Describing his early childhood as a poverty, within a poverty, Haki Madubuti founder and publisher of Third World Press and professor of English at Chicago State University recently delivered a keynote address at Columbia University in New York entitled, "Where Are Our Leaders Towards a New Realm of Leadership?"

Madubuti said his father's departure caused his mother to support him and his sister. According to Madubuti this also led his mother to use hard drugs and alcohol, and a life of prostitution. She died from a drug overdose before he was 16 years old.

My story is not unusual in the context of growing up in America," said Madubuti, who felt a sense of relief at his mother's funeral because he had grown weary of observing her spiral into self destruction. With his sister unwed and the mother of three by the age of 20, Madubuti said he felt as if he were being torn apart from the inside.

It was not until he read Black Boy, the autobiography of Richard Wright, did Madubuti feel a foundation forming for his intellectual development.

"It was the first time I read words that didn't insult me," said Madubuti.

However, it was not until Madubuti, enrolled in the U.S. Army at the age of 17, and had a book by Paul Robeson torn to shreds by a drill sergeant who shouted, "What is your Negro behind doing reading that Black communist?" that he decided the course of his future.

"I would never again apologize for being Black ... never again put myself in a cultural or intellectual setting where people outside of my culture knew more about me than myself, and if ideas were that powerful to make a drill sergeant act so violently then I was getting into the idea business. I learned early that we all tap dance to someone's idea," said Madubuti. He described the two years and 10 months that he spent in the U.S. Army as his undergraduate preparation for his career as an "activist for life."

The challenge, according to Madubuti, is for African-Americans to discover a "way to neutralize oppression and racism without becoming racist and oppressive ourselves."

While Madubuti believes that the 1960's were a critical period in American history that changed the course of the country for the better, Black leaders then and Black leaders today know protest methods need to change to improve their effectiveness.

"We marched, boycotted did everything we could do; we weren't reacting enough," said Madubuti. "We decided to start to build institutions that all peoples of power had; internal and individual building, as well as external cultural building," he said.

To emphasize his point, Madubuti used examples from his own life.

The first involved a plastic airplane that his mother had bought him during his childhood which only rolled on the ground. After accompanying his mother to the home of a white upper-middle class family for whom she worked as a housekeeper, Madubuti wandered into one of the children's room where he saw a model airplane that required assembly and actually flew.

"Here I was happy with this cheap plastic plane that didn't even fly, while this white child was learning about science and physics while putting his plane together by himself or with his parents," said Madubuti. "Blacks are being taught to buy in this world, while whites are taught to build and run it."

Fearing that white publishers would not publish his work because of its criticism of whites, Madubuti decided to start his own publishing company. Part of the problem in African-American leadership lies in the fact that people are waiting to be led, said Madubuti.

"We are defined today as people that follow," he said. "Before doing what I say - see what I do. One of the problems in our community is that talk is cheap. Leadership must have some history of doing good work," Madubuti added. However, he does not consider himself a leader in the traditional sense.

"I'm not looking for a following," he said. "What has always been important to me is production."