c. 1999 Religion News Service
UNDATED _ A few years ago, while watching the docudrama,”Separate but Equal,”I suddenly found myself overwhelmed with emotion. As an all-star cast _ including Sidney Poitier, Cleavon Little and Burt Lancaster _ re-enacted the events leading up to the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision in Brown vs. Board of Education, I was reminded of how much many African Americans have forgotten.
Even more disturbing, having forgotten the lessons of history, we seem now on course to repeat them.
For example, two generations after Brown and the civil rights movement it spurred, there are more African-American men in prison than in college. At the same time, illegitimacy, unemployment and crime are currently at levels that far exceed those seen prior to the movement.
This information, of course, is hardly new. A plethora of studies have been commissioned and books written detailing the sociological, demographic and occupational trends contributing to the crisis.
Moreover, as Harvard professor Orlando Patterson notes, the problems associated with the black community are hardly as widespread as generally believed. Patterson argues that the crushing circumstances and social dysfunction of the black underclass _ which accounts for less than 10 percent of the black population _ must be viewed separately from the normal, day-to-day struggles of the working poor, whose numbers are much larger.
Yet even Patterson admits the problems of the underclass are”so bad”that they command our attention. Furthermore, there can be no gainsaying of the fact that, regardless of other factors, including institutional racism, African Americans themselves bear some responsibility for the problems facing the underclass.
It is just on this point that our memory lapse betrays us; for as the film reminds us, the fate of the least of us affects all of us.
As depicted in the film, Thurgood Marshall, the head of the New York-based NAACP Legal Defense Fund, files a lawsuit in the name of a young, black South Carolina boy who is required to walk several miles to and from school because the one closest to him serves only white children. The South Carolina lawsuit is eventually combined with similar suits from Virginia and Kansas forming the case presented in Brown.
For Marshall and the others on his staff, the risks of such litigation were enormous. Apart from personal threats and financial indebtedness, the fate of an entire race of people rested on their shoulders _ a fact that their detractors in the black community never let them forget.
Today, however, the sense of communal responsibility _ of the community’s chain being only as strong as its weakest link _ seems to be missing. To be sure, unanimity regarding the needs, priorities and direction of the black community has never been, and likely never will be, achieved.
Yet, what separates our past from our present is there is no longer a critical mass of people willing to make the sacrifices necessary to effectively serve the least of us. There remain, nevertheless, skills to be taught, needs to be served and lessons to be passed on.
To the degree that we fail to do what we can do, the cycle of our history will continue.
DEA END ATCHISON
