LESSON 11: Travel lightly through life and resist the tyranny of burdensome or unneeded things. More is not necessarily better. Tolstoy said that “he has much who needs least.” King Saul gave the shepherd boy David heavy armor to go out to slay Goliath but the boy knew he would be unable to move or fight with it, relying instead on his strategic skill, slingshot, and God’s grace. I am so burdened by taking care of all the things I have let myself be convinced I need in bouts of shopoholism. The more paper I throw out the more seems to pile up. I have more magazines than I can read, more newspapers than are worth reading, and more machines than I can usefully use that keep breaking down.
LESSON 12: Be a pilgrim and not a tourist in life and don’t confuse heroism with fame or celebrity. Cleveland, Ohio’s Rev. Otis Moss says: “Pilgrims seek insights; tourists just want to see the sights.” God has placed endless miracles and opportunities before us. See and hear them and be grateful. Learn the difference between heroism and celebrity and not to confuse money with meaning, educational degrees with wisdom and common sense, or power with worthwhile purpose. Someone has said, “The hero is known for achievements, the celebrity for being well known. Celebrities make the news, heroes make history. Time makes heroes, time dissolves celebrities.”
LESSON 13: God has a job for all of us to do. Open up the envelope of your soul and try to discern the Creator’s orders inside. The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote that each of us comes to earth with sealed orders from God. Struggle to find your orders and to carry them out. Nobody can do it for you. Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter echoed Kierkegaard’s belief when asked a few weeks before she died why she had been willing to risk violence and harassment to get her children a good education. “It was in us to do it. You know, somebody got to do it. We are born for a purpose. Everybody is born for a purpose. You were born for a good purpose. God has a job for all of us to do.” Seek your job and try to do it well.
LESSON 14: Follow the Golden Rule rather than the world’s silver, iron, bronze, and copper rules. Every great faith affirms the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” as the key to peace and salvation. But my wonderful late friend and great preacher, Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor, described how humankind has downgraded it into four lesser ones to fit and justify rather than elevate our conduct: the silver rule, do unto others as they have already done unto you; the iron rule, do unto others as you fully expect them to do unto you; the bronze rule, do unto others before they do unto you; and the copper rule, do unto others and cut out.
LESSON 15: Bear all or most of the criticism and share all of the credit. Don’t hog the limelight if you want to hold coalitions together and keep friends. Daddy used to tell my mother, sister, brothers, and me to step back and let others shine. If anybody in our congregation could do a task at all, however less well than we could, he would always say step back. I did not have a media or public relations staff person during the first decade of CDF’s existence. We were eager to get other people adopting our words and vision as theirs. You can go a long way in life if you do the work and give other people the credit.
LESSON 16: Be real. Try to do what you say, say what you mean, and be what you seem. Speak plainly and truthfully in this era in which words are often used to manipulate rather than illuminate, to hide rather than reveal the truth, to make big profit rather than good policy, to make us forget rather than learn and listen, to comfort us when we need to be challenged and to change, to help us avoid ourselves and our problems rather than confront and struggle to solve them. Phoniness and calculated performances have become the norm in too much of our political and religious life. Too many preachers’ sermons are attempts to stir up the congregational audience rather than expressions of reverence and gratitude to God. Soundbites for television have replaced complex truth, and filth and profanity are perceived as funny and acceptable language for children as four-letter words have proliferated in our culture. Try not to pretend to be what you are not. There is so much falsehood and pretension in politics, in business, in religion, and in the media that children feel unable to trust and believe anyone or anything. This breeds cynicism and despair. How sad it is that we have to tell our children that we don’t want them to grow up to be like many of the people in power all around them.
LESSON 17: Avoid high-maintenance, low-impact people and life in the fast lane. Life’s too short and precious to fritter it away on people who are more concerned about themselves than about helping others or serving a cause bigger than themselves. My brother Harry bought a 1935 Ford and fixed it up when he was in divinity school. He recounts how the old Ford did just fine going to and from Rochester, New York and Bennettsville, South Carolina until he decided to switch to the fast lane where it would shake violently and struggle to keep up as the faster cars zoomed by. Drugs and booze and guns and partying and sex may entice you out of the steady slower lane but they can wreck your life. Pull over to the side, think about your destination, and then travel there at a safe speed for yourself and others.
LESSON 18: God did not create two classes of children or human beings—only one. Never defer to another on the basis of color, income, gender, money, or title. Any adult who teaches Black, Brown, and White children that God our Creator values them unequally is not a hero but a heretic. I remember as a child hearing South Carolina’s Senator James Byrnes, much esteemed in some circles, utter disparaging words of “never” which fell on my ears and pierced my heart as he urged fellow White citizens to resist Brown if the Supreme Court gave me a right to go to nondiscriminatory schools.
