Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 17, 1993 TAG: 9301170107
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BONNIE V. WINSTON STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
BLACKS STILL NATION'S `UNKNOWN QUANTITY'
It is almost 25 years now since the death of Martin Luther King Jr., and again I pat myself on the back for rising with the dawn to commemorate his life at a community breakfast marked by hot biscuits and speakers with warmed-over themes.While the eggs have advanced from powdered to the tasty, pour-from-the-carton variety, I still find myself peering into the somehow ageless black and white faces gathered there, and asking silently the same old question: What really has changed?
The unfortunate answer is not much further than the intense opening scenes of Spike Lee's movie, "Malcolm X," which cut back and forth between the jarring images of Rodney King being whacked to his knees by the billy-club blows of police officers and the American flag suddenly imploding in flames and burning into an "X."
In the American equation, we - black folks - are still the unknown quantity, the "X." And our future is equally unknown. It doesn't matter that lunch counters now are integrated. It doesn't matter that our seats have moved from the backs of buses to front and center in Virginia's Statehouse and the Congress.
Because at one time or another, we still feel the stinging blows - be they physical like Rodney King's, or verbal, emotional or psychological - brought on solely by race, that bring us to our knees.
Seeing the movie for the second time a couple of weeks ago, with Gov. Douglas Wilder, gave me some more insight. For Wilder, the "total message" of Lee's epic was a sentiment often attributed to King but one of which Malcolm also is deserving: Develop yourself; become attuned to the issues and move forward.
"Education is key," Wilder said afterward, "because if you're not educated, you can't know the issues and which direction to take."
Wilder recently shared a platform with Malcolm's widow, Betty Shabazz, but came to know the late Muslim leader's belief in self-help only through his autobiography and later biographies.
"Yes, Malcolm is a hero," the governor said. "He conquered insecurity. He conquered self-doubt, and he eschewed materiality. . . . He was independent thinking, but that independent-thinking was not isolationism."
That sense of being connected - to a glorious and stalwart past, and now to one another (race notwithstanding) - was part of Malcolm's discovery when he traveled to Mecca.
"It wasn't until he went to Africa," Wilder said, "that Malcolm's view was broadened. He saw then that Africans were people of substance . . . and that they came in all hues."
Unfortunately in our country, Wilder said, color still is the major point of demarcation.
The line runs deep, separating us from our history and cutting us off from the future that should be ours. Instead, our community's prospects are lost in daily headlines screaming of our self-abuse in guns and drugs and violence, in a system of welfare-cycling and false notions that we are a fatherless tribe.
"We are not a matriarchal society, despite what the numbers show," Wilder said. "The African-American man was always revered in the African-American community because whatever else, his family was always first."
The price of ignorance is brutality, Wilder warned.
And as dangerous as the outside brutality is that which we inflict on ourselves.
The mistake, Wilder said, is that we keep "waiting for the bell to ring, for the key to be put in the lock . . . for the arrival of one leader."
"When Martin was here, some people thought he was too radical. When Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court, some people told him not to go because they said we need him to argue the cases.
"Some thought Malcolm was crazy and [W.E.B.] DuBois was too educated and Booker T. Washington too pedestrian," Wilder continued.
He suggested that the answer lies somewhere inside each of us.
"What we need is a constant re-evaluation and commitment of individuals - an evaluation of who we are and where we are going," Wilder said.
Perhaps solving America's equation for "X" will take continued personal transformation, much like Malcolm's, to include education, broadening and a personal understanding of our link in the chain of what has been and what is to come.
"We need more voices . . . more cohesion, commonality and identification of the issues. We have a need for more voices speaking out on the issues," Wilder said.
While the results may not land us in history books or even rate a footnote, it is worth knowing that where we are is the result of many everyday individuals whom memory has forgotten. Their collective action has brought us to this point, and our collective action will determine what follows.
Bonnie V. Winston covers state government and politics from the Roanoke Times & World-News bureau in Richmond.