COMMENTARY: Sometimes it takes the wisdom of age to preserve a legacy

c. 1996 Religion News Service (UNDATED) In the film,”The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,”the movie’s protagonist (masterfully played by Cicely Tyson) waits expectantly for a young man to emerge who will help deliver African-Americans from racial oppression. As the years go by, each would-be deliverer falls short in his quest. Finally, it is left to […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) In the film,”The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman,”the movie’s protagonist (masterfully played by Cicely Tyson) waits expectantly for a young man to emerge who will help deliver African-Americans from racial oppression.

As the years go by, each would-be deliverer falls short in his quest. Finally, it is left to Miss Pittman to do what the young people cannot do.


I thought of Miss Pittman recently as I read of the current activities of a real-life heroine, Rosa Parks, who is now telling her story to a new generation.

Mrs. Parks is the woman who refused to relinquish her seat to a white man on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955. A devout Christian of unimpeachable character, her subsequent arrest angered Montgomery’s black community and ultimately led to a 381-day boycott of the city’s public transit system. Led by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the boycott served as the catalyst for the modern civil rights movement.

Now 83 years old, Mrs. Parks is touring the country to remind young people of her legacy and of their responsibility to preserve it. In so doing, she represents a period in history that many blacks of my generation have forgotten _ and our children never knew.

Prior to the civil rights movement that Mrs. Parks helped establish, African-Americans generally lived in their own insular communities. Black professionals _ mostly ministers, teachers, doctors and funeral directors _ lived in the same neighborhoods with shopkeepers, laborers and domestics.

The lack of social mobility outside of the community served to reinforce a sense of pride and dignity within the community. Illegitimacy, substance abuse and crime, while not uncommon, were far from rampant.

However, with the advent of desegregation, the diverse educational and social fabric that made up most black enclaves began to fray as the”haves”left the”have nots”in pursuit of better employment, housing and schools. In the process, they took with them many of the hopes, dreams and values of the communities they left.

A generation later, the ranks of both the black community’s middle class and underclass have swollen to record levels. Social dysfunction _ divorce, spousal abuse and child abuse _ has increased in both groups. Simultaneously, the black church, the traditional keystone of the community, has lost much of its hold on the people.


Statistics show that nearly two-thirds of black children are born out of wedlock _ and most of them live in poverty. Roughly the same proportion grow up without their fathers living at home. The top two killers of young black men today are AIDS and murder. At the same time, church attendance for black men shrank from 80 percent at the height of segregation, to about 25 percent today.

Thus the black community has become like many dysfunctional families: We are aware of our need for healing, but don’t know how to make it happen.

Enter Rosa Parks. Like a wise grandmother, she understands the anger of youth, while possessing a wisdom that comes from having been there and done that. As with many of her generation, she has, for the sake of the children, chosen to remind us of our history and of the God who has brought us thus far.

She reminds us, for example, that Moses was 80 years old when he led the children of Israel out of bondage. Joshua and Caleb also were old when they led the Jews into the Promised Land.

In short, she reminds us of the value of sage wisdom, a wisdom that comes only from an intimate relationship with God. For a people who have lost their spiritual moorings, it is a lesson we cannot afford to forget.

MJP END ATCHISON

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