Portia Allen-Kyle has spent more than 15 years at the intersection of law, strategy, and movement leadership. She has served as a Biden-Harris administration appointee in the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Transportation, led Color of Change as interim executive director, and now works as a tax fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. In a candid conversation with Rolling Out’s Equity in Focus series, she delivered one of the most honest assessments of where the civil rights movement stands today and where it must go next.
Her central argument is uncomfortable but clear. The legal framework that generations of Black Americans fought to build may have hit a ceiling.
“We have probably seen the upper limits of what is possible with our current civil rights framework,” Allen-Kyle said. “We’ve spent more time protecting old rights than creating new ones.”
Why tax justice is the new frontier
Allen-Kyle’s current work at the Roosevelt Institute reflects a strategic pivot that she believes the movement must make. Rather than continuing to operate primarily within a legal framework designed to remedy discrimination after it has already occurred, she argues the next generation of civil rights work must focus on redistribution at the front end.
“I’ve gotten more and more into tax justice as the frontier of the battle for civil rights,” she said, “because that is a place where you can make rights real. We can redistribute wealth to provide for people at the front end, as opposed to trying to remedy at the back end what happens when people don’t have enough.”
The penalties for racial discrimination, she noted, are often non-existent in practice. That structural gap means that even successful legal challenges frequently fail to produce meaningful change in people’s lives. The imagination work of designing what comes next, she argues, is dangerously underinvested in.
What the movement actually demands right now
Allen-Kyle is equally direct about what movement leadership requires in the current political moment. She points to the need for generalists, leaders who understand not just policy and advocacy but also finances, compliance, and organizational management, as essential to surviving an era of coordinated institutional attacks.
“It is not just enough to do good work and be passionate about the issue,” she said. “You also need to know how to go on the offensive to protect organizations and have a mastery of how the business runs.”
She draws on history to make the point. The charge against Marcus Garvey was mail fraud. Attacks on movement organizations have historically come through taxes, compliance, and financial regulation rather than direct confrontation. Understanding those vulnerabilities and building proactively against them is not a distraction from the mission, she argues. It is the mission.
The honest truth about sacrifice
Allen-Kyle is also unwilling to romanticize what this work costs. She pushes back against a culture within movement spaces that she believes has obscured the reality of sacrifice from the people entering it.
“Movements of the past have been romanticized,” she said. “Many of our greatest leaders of the past century lived in poverty after their moment passed, were forgotten, had their stories not adequately told.”
When staff at Color of Change asked for reassurances that they would be protected under the current political climate, she declined to make promises she could not keep. “Those promises would be irresponsible,” she said. “It is us who will save us, and those are the types of things we need to be building right now.”
For Allen-Kyle, that is not pessimism. It is clarity. The work ahead requires people who understand what they are walking into, who are grounded in their own values, and who are prepared to lead without the guarantee of recognition or protection. That kind of leadership, she believes, is what the moment is actually asking for.