Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, February 17, 1991                   TAG: 9102180330
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: C/3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: OPAL MOORE
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

CELEBRATING BLACK HEROES ISN'T ENOUGH

But when white students petition for the class to become a permanent fixture in the curriculum, Fresh Prince - who loves to wear his Malcolm X T-shirt, though he knows little about the man or his work - vetoes the idea. He is disturbed when the subject is more complex than he imagined.

Fresh Prince is not a committed young brother. He will not transform the hearts and minds of black people. But the TV story touched the surface of some very real patterns of change in our off-camera world.

Last year, in a two-day writing workshop for minority students, I included the works of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr. and Frederick Douglass. The workshop attracted only a handful. Black students often are assertive in extracurricular activities but shrinking violets when faced with the prospect of writing for the classroom.

Malcolm X and King viewed reading and writing as a necessity for the development of rational, political action. The workshop students admitted they knew practically nothing about these men, but recognized there was more they should know.

These college students are hungry for heroic figures. They're fed up with the seemingly hollow iconography of "the Founding Fathers." But like Fresh Prince, they will settle for celebrating famous black men rather than learning from them.

The workshop students seemed most interested in Malcolm X, formerly Malcolm Little, who started out much as they had. He excelled academically in predominantly white schools, and assumed he would enter the conventional world of aspiring and accomplishing Americans.

But as he approached graduation from eighth grade, he was gently reminded by a favorite teacher that he was, after all, just a "nigger" and should not expect to become a lawyer; he should look into something more realistic, like carpentry. Before, Malcolm had been much like the students sitting before me, who've journeyed a certain distance in their lives without having to consider the political aspects of their ethnicity.

Malcolm X had to renounce ignorance in people of all colors in order to begin educating himself beyond his eighth-grade preparation. He found a healing balm in the Black Muslim movement, which emphasizes the racial superiority of black people and the treachery of white Americans.

But after traveling to Africa, a land fragmented and tortured by years of colonial white rule, he was convinced evil had no skin color. He renounced his allegiance to Mohammed and to much of the teaching of the Black Muslim movement. For his integrity, courage and truth-bearing, he would be killed.

The two-hour discussion of Malcolm and others did not allow for much depth; most had not read Malcolm's writings, nor those of King or Douglass. As a result, much of the writing was tentative, strained or incomplete.

One young woman, however, wrote with particular confidence. The other students seemed elated and relieved that one of them had managed to write so well and with so much passion. I felt their identification with her accomplishment, in much the same way the young identify with star athletes, movie personalities, Oprah Winfrey, Malcolm X and others.

It is not enough to condemn students for their seeming lack of commitment, for their T-shirt passions. Students need to know that whatever greatness there is to be found in our history, it is not a talisman to ward off evil. And even the ancestor gods we worship require sacrifice.

Frederick Douglass traded bread for words, learning his most valuable lessons from the hungry white boys he met in the streets of Baltimore. Malcolm X traded arrogant certainty for truth and searching. Martin Luther King Jr. traded safety for justice. Their lives teach a lesson youth will not readily accept: Knowledge and power come with a price tag of hurt. As one poet warned, "The revolution will not be televised!" Revolution is an act of mind.

Somebody turn off the TV.