She heeded his advice. After graduating from Yale Law School, in 1963, she became the first African American woman to practice law in Mississippi. Her magnificent work since has centered on issues relating to child development and children in poverty, and in 1973 she established the Children’s Defense Fund to aid poor, minority, and handicapped children. She has been an advocate for pregnancy prevention, child-care and health-care funding, prenatal care, parental responsibility for education in values, reducing the violent images presented to children, and selective gun control in the wake of school shootings.
Another trailblazer I much admired was Barbara Jordan. I did not know her, and that, for me, is a loss. As the first black woman to serve in the House of Representatives, she altered our political landscape with power and a presence that seemed to be channeled directly from a source larger than herself. Every time she spoke, I was transfixed. One of her most eloquent and memorable speeches was delivered at the 1976 Democratic Convention—as relevant three decades later as it was then, when she spoke of the need for innovation:
We do not reject our traditions, but we are willing to adapt to changing circumstances, when change we must. We are willing to suffer the discomfort of change in order to achieve a better future. We have a positive vision of the future founded on the belief that the gap between the promise and reality of America can one day be finally closed. We believe that.
Barbara Jordan was not only an effective political force but also a public servant and simply a good human being.
What is noteworthy, my thoughtful great-granddaughter, is the existence of earlier individuals of courage who helped pave the way for those who followed. The name of Fannie Lou Hamer, for example, is important to recall for her contributions as a civil rights activist who gained national attention with a speech at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, in which she told of voter discrimination and violence against blacks in her home state of Mississippi. Born the last of twenty children in a family of sharecroppers, she chopped and picked cotton as a child. As a woman, she worked on a plantation until she was fired for registering to vote, but, refusing to be erased, she went on to become a national symbol of the participation of poor Southern blacks in the civil rights movement. A debt of gratitude is owed to Fannie Lou Hamer to this day.
Then there is the woman who for forty years was one of the most fearless and respected women in the United States, Ida B. Wells. My friend William Garfield Greaves did an excellent documentary on this extraordinary woman. Orphaned at sixteen when her parents died in a yellow-fever epidemic in the late 1870s, she nevertheless managed to attend college, and became a teacher in Memphis, Tennessee. She was later involved in an altercation with a white conductor while riding a train. Having purchased a first-class ticket, she was seated in the ladies’ car when the conductor ordered her to go sit in the Jim Crow section, where there were no first-class accommodations. She refused, and as the story goes, when the conductor tried to remove her, she “fastened her teeth on the back of his hand.” Ejected from the train, she sued, winning her case in a lower court, although the decision was reversed in an appeals court.
These were courageous acts at a time when the death of a black woman or man at the hands of someone who wasn’t black was often devoid of penalty. And in spite of the awesome nature of the authorities, she stood against exploitation and threats.
Behind the broad strokes of history there are always individuals of courage who have been chosen by destiny to play their parts. Two women who exemplify behind-the-scenes heroism are Dr. Mary McCleod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. The two women, one black, one white, teamed up as friends and allies on a range of issues relevant to minorities—particularly in their advocacy to create more opportunities for African Americans in all the branches of the military. Together, they campaigned publicly and personally to convince President Franklin D. Roosevelt to activate the Tuskegee Airmen, the Ninety-Ninth Pursuit Squadron.
Many historians believe that the pilots of the Ninety-Ninth who provided escorts for the American bombers on their missions from Northern Italy to the various German targets were a key factor in the Allies’ victory of World War II. Without the two women moving mountains, however quietly, the Tuskegee Airmen would never have found their wings.
Today, we are all beneficiaries of the resolve of the black students across this nation in their refusal not to back down in the early days of school desegregation. For example, in Arkansas in 1957, the boys and girls of the Little Rock Nine, as they were known, crossed the threshold of a previously all-white high school—under the guard of one thousand members of the 101st Airborne of the United States Army. A few years later, deadly riots were set off when James Meredith became the first black student to attend the University of Mississippi.
Exemplifying the kind of courage I’m talking about is Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the first two African Americans to attend the University of Georgia in 1961, who endured the animosity that included at one point a horde of segregationists attacking her dormitory with rocks and bottles. City police had to disperse the mob. But she stayed firm throughout with a bravery that seemed to say, “That’s my calling. That’s where I want to make my stand. That’s where I want to let it be known that we are not represented, and I want to represent those who feel that they are not represented.” She graduated and went on to a distinguished career in journalism, winning numerous awards.
When I was in South Africa for Oprah’s school opening, Charlayne Hunter-Gault was kind enough to invite me to her lovely home there. With the tireless energy that made it hard to believe she was turning sixty, Charlayne was moving about the continent constantly as an indispensable eye for others who live outside Africa and have an interest there. She had been a wonderful correspondent for PBS, was writing a book, and was doing special pieces for various networks in Europe and Africa.
