Among young African Americans, there is a growing sense that there are significant generational differences with the CBC and that the organization may have lost its conscience. Hillary Clinton has taken heat for the 1994 crime bill that led to the disproportionate incarceration of black people, but the bill was only assured passage once the CBC withdrew its opposition. CBC members have clashed with Black Lives Matter protesters. And activists have criticized the CBC Political Action Committee, a separate but associated group, for the board’s ties to private prisons and big tobacco.

While some of these criticisms are valid, there is little question that the CBC is of immense value to African Americans and the nation at large. For decades, it’s been the organ through which the concerns of black Americans have entered the halls of Congress and the means by which policy victories have been delivered for disenfranchised minority communities. There is simply no doubting that the interests of black America remain central to the caucus’s aims. But there is also little doubt that the black electorate is changing, and the CBC will have to keep pace with this evolution if it wants to remain relevant to black Americans.

The Congressional Black Caucus was formed as a nonpartisan body in early 1971 to rally the collective influence of its 13 members and ensure that issues facing African Americans were raised and debated in Congress. Its guiding principle, set forth by Representative Bill Clay of Missouri, was direct and concise: “Black people have no permanent friends, no permanent enemies … just permanent interests.”

It didn’t take long for the group to make national headlines. When President Nixon refused to meet with black legislators, they boycotted the State of the Union. The caucus declared that Nixon’s unwillingness to meet with black members of Congress was emblematic of his disinterest in the concerns of African Americans. Shortly thereafter, the president conceded to a meeting, and the CBC received extensive media attention for its victory.

Protest is very much a part of the CBC’s character—many of today’s CBC members are contemporaries of the civil-rights movement. It would seem that today’s protest movements would be fertile ground for CBC goals. But many of today’s black activists are not as interested in what they see as respectability politics or dressing in their Sunday best for protests like their civil-rights-era predecessors. They are taking the stage whenever they choose and demanding that presidential candidates hear them. They are challenging leaders from previous generations, and some of those leaders don’t necessarily like it. In the black community, where eldership is revered, the boldness of today’s protesters has rubbed some CBC members the wrong way. Many black activists don’t care; they are less concerned with paying homage to elected officials and more interested in expedient policy outcomes.