Dr. John Young                                                                                                          1/20/08

Unitarian Universalist Church of Jacksonville

Children of the Movement

            In one way or another several of us may consider ourselves to be children of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s and specifically of the civil rights movement. Along with Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, there were hundreds of other leaders in the Civil Rights movement, and hundreds of others who led peace, feminist, and other liberal or radical groups of that era, along with thousands of activists like me and some of you. When we hear the old songs, see the fraying photos, or think back of those days, it stirs our hearts and souls because those were celebrations of our activism and conscience and epiphanies in our spiritual growth. Rodney Hurst, who led the integration sit-ins in Jacksonville as an adolescent has now finished a book on the Civil Rights Movement in Jacksonville, and he will be our speaker on April 27, 2008.  He spoke to me about the importance of our minister then, Rev. Charles McGehee and how he and members of our congregation then were instrumental to the Jacksonville Civil Rights movement’s success.

            The principles of the movement are central to our UU faith: the worth and dignity of every person, equity and compassion in our relations, acceptance of one another, the rights of conscience, the use of the democratic process, and the goal of a world community of peace, liberty and justice for all. We stand by Dr. King’s words that are on the outside wall of our Social Hall: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” With him, we “seek a network of mutuality, we want to be maladjusted to injustice,” to learn from him and from the movement to move beyond the “disease of fear and reject revenge, aggression and retaliation.” We intend with him to make “peace our method now by pursuing peaceful ends through peaceful means. We shall hew out of the mountain of despair a path of hope.”

            My daughter’s apartment in Washington D.C. is next door to an excellent progressive bookstore. I picked up a book there by an Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter, John Blake, entitled Children of the Movement. It is filled with interviews with the children of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Blake is concerned that the Civil Rights movement is “in danger of being obscured by sentimentality.” He found that many of the movement’s children are “emotionally distant from their parents who seemed more suited for protest than parenthood. Surprisingly, he found that some of the children are more pessimistic than their parents about improving society. They saw their parents’ idealism chewed up by the movement, and they’re not going to try to change the world.” Greg Hines tells me that he has a bunch of copies of this book at his branch of Books a Million.

            The book begins with James Bevel who convinced Dr. King to let the children march in Birmingham and a generation later, in 1994, convinced Louis Farrakhan to hold the Million Man March in Washington D.C. Bevel was a great tactician for civil rights. Bevel now lives in Chicago, owns and runs a dry cleaning business and helps at-risk youth including teaching effective parenting classes. He has two daughters, one is a publicist with a husband and children and who volunteers at child abuse centers; the other graduated from Stanford and Yale Law and is an attorney with a top Atlanta law firm. They saw their father only three times as they grew up. As one daughter said: “Our father told a million black men that they need to atone and take responsibility for their families, but he hasn’t done either in his own personal life.”

            James Forman, the former Executive Director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] during the Mississippi Freedom Summer to register black voters has two sons. One is an actor in Hollywood who teaches inmates as a volunteer and the other, James Forman Jr., is an attorney in DC and started a charter school for drop-outs and youth who have been imprisoned. He hopes for “a day when many more blacks will be able to make the leap from the inner city to the mainstream. Right now so many live in a state of isolation from the larger society, and our society has a lot of ignorance about one another.”

            When I was a youngster, Bob Moses was one of my heroes. He was a Harvard trained mathematician who quoted Camus and had studied Zen in Japan for a year. He went to Mississippi and worked virtually alone for several years registering voters. He was beaten, shot at, and several of his colleagues were killed. After 5 years there he shifted to the peace movement and at 31 was drafted. He fled with his wife to Canada and then to Tanzania where he raised a family, taught math and helped his wife get through medical school. President Carter granted him amnesty in 1976 and he returned to the US. He and his daughter now run the algebra project in an inner city, largely African-American, high school in Jackson, Mississippi. They use real world lessons to teach black children that they can understand and use higher math. Bob Moses exudes tranquility, is a vegetarian, and swims 2000 yards a day. “I’m trying to make sure that I honor my fallen colleagues with my life.”

            Julian Bond, who led SNCC, became a Georgia State Senator at 25 and more recently narrated TV’s Eyes on the Prize and spoke at a UUA GA. Julian Bond has a son Michael who has served on the Atlanta City Council and is now Deputy Director the Atlanta NAACP. Andrew Young, Dr. King’s confidant, has been US Ambassador to the United Nations and twice mayor of Atlanta. His son, Bo, is an entrepreneur. He owns Young Solutions, a printing supply firm for Fortune 500 companies and owns interests in 5 other companies. Bo argues that the next stage of the movement is for African-Americans to become compassionate capitalists. As he says: “I want to integrate the money in America.” Because his father, Andrew Young, was forced to become a dentist by his father, Andrew wanted Bo to find his own way. Andrew had grown up in an integrated neighborhood and his parents taught him to understand that the racist world was sick rather than him. Unfortunately he feels that “the world is still sick and you have to be very careful around sick people. He wanted his son to learn to do what he could do well, and that the money would come, but Bo wants to be a millionaire by the time he is 35. Andrew Young says, “Not only do I not believe this way, but it is somewhat offensive to me. I think you don’t seek money first, you seek the Kingdom of God and then these things [like wealth] will be added to you. I want my children to live successful Christian lives, not successful American lives. To live a successful American life you conform to the existing situation, regardless of what it is. I believe in challenging authority, questioning people’s opinions. I want people to think for themselves.”

