By Bankole Thompson
When I stood before the mourners gathered on Aug. 25 at Empowerment Church in Southfield, Michigan, to deliver the eulogy for Dr. William G. Anderson, the 98-year-old civil rights giant who had worked alongside Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I invoked an image that has remained with me since that consequential moment: the Empty Chair.
I developed the metaphor to describe something larger than the historical absence I was invoking that day. I wanted to give language to a condition I had encountered repeatedly over decades of interpreting public life as a journalist and public intellectual.
The Empty Chair did not begin at Anderson’s funeral. It arrived there.
For me, it represented the culmination of years spent examining poverty, race, economic power, corporate responsibility, democracy and human dignity and repeatedly encountering people whose lives were being determined by conversations in which they had no meaningful voice.
They were present in the consequences but absent from the deliberations. Eventually, that absence needed a name. At Anderson’s funeral, I gave it one: the Empty Chair.
Journalism Must Interpret
That progression matters because I have never believed that the highest function of journalism is merely to record what happened. Facts are foundational. Verification is indispensable. Accuracy is nonnegotiable. But journalism that stops at the announcement, the quotation and the official statement risks becoming an inventory of events rather than an interpretation of public life. The journalist must ask not only what happened, but what does what happened mean?
And the public intellectual must push the inquiry further. What does an event reveal about the society producing it? What history brought us here? What assumptions about power are concealed beneath the official explanation? Who benefits? Who bears the burden? Whose experience is considered authoritative? And who is absent altogether?
There is, in that sense, a prophetic dimension to serious journalism. I do not mean prophecy as prediction. Nor do I mean that journalists possess some special moral infallibility. The prophetic tradition I have in mind is much older and more demanding that is the responsibility to expose the distance between what a society proclaims and what it practices.
Frederick Douglass understood that responsibility. Douglass was not simply an abolitionist and extraordinary orator. He was a journalist, editor and public intellectual who understood that the written word could place the contradictions of the republic on trial. His genius was not merely that he denounced slavery. He forced America to encounter the contradiction between its magnificent vocabulary of liberty and the human beings deliberately excluded from it.
Ida B. Wells also understood the responsibility when she refused to accept prevailing explanations surrounding lynching and investigated the realities concealed beneath them.
King although not a journalist, inhabited that same tradition of moral interrogation when he compelled America to measure its conduct against its creed and eventually insisted that civil rights without economic dignity left the American promise dangerously incomplete.
Their work reminds us that interpretation at its best is not the enemy of truth. It is the pursuit of truth beyond the surface. That is how I understand my own responsibility as a journalist and public intellectual, not as an oracle standing above society, but as an interpreter standing inside history, examining the places where power and principle collide. And for years, I have been particularly interested in those collisions.
For example, the family discussed in an economic report but absent from the economic conference, the worker whose livelihood appears as a variable on somebody else’s spreadsheet, the resident whose neighborhood becomes valuable only after powerful interests decide to invest in it and the poor who become statistics in debates conducted by people who rarely encounter poverty.
They have no voice in the debate, no representative in the room and no seat at the table. And too often, no room in the inn of economic opportunity. That is the intellectual journey that eventually produced the Empty Chair at Anderson’s funeral.
The Chair at Philadelphia
I developed the metaphor around the Constitutional Convention of 1787 because the founding itself provides one of the clearest illustrations of the contradiction. The men gathered in Philadelphia were constructing an extraordinary experiment in republican government. They debated representation, federalism, executive authority and the architecture of a new nation. Yet amid the intellectual brilliance of that room was a profound absence.
There was an Empty Chair which belonged to the enslaved Black person whose humanity could be counted for purposes of political representation while his citizenship and freedom were denied. It belonged to women who possessed obligations to the emerging republic without equal political authority within it. And it belonged symbolically to generations of Americans who would inherit the responsibilities of the American experiment before receiving the full protection of its promise. The Empty Chair therefore represents something deeper than physical exclusion.
In my view, it represents the distance between American architecture and American belonging. Because the Constitution could construct institutions but it could not ensure that every human being would be welcomed equally into the moral imagination of those institutions. That work would fall to generations yet unborn. Douglass would become one of the great interrogators of that contradiction. And more than a century later, Anderson’s generation would inherit the argument.
Anderson’s Generation
William Anderson belonged to a generation that refused to leave the chair empty. The civil rights movement was, among many things, a historic struggle over who possessed the standing to sit at America’s table. Anderson and those who marched alongside King were demanding more than access to restaurants, buses, voting booths and public accommodations. They were demanding recognition. They were insisting that America finally see people whom its institutions had learned to look past.
King understood that political inclusion without economic dignity remained incomplete. Toward the end of his life, his attention increasingly turned toward poverty, labor and the economic structures that determined whether formal citizenship translated into a dignified existence. That progression matters enormously today because the Empty Chair did not disappear with the Civil Rights Act. In fact, it migrated.
The Moral Geography of Power
The Empty Chair is not simply a metaphor about exclusion. It is about the moral geography of power. Power has a geography. It has rooms, tables, institutions, invitations and boundaries. Some people possess almost automatic admission. Others experience the decisions made inside those rooms primarily through their consequences. That is why the most important question is not always who occupies the chair. Sometimes it is who never received an invitation to the room.
Who gets inside? Who remains outside? Who decides? Who is spoken for? Who is spoken about? Whose experience counts as expertise? Whose suffering qualifies as an emergency? Whose prosperity becomes a public priority? And whose absence has become so normalized that nobody even notices the vacant seat?
Those are Empty Chair questions.
