.png)
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a focal point for historical coverage of Black movement organizing in the mid-20th century–so much so that histories often denote pre- and post-King eras. His recent birthday, and memorialized holiday, calls to mind the lineage of Black male organizers who co-led organizations and mobilizations–from Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line, to James Boggs’ organizing work in Detroit, to Boston’s own Mel King and Chuck Turner, instrumental presences across a bevy of liberation struggles.
In the present-day, Black men are still organizing, often within leaderful paradigms which prioritize gender-inclusivity and feminist politics. They have a pivotal role to play in Black communities and polities building real, massive, freeing power for us all. Black Men Build, founded in 2020, is just one example of an organization led by Black men that is seeding healthy masculinity, liberatory narrative and culture, and knowledge production across their eight hubs nationwide. The organization calls on familiar ancestors, naming themselves the “Sons of Harriet who have returned” and laying out a Pan-Africanist approach to Black freedom in line with Walter Rodney, WEB Du Bois, Ella Baker, Malcolm X, and the Republic of New Afrika.
Embracing an approach to membership that entails “coming as we are and growing as we go,” Black Men Build does not leave brothers behind in its anticolonial, anti-imperial, antifascist, anticapitalist, pro-Black initiatives that seek ways to live in right relationship with the world; and they take seriously a feminist politics of deep, non-liberal healing that seeks to redress harm within Black communities alongside external factors that harm Black men, specifically. Their five core values and nine bars (akin to the Panther’s Ten-Point Program) lay out their principles and goals succinctly, inviting brothers into their work while making clear what the work is in front of us.
Alula Hunsen, Ujima’s Editorial Manager, was able to speak with two member/leaders of the organization: Brent Maximin, organizer for Black Men Build’s New York City hub and a member of the political education team for the national organization; and Ekundayo Igeleke, Director of Political Education and Culture as well as Political Education Chair of the Columbus, OH hub. Maximin and Igeleke dig deep on not leaving brothers behind, building up revolutionary culture, and supporting healthy and transformative masculinities in Black movement work.
How would you describe what it is that you do and take on at Black Men Build? What are your programs, what’s your structure?
Brent Maximin: We are a national, grassroots, membership based, power-building organization; we engage Black men and provide Black men and their families the tools that they need to transform themselves and transform their communities. We were partly founded through answering a call made by sisters within the movement, saying that brothers could be doing more to organize themselves. It felt like we were losing Black men, where they were not engaged or did not feel like they could engage in liberatory work, and we needed to halt that slide. So we were founded to bring Black men into the movement for Black liberation. Our goal is to be the largest power-building organization for Black men.
Ekundayo Igeleke: The bedrock of our programming is our men's circles; it’s the one program across our different hubs that we reserve exclusively for Black men. It's a healing space for Black men to share, to listen, to learn, and to grow, because we have so few of those spaces. We also learn together, provide political education, and produce political analysis: nationally, we do our Theory Thursday program, which is twice a month. We do mass calls once a month; and locally, political education is happening, too.
We do mutual aid work, alongside other survival programs–even though we're not a service organization–with the goal of raising contradictions as we support one another materially. I always say that it's hard to talk to a brother about organizing or power mapping or about what George Jackson wrote when he was behind bars, if that brother's hungry, right? Or if that brother needs material resources. So we help meet those needs as an organizing tool, and we are building capacity towards running campaigns as well.
We have women's circles, too; one of the things that our hubs are very clear on is that while we're organizing Black men, we don't believe that this is solely our work. So Black women and gender-expansive folks are a part of our organizing communities, and this shows up in our leadership and our programs. All of our programs, besides the men’s circles, are open to all people that can consider themselves African people or in solidarity with African people.
In engaging Black men, we are always thinking about breadth. We intentionally cast a pretty wide net, which means that we're trying to reach people who may have been considered apolitical or more spiritual brothers, from Five Percenters to religious liberals. We're reaching brothers behind the wall and brothers with PhDs; and part of our political foundation is centering the practice of Black August, which is understanding that there is tremendous power, intellect, and strategy that comes out of the prison movement. Black August is one legacy within the range of the Black Radical Tradition we operate from, in addition to our own inventiveness.
