Commentary: Wanted: More Soldiers for Civil Rights
Date: Monday, July 19, 2004
By: Deborah Mathis, BlackAmericaWeb.com

It’s a pity that, outside of academia, the political arena and a few churches, there has been no real celebration of the Brown v. Board school desegregation ruling of 1954 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 – two landmark events for which the country is inarguably much better off. Maybe we were too busy planning for the Fourth of July.

Or perhaps we were dumbstruck by Bill Cosby’s scathing indictment of black irresponsibility which, at best, only told part of the story by focusing on the effect while shrugging off the cause and thus was a metaphysical failure. Sure got a lot of media attention, though, didn’t it? But, of course. How they love it when the fault is not with the stalker but with the stalkee for not taking proper precautions.

Or it could be that we’ve just gotten complacent and that after the modern movement made its biggest scores, we did as the Rev. Jeffrey I. Johnson alleges, and let our guard down.

Johnson, the youth pastor at Baltimore’s Empowerment Temple A.M.E. church, took it to the choir last week when congressional Democrats convened its second annual African American Leadership Summit. Although he came to praise civil rights efforts, activists and achievements, Johnson also came to eulogize the old-school movement, trumpeting a new approach, or at least the need for one.

“When we got post-1970,” he said, “we chilled. There was a group of individuals who said, ‘I don’t want my baby to have to fight the way I fought. So just go to school, get a job, baby; move to the suburbs and enjoy your life.’ There was another group of individuals that said, ‘Don’t even worry about being black; if you don’t mention it, maybe they won’t notice. Don’t say that you’re black, don’t be proud of being black, but just be black in whiteface. And so you can go to a college campus and pretend like you don’t have a heritage that you’ve been given; you can pretend like you don’t have issues that frustrate you.’”

Ouch. And he was just getting started.