Planned Failure

This chapter uncovers George Schuyler and Ella Baker’s Young Negroes’ Cooperative League, founded in Harlem in 1930, reaching the West Indies by 1931 with over three hundred members. It reveals Baker and Schuyler to be far more radical than thought. They were anarchic, both interrogating the basic legitimacy of the state. Reading manifestos, pamphlets, conference brochures, Schuyler’s serial novel, letters, Baker’s unpublished essays, and more, the chapter theorizes a practice of activism it calls “planned failure.” Reversing the notion that black social movements have been failed plans, planned failure designates the intended demise of the original plan under the assumption that to maintain the form of the organization is necessarily to reinforce intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, and class one sought to escape. Planned failure registers Baker’s and Schuyler’s anarchic suspicion of centralized planning and their wish to redefine the Black public sphere around self-governing enclaves, instead of charismatic leaders. Finally, by illuminating the roles comedy and the ecstatics played in Baker’s and Schuyler’s activism, the chapter contests tragedy as the dominant frame through which to read black social movements.