What brought you both into organizing with Black Men Build?
EI: Prior to Black Men Build, I’d been part of a variety of organizing efforts locally and nationally. Before Black Men Build launched, myself and James Hayes—an Ohio organizer and a co-founder of Black Men Build—were finding ourselves in a somewhat precarious situation as Black men during the Black Lives Matter movement, and seeing that we were, in many cases for many years, the only Black heterosexual men in movement spaces as it related to the Movement for Black Lives. We had become some of the few Black men who were trusted or considered safe in those spaces.That led us to think that perhaps brothers weren’t engaging or felt they couldn’t engage–the pendulum had swung too far, from ever-present Black male leadership in movements to none at all. So, prior to the pandemic, we had a few gatherings amongst brothers who did some form of movement work just to break bread and check in. There wasn’t necessarily a purpose or a political vision of that group, it was just to gather and see where it took us. The pandemic started shortly after, and Black Men Build was in the throes of being launched, so we moved those efforts into this formation.
BM: I had been in and around movement spaces, but was not a full- or part-time organizer before Black Men Build. I heard about Black Men Build because I worked with one of our co-founders, Phil Agnew–who is now one of our co-directors–as student organizers in Florida. I trusted his politics and analysis; and like Ekundayo, I was looking for a political home. I’ve found that many “left” spaces do not center or prioritize the material needs of Black people in this country–including organizations and spaces whose analysis and work I respect–so I didn't see my people there, because there was not any intention behind organizing my people. So yeah, Black Men Build found me, or we found each other, and it became my political home.
I'm hearing a few references to Black Men Build’s hub model–would you mind speaking a bit more to how those hubs operate in and amongst each other?
EI: Sure. Right now we have eight hubs, with many more budding. On the east coast, we have New York (with budding development in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New Jersey). In the south we have hubs in Atlanta and Miami (with development happening in Texas and North Carolina). In the Midwest: Columbus, Detroit, St. Louis, and Milwaukee. On the West Coast, just Los Angeles (with building energy in Oakland and other places). Our hubs are where the organizing happens, while our national entity helps shape the vision and direction; but our staff organizers in each hub are not separate from the national entity, and decisions are made as a collective.
BM: I want to double down in saying that hubs are not franchises of the national organization: it’s more like we’re a system of conversant and linked mushrooms, if you will.
EI: We work interdependently, with hubs feeding off each other while also remaining responsive to local conditions. Sometimes there's a strategy that may be working well in, say, St. Louis, so we’ll deploy similar tactics elsewhere. Still, the hubs need to operate based on the circumstance of their local communities, local politics, and local cultures. There’s a lot of overlap across hubs–missions are shared, and some programs are held up to share standards (how we facilitate men's circles, for example).
BM: The survival programs we run (from self-defense and boxing to mutual aid) are grounded in the specifics of the community we're in. Some hubs are able to do firearm training, for instance; that's not accessible to us in New York, so we run boxing and self-defense classes twice a month. Columbus may have access to, say, a community garden where members can learn directly how to work the land with their hands.
EI: Hubs are also shaped by their local histories: for example, New York has more revolutionary history and more revolutionary formations, so politically they may be more advanced than somewhere where there isn't a legacy of revolution or a legacy of revolutionary struggle, where there aren’t current organizations that represent that. Meanwhile, Columbus has a particular leadership class of bourgeois Black identity–we have a Black city council, Black police chief and assistant police chief, Black school board, Black arts organizations, so there's a sense of liberal progress, but less revolutionary formations to partner with. Each hub has their circumstances and situations from which they organize.
I'm curious how you all approach building cultural strategy, building narratives. I know Black Men Build publishes a magazine called Wartime which is part of it, but it sounds like there’s also a lot of interpersonal and cultural work that's happening in these hubs.
EI: Wartime highlights and clarifies that we as Black people are at war, that we are still under the assault of genocide. We Charge Genocide came out in 1951, drafted by the Civil Rights Congress [a Black-led organization formed from the merger of three Communist Party-linked liberation organizations in 1946 which fought for civil liberties and legal defense of movement radicals], and it was a means to petition and make such a case to the UN as a body; we see Wartime within this paradigm as a publication. There's a long history of radical literature, revolutionary literature that we are a part of.
