Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 1, 1994 TAG: 9403040005
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: William Raspberry
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Negroes, as we then called ourselves, were plagued by racism: discrimination, segregation, denial of opportunity based solely on race. There were race-based barriers to union apprenticeships, to fair treatment by the criminal-justice system, to housing in ``white'' neighborhoods and schools, to ``white'' jobs - even to the voting booth.
Racism was the enemy, and there sprang up a movement to confront it.
This being Black History Month,Two reminders are in order. First, the movement succeeded in dismantling American apartheid. Second, it wasn't enough.
The fruits of that movement - the opening up of places of public accommodation, the extension of the franchise, the official desegregation of the law - were critically important. When the legal barriers were breached, well-prepared blacks came flooding through. They and their progeny still represent America's black (and not only black) leadership. They are military generals and Cabinet officers, mayors and members of Congress, journalists, physicians, judges, corporate executives, educators, diplomats, astronauts - everything.
These successful blacks are far from complacent, as Ellis Cose makes clear in his solidly researched new book ``The Rage of a Privileged Class.'' But they are successful.
Millions of blacks aren't. And if you asked me today to list the most pressing problems facing black America, racism would be several notches down from the top.
Racism hasn't gone away; maybe it never will. But it seems obvious that racism is a less powerful barrier than it once was. Young people who earnestly desire success and are willing to work for it seldom are denied that success solely on account of race. So why is it that millions of our youngsters are not successful, and show no sign of becoming so?
I have argued that there have always been both external and internal barriers to our progress. A generation ago, the decisive barriers were external, and we built a movement to demolish them. Today, the decisive barriers are internal, and we need to build a movement to overcome them as well.
What would such a movement entail? There's no end to the possibilities, but for me the top priority would be to rescue our children. An astounding number of children are being lost: to drugs, to hopelessness, to violence, to death. They fail at school, become parents before they are grown-ups, reach adulthood without acquiring the education or skills to earn a decent living. Our young women suffer the debilitating effects of low self-esteem, and our young men, who ought to be the strength of their communities, are more likely to terrorize them.
We need a crusade to save our children - a crusade as powerful and as broad-based as the 1960s crusade for civil rights. We need a new movement.
And, I freely confess, I don't know how to create it. I'm not all that clear on how the earlier crusade became a movement.
In the 1950s and '60s, well before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat and unwittingly launched the Montgomery Bus Boycott, there were people across America working at various aspects of civil rights. There were voter-registration workers; real-estate testers; school desegregators; filers of class-action suits; sit-in, wade-in, march-in demonstrators. Many of the resisters didn't even know about the work of the others.
Then something happened. Somehow, an umbrella was spread over all these discrete and independent projects, and they became, collectively, ``the movement.''
It was far more than a matter of nomenclature. The birth of ``the movement'' changed attitudes. We saw change coming, and we wanted to be part of it. We joined a vast alphabet soup of civil-rights groups, walked picket lines, boycotted recalcitrant businesses. White people joined us from across America. Sharecroppers joined college students, business executives joined politicians and reverend clergy, and America changed.
There are today people performing all the elements of a children's crusade: helping youngsters with their algebra and their self-esteem, keeping them out of jail, talking to them about life, raising money for their education, helping them to see - and attain - their life possibilities.
I wish I understood by what chemistry these individual and local efforts could be transformed into a movement with the power to reach beyond the particulars of time and place and make our children - and not just black children, either - know that they are valued and loved and counted on.
We'd still have racism, no doubt, but we'd also have a thing that is in woefully short supply, and whose absence, in my view, accounts for most of the problems that afflict our children.
We'd have hope.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB