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Passing the Torch? By Julian Bond
The New Generation of Student Activists
[image] The author with a past generation of collegians.
At one of the too-frequent anniversaries of the 1963 March on Washington -- perhaps the 30th anniversary in 1993 -- a ceremony was held which featured the symbolic "passing of the torch" from the grizzled and gray-haired generation that had beaten back segregtion in the deep South states in the 1960s to the current generation of eager Black youth.
I watched the ceremony in dismay, thinking back to my own days as a sit-in protestor and voter registration worker in the early 1960s.
Like many others of my time and place, I was attracted to the 1960 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters because they offered me, at age 20, an opportunity to directly confront and attack an evil system which kept me away not only from an integrated cup of coffee but also from the jobs that even my Morehouse College degree wouldn't have qualified me for.
I would never have the major qualification for many ordinary jobs -- dime store clerk, bank teller, policeman who could arrest White people.
The prerequisite for these jobs was a White skin, and the assault on lunch counters was an assault on the barriers that prevented me and thousands of young people like me from realizing our potential.
Segregation and racism frustrated our ever achieving the futures we had trained for; it cheapened the worth of our college degrees. And it crippled the lives of every Black person -- college students and first grade dropouts. So we sat-in and rode-in and marched and protested -- but we also did much more.
We organized. We spent long hours convincing others to make a dangerous attempt to register to vote. To become a member of a brand-new political party. To join a labor union. To take steps that would help improve their lives. To join with others in a struggle that had begun long before we had been born and which we hoped would continue after we had left the scene.
By the mid-sixties, we had won some fights -- legal segregation was elimited by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination at the ballot box was voted out by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
With many of my generation -- Ben Brown, John Lewis, Marion Barry, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Clarence Mitchel III -- I entered
[image] Students in a 1968 demonstration at Columbia University. ©Steve Shapiro/Black Star
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politics. Today, like many others, I am an academic, teaching young people at Washington's American University and the University of Virginia about the 20th Century struggle for equal rights.
My students are especially interested in the roles played by young people in that struggle. Among others, I tell them about college student James Farmer meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt.
They learn about young Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Mississippi martyr, and Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, two young women arrested for refusing to give up their seats on Montgomery, Alabama buses months before Rosa Parks' historical refusal to stand.
They already know a bit about young Martin Luther King, just 26 when the Montgomery Bus Boycott began.
I introduce them to the heroic Little Rock Nine who braved mobs to win the right to an equal education, and whose dignity and courage in the face of howling mobs provided inspiration to a generation of Black teenagers.
They learn about four young men from North Carolina A & I University -- Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair (who became Jibreel Khazan) and David Richmond -- whose February 1, 1960 sit-in at a Greensboro Woolworth's lunch counter set the South on fire.
They meet Fisk University's Diane Nash; sisters Mary Ann and Ruby Doris Smith, from Morris Brown and Spelman Colleges; Johnson C. Smith's Charles Jones, Virginia
[image] Protest at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, 1982. ©Roy Lewis Photography
Union's Charles Sherrod and hundreds more who rocked the South with the 1960 sit-ins and the 1961 Freedom Ride.
They learn that young people were an important part of the movement, pushing their elders to great militance, daring to take the movement to small towns and rural backwaters.
Now, it was 1993. Crowds had gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, commemorating the 1963 March many of us had attended. We were asked to witness a symbolic torch passing, a surrender of the leadership roles we had won to a younger generation because...
Because they were young? Because we were old? Because the only way they'd exercise leadership was if we handed it off to them?
I turned away in dismay.
Dismay because I knew that leadership isn't handed off like batons in a relay race or given away like a piece of candy to children; it is earned through struggle and sacrifice and activism.
Dismay because no one had ever passed a torch to me; I had to pry it from my elders' hands. They didn't want to let it go, and they weren't about to pass it along to some complaining kid whining about how the old folks wouldn't let him play grown-up.
Some of today's college-age young people are justifiably angry at the old codgers from the '60s movement days mouthing off about what we did when we were their age in the good old days long ago. They must be irritated at our constant reunions and celebrations where we rehash war stories of generations past. Many must wish we'd shut up or die off.
