c. 1998 Religion News Service

(Samuel K. Atchison is an ordained minister and has worked as a policy analyst and social worker to the homeless. He currently is a prison chaplain in Trenton, N.J.)

UNDATED _ The recent death of Eldridge Cleaver and the chronic, possibly terminal, illness of Kwame Ture (Stokely Carmichael) symbolize the passing of an era and provide an opportune moment for assessing the era’s legacy.

A generation ago, as leaders in the then-fledgling Black Power movement, Cleaver and Carmichael _ along with Huey Newton, Bobby Seale and others _ represented the hopes of some Americans and the fears of many others.

Their emergence in the mid-1960s coincided with the general feeling of unrest then engulfing the country. With the escalation of the war in Vietnam and increasing racial violence at home, many of the nation’s young people felt torn between the Judeo-Christian values of their parents on one hand and a growing cynicism on the other.

Within the already fragile civil rights coalition _ made up of religious, civic and student groups _ the struggle focused on the central theme of the movement and its commitment to nonviolence.

Carmichael, who gained fame as the leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), began to challenge the moral message of the movement’s principal spokesman, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

For Carmichael, the violence he and other participants endured in the struggle obscured the issue of America’s moral responsibility to grant equal rights to blacks.

In America, he came to believe, the basic issue was power, not morality or equality. As he noted several years ago on”Eyes on the Prize,”the Public Broadcasting System’s civil rights documentary series,”the issue was clearly not one of morality … but of power.”Appropriating Malcolm X’s ethic of securing freedom”by any means necessary,”Carmichael began to advocate the use of”black power,”thus bringing to a head his clash with King.

Simultaneously, Cleaver, as the California-based Black Panther Party’s minister of information, provided an intellectual rationale for black rebellion based on the nation’s history of white oppression.

The net result was a worldview permeating virtually every aspect of the black counterculture, from language, to fashion, to art. It helped spawn a renewed interest in African civilization and history. It also gave rise to such cultural icons as The Last Poets and Gil Scott Heron, rappers of an earlier generation.

Yet this embrace of all things black brought with it consequences its founders never anticipated but nevertheless remain with us today.

For example, Carmichael’s promotion of”black power”to the exclusion of morality appeared on its face to reject any parameters or constraints on the use of such power. Indeed, many sympathetic whites were intimidated by both the use of the term and its lack of definition. For his part, Carmichael was blunt in saying the movement had no further use for whites.

A generation later, the cultural chasm between blacks and whites remains as wide as ever _ almost as wide, in fact, as the gap among blacks themselves.

Even more frightening, the mantra of power without morality is being chanted with increasing frequency among the young.

To be sure, the allure of the gun transcends race and culture, as recent events in Paducah, Ky., Jonesboro, Ark., and Edinboro, Pa., clearly demonstrate.

But to the degree the founders of the Black Power movement conveyed an ethic of violence to the next generation of young people, responsibility for the result must be laid at their feet.

Yet the freedom whose quest spawned the movement in the first place remains elusive. Perhaps this is because the movement’s moral underpinnings were abandoned. Lacking moral guidance, both the Black Power movement and its leaders became undone.

For example, Cleaver became, among other things, a born-again Christian, an adherent of the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, a drug addict, a designer of men’s pants, and a conservative Republican.

Carmichael moved to Africa, changed his name to Kwame Ture (after African leaders Kwame Nkrumah and Sekou Toure), and fathered two sons whom, he admits, are less important to him than”the people.” Bobby Seale achieved minor notoriety as a pitchman for barbecue ribs and was an unsuccessful candidate for Oakland’s City Council. Huey Newton earned a doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, but could never recover from an addiction to drugs. He was shot to death on an Oakland street in the late 1980s.

Thus, for all of the emotions they inspired and the cultural impact they engendered, the legacy they leave is mixed at best. Seems like an awful lot of effort for so little reward.

DEA END ATCHISON