When Institutions Fail, Build Your Own
Black History’s Blueprint for Surviving Authoritarianism
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This is the third article in a Black History Month series called, “How Black History Teaches Us to Resist Authoritarianism.” Read part one. Read part two. Come back next week for part four.
Our institutions are failing us.
From corporations to the courts, to the church, and beyond. Distrusting institutions is not only understandable, it is a reasonable precaution against exploitation.
The people entrusted with position and power through institutions have covered up or committed sexual abuse. They have quashed programs meant to bring racial equity in the workplace. They have pandered to the wealthy instead of serving the most vulnerable.
Throughout U.S. history, Black people have been repeatedly betrayed by institutions. Yet studying the past shows us that they did not abandon institutions altogether.
They built better ones.
In the struggle against authoritarianism, Black history teaches us to build independent institutions.
Don't Start with 1930s Germany
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Building Black Institutions
Charles Hamilton Houston may not be well-known today, but he was instrumental in helping to bring down the legal architecture of Jim Crow segregation.1
Houston graduated Amherst College as a valedictorian. He joined the US Army where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant and served in France and Germany during World War I.
African Americans like Houston faced racism the military and constantly bore humiliations from the white soldiers. This treatment both incensed and inspired Houston.
He reflected, “I made up my mind that I would never get caught again without knowing something about my rights, and . . . I would study law and use my time fighting for men who couldn’t strike back.”
Thus began an illustrious career as a lawyer.
Houston enrolled in Harvard Law School where he became the first Black person to serve on the editorial board of the Harvard Law Review.
After graduation he taught at Howard Law School, a historically Black college. HBCUs are themselves examples of Black institution building. They were started to educate Black people when predominantly white institutions (PWIs) refused to admit them.
Houston transformed Howard Law School from a part-time, unaccredited night program into a highly respected institution accredited by the American Bar Association.
Houston’s leadership helped position Howard as the destination school for Black lawyers. At one point, Howard Law trained up to 25 percent of all Black lawyers in the nation.
Houston crafted his classroom on the basis that lawyers should be “social engineers.” By which he meant, lawyers must use the law to shape a better society for the marginalized, not just for personal gain.
He devoted all his prodigious talents to laying the groundwork for legal challenges to segregation and racial inequality. He ensured this impulse would continue through the institution he equally invested of Howard Law School.
Black people built independent institutions not because they did not want to associate with white people but because white people did not want to associate with them.
Instead of abandoning institutions, Black people built their own.
Why Authoritarians Fear Narrative Resistance
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Why We Need Independent Institutions
Despite their shortcomings, institutions—at their best—still provide essential resources for resisting authoritarianism and shaping life together for good.
Institutions centralize resources, shape culture and identity, and create enduring legacies.
While select individuals can accumulate massive wealth and resources, this is inefficient and unhealthy both for individuals or society.
Institutions can gather and consolidate resources better than individuals. Churches, for example, can take up offerings from hundreds of people and then distribute them to others individuals and organizations where they will be most effective.
Institutions can draw on a far larger network of contributors and then organize those resources through the mechanisms of the institutions more effectively than individuals.
In the fight against authoritarianism, we will need institutions that can mobilize financial and people resources quickly and deploy them in responsible ways.
Institutions also shape culture and identity.
In essence, institutions can say to their members, “This is who we are, and this is what we do.”
When you become a member of an institution, its practices, policies, and human connections form a culture that can strengthen healthy habits and discourage unhelpful ones.
When I served as a middle school principal, we started every week with a “team and family meeting.”
While I used these meetings for important announcements, their most important function was to remind us of the character we were cultivating and the type of people we wanted to become.
That’s how institutions can serve as shapers of culture and identity.
Instituions create enduring legacies.
We build institutions so they last beyond the tenure or lifetime of an individual.
Carter G. Woodson founded the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. It became the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and the institution endures to this day as the steward of Black History Month.
In building these generational legacies, institutional memory is also built--an organizational muscle memory for lessons learned and how to conduct.
Institutions save us from repeating past mistakes and from wasting time devising systems when effective ones already exist.
Why Effective Institutions Foster Hope
Have you ever noticed how the inner voice that says, “We are powerless. This will never work,” gets louder when you feel alone?
That’s because loneliness and isolation amplify despair. Community, partnership, and action are the antidote.
Hope is a group project.
Building independent institutions is about more than mechanics. It’s also about hope.
Institutions bring people together on a shared mission. We learn from from one another.
Hope becomes durable when it’s shared, resourced, and organized.
Authoritarians despise independent institutions because they cannot be easily controlled.
And the most potent challenge an independent institution poses to authoritarianism is their ability to cultivate hope that change is possible.
Coming Up…
Next week, we’ll talk about how Black people engaged a political system that repeatedly sought to oppress them. Even when the system excluded them, beat them, jailed them, and mocked their demands, Black communities refused either naïveté or withdrawal. They built alternative political formations and kept resisting even when the cost was blood.
This is not a story about blind faith in democracy. It is about disciplined engagement without illusion, and about participating in the political system because abandoning it would guarantee something worse. Democracy survives only when people organize to protect it.
ACLU- I can’t imagine where we would be without it.
The public school system.
And the PTA… not sure if all schools still maintain this avenue for engagement and investment in the future.
So much distrust right now.