Becoming the Leaders We’ve Been Waiting For

Princeton scholar and author Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., recently delivered an unflinching yet deeply hopeful message during an event hosted by the Indianapolis Foundation (IF) at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. 

During the event Forward Movement: A Conversation with Dr. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., he rooted today’s challenges in what he called “the gap at the moment of creation” — the distance between America’s founding ideals and its lived reality. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” he reminded the audience, quoting the Declaration of Independence, “that all men are created equal.” And yet, he noted, these promises were “contested far over blood spilt in the name of them.”

That gap, Glaude argued, has never been fully reconciled. “We have witnessed over the last 40 years the disintegration of any robust sense of the public good,” he said. “We are awash in greed and selfishness … festering in cesspools of grievances and hatreds and fear.”

In the vein of his recent book, We Are the Leaders We Have Been Looking For, Glaude invited Indianapolis residents to imagine a new path — one that begins not in Washington, D.C., or in the hands of charismatic leaders, but in the everyday practices of ordinary people who choose to live differently.

“If we’re honest,” he said, “we have to admit that we’ve been in this battle since the founding.” He invoked Frederick Douglass’s description of racism as “that horrible reptile coiled up in the nation’s bosom,” still blocking the way to what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called the Beloved Community.

The Forward Movement event also included remarks by Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett; IF President and CEO Ahmed Young; IF Vice President of Equity and Policy Leigh Riley Evans; and IF Chief Equity and Innovation Officer Dr. Michael R. Twyman. Joy Mason, founder of Optimist Business Solutions, served as emcee and Ebony Chappel, director of brand and community strategy for Free Press Indiana, engaged Glaude in a conversation following his speech.

Embracing a Transformative Solution

To move forward, Glaude looked to the legacy of Ella Baker, the civil rights strategist whose work shaped the modern freedom movement. She believed that true change arises when people discover their own power. Baker, he said, understood that “what America needed most was the development of people.” She challenged the idea that progress rests on a single heroic figure. Instead, she insisted that ordinary people “grow into being responsible for carrying out a program”... seeing themselves not as bystanders, but agents of transformation.

Glaude echoed her conviction: “We are the leaders we’ve been looking for.” The challenge, he said, is to cultivate the habits, imagination, and courage required to sustain democratic life.

This charge aligns directly with the Indianapolis Foundation’s work to strengthen community leadership by investing in systems that shape daily life—housing, economic mobility, health and environmental well-being. Across these areas, the foundation supports local leaders, grassroots organizations and residents who are building solutions rooted in lived experience and local wisdom.

This is also where the Indianapolis Foundation’s Forward Movement platform enters the story. Designed as a digital learning tool, the app helps residents understand the long arc of racism and inequality through local history, while offering clear pathways for engagement and action.

Glaude praised the initiative, calling it “a digital learning platform that helps everyday people understand the workings of racism … purposeful in its aims to cultivate informed action and engagement.” According to Glaude, Forward Movement represents the kind of civic infrastructure communities need to strengthen their moral muscle. “You shift the narrative, you build capacity,” he said, “and you offer a way for the city to embark upon a different pathway.”

Together with its equity-focused investments, Forward Movement represents the Indianapolis Foundation’s long-term commitment to help residents step into their own leadership — standing up, speaking out and shaping a more thriving city for all.

The stakes, he argued, could not be higher. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” he warned, quoting James Baldwin, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” In an era where “non-democratic forces threaten the very foundations of our democracy,” Glaude said now is the time for “courageous action, bold and innovative engagement, and affirmation in word and deed of the power of everyday, ordinary people.”

He urged the audience to refuse conformity to injustice, what King called the work of the “creative nonconformist.” 

“We must say, ‘No,’” Glaude said, “to those who long for the days of the nineteenth century’s explicit empire …  No to those who believe that ours must always be a white Republic.”

Investing in Change

The work ahead, he reminded Indianapolis, must begin “close to the ground” … in neighborhoods, schools, congregations, workplaces and everyday choices. True democratic renewal, he said, is a matter not just of policy but of practice: listening, tending, showing up, imagining new possibilities and reaching for a higher self.

“If this country is to be saved,” Glaude said, “we’re going to have to choose to be better people, to become the kinds of people that democracy requires … to finally live into the promise of America.”

In Indianapolis, the tools, the will, and the people are here. What remains is the courageous choice to lead, Glaude said. “Everyday, ordinary people have the power to change the world,” he said.