Aging & Wisdom Quote by H. Rap Brown

Borrowing the authority of an unnamed "old African leader", H. Rap Brown pulls off a double move: he wraps his demand in ancestral gravitas while also sidestepping the American expectation that Black radicalism must sound polite, procedural, and grateful. The line is built to provoke. "Leadership should never be shared" is a deliberate affront to liberal pluralism and its favorite word: coalition. Brown is arguing that when power gets "shared" with those who already have it, the dispossessed don’t gain leadership; they gain a committee seat.

The subtext is about control of agenda, not just symbolism. Brown is speaking from a moment when Black freedom politics were splintering between integrationist strategies and emergent Black Power insistence on self-determination. In that climate, "shared leadership" could read as a trap: white patrons, mainstream institutions, and even well-meaning allies setting the terms, rationing resources, and moderating demands until the movement becomes legible to the status quo.

Notice the rhetorical pivot from proverb to vow. He starts with reported wisdom and ends with a clenched-fist declaration: "We will lead the revolution". That "we" is doing boundary work. It names the dispossessed as the only legitimate authors of liberation and casts everyone else as, at best, secondary. The intent isn’t to win a seminar debate; it’s to harden collective identity, preempt co-optation, and justify militancy as self-defense against a system that treats shared power as an aesthetic rather than a material transfer.