WASHINGTON – The passing of Coretta Scott King, the formidable “first lady” of the civil rights movement, makes it impossible to ignore a difficult fact: The era in which the phrase “black leadership” had real meaning is long gone.
Mrs. King wore the mantle of first lady with great steadfastness and grace for nearly four decades. She died Monday at 78, never having fully recovered from the stroke she suffered last year, and she will be eulogized throughout the land with great and solemn dignity. She deserves those honors. History compelled her to live a legacy, not a life, and at times the obligation must have been confining to the point of suffocation.
In creating that legacy for his widow, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. also shaped the relatively brief historical moment in which it was possible to talk of a black leadership group that spoke with one voice for black America. For me, and for many others, it has been hard to let that golden moment slip away. But let it go we must. Otherwise, we cling to a comfortable illusion rather than face a much more complicated reality.
The unity that King achieved, and wielded masterfully to confront and shame a racist nation, was a miraculous aberration. There were always competing visions of how African-Americans should seek to achieve equality and justice, going all the way back to the turn of the 20th century and the radically different paths advocated by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois.
Washington believed that black Americans should pursue vocational education, that progress would be made through quiet self-reliance and that it was counterproductive to rock the boat. DuBois believed that there was greater power in higher education, that American society had to be held to its stated ideals and that this could never be accomplished without protest and agitation.
Meanwhile, Marcus Garvey came along and said the hell with it, let’s all go “back” to Africa.
All these strains of leadership, and a hundred sub-strains, were alive when King rose to prominence in the late 1950s. His method of nonviolent direct action was different from the legal strategy pursued by leaders such as Thurgood Marshall, for example, or the political campaigns led by Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young and others. King, however, came out of the strongest, most vital African-American institution – the church – and he used it to forge a mass movement that proved unstoppable.
When King, tragically, was stopped by an assassin’s bullet, the remarkable cohort of lieutenants he had assembled took up his banner. One of them, the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, eventually came to serve as the voice of black America – a role he continues to fill.
However, America has changed. Racism persists, all right, don’t get me wrong. But it’s different now, more subtle, a product of attitudes and not of Jim Crow laws. Record numbers of black Americans have entered the suburban middle class. Some have risen much higher: Several of the nation’s biggest and richest companies – Time Warner, Merrill Lynch, American Express – are run by black men. The most powerful woman in television is black. The secretary of state is a black conservative.
There is no one black leader, no one idea of black leadership. There are many leaders and many ideas.
At the same time, though, huge numbers of African-Americans have been left behind – in the decaying inner cities, in the rural South – and they are in danger of simply being written off. In a knowledge-based economy, these millions of people are sending their children to schools too dysfunctional to teach them to read. The connections between African-Americans who escaped and those who didn’t seem to be growing more tenuous day by day.
We should not be discouraged. But we should realize that black America’s issues are too diffuse and varied for any one leader, or any one philosophy, to overcome.
One of the reasons Mrs. King was such a beloved figure, I think, is that she reminded us of a time when the common purpose of African-Americans was much clearer, the task that lay ahead of us was evident to all, and there walked the earth a remarkable man who could convince us to lay aside our differences and walk together arm in arm.
Now the woman who lived the legacy of that time and of that man is gone. Let us mourn her death, let us celebrate her life, and then let us find a new paradigm of leadership for a new and more ambiguous era.
Eugene Robinson is a Washington Post columnist. Contact him by writing to eugenerobinson@washpost.com.
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