Having sung the praises of individuals that others have acknowledged before me, I should point out that some people don’t always receive their just recognition for acts of courage—but they do what is right because they must or because they can. Lyndon B. Johnson is someone who has rarely been given his due; I grew to have such great respect for him. He was buffeted about by circumstances, including the Vietnam War, but on the home front, and in other aspects of world politics, he did some wonderful things. The most remarkable was that he—a Southerner—of all people met with Dr. King and the leaders of the civil rights movement and recognized that it was incumbent upon him to step up and push through the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Even though the political winds were against him, he understood that, for the sake of American democracy and the moral and ethical values on which it is based, this was his calling. Destiny had marked him for this purpose.
President Johnson went into the dungeons of the Republican and Democratic party structures and fought with those who believed that blacks were not meant to participate in the practice of democracy. They were so against what he wanted that he had to use all of his skills as a politician, all of his resonance as a Southerner, and all the chips that others owed him. He put it all together and made it happen in the United States of America.
In 1965, President Johnson appointed Thurgood Marshall as solicitor general—a tenure during which Marshall won fourteen of nineteen cases. Then, in 1967, Johnson went a step further and appointed Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.
LBJ was a stone, absolute Southerner, yet he had the guts and the courage and the sense of humanity to demand equality for minorities in this country. My feeling is that history books should reserve a place of honor for LBJ.
Another unsung person of courage to note in this context is Earl Warren, a Republican. He did for the African American community a monumental service. Many people don’t know what a fight it was to get the U. S. Supreme Court school desegregation decision of 1954. When I played Thurgood Marshall in the film Separate but Equal in 1991, the movie script called for me to argue as Marshall before the Supreme Court. Director Geor
ge Stevens put together the combination of truths lying behind that decision, including the difficulties that Warren had bringing in line the other court justices. A few of them were absolutely against it. But Warren stuck with it. He believed in it for America. It was the move of a man of character.
In Africa, there are still more men, if you’re looking for courage. There, a few years back, the colonial powers were the ones who owned the government, who owned the guns—the ones who were responsible for whether you ate, had a job, whether your children got an education, or whether you lived or died. But that colonial system was challenged by, in addition to Nelson Mandela, men like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya, Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria, Kenneth Kaunda of Zambia, and men in others places. They knew that the authorities would try to eliminate them. The South African government sent warplanes to bomb Zambia, where the African National Congress of South Africa had exile headquarters. The ANC had declared war on the colonial power that had taken their country, put it in the configuration of the British Empire, and utilized their resources and exploited their people. But these men said, “That is wrong,” and they stood brave in the face of all the inequities.
There are also individuals whose very names represent a distinction of courage that defines them—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., without question, and Jimmy Carter, both the man and the president. President Bill Clinton is certainly someone I deeply admire—for his charm, his brilliance, and his humanity.
There is a group of incredibly courageous individuals that I would be remiss not to mention collectively—the artists of this world who help give humanity its soul. I’m talking about the extraordinary actors, writers, directors, painters, musicians, dancers, and others who have inspired me throughout my career and in whose company I am honored to be. Now more than ever, we must look to our artists to be our truthtellers and to challenge us toward creative solutions to the many problems mankind faces.
As I survey the changes on the horizon, I’m encouraged by the appearance of promising leaders who will surely come to epitomize bravery for your generation—Barack Obama, for one, who has in a short time altered the political landscape. I’m excited by a heightened consciousness among creative entrepreneurs and activists like Steven Spielberg, Bono, and Bill Gates—each of whom has taken on a cause larger than themselves.
When I speak of men and women of courage, dear Ayele, I also think about my own father. His acts were not a matter of life or death, but he was a man of courage nevertheless. My father had a sense of himself and his fellows. He was a member of the leadership of the community, the people who made the decisions about how they should live with their neighbors, how they should coexist in terms of sharing the land, how they should live in terms of bartering. He dealt with the farmers and with the fishermen, the people who worked the fields and those who worked the sea. He spoke with them daily.
He had little substantive education, much like his fellows, but they spoke about the stars, religion, and what they knew of history. They knew that they were there in the Bahamas because their forefathers had been captured and put on ships and transported to a different part of the world. They knew that those ancestors had a history and a culture, and they talked about that history and culture. Through oral history, they retained some of the fragments of who their great-great-grandfathers were, and probably even some surviving words of their language.
They didn’t talk about England. They knew that the white men with the big boats came, and they rounded up people, and those that resisted were subdued or killed. They didn’t know the names of the oceans, and they had no concept of the continents, but they talked about this history because they knew that the people who captured their ancestors came from somewhere else. And they knew that those people had the advantage of weaponry, and technology: they had boats. And they knew that what those people wanted was to convert them from the free people they were to slaves, transport them, sell them, and work them.
