name and refuse: the temptation to tap out, to disengage out of frustration when others do not participate, do not vote the “right” way, or do not move fast enough. A person defeated in spirit will soon be defeated in reality, and forgetting that social change is a protracted struggle is a sure path to lost morale.
History is often taught as a series of dramatic moments: a march, a speech, a bill signed into law. What gets erased are the decades of organizing that made those moments possible. When people expect immediate transformation without understanding the long arc of struggle, disappointment is inevitable.
None of our ancestors waited for mass participation before acting. They organized amid apathy, repression and isolation. To abandon the work because others have not yet joined is not radical – it is a misunderstanding of how change has always happened.
Here, the activist Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael) offers needed clarity. Voting once every few years is not democracy – it is delegation. As Ture said, politics is daily. It lives in workplaces, schools, housing and food systems. Resentment toward people who did not vote the “right” way is not political maturity. This moment requires building the conditions for participation, not shaming people for their absence.
Taking responsibility now
For the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color, this moment requires taking our work to the next level, and refusing to remain confined by what liberalism tells us is acceptable. As fascism actively dismantles the liberal world order we were told to trust, clinging to those limits is no longer strategic; it is dangerous.
Too often, we exhaust ourselves naming external enemies while ignoring the internal forces that limit our ability to build real power. Many of our organizations – and many of us within them – remain constrained by liberalism in ways that actively undermine our ability to win tangible gains for poor and working-class communities. If we are serious about building multiracial, multigenerational power rooted in those most harmed by violence and exclusion, then we must be just as serious about outgrowing the frameworks that no longer serve this moment.
And the work is already happening every day in communities across this country. There are organizations to join, movements to plug into, people already doing the hard, unglamorous work of building power. Each moment is an invitation to learn, to be imaginative and to begin where you are. Movements are not born fully formed – they begin when ordinary people decide to act anyway. And maybe, just maybe, the work will be a little easier for those who come after us because you decided to begin.
Now is the time to become the ancestors future generations will thank, to take our place in history as people who stood against fascism and chose community over chaos.
What’s giving me hope now
Hope matters to me. But one thing I’ve learned over the years is that hope without struggle is hollow, and struggle without hope is unsustainable. The truth is, hope ebbs and flows. There are moments when it feels abundant, and moments when it feels distant. But whether we feel hopeful or not, our responsibility does not change.
What keeps me grounded is this: if political prisoners can continue to fight from inside cages, and if people experiencing genocide can continue to resist under conditions meant to break them, then I have a responsibility to keep fighting here, in the United States. Not because I always feel hopeful, but because the struggle demands it.
Whether the wind is pushing us forward or pushing us back, the task is the same. To fight. Some people say the will to fight comes from believing another world is possible. I’d add this: if you want people to have hope, get them into struggle. Help them win something real. Because hope doesn’t just live in ideas – it lives in action, in collective effort, and in the knowledge that we are not facing this alone.
Eric Morrison-Smith is executive director of the Alliance for Boys and Men of Color
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