So we use Wartime in a variety of ways; it’s a tool, a literary and narrative device, but it’s also a means to share information that can reach people who aren’t in academic spaces, people who may not be hyper-literate. We want a high school student to be able to pick up Wartime and understand it without us dumbing down information; so we stick to prose and poetry and limit pieces to 800-1000 word essays to keep it short-form–Wartime is an entry point, but not the full story.
It's an intentionally beautiful product: one of our ways to engage in a battle of ideas is through the images we use, right? Black people need to see themselves, and we demonstrate ourselves in the magazine by showing the broad spectrum of Black maleness–from brothers with flowers in their hair and gold teeth to hood n*ggas hugging their kids.
And it’s also an organizing tool; each issue has a section which reports from the field on the issue’s theme, and we pull quotes from members who’ve engaged our work…brothers will give testimony saying that Wartime brought them into Black Men Build’s fold, and that Black Men Build saved their lives. We don't take that lightly.
Another important aspect of our culture is letter-writing; we build relationships with incarcerated folks through letter-writing workshops, which we prioritize during Black August. It’s something of a lost art, but it’s the only way many behind the walls are able to get their stories out–for instance, George Jackson’s first book is composed of letters from his time as a political prisoner.
Our mass calls help to build internal or organizational culture: we start with a section called, “Who do you love?,” bringing the revolutionary power of love from Che Guevara to the call, and we often invite people onto the call who share artistic, creative, or intellectual pursuits that contribute to our cultural understanding while learning about a particular type of politics.
We also have hosted open mics; in New York they’ve done hip hop workshops and rap ciphers and in Columbus, we hold a film series, all appealing ways to keep people engaged through culture. We lean into the many ways that African people, Black people are attuned to engaging.
What is possible in building healthy and productive masculinities that work in harmony with the world around us, with the movements around us?
BM: We start with where we're at as men, but in our values, we see we are bonded with Black women and all Black people in the fight for true freedom. So we’re hoping to eventually build a united front, with many organizations that are rooted in some commonalities that we can organize people around.
As Black men, we know patriarchy is a poison, right. We know patriarchy is a barrier to liberation, that our people will never be free if we try to get free by repeating or mimicking unhealthy models of manhood and masculinity that have been forced upon us by the colonizers.
A vision of manhood that is not based in domination, not based in hoarding resources, not based in seeing our value in terms of what we can produce, that steps away from the colonial, capitalist view of masculinity, allows us to work towards liberation. The healing we work through is not a liberal healing for healing's sake. It's not “rest is revolutionary” nonsense; rest is a need, but resting itself is not revolutionary. Healing is a need, but healing itself is not revolutionary. We are healing so we can get to work. You can't fight beside me if you think that you should be able to dominate or abuse or put down a woman or a gender-nonconforming person because of the biological circumstance of your birth.
So I need us to heal and unlearn so we can build a new world. Breaking down that barrier, doing that unlearning, and creating something new is critical. We can’t be revolutionary, like Kwame Ture says, if all we talk about is destroy, destroy, destroy.
The phrasing we've been using, the theme of a tour we did this summer, is that New Men Must Be Born (drawn from a poem by Phil Agnew). That is intentional–it's not called, “Old Men Must Be Destroyed,” because we are building a positive vision for masculinity as much as we are focused on challenging and unlearning. As the saying goes, we're not going to get free by using the master's tools. We're not trying to get a seat at the table. We don't think the table should exist. We're trying to break that table down, and use the pieces to build a ladder or a bridge. That's the only way that we get to where we need to go.
I would love to hear who your partners and peers are: folks you're rubbing shoulders with in this work.
BM: We have some national partners, as well as some partnerships and coalitions that our hubs work with on the ground; we have relationships across a few of our hubs with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, with Black Alliance for Peace, and nationally we’ve partnered with the National African American Gun Association. Beyond this, we take the organizing approach of no permanent allies, no permanent enemies, so we are in coalition and in partnership with other orgs and partners around specific issues, building deeper relationships in a united front against fascism, for instance. We also work with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement and People’s Forum, and we’re a part of the Shut It Down Coalition.