The Empty Chair in the Economy
Today, some of America’s most consequential Empty Chairs can be found in the economy. There is an Empty Chair whenever economic growth is celebrated while working families cannot afford the basic architecture of a dignified life.
There is an Empty Chair whenever development is negotiated without meaningful consideration of the residents whose neighborhoods will absorb its consequences.
There is an Empty Chair when governments and corporations describe prosperity principally through investment totals, tax revenues and construction costs while families experience the economy through wages, rent, groceries, transportation and health care.
There is an Empty Chair whenever technological innovation races forward while workers wonder whether anyone designing the future has considered what will happen to them.
And there is an Empty Chair when artificial intelligence is discussed almost exclusively in the language of efficiency, productivity and capital while the dignity of human labor becomes a secondary consideration.
These are not merely economic questions. They are questions about membership.
Who belongs to prosperity? Who has a seat in the inn of economic opportunity? And who remains outside, able to see abundance but unable to participate meaningfully in it?
A society can generate extraordinary wealth while leaving millions of people economically homeless. GDP cannot resolve that contradiction and neither can their stock market or a ribbon cutting ceremony. The contradiction belongs to the realm of moral imagination.
The Chair Is About Power, Not Optics
This is why the Empty Chair should never be reduced to a fashionable argument about representation. It is about power. Putting a different face in a powerful room does not necessarily fill the Empty Chair because representation without moral independence can become another form of absence.
A person can occupy the seat physically while the experiences and interests of those outside the room remain invisible. The chair is filled only when people historically relegated to the margins become part of the moral calculation of power.
That distinction is essential because the objective is not simply to rearrange who sits around the table. The deeper question is whether the table itself has learned to recognize the humanity of those who were once excluded from it.
Journalism and the Absent Person
This is where journalism becomes indispensable because power naturally directs our attention toward the people sitting at the table. For example, government will issue the press release, corporations will present economic projections, politicians will announce the agreement and institutions will celebrate the milestone.
The journalist’s responsibility begins with those facts but cannot always end there. The questions asked must be: What does the announcement mean? What history preceded it? Who gains? Who pays? What assumptions have gone unquestioned? And who was never invited into the conversation? That is not advocacy masquerading as journalism. It is journalism refusing to become stenography.
The official version of an event is the beginning of serious inquiry, not necessarily its conclusion because power tells us what happened inside the room.
Journalism must sometimes tell us who was missing from it. That is where the prophetic responsibility of journalism becomes relevant. Again, prophetic does not mean partisan. It does not mean abandoning evidence. It does not mean declaring oneself morally superior to the people and institutions one covers.
Quite the opposite.
The prophetic journalist must be disciplined by facts precisely because the questions being asked are consequential. But facts sometimes reveal contradictions that power would prefer remain disconnected. The prophetic responsibility is to connect them.
For years, I have tried to interpret public events from that vantage point especially for people whose names rarely appear in economic reports, whose lives seldom dominate institutional agendas and whose experiences can disappear beneath abstractions such as “growth,” “development,” “restructuring,” “innovation” and “progress.”
The Empty Chair is therefore not a departure from my journalism. It is its distillation. It gives a name to an absence I have been writing about for years.
Memory Must Make Demands
America has become exceptionally skilled at commemorating its dissenters after their demands no longer inconvenience the powerful. We quote King without always confronting his critique of economic injustice. We celebrate Douglass while sometimes softening the ferocity of his interrogation of the republic. We honor civil rights giants like my mentor Rev. Dr. Bernard Lafayette Jr. while forgetting that they became consequential precisely because they were willing to make institutions uncomfortable.
But memory without obligation is merely ceremony. That is why the purpose of remembering William Anderson cannot simply be to admire the battles his generation fought. The more difficult question is whether we can recognize the battles assigned to the current generation.
Every generation encounters a different table, confronts a different arrangement of power and inherits an Empty Chair. In 1787, the chair represented human beings excluded from the constitutional imagination.
Douglass forced the republic to confront the moral consequences of that exclusion. In Anderson’s generation, the chair represented ordinary people demanding rights the nation proclaimed in principle while denying them in practice.
And in this generation, the Empty Chair increasingly belongs to people who can see prosperity but cannot enter it; who hear institutions speaking about opportunity but experience economic exclusion; who watch decisions about technology, development and capital being made while wondering whether their humanity appears anywhere in the equation.
They may have no lobbyist in the room, no microphone at the hearing and no representative at the negotiating table. But they are there because journalism worthy of its calling must see them.
Who Is Not in the Room?
That is what I was trying to convey when I stood at William Anderson’s funeral and introduced the Empty Chair. I was not simply reaching backward toward Philadelphia in 1787. I was interpreting the present through history. And perhaps that moment represented the final arrival of an idea my journalism and public intellectual work had been pursuing for years.
The Empty Chair is the people power forgot, the worker prosperity bypassed, the neighborhood development discovered only after decisions had already been made, the family hidden beneath the economic statistic, the human being buried beneath the spreadsheet, the voice missing from the debate, the distance between being governed and being heard and the space between America’s promise and America’s practice.
As America marks 250 years of its extraordinary and unfinished experiment, perhaps one of the most consequential questions before us is not simply who occupies the White House, the boardroom, the courtroom, the university office or the executive suite.
The more revealing question is: Who is not in the room?
Look carefully at many of the great moral failures of American history and somewhere nearby you will find an Empty Chair. Power naturally asks us to watch the people sitting around the table. The prophetic responsibility of journalism is sometimes to make society look at the chair nobody else noticed was empty.
The responsibility of leadership is to ask why it is empty. And the responsibility of democracy is to decide whether, after 250 years, we are finally prepared to pull that chair up to the table.
