The Great Black Hope?

Within the black community, critiques of Samuels’s approach range from the principled to the destructive.

On the reasoned side, Remington says Samuels’s philosophies are similar to those of black conservative Shelby Steele, who “talks more about personal responsibility than system causes that create the situation. That makes it appear like you’re a gatekeeper or toady for the system.” Then there are the turf wars: Remington says he frequently attends events at the Urban League, a longtime, system-challenging organization, and Samuels is often not present. Not only that, McAfee believes the Peace Foundation competes with traditional inner-city institutions for scarce nonprofit and corporate dollars. “I came out the doors of the church this summer and some folks from white churches [were] walking up and down the neighborhood cleaning stuff up,” says McAfee. “Some people would get all excited about that. I couldn’t get excited about it, because there is no way I would go out to Edina, near a white church, and [clean] it up unless I contacted that pastor first. That’s pastoral protocol.”

And then there are the hatemongers, such as Booker Hodges, who, as a guest on a public-access cable TV show after Samuels talked of the big house, spoke—possibly metaphorically—about how “we have to kill the house niggas. We gotta kill them. And that’s what we doin’ on this show. . . . If you see a house negro, deal with them appropriately, call them out, do not allow these people to continue to sell us out.”

Although Samuels was outraged enough by Hodges’s threat to file a city civil rights complaint that’s still pending, it’s telling that he now speaks as if the static is the birth pangs of a new black leadership: “That is the result of, I think, visionary leadership. Then eventually other people come along as they begin to see. I have to keep speaking out because based on what I’ve observed over the years what’s happening is not working.”