“C’mon…Junior is on TV!” I was visiting my grandparents near Shelbyville, Kentucky, that hot August day. Back then, if anybody Black was on TV, we’d all come running. There was my uncle, Whitney Young, Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, speaking at the March on Washington. I didn’t know what Uncle Whitney’s job was, but clearly this was a big deal. I later learned Congressman John Lewis, Martin Luther King, Jr., A. Phillip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Dorothy Height, Bayard Rustin and Uncle Whitney had planned the March together.
I’ve been thinking about Uncle Whitney and Congressman Lewis lately. Congressman Lewis is the last of the national 1960s civil rights leaders to pass away. I interviewed Congressman Lewis in 2008 for a documentary I was producing called "THE POWERBROKER: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights." Congressman Lewis told me then, “I think there’s been a misunderstanding of the purpose of the civil rights movement. It was to create a truly interracial democracy, a beloved community. If Whitney was here today, he would still be speaking about one house, the American house, the American family.”
He was right. Uncle Whitney once said, “The purpose of the movement is to help America live up to her ideals.“ Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s motto was “To Save the Soul of America.”
Are we still unclear? I wonder when well-intentioned white friends ask these days how I’m doing. I ask how they’re doing. In the 1960s, the civil rights/justice movement was called, “The Negro Problem.” But isn’t the pursuit of “liberty and justice for all” really “The American Problem” or better, “The American Quest”?
During an NBC News interview, Uncle Whitney said, “But we also need, if this (movement) is to have any meaning, the re-education of white people to teach white people what it means to live in a democratic society. Most white authorities approach Black people as if they have only something to give Black people and nothing to receive. The truth is that white society needs, as desperately, those qualities Black people have developed out of suffering — qualities of compassion, faith, a basic humaneness.”
Developing these qualities was hard-won. Uncle Whitney was a student at Lincoln Institute, an all-Black boarding high school 22 miles from Louisville. One evening, Whitney Junior, as he was called, went to a diner after winning a basketball tournament. The owner refused to seat them. Uncle Whitney was furious. He told his father who said, “Son, never let anyone drag you so low as to hate them.” Character counts.
Congressman Lewis learned the power of personal transformation as a young American Baptist College student. On Feb. 27, 1960, Lewis was arrested during lunch-counter demonstrations to desegregate Nashville. Lewis was afraid of going to jail, but went anyway. During the previous fall, Lewis had attended Pastor James M. Lawson Jr.’s non-violence workshops. He learned violence is unacceptable and change is possible by remembering your humanity and that of the person in front of you.
In David Halberstam’s book "The Children," Lewis describes that day in jail. "I had never had that much dignity before. It was something I learned, the sense of independence that comes to a free person.”
John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr., Whitney Young Jr., and unnamed heroes knew the struggle both requires and builds character. The challenge was to live the ideal, “We hold these truths to be self-evident. ...” I believe Uncle Whitney would say today declaring Black Lives Matter doesn’t mean that other lives don’t. In truth, as generation after generations of African Americans and others pursue justice, human rights are advanced for all.
It is our mission. Or, as my son says, “It’s a family business.” The poet Langston Hughes said it plainly, “America never was America to me, and yet, and I swear this oath, America Will Be!”
Originally published in Louisville-Courier Journal on August 6, 2020.