LESSON 19: Don’t ever give up on life. It is God’s gift. When trouble comes, hang in. The old folks in my childhood always said God never closes one door without opening another. I believe this. I have watched with profound admiration a dear, wealthy young friend live so fully after learning he was infected with the AIDS virus. I first met him as a teenager. The decade after he learned he had HIV has been a truly remarkable and inspiring story of human courage and resiliency. He lives, as we all should, as if every day is his last and best, fully, joy-filled with singing, hiking, swimming, meditating, playing tennis, cooking, and working as a manager in his company. What a blessing he has bestowed on all who know and love him with his message that life is here and now and good and I will rejoice and be glad in it. I hope all those infected with HIV and any whose family members view it as a death rather than life sentence will take heart. While the new drug cocktails have not cured AIDS, they have shifted the debate to the quality of life with HIV for those able to afford them and are blessed with good health coverage. That’s progress. I pray all those similarly affected by serious problems will transform them into life sentences.
LESSON 20: Strive hard to be a good parent. It is as or more important than your career. This is true for fathers and mothers. “The biggest business in any society in any period is the nurturing, rearing, and cultivating of children,” my father believed. Daddy laid out four key things parents ought to have or do: (1) a wide understanding and a deep appreciation of both your world and your children; (2) firm convictions; (3) the strength to give sensible counsel, positive discipline, and moral and spiritual poise in an age of strange irony; and (4) a commitment to, at all costs, maintain a home, a center of love for children’s nurture and security.
LESSON 21: Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn. Give something back. Every minute you drink from wells you did not dig, are sheltered by builders you will never know, are protected by police and soldiers and neighbors and caretakers whose names are in no record books, are tended by healing hands of every hue and heritage, and are fed and clothed by the labors of countless others. Olive Schreiner, the South African writer, said: “Where I lie down worn out, other men will stay young and fresh. By the steps I have cut they will climb; by the stairs that I have built they will mount. They may never know the name of the man (or woman) who made them. At the clumsy work they will lau
gh; when the stones roll they will curse me. But they will mount, and on my work, they will climb, and by my stair … And no man liveth to himself, and no man dies to himself.” What will your obituary say? What will your legacy in life be?
LESSON 22: Don’t let anything or anybody get between you and your education. This was my daddy’s last word of advice to me as he lay dying in an ambulance as we were riding to the hospital. Mrs. Mae Bertha Carter, in an interview shortly before she died, recounted why she and her husband Matthew chopped and picked cotton and later endured violence, eviction, joblessness, and constant fear about their children’s safety, mistreatment, ridicule, and isolation by White teachers and children: “Don’t care where you go in this world, you need an education, so we stay on the farm, grow our food, send our children to school, and let them get an education. My basic message when I talk to children is to get an education, because without an education you nowhere.”
LESSON 23: Never judge the contents of a box by its wrappings. Open it up before you buy or throw it out. This nation throws away billions of dollars and countless wealth in human potential by judging children and others by their extrinsic characteristics of color, gender, or background rather than by their intrinsic qualities and abilities. And don’t get infatuated by or taken in by titles and position. Look beyond appearances to see if there is any substance or character behind them.
LESSON 24: Take responsibility for your behavior. Don’t make excuses, blame, or point fingers at others or hide behind “everybody’s doing it.” So many urgent needs go unaddressed because we waste so much time and energy pointing fingers at someone else and doing nothing. Epidemic poverty, violence, and immorality in our society is the convergent cumulation of many factors. Pick one to tackle and do your part. So much selfish and destructive behavior is condoned because “everybody’s doing it.” Stop it with you.
LESSON 25: Possessions and power don’t make the man or woman: principles, character, and love do. “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” St. Matthew reminded. Stocks and bonds, pearls and furs, money, houses, and land may be fun to have, and food and shelter are necessary to exist, but they do not add up to a life or lasting legacy. Material possessions have never made a person great if they are hoarded rather than shared to lift the lives of others. Nobody asks about Martin Luther King, Jr.’s possessions or remembers Robert Kennedy primarily because of his family’s wealth; it was their growth into service for the poor and those left behind that we remember. “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.” I hope the young people of today will lose the world, find themselves, and save America’s soul.
A GLOSSARY OF MENTORS
AND SIGNIFICANT OTHERS
This book shows how many significant adults influenced me at different stages in my life. I have profiled some of those who had the most profound impact but mention others who inspired and helped me grow throughout my life. I want young people to know about them. Like those I profile, they shared common characteristics of personal integrity, courage, persistence in the face of adversity, and a willingness to stand up against social injustice.
MARIAN ANDERSON, great Black contralto after whom I was named. Denied the right to perform at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution in 1939 because of her race, she sang before 75,000 people at the Lincoln Memorial with the help of Eleanor Roosevelt.
ELLA BAKER, the key catalyst behind the organizing of the SNCC—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She also helped Dr. King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference understand the importance of infrastructure to movement building. Joanne Grant’s biography, Ella Baker: Freedom Bound, gives an account of her life.
MARY MCLEOD BETHUNE, leading Black educator and women’s leader and founder of Bethune-Cookman College and of the National Council of Negro Women.