EI: We’ve worked with and continue to support individuals as well: Dhoruba Bin Wahad and Jalil Muntaqim, who were political prisoners; and Dr. Jared Ball and Dr. Trevor Lindsay are consistent collaborators as well.
What’s one thorn or challenge: maybe something you are working towards remedying, or a difficulty you’re running into with implementing your strategies?
EI: The conditions of being in this particular stage of capitalism makes it difficult as a worker to battle between showing up for yourself and your family, while staying engaged in struggle. The project of organizing Black men in itself is hard, because many movements have abandoned or not prioritized brothers.
We're also trying to make sure we don’t fall into the trap of just organizing one group of lower middle-class brothers, that we’re including brothers who have not been organized en masse since the Black Panther party. We’re always thinking about the brothers that are extremely marginalized, of all the brothers, sisters, and siblings of our gender-expansive family which have been pushed to the fringes of society.
A unique challenge for Black Men Build is that we are up against the manosphere. There are many Black men feeling powerless, and they feel that their masculinity is the pathway to finding their power–this doesn’t mean violence or toxicity necessarily, but there’s a limitation that this places on the imagination of how to be free individually, and it leads to folks showing up in non-transformative ways of being. Working against this is a task for us: we see our young people, Black boys and men are being seduced by it pretty heavily.
So that’s what lies ahead. How can folks support and jump into the struggle with you all?
BM: If you're in one of our eight cities with hubs, tap in! Each hub is active, has its own pages on social media, and has organizers on the ground–tap in there, somebody will find a way for you to get involved. We need everybody: we need educators, we need warriors, we need fighters, we need lawyers, we need builders, we need healers. We need brothers who may have nothing but time who want to join this fight. You can also tap into one of our national virtual programs; we have Theory Thursdays twice a month.
EI: Every other month we host a national orientation, as well, if folks want to learn more about our work in a structural format.
BM: If you're not in one of those cities, help us build a hub. In New York and Columbus, what's somewhat unique about our hubs is that we were not part of the launch of Black Men Build. Ekundayo and Ernest Levert Jr helped build the hub in Columbus, and I helped build my hub in New York because we believe in Black Men Build’s Mission. We gathered brothers and sisters around us to make this happen, and this kind of development is in progress in Baltimore, Orlando, Philly, and Raleigh, North Carolina–if there's not a hub in your city, we’ll help you build one.
Monetary support always helps, we need that, too <laughs>. It’s not the way to freedom, but it helps keep the lights on in our hubs, it helps us support our survival programs.
EI: Good general practice for raising money for movement work that also applies if folks want to support us: it's best to not just donate once, but, reoccurring. That way, organizations are not left in precarious situations with their funding. The more donations that we have, the more members we have that pay dues, the less we have to depend on the nonprofit industrial complex and grants for revolutionary work. Money and resources are crucial to be self-determined in the directions we take. We're growing pretty rapidly, and as Brent mentioned there are hubs developing which require staff and consistent funding, so it’s important.
BM: We have our field interest form on our website, if you are willing and able to do more; we’ll find a way for you to contribute.
Ekundayo Igeleke (he/him) was born to Nigerian and southern Baptist parents. He is a popular educator, writer, photographer, scholar, national strategist, and grassroots organizer with over ten years of experience in these areas. He currently is the Director of Education and Culture with Black Men Build, founder of Culture Dream Lab, and a PhD Candidate in Comparative Studies and Black Studies at The Ohio State University. He serves as a member of the Maroon Arts Group and The Party for Socialism and Liberation. When he is not in radical action, he spends time with his family and village, watches anime and basketball, practices yoga, enjoys a variety of community arts, and reads 3-4 books at a time.
Brent Maximin (he/him) is an educator, researcher, and community organizer born and raised in Belmont, Trinidad & Tobago, and based in New York City. Dr. Maximin is currently a Doctoral Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at The City College of New York, and an organizer with Black Men Build NYC.