This past Thursday I headed uptown to sit on an amazing panel hosted by Harlem World magazine and moderated by Troy Johnson of the African American Literary Book Club (www.AALBC.com). Panelists included Flores Forbes (author of Will You Die With Me?), and my amazing editor Malaika Adero. We gathered at Tribal Spears in Harlem to celebrate the recent Up South Festival, which Malaika founded and organized. http://www.upsouthinternationalbookfestival.com/

The panel discussion very quickly turned into a conversation that included the voices of nearly everyone in attendance. And instead of talking books, we shared ideas and opinions on the gulf between the Civil Rights generation and the Hip Hop generation (see my ?Letter to Angela Davis? on my ?Articles and Essays? page for my thoughts on that), the grass roots vs. the net roots, Black leadership and Black institutions. We also discussed the 50 shots fired by the NYPD that killed unarmed brother Sean Bell the night before his wedding. Sister Rashidah Ismaili joined us on the Tribal Spears sofa to share her decades-worth of wisdom gained from a lifetime of participation in activism and art.

I suggested that it might be time to move away from individual, charismatic leadership and focus instead on the community, the folk. We all, it seems to me, have to be the leadership that insists ? that insures ? that incidents like the one in Queens never happen again. I also wondered if the Internet would be the place for strategy sessions and consciousness-raising in the future. Sister Rashidah gently corrected me, telling us all that nothing, no machine, would ever replace human interaction. As I nodded my head in agreement with her, I looked around and realized we were building institution ? the institution of ideas ? right there at Tribal Spears, in the village of Harlem.