UNITA BLACKWELL, a civil rights leader and former sharecropper who became the first Black woman mayor in Mississippi. A former MacArthur Prize Fellow, she is now serving a second stint as mayor of Mayersville, Mississippi.
AMIE BYERS, a stalwart member of Shiloh Baptist Church whom my mother sent to help me and my husband raise our three sons. She lived with our family for fourteen years.
MAE BERTHA CARTER, the first school desegregation plaintiff in Sunflower County, Mississippi and the first Black parent to exercise her “freedom of choice” to enroll eight of her children in previously all-White schools in Drew. The treatment of her children led her to court, where her challenge ended Mississippi’s “freedom of choice,” designed to prevent rather than enable Black children to get an equal education. Constance Curry’s Silver Rights describes her struggles.
SEPTIMA CLARKE Black South Carolina schoolteacher who won the right to equal pay for Black teachers in that state and headed the Citizenship Education Program at Highlander Folk Center near Knoxville, Tennessee and later for Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
WILLIAM SLOANE COFFIN, JR., former chaplain of Yale University, senior minister of Riverside Church in New York City, and head of SANE, a national organization seeking to stop the proliferation and use of nuclear weapons. His autobiography is Once to Every Man. He is also author of A Passion for the Possible: A Message for U.S. Churches.
SAMUEL DUBOIS COOK, a Morehouse College graduate and disciple of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. A gifted professor of political science at Atlanta University who later became president of Dillard University in New Orleans, his political theory course greatly influenced me as a Spelman student.
OLIVE WRIGHT COVINGTON, my big sister, a graduate of Fisk University, was a teacher and teacher trainer in the public schools of the District of Columbia and of South Carolina. She directs CDF’s office in Bennettsville which serves as the curriculum development laboratory for over forty CDF-sponsored Freedom Schools across the United States.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS, former slave and great abolitionist leader and orator. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, chronicles his great life.
MEDGAR EVERS, head of the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Assassinated in 1963 by Byron de la Beckwith, who was finally convicted in 1998 thanks to the persistence of Medgar’s widow, Myrlie. Medgar picked me up at the airport on my first trip to Mississippi. Myrlie Evers’ book For Us, the Living is a record of their struggles.
FANNIE LOU HAMER, a key voice in and the soul of the Mississippi movement. She was a sharecropper who insisted on and sacrificed everything to achieve the right to vote. Kay Mills’ This Little Light of Mine recounts her life.
AARON HENRY, president of the Mississippi NAACP, a pharmacist and civil rights leader in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
M. CARL HOLMAN, poet, journalist, and professor at Clark College who strongly supported the student movement in Atlanta. He later became deputy director of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and succeeded John Gardner as head of the National Urban Coalition.
CHARLES HOUSTON, the brilliant conceptualizer and leader of a legal team including Thurgood Marshall, William Hastie, and James Nabrit, whose systematic legal strategy led to an end to public school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education. Genna Rae McNeil examines his extraordinary leadership in Groundwork: Charles Hamilton Houston and the Struggle for Civil Rights.
MORDECAI JOHNSON, first Black president of Howard University and contemporary of Dr. Benjamin E. Mays. I heard him speak several times as a child.
THERESA KELLY, a community elder in Bennettsville with whom I stayed when my parents went away. Our family had dinner with her on Sunday evenings.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY, former attorney general, Democratic senator from New York, and candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination when assassinated in June 1968. On a trip to Mississippi with a Senate subcommittee examining poverty programs he we
nt with me to the Mississippi Delta to see poor families. He became a passionate advocate to end hunger and poverty, and suggested a Poor People’s Campaign which Dr. King began planning before his death.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR., principal leader of the Montgomery Civil Rights Movement and moral voice of the national Civil Rights Movement. His “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial, witness against the Vietnam War, and call for a Poor People’s Campaign made him America’s leading prophet and practitioner of nonviolent direct action in the twentieth century.
LUCY MCQUEEN, a community elder and Sunday school teacher in whose Bennettsville home I sometimes stayed.
MALCOLM X, fiery, charismatic Black Muslim leader who was assassinated in 1965. He overcame early and difficult obstacles of racism and turned away from criminal activity to become a major Black American leader. With Alex Haley’s assistance, his extraordinary life was chronicled in The Autobiography of Malcolm X.
JOHN DAVID MAGUIRE, a Freedom Rider with Yale chaplain Bill Coffin, fellow Wesleyan University professor David Swift, and Yale law student George Smith. He later became president of the State University of New York at Old Westbury and of Claremont Graduate University.
THURGOOD MARSHALL, first Black justice of the United States Supreme Court and solicitor general of the United States. He headed the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and Educational Fund and was the lead attorney in Brown v. Board of Education which outlawed public school segregation in 1954.
BENJAMIN ELIJAH MAYS, president of Morehouse College between 1940 and 1967 and a mentor of many of my mentors including Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dr. Otis Moss, and Dr. Samuel DuBois Cook. He chaired the Atlanta school board after retiring from Morehouse’s presidency. His autobiography is Born to Rebel.
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