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Black women’s self-defined leadership. Such organizations as Community Coalition in Los
Angeles, founded by Karen Bass, incorporate the core elements of Black women’s leadership.
Founded in 1990, the Coalition was born out of a two-day conference of Los Angeles area
activists who sought to address the crisis at its roots – social and economic inequality. Since its
founding, the Coalition has grown to address a broad range of issues, employing a model of
leadership and agenda for transformation that is consistent with radical organizing principles. In
1999, Community Coalition, a membership organization comprised of community members
from South Los Angeles, worked to organize and mobilize high school students
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to protest the
conditions of inner-city schools and the disparities between public schools attended by Black and
Latino students and those with a majority White student population. Rather than following
traditional methods of leadership where power rests with a single leader and methods are limited
to electoral participation and lobbying, Bass worked within the community, encouraging students
to recognize their own oppression, form a coalition, and participate in outside agitation which
eventually led to the allocation of $2.4 billion in additional funding for schools in impoverished
neighborhoods with the passage of Proposition BB (Community Coalition 2002).
Community Coalition serves as an ideal case study for this research in that it was initiated by
Karen Bass, an African American woman more than a decade ago and she continues to serve as
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High school students from South Central Los Angeles serve as what is perhaps Community
Coalition’s most active and visible project – South Central Youth Empowered through Action.
The mission of the project is to “recruit and train high school students to become the next
generation of leaders.” (Community Coalition. 2002.) This sort of organizing where groups are
empowered to address their own oppressions and leadership is shared inherit the organizing
principles utilized by Ella Baker, Lugenia Hope and early African-American women’s leaders.
Convention