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Who will step up?

Rosa Parks. Constance Baker Motley. Vivian Malone Jones. As 2005 passes, so too are many giants of the civil rights movement. Waiting in the wings: the challenges and the new leaders of today.

By RODNEY THRASH
Published November 3, 2005

The call, the one that Barbara Herard can't forget, came before noon.

Phones at the Detroit office of U.S. Rep. John Conyers, where Rosa Parks worked for 23 years, rang, it seemed, nonstop.

Herard, the office receptionist, heard in one caller's voice a sense of helplessness and bewilderment.

"All of our leaders are dying," the man said 16 hours after Parks, the mother of the civil rights movement, died of natural causes at 92. "Where do we go from here? Who do we have to look up to?"

Perhaps more than in any other year, African-Americans are asking themselves and each other those same questions.

Civil rights titans, the ones responsible for dismantling Jim Crow in the 1950s and 1960s and ushering in sweeping racial and legislative changes, have died in rapid succession this year, this past month in particular

Constance Baker Motley, a civil rights lawyer who went on to become the first black woman appointed to the federal bench, died Sept. 29. C. Delores Tucker, the first black Pennsylvania secretary of state who later became gangsta rap's most vocal critic, died Oct. 12. The next day, it was Vivian Malone Jones, the first black student to graduate from the University of Alabama. And now Parks.

"They remind us that we've got to continue to grow new fruits out in the vineyard because the old trees are passing on into history," said the Rev. Joseph Lowery, who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with the most recognizable face of the movement, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. "We've never been reminded so forcefully and so often as we have during the past couple of months."

Iconic figures of the movement also remind people of the way history works. People such as Parks represent the last link to a bygone era, a time not so long ago when segregation was the law of the land.

"These were people who, however they did it, found a way to negotiate the choices of their generation and made a difference," said Raymond Arsenault, the John Hope Franklin Professor of Southern History at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg and author of Freedom Riders: 1961 and the Struggle for Racial Justice, due in January. "These were the ones who somehow figured out a way to make these difficult, risky choices to put their lives on the line at a critical moment and they were able to move history in a positive way."

But who's waiting in the wings to take their place?

"They're irreplaceable only because their time will not come again," said Dr. Molefi Kete Asante, a professor of African-American Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia and one of the nation's premier academics. "There's no way that we can replace a Rosa Parks. We don't have that struggle anymore on the buses. We have new times, new contacts, new challenges, and we will have new leaders and new people."

Irreplaceable the figures may be, but a dearth of new black leadership there is not, people interviewed said.

Granted, there is no single, high-profile figure that black people can gravitate toward.

But "there are thousands" of leaders, Asante said. "And they're everywhere. You find them in business. You find them in universities. You find them in the art world. You'll certainly find them in science."

Like the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a Chicago preacher, and Maulana Karenga, a California philosopher. Like Zynette Paige, who runs the SBA Academy in Fort Wayne, Ind., and Alton Maddox, a New York attorney.

The problem, Asante and others said, is that those people aren't media magnets like Parks, King or Malcolm X.

"See, you're talking about the visible ones, and they're visible only because the majority press says they're visible," Asante said. "No people ever lose all of their leaders. So long as they are surviving they have leadership."

What is lost with the passing of Parks and others isn't leadership, but memory.

"It's like a library being lost," he said. "What she knew, what she felt, all those things, we lose that."

Arsenault said we also lose something else: perspective.

"So many of the people have a sense of both of how far the movement and the nation has come, but also how it's only a partial victory and how there have been ironic kind of surprises in terms of how intractable some of the problems have been related to race and equality," he said. "So I think that they can bring a really interesting kind of perspective on that in fact that the glass is both half-full and half-empty and it's not easy to figure these things out."

Arsenault sees how the loss of that living history and perspective impacts his students.

"I want to take them to a higher level, but I jump to the wrong conclusion that they're already going to . . . know not just about Martin Luther King, but (Alabama segregation foe) Fred Shuttlesworth, and in many cases they don't," he said. "They've never heard of these people."

The reason for the disconnect is complex. Many African-American men and women weren't born until after the Montgomery Bus Boycott, after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and after affirmative action.

"The older people were bridges in a sense that brought us over the gulf of segregation," Asante said. "The young people don't know segregation as such."

Those on the front lines of the movement, Lowery among them, acknowledge that they were not effective in passing on that legacy to young people.

Lowery, who now runs the Peoples' Agenda in Atlanta, said perhaps they basked in the victories of the movement as opposed to preparing a new generation of African-American warriors.

But then again, no one prepared him and others to launch a civil rights movement. They simply did it.

"Nobody did a good job training us," Lowery said. "We caught the vision. We caught the spirit. We made our own torch and lit it.

"Each generation has to catch the vision."

So why hasn't this generation caught on yet?

Trenia Byrd-Cox, president of the St. Petersburg branch of the NAACP, said the enemy was clearer during the civil rights movement than it is now.

"They dealt with the horrors of segregation," she said. "For this generation, the enemy is not as blatant, but very, very pervasive, very comprehensive and in far too many cases effective in undermining the achievements and progress of African-Americans in this country. It makes it really difficult for people to really put their arms around what the real barriers are, but for Rosa Parks, it was strange fruit. It was lynching. She knew there was a black water fountain and a white water fountain."

Today, Byrd-Cox said, the movement is less about civil rights and more about human rights: education, health care and how the criminal justice system deals with the poor and minorities.

"When you look at the fact that black male children in school are so quick to be labeled and placed in special education classes, when you look at the fact that we're willing and doing it at astronomical rates, criminalizing students for misconduct, when you think of the denial rates for mortgages, now it's subtle," she said.

And it's going to require broader-based coalitions than before.

"That kind of mobilization effort is going to require collaborating with some old partners like the black church and also some new partners, depending on the target," Byrd-Cox said. "That way you can deal with the concern of the voiceless, your homeless, your poverty-stricken."

But to think that struggle for civil rights has been won would be misguided, Lowery said. The momentum and the focus may have shifted, and the issues may be more more complex to tackle, but the struggle remains.

In fact, he says, a reawakened movement is on the horizon, spurred in part by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which disproportionately affected poor African-Americans.

"It doesn't have the national scope that it once had because the issues that we're fighting now really don't lend themselves with such facility to a national pageant as it was," Lowery said. "There are issues that demand local and regional (attention) to combat."

In Detroit, where Parks was buried Wednesday, Herard, the Conyers congressional aide, tried to do her part. She encouraged the caller who didn't know where to turn.

"It's up to us," she told him, "to carry on where Rosa Parks left off."

- Rodney Thrash can be reached at 727 893-8352 or rthrash@sptimes.com

[Last modified November 2, 2005, 10:43:03]