I was surprised by the nearly unanimous responses from these liberal, moderate and conservative alums, and I wondered why none of them thought to “look into this” themselves. I also asked myself why Jackson would get into the middle of such a debate when he is in his 60s. Was he ego-tripping, or did he anticipate that younger folks like these former students would be reluctant to get involved?
I won’t deny Jackson’s sizable ego, but he would have a hard time finding a nationally recognized African-American political activist under 50 to take his place. There are exceptions– human-rights advocate Martin Luther King III, litigator Constance Rice and Rep. J. C. Watts–but it would be difficult to name five more. By contrast, Martin Luther King Jr. was in his mid-20s when he organized the Montgomery bus boycott, and Julian Bond, Marian Wright Edelman and John Lewis have been activists since their college days.
I am not advocating the mass retirement of current leaders or a sudden inrush of disruptive know-it-alls. I am suggesting that some of the younger beneficiaries of the civil-rights movement use the pro bono policies of their law firms or businesses to take leaves of absence to work a year or two for civil- or human-rights groups. They could offer their legal expertise and fund-raising talents and, more important, gain the hands-on experience they have avoided.
Perhaps the responsibility for this younger generation’s complacency lies with those of us who preceded them. We–their parents, teachers and clergy–may have kept them so far from the fires of political agitation that they never quite learned how to “cook.” We shielded them from the brutal details of slavery, lynching and Jim Crow, but we also failed to show them how political activism helped to end these atrocities.
Consequently, few young people seem as willing to face controversy and make sacrifices as their forebears were. Maybe it is time to teach them that “controversy” is derived from Latin roots meaning “to turn” and “against,” and that to “sacrifice” originally meant to “make holy and worthy of the gods.”
Young people who don’t know the virtue of these words might be reluctant to “turn against” injustice, to fight problems like racial profiling. They will continue to focus on that one fleeting moment in Memphis on April 4, 1968, when King was assassinated, rather than the years of struggle against racism and oppression that made his life “worthy of the gods.”
I don’t wish to suggest that all African-Americans under 50 are uninformed, self-absorbed ingrates. Some of them are working hard for change at the local level and have legitimate questions about whether national organizations or one or two charismatic personalities can adequately address all black issues. But again and again we see–as we did in the 1990s, when a fast-food chain was caught refusing to serve blacks at restaurants across the country–that what initially appears to be a “local” problem is symptomatic of a much larger, national one.
National issues require centralized leadership. Admittedly, this can be a risky approach because it exposes a few individuals and organizations to constant scrutiny and makes them synonymous with the causes they advocate. If these high-profile leaders and organizations are involved in scandal or otherwise discredited, their constituencies are adversely affected, too. Regardless of these risks, it is difficult to imagine the anti-slavery movement without Frederick Douglass or the civil-rights movement without King and the NAACP.
Leadership shouldn’t be the lifetime responsibility of just a handful of men and women. Even the most revered activists will want to retire at some point. I hope that members of the younger generation will step forward even before that happens. Then Jesse and Al won’t have to carry the burden alone.
