The civil rights attorney, strategist, and former interim executive director of Color of Change breaks down sacrifice, accountability, and what the movement actually demands right now.
Portia Allen-Kyle has spent more than 15 years moving between courtrooms, campaign rooms, and the kind of high-stakes organizational leadership that most people only read about. A civil rights attorney and strategist, she 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 serves as a tax fellow at the Roosevelt Institute. She is also the founder of FuturaBold and Why.Race.Still.Matters., a project exploring the intersection of culture, identity, and politics. She sat down with Rolling Out’s Equity in Focus to talk about what real movement leadership requires and where the civil rights framework stands today.
Your career spans law, strategy, and advocacy. What connects all of it for you?
My love for Black people. The driving force and motivation in just about everything that I’ve done is how can I continue to leverage my skills and use the opportunities that I’ve been afforded to help move all of us forward and help create a better world, but especially for Black people. It’s the least I can do for the opportunities I’ve been given, and wanting to leave a positive social footprint for my daughter and future generations.
How do systematic barriers continue to shape the everyday realities of Black communities?
Some of the barriers are visible, and we are so familiar with them that we can navigate and figure out how to work around them. We are resilient, we innovate, and we constantly create alternatives and pathways where previously there were none. The other part of the barriers, many of them unfortunately are invisible. The work is both to expose those invisible barriers and also to figure out ways to break them down, minimize the harm, and open new doors even when the things being closed are opaque and not easy to see.
You make a strong case for generalists as the next generation of leaders. Why does that model work right now?
Right now, particularly in racial justice and nonprofit advocacy spaces, what you are seeing under this regime are attacks across the board. It is not just enough to do good work and be passionate about the issue. You also need to know how to go on the offensive to protect organizations and have a mastery of how the business runs. The charge against Marcus Garvey was mail fraud. The charges against a lot of our leaders are about taxes and compliance and finances. Generalists are well-suited to understand those attacks and proactively protect ourselves. The mission alone won’t protect us from the heat we are going to experience in this next era.
Movement organizations can give the impression this work comes without real sacrifice. Where does that idea come from?
Movements of the past have been romanticized. It’s nice to think about John Lewis crossing the bridge, but the quiet part of that history is the protection of armed allies in that fight. A lot of our ancestors were courageous, but it doesn’t mean they were unafraid. Many of our greatest leaders of the past century lived in poverty after their moment passed, were forgotten, had their stories not adequately told.
Revolution always carries sacrifice. One of the hardest things in leadership, especially once the Trump regime came back into office, was staff wanting reassurances that they will be protected. Those promises would be irresponsible. It is us who will save us, and those are the types of things we need to be building right now.
What did stepping into the executive director role at Color of Change teach you about leading for the Black community under pressure?
It is always a reminder that we are not a monolith. Any progress is going to require nuance. Colorism is real. Economic privileges are real. Business-oriented Black people want something different than movement folks, who want something different than on-the-ground organizers, who want something different than people just going through life day-to-day wanting to know that someone is fighting for them. In this period of time in particular, understanding those nuances is more important than it has probably ever been, because we need all of us in our lanes, playing our parts to win.
Interim leadership means fully owning problems that were not yours to create. How do you show up for that without losing yourself?
You have to be willing to be unpopular. If you are the type of leader that wants to be liked, it is probably not going to work out, not in this moment, not under crisis, and not in a landscape that is constantly changing. Even if you didn’t create the problem, you do need to own the solving of it. Bringing people along is not always possible. Not everybody comes with you in times of change, and it is a fantasy to think otherwise. You need the fortitude and confidence in yourself to navigate a series of tough situations.
Crisis requires fortitude. What does that look like when the decisions are unpopular and Black lives are directly at stake?
You can’t always work on everything, and you do have to tier crisis. You need a strong personal routine, a way to metabolize stress and conflict, to have healthy conflict that resolves itself and doesn’t linger. When I think of fortitude and leadership, it is the clarity and the transparency to communicate and stand by and be very consistent in your actions and decision-making and the values that are guiding those things.
Everyone wants consensus, but not everyone wants the accountability. How do you navigate that in spaces meant to serve Black communities?
Sometimes it is very helpful to be transparent up front about what is actually on the table for change and what the places of input are. It is possible to outsource decision making, but that also involves transparency about outsourcing the accountability, because even though you can outsource decisions, it is not always possible to outsource the accountability.
Leadership is navigating when values are in conflict. When speed is in conflict with consensus. When transparency is in conflict with the need for particular outcomes. We talk about values in really vague terms, but leadership is reconciling those conflicts in a predictable and principled way, owning and communicating those decisions, because sometimes they will be right and sometimes they will not.
What role does civil rights law play in protecting the Black community in today’s political climate?
The hard truth is that we have probably seen the upper limits of what is possible with our current civil rights framework. We’ve spent more time protecting old rights than creating new ones. At this moment where every structure designed to protect the vulnerable has essentially failed, the work of the moment is imagining not how to work within what we have, but what is actually the framework of civil rights and protection that we need. The penalties for racial discrimination are often non-existent.
I’ve gotten more and more into tax justice as the frontier of the battle for civil rights, 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. That imagination work is underinvested in. We should be having those conversations to be ready as we build whatever comes next.
What is the most honest thing you can tell a young Black professional who wants a career in this space?
Master your craft as the baseline. Who you know doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything. There is a really strong case for generalists, those who know policy and advocacy but also understand finances and can run an organization. The second thing is stay true to yourself. The most consistent person that is never going to let you down is yourself. It’s easy to get caught up in other people’s missions, other people’s journeys, other people’s expectations, but if that doesn’t align with how you see yourself, it shows. Master your craft, stay true to your values, and walk your path.