Confluences
The Romans had their Ides of March, ours are the Ides of April. The signs are not encouraging, the auguries disturbing. Our taxes are still spent on a highly militarized economy while our needs for health, education, and justice go underfunded and are in disarray. In the face of escalating vituperation, the fact that we do need to be deeply concerned about our priorities and social processes must be balanced by a return to and respect for civil discourse. One of the best places to look for models of powerful leadership in service to societal needs is in the civil rights movement.
Representative John Lewis was the keynote speaker for the 51st Annual Dinner of the Rockland County NAACP. As the sole surviving speaker from the podium of the March on Washington, Lewis has lost none of his truth-telling character and was understandably nostalgic. He told the stories from his Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement, of Nashville sit-ins, the Edmund Pettus Bridge and Bloody Sunday followed by the march from Selma to Montgomery, and of the lives given by American blacks, in this country, to secure the right to vote. Each step on this path, he noted, was one leading to Barack Obama’s election.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). FOR extends its warmest affirmation of the important history of one of the most significant advocates of voter registration work as founders and leaders gather at Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina where SNCC was founded in April 1960. One of those leaders, John Lewis, celebrates 23 years in Congress. His call is as metaphorical as literal, “We’ll never leave the house, we all live in the same house.” The world house. Lewis’s passion for the unfinished agenda of building the beloved community is told in many chapters, of which SNCC is a central one.
April 15th, the Rev. Dr. Benjamin Hooks, NAACP lawyer, Baptist pastor, civil rights leader, and entrepreneurial businessman passed away. Hooks was a study in courage, integrity, and inspiration. From the U.S. Supreme Court to the pulpit of Great Mount Moriah Baptist Church in Detroit, from Memphis to Detroit to Washington, D.C., he was an advocate of nonviolence as the path to social change. “There are a lot of ways an oppressed people can rise. One way to rise is to study, to be smarter than your oppressor. The concept of rising against oppression through physical contact is stupid and self-defeating. It exalts brawn over brain. And the most enduring contributions made to civilization have not been made by brawn, they have been made by brain,” he said.
When we need to be smart about how we wrestle with our nation’s issues, these are the models we can turn to for vision and example. I am turning next to Michelle Alexander for analysis and answers about our unfinished business, the challenge of the times, race and America. You might join me in reading her The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration on the Age of Colorblindness, just out from the New Press.
