[Mb-civic] No One Will Fill Her Shoes - Eugene Robinson - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

No One Will Fill Her Shoes

By Eugene Robinson
Wednesday, February 1, 2006; A23

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 yesterday 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, or the political campaigns led by Roy 
Wilkins, Whitney Young and others. King came out of the strongest, most 
vital African American institution -- the church -- and 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.

But 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.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/31/AR2006013101097.html
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