            I have met two of Dr. King’s children when they spoke in Jacksonville. His daughter who is an evangelical minister and carefully put down white liberals in her talk making clear that she was part of the evangelical right wing politics in America, and MLK III who seemed to be a pleasant but ineffectual man, although he became the President of the Southern Christian Leadership Council. He said: “Daddy used to say if a man hasn’t found something worth dying for he isn’t fit to live. I’m not sure I got that.”

            Ilyasah Shabazz is the daughter of Malcolm X who was shot to death in front of her when she was two years old. Her sister was arrested trying to assassinate the head of the Black Muslims who probably ordered their father killed and their mother, Dr. Betty Shabazz, raised them in carefully integrated middle-class circumstances and received her doctorate and taught in universities before dying in a home fire set by a disturbed nephew. Ilyasah knew so little about her father’s public life that she read his autobiography when she was in college. She wrote a memoir, Growing Up X, published in 2002. She says: “Islam is about submitting to God; it reminds you that you are not the only person who suffers.”

            Frankly, I did not think I would ever be reading about the daughter of George Wallace, who was Governor of Alabama for 20 years and an unsuccessful segregationist candidate for US President. Peggy Wallace Kennedy is a Democrat, voted for Bill Clinton and counts Jimmy Carter as a hero. Her husband is a former Alabama Supreme Court justice, and they have two sons in their 20s. Peggy was five when the Montgomery bus boycott began. She remembers her father having many black friends, and reminds us that in his later years of being Governor that he had many African-American supporters in Alabama. She says that her father spent the first half of his life seeking power and that after his attempted assassination, that he spent the second half of his life seeking forgiveness. She tells of a recent conversation with her son, Burns, who was talking to her about the difference between gay and straight people. She interrupted him and asked him: ‘What famous person said it is not the color of your skin but the content of your character that matters?’ He didn’t know, and she reminded him that it was Dr. King. She told her son that King’s words can also apply to being tolerant if a person is gay or straight. She laughed and said, I guess it was kind of ironic that I was quoting Martin Luther King.”

            Rev. James Reeb was a Unitarian Universalist minister. He had come to Selma, Alabama after the bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. Along with two of his UU colleagues [our ministry was the largest contingent there, some 45 of the 450] he had just left his evening meal at a restaurant, and he was struck and killed by a white racist. He left five children and his wife in a Black neighborhood in Boston where he worked. A prayer left on his desk read: “Grant us peace fearlessly to contend against evil and to make no peace with oppression, and, that we may reverently use our freedom, help us to employ it in the maintenance of justice among people and among nations.” His daughter Anne became a gymnast and a ballet dancer, moved to San Francisco, and formed the Earth Circus in 1990. Her father tried to reach people through his faith, and Anne tries to reach people through her art. Her circus educates people about HIV, the environment, and she now performs at many corporate functions where she feels that she changes minds and hearts through an entertainment medium. As President Johnson said of my father, “He was a good man. He wanted to make a difference in the world, not just to talk about it, but to be out there doing it. We have to learn how to forgive and to go on.”

John Blake concludes his book by talking about the children of three old radicals who have become new radicals themselves, working to change people’s ideas about globalization. Blake reminds us that Dr. King himself progressed from African-American focused civil rights to coming out against the Viet-Nam War to launching a Poor Peoples’ Campaign to force Americans to confront the poverty in their own country. Just five months before he was assassinated, King predicted that a battle centered on the ‘economic colonialism’ of the world’s poor would be the next chapter of the movement. “It is clear that the next stage of the movement is to become international.” Blake agrees, arguing that “activist Americans must help to make it politically feasible for governments to undertake the kind of massive aid that the developing countries need if they are to break the chains of poverty. We need to remember that the poor countries are poor primarily because we have exploited them through political and economic colonialism.” [228-229]

            Some of the leaders of the Movement or movements in the 60s and 70s sacrificed being as good parents as they might have been because of their activism, as unfortunately happens with many leaders, creators and activists in other fields. Some of their children have lost their way, but many are activists themselves and most have found their own ways to be successful and to change the world. We need not only to know and to speak up, but we need to have the courage, as these women and men did, who led the Civil Rights and other movements of the 60s and 70s, to do, to put our lives on the line for what we believe in, to make sacrifices and take chances with courage and fortitude. It is important to be personally responsible. It is important to maintain balance, but on this Dr. King’s birthday anniversary week-end, it is also important to re-commit ourselves to speak up for justice, to stand up for justice and to do all that we really can do to make a better world. As Andrew Young said our world is still sick, and it will not be healed unless we all do what we can to make it healthier.