Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson (left) and sports journalist Stephan A. Smith participated in a forum at the NC A&T University Alumni Events Center on Thursday. (photo by Quentin L. Richardson)
The overriding theme of a forum held tonight at the NC A&T Alumni Events Center to mark the inauguration of a series of events to mark the 50th anniversary of the Woolworth’s sit-ins was apathy, and the distance between professional leadership and the struggling masses.
The Rev. Jesse Jackson concluded the evening by scolding his alma mater. He bemoaned the fact that roughly 10,000 students are enrolled in the historically black university and only about 200 voted in the last municipal election, which saw the city’s first African-American mayor, Yvonne Johnson, lose her contest by a margin of 921 votes. Noting the presence of Joseph McNeil, one of the A&T students immortalized as the Greensboro Four for initiating the Woolworth’s sit-ins on Feb. 1, 1960, Jackson insisted that such acts of engaged citizenship must continue.
“We lost the mayor, y’all,” he said. “A&T lost the mayor…. There are some people in this room tonight that should feel pretty guilty because you had a moment to be to a Greensboro Five, and you blew it for homecoming.”
Jackson’s statement referenced an earlier admission by panelist Gary Brown, a senior who is the chief of staff for the Student Government Association.
“The lack of young people voting, it was homecoming weekend,” Brown explained. “The student body was focused on homecoming. We were out there — Aggie leaders, elected officials and appointed officials — and we did our part. ‘You need to vote. You can vote.’ They didn’t do it. But we gave them the opportunity. What’s it going to take to make the light bulb go off? I hate to say it, but it’s going to take a disaster.”
The forum, broken into two panel discussions to reflect the retrospective and contemporary aspects of “21st Activism and Protest: The State of the Civil Rights Movement” was hosted by journalist Ed Gordon. The second panel, which was tilted towards younger participants, ended up stacking Brown and two other college students against two of Gordon’s professional media colleagues, Stephen A. Smith and Warren Ballentine.
“We can’t stop trying,” Brown had said in prefacing his disappointing report on voter participation. “We are the leaders of today. It’s our responsibility no matter how apathetic their attitudes to keep giving these people — our brothers and sisters — opportunities. That brother at the barber shop, maybe he’s part of that underworld drug thing. He may be involved in prostitution. Because that’s lucrative.”
Smith seemed to lecture Brown: “When you are a young man and you have just this rose-colored glasses in front of you and what you’re looking at, at some point in time you have to be practical about the way you go about things.”
Zim Ugochukwu, a UNCG student who founded Ignite Greensboro, riposted, “What is long with having rose-colored glasses? If Barack Obama didn’t have rose-colored glasses, then if someone said, ‘You can’t be president,’ he would have said, ‘Okay, I’m gonna go to law school.’ And that’s it. So I think it’s important to have those dreams and have those aspirations because if you don’t have those, you’ll never be a leader.”
Ballentine interrupted, “Can please call President Obama ‘President Obama’? He’s my friend, but I call him ‘President Obama.’”
Addressing Smith, Gordon expressed a sense of weariness about the familiar contours of the discourse.
“You and Warren and I have done these panels, done these panels and done these panels,” he said. “And I can tell you truthfully that for 20 years in my life — I’ve got gray hairs to show it — we’ve heard the same stories, the same, ‘Well, when I grew up, the neighborhood beat you and then your mama beat you, and we need to get back to it.’ Okay, we ain’t got back to it in twenty years. So my question becomes, how do we move from rhetoric to movement?”
Smith, who makes no apologies for calling out black athletes on bad behavior in his work as a sports journalist, answered, “We got to stop being scared, and we got to recognize that there are some in our community that are a lost cause; they’re gone. We got this thing going on where we want to save everybody. Everybody can’t be saved. Some people are just a lost cause. The Bible — you talk about the word of God, but he recognizes the existence of the devil. The devil is there, you understand. And guess what? The devil comes in the form of blackness too. There are some straight-up black devils. They got to go.”
Jackson and another veteran civil rights activist, Benjamin Chavis — incidentally, a North Carolinian by birth — made what I thought were the most interesting comments, because both were rooted in the experience of the 1960s civil rights museum. I’m wrapping up for the night, but I may write more about them in the next couple days.
Despite what the billing indicated, the Rev. Al Sharpton was not present.
2 comments:
WOW! Rev. Jackson expects voting strickly according to color.
Let's unpack that question a little bit, Mike. Although we've surely made some headway with Obama's election in demonstrating that a black candidate can prevail in an election with a majority white electorate, is the converse true that blacks can go to the polls and vote for a white candidate confident that that candidate will fairly represent their interests? Have white politicians in Greensboro demonstrated that they represent the interests of all their constituents without showing favor to white residents who currently make up the majority of the electorate? I don't know that the answers are clear, but I think those are questions worth considering.
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