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TransAfrica's New Leaders Seek Coalitions

By Todd Steven Burroughs
NNPA National Correspondent

WASHINGTON (NNPA)-Just as Africans are learning that they can't operate in isolation, Black America needs to give international issues the same attention they give to the domestic agenda, the new president of TransAfrica says.

"When we think about our lobby, our best lobby is Black America," says William Fletcher, who becomes the group's president on Jan. 14. 

"Many Black organizations have organized almost exclusively on domestic issues," he says, calling it a mistake because issues such as AIDS in Africa also hit close to home. "We need to be on the streets, in the boardrooms and on Capitol Hill to address these issues."

The 25-ytear-old TransAfrica will target Black America's mainstream-the middle class, the working poor and those who want to work toward a more humane American policy toward an embattled Africa. 

It also hopes to tap into the energy and activism of college students through campus tours that would focus on African economic development and human rights.

Randall Robinson, the charismatic Harvard law graduate who founded TransAfrica in 1976, retired as president in October. He remains on the organization's board of directors. Danny Glover, the activist-actor best known for the "Lethal Weapon" series of movies, is now board chairman.

Glover, a board member for three years, says a more visible TransAfrica will reinvigorate those human rights activists already fighting for Africa, but in the political margins. 

He believes that putting forth TransAfrica's case in these new arenas will bring about needed dialogue in the nation's body politic. "This may be naïve, but we have to make the argument," says Glover.

He says, for example, that sponsoring more forums-as the group has done with the Africana Studies Department of New York University and UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization)-will educate more people about how they can help. Such discussions will help TransAfrica to cultivate relationships with broader groups.

Their most obvious challenge is successfully following Robinson, who, through his high profile, helped lead the anti-apartheid movement in the 1980s, the fight for American intervention in Haiti in the 1990s, and now the argument for reparations for the descendents of enslaved Africans.

Some view TransAfrica's transition as rare in civil rights circles, where 1960s-era leaders usually stay in their posts far longer.

Mel Foote, president and CEO of Constituency for Africa, another advocacy group, was happily surprised by Fletcher's appointment. 

"All these Black organizations have no succession plan to current leaders," he claims. "Randall has big shoes....Randall and TransAfrica go hand-in-hand."

But Fletcher is to the job of building an institution instead of becoming a personality, says Salih Booker, executive director of the advocacy group Africa Action and a former Trans-Africa staffer.

"I think it's a good development that, in the case of TransAfrica, it chose a bright and committed activist and analyst to lead the way during a period of growth," he says. "I think Bill's someone with a global view and an understanding of where Africa fits in with the rest of the world."

Fletcher, 47, a longtime labor leader who left the vice presidency of the George Meaney Center/National Labor College for his new position, knows he can't duplicate Robinson's style as he enters into the small circle of Africa policy lobbyists such as Booker and Foote. "I'm not trying to fill Robinson's shoes," he says.

His role, he says, is to be a coalition-builder among social justice groups, turning TransAfrica into a center for organizing. "I'm not interested in paper coalitions," says Fletcher. "I'm not interested in coalitions to get together for a press conference."  

Fletcher's appointment is another opportunity to converge his life's experiences of race and class. 

The great-grandson of William Stanley Braithwaite-a prominent poet of the Harlem Renaissance era, the crucible of Black artistic expression between the end of World War I in 1919 and the beginning of the Great Depression in 1929-Fletcher grew up amid family discussions about how race and class fit on the world stage. He was a Black Power-era student activist in high school before studying at Harvard's African American Studies Department under labor leader Ewart Guinier-the father of Lani Guinier, President Clinton's unsuccessful choice for assistant attorney general for civil rights. 

A former assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney and the group's education director, Fletcher says he's learned in the labor movement that there are several organizations that would welcome another partner in working to improve the economic condition of people of color.

Fletcher's appointment comes during a conservative resurgence in the nation. Battling an economic recession, America's international focus is dominated by talk of terrorism and corporate mega-mergers instead of development of Africa, the Caribbean and Latin America.

Linda Faye Williams, a political science professor at the University of Maryland at College Park, says she hopes Fletcher succeeds-particularly at raising money-in such times. 

"Corporate America is already global," she says. She hopes progressives will financially respond to TransAfrica's continuing work.

Booker of Africa Action says he hopes that Fletcher and Glover will push TransAfrica back out front. He points out that in recent years, as Robinson focused on book writing, the group-which has a multi-million-dollar headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C. but a national staff of under 10-stopped publishing reports and publications and only holds public policy forums a few times a year. 

"It's a common problem in the African-American community: building institutions instead of promoting leaders," he says. At TransAfrica, he says, "institutional development has lagged behind." 

Fletcher and Glover say they know they have to expand both their seven-member national board and their staff to fit their new goals. The hope their work will reflects a new sense of urgency, one fueled by the AIDS epidemic, hunger and other social ills in Africa and the Diaspora. 

Says Fletcher: "If we shut our own eyes to the atrocities and oppression happening oversees, we do so at our own peril...I don't know if I'll succeed, but this is what is necessary." 
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