c. 2000 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., and a fellow of the George H. Gallup International Institute in Princeton, N.J.)
UNDATED _”We’re not where we used to be, but we’re not where we ought to be, either.”Thus did Hosea Williams, a former aide to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., summarize the quandary facing black America.
For African-Americans, the events at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., on March 7, 1965 represent a watershed in the history of the civil rights movement. There, as some 600 voting rights advocates embarked on a 54-mile march to the state Capitol in Montgomery to protest the denial of voting rights to blacks, they were met with violent resistance in a nationally televised confrontation with Alabama state troopers. Dozens of people were wounded, including Williams and John Lewis, then chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
On March 20, then-President Lyndon Johnson federalized the Alabama National Guard to protect the marchers, enabling them to complete the trek to Montgomery in peace.
Thirty-five years later, Williams, now in a wheelchair, and Lewis, a Georgia congressman, joined King’s widow, Coretta, President Clinton and some 10,000 others in a commemorative re-enactment of “Bloody Sunday.” In a fitting symbol of changing times, Alabama state troopers, both white and black, saluted as the marchers approached the bridge.
Yet, amid the heart-clutching nostalgia, characterized by a stirring speech by Clinton, a self-described “son of the South,” it was left to Williams, now hobbled by age and infirmity, to remind those gathered that “we’re not where we ought to be.”
And indeed we’re not.
In his speech in Selma, the president noted that “in 1964, there were only 300 black elected officials nationwide, and just three African-Americans in the Congress. Today those numbers have swelled to nearly 9,000 black elected officials and 39 members of the Congressional Black Caucus.” Others have pointed out that blacks now generate income well in excess of $500 billion annually, more than the gross national product of many countries.
Yet they also point out that with a savings rate of less than 4 percent, we spend it nearly as fast as we earn it. As Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Claude Lewis once suggested, a higher savings rate among black Americans could result in greater resources being invested in poor urban communities.
But we can’t invest it if we spend it.
Regarding the much-ballyhooed right to vote, Martin Luther King III, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and a son of the late civil rights leader, correctly argued that 35 years later, “there’s a deafening silence at the polling places throughout the nation.”
He said the constitutional right many suffered and died for should not be forgotten by the current generation of black Americans and the power once denied blacks through discrimination cannot now be ceded by blacks through apathy.
We have a tendency in the black community to romanticize the sufferings of the past at the risk of ignoring the challenges to our future.
To be sure, our forebears have bequeathed to us a legacy of triumph through struggle.
They did much with little. We, however, run the risk of doing little with much.
DEA END ATCHISON