But some are doing more than hurling rhetorical darts at their elders: Building on an activist organizing tradition that dates back to slavery, they are carrying forward a fight that began shortly after the first slaves set foot in Jamestown.
[image] Julian Bond in 1964 with fellow participants in the Mississippi Summer Project for education and voter registration. ©Steve Shapiro/Black Star
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Virginia in 1619.
Some are combining education with real activism and organizational work -- not wordy press conferences full of empty threats and proclamations, not rallies where there are more speakers than audience, not bigoted attacks on others meant to draw headlines for the attacker, not announcements of brand new organiations each semester in the name of unity.
These young people are carrying it on. The torch is already in their hands, and they are proudly holding it high.
Howard University student Robin Adams organizes young people in Washington's public housing projects.
Melvyn Colon, a PhD candidate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is a single parent and an organizer for community development in Boston's Puerto Rican neighborhoods.
Selma, Alabama organizer Margaret Ann Brock has struggled to get her college education for 15 years; she is close to that goal at Auburn.
At Union Institute, Joyce Duncan is seeking a PhD in organizational development, but she has spent much of her young life as a uion activist and tenant organizer.
Spelman College studen Rachael Jackson organizes in Atlanta.
Milagros Roca is getting her master's degree at Bryn Mawr; when she's through, she'll go back to her work with children in Boston.
Hermilia Trevino-Sauceda, a farm worker all her life, created an international network of farm women, and is getting a BA in rural development at California State, Fullerton.
PhD candidate Syovata Edari creates African heritage videos and organizes for prisoner rights while a student at the University of Wisconsin.
Prathia Hall-Wynn, my colleague in the 1960s student movement, has never stopped being an advocate of Christian activism; she's now working for a doctorate at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Vivian Brady wants to be a people's lawyer, not an apologist for corporations or a defender of privilege. She's worked against racism and police brutality in New York and will get her law degree from NYU Law School.
Radiclani Clytus has worked for years as a mentor to poor youth and in anti-racist work; ow he's working for a PhD at Indiana University.
Maya Pennick has been an activist with the Alabama-based Federation of Southern Co-ops since childhood; now she is a student at Georgia State with plans to teach.
Her fellow Georgia State students, Kevin Ladaris and Olimatta Taal, are leaders in the Ten-state Youth Task Force against environmental racism and for education equity.
Celestina Owusu came to the United States in 1983 and plans to return to Ghana to bring health care to her village after finishing her studies in public health at Johns Hopkins University.
Virginia Commonwealth University student Franklin Roberts and Ferris State University state Ernest
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25th Anniversary / April 1996 Volume 26, Number 3 - Special Issue - ISSN 0192-3757 Inside The Black Collegian
Coverson serve with me on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Board of Directors. Coverson is a Board Vice-President, and serves with others in the largest youth membership -- that of the NAACP -- of any secular adult organization.
There are many others; these activists are only a few of a larger number that still isn't large enough -- not now, not in the early '60s when I was a college student, not at any time in our history.
But the young people I've listed above are signs of hope and optimism. They give reassurance that seriousness and commitment can be transmitted through generations, that torches can be passed -- not at fancy ceremonies because of childish complaints but as a result of achievement and accomplishment.
Sadly -- or luckily -- for those who yearn to do their part, there are plenty of torches to go around.
Bob Moses was a Harvard University drop-out who came South to work with Dr. King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He stayed to work with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and, today, directs the Algebra Project, teaching young people complicated mathematics. He isn't worried about the present generation.
"Leadership is there in the people," he said. "You don't have to worry about that. You don't have to worry about where your leaders are, how we are oging to get some leaders. The leadership is there. If you go out and work with your people, then the leadership will emerge ... We don't know who the leaders are now; we don't need to know. But the leadership will emerge from the movement that emerges."
Julian Bond is a distinguished adjunct professor in government at American University and a Professor of History at the University of Virginia. During the 1960s, he was one of the early membres of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
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