My father wasn’t born until 1884, but he knew what slavery was, even though he was now removed from it. And he and his fellow men articulated their opinions and posed their positions to each other about how it came about, what happened, and how they got to be where they were and who they were, and what could have happened in Africa when their forefathers were taken into slavery four, five, eight, ten generations earlier.
Some of the men of courage I have mentioned were grandsons or great-grandsons or great-great-grandsons of some of those same people, but they had an education. Robeson, Bunche, Marshall, and Robinson had magnificent educations; Nelson Mandela was educated as a lawyer. But even though my father was not learned in a formal sense, there was nevertheless a connectedness between him and all sons and grandsons and great-great-grandsons of all the slaves who ever lived and died in the Caribbean area. There is a sense of self, of character, and of personal self-worth and kindness and hopefulness and embrace that is characteristic of such people, educated and noneducated alike.
My father was not ashamed that he did not have much of an education. He had a point of view in life, and I think that is where his character was. I see in my mind’s eye a gentle, firm, meaningful, courageous person. He would discipline his children with a sense of fairness. He expected of them a certain kind of response, and when that response was not forthcoming, he whipped some bottoms and punished his kids for particular kinds of misbehavior.
Among elders of the village, he had their respect, and they had his. I can remember that. Even now I can hear him talking with his compatriots, I can see him spending an evening with his peers, sitting around on a moonlit night, drinking and sharing thoughts on what they perceived to have been the endless complexities of life. He was quite a person; he was my frame of reference. He was the male I knew who took good care of me, spent time with me, and talked with all of his children. I remember his speaking in terms of what a person needs to do, how a woman should behave, how a man should behave, how respect should be observed—all such things that spoke to the elements of character.
Looking back, retrospectively, the man I now see my father to have been was of such texture that I would put him against any man in the outside world. What I judge him on today would be his character, his heart, his courage, sense of fairness, compassion, humanity, on his sense of himself. I think he saw himself as a good man, and he charged himself with the responsibility to remain a good man, despite the difficult life he lived. I could see him contemplating a question, looking for the right answer, searching for the proper response, examining whether it was honest or fair or reasonable or worthy of him, or of the person he was trying to help, or of the person who was seeking to help him; all of that is both in one’s body language and in one’s internal attitude. You can tell; that’s how I learned: watching how differences were settled. And I never witnessed a fight between two adults that involved my father—except for the time when my uncle attacked him.
More than anything, the true sense of him came to me from how he was with my mom. I never, ever heard an unkind word pass between them, not one. I would watch her listen to him, and he would listen to her. They would talk about their family, their neighbors, the seasons, when the rains were going to come, the hurricane seasons and being prepared for them. And while they didn’t know about the world materially, they knew about the universe. And they knew enough about the universe to know that they were a part of it, that there were forces and energies and connectedness between human beings and the stars and the oceans.
Part III
Q UESTIONS, ANSWERS, AND MYSTERIES
sixteenth letter
THE NEUTRAL ZONE
Dearest Ayele,
My mind reels at the passage of the days. Yesterday, or so it seems, I met you for the first time, on your second day of life. Then just a week ago you turned two years old. You are now entering your third year of history, to be written later by you, perhaps in correspondence like ours, that you write to your great-grandchildren.
As I approach my eighty-first birthday, I intend to conclude this last handful of letters by returning to those large universal questions of existence that I posed early on—together with such answers as I can provide, along with thoughts and suggestions of further mysteries to be unraveled by you and your compatriots in the years ahead of you.
There is no rite of passage to my knowledge for the passing of that torch, but it is well established that the search for answers to the fundamental questions of life falls to every generation. It will to yours, Ayele, as it has to your parents, your grandparents, and your great-grandparents, among whom I proudly count myself. How and when that search takes form is subject to many factors, especially the subtle and unpredictable influence of time, as I know all too well in the rapid acceleration of years left to me on my watch.
Therefore, Ayele, as time continues to fly, I will try, through these last letters, to pass on final insights that have worked their way through the grapevine that includes at least the six generations of our family that, we know for sure, have walked the earth in the past two hundred years—all of whom, each in their own individual and generational manner, have already undertaken or will undertake the search.
Let me state for the record that in my compulsions to be a better person, to search for truths, to be in constant deliberation—like unraveling the knottiest balls of yarn—it has not necessarily been a pleasant experience.
Indeed, Ayele, there is so much turmoil inside me. Big questions, little questions—you name it.
There’s turmoil when I am alone, there is turmoil when I am at work, there is turmoil when I am trying my best, in a supposedly relaxed circumstance, to feel at ease.
I don’t know why this turmoil accumulates inside me. Where is it coming from? Is it coming into me from the outside? Is it triggered by the way I live, by my reaction to things around me? Is it long-buried guilt, struggling to surface out of my subconscious? Is it shame, trying to claw its way through a wall of denial? Is it the suppression of long-overdue apologies owed to self and to others for wrongful deeds, conveniently forgotten but still festering in some dark corner of my subconscious self?
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