Juan Williams - Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America—and What We Can Do About It

CONTENTS

This book is dedicated to the people rising above Katrinas storm in the city of New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and across America.

And the Lord saidI will judge his house for ever for the iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not.

1 SAMUEL 3:1113

INTRODUCTION

I N 2006, JUST AFTER THE January holiday honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., an animated Dr. King came to life on the Cartoon Networks new show The Boondocks. Animator Aaron McGruder had created an older version of the assassinated civil rights legend. He stood at the pulpit of a black church, looking out at gangster rappers in a fistfight, high school dropouts calling each other niggers, and unmarried black teenage mothers dressed like whores. Is this it? This is what I got all those ass-whippings for?I had a dream once, he said, referring to the sacrifices he made during the civil rights struggles of the fifties and sixties. Kings face twisted with disappointment. His voice dripped with disdain for what had come of his dream.

Every word of the cartoon Dr. Kings stinging sermon was rooted in an electric speech that actor and comedian Bill Cosby had given in 2004 on the fiftieth anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Courts decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. Much as W.E.B. DuBois predicted the problem of the colorline would dominate the twentieth century, Cosbys speech set the agenda for civil rights in the twenty-first century by calling for the most powerful, self-reliant black Americans in history to deal with the crisis of children without parents, children failing in school, and civil rights leaders making excuses for absurdly high rates of crime in the black community. It was a speech that continues to redefine discussions of race, poverty, and class in America.

THE EVENT WAS GOLD-PLATED. On May 17, 2004, three thousand of black Americas elite, in tuxedos and gowns, gathered at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C. The very building where black opera star Marian Anderson had been barred from singing in 1939 because of her race filled up with elegantly attired black people for a celebration of the golden anniversary of the Brown decision, the crowning moment in the midcentury African American struggle for racial equality. It was exactly fifty years earlier, on May 17, 1954, that the Supreme Court stunned the nation by ordering racial integration of public schools in Brown.

The featured speaker for the anniversary gala was the famed entertainer Bill Cosby. He had a script for his remarks but he didnt use it. The result was a speech that created a roaring controversy about the state of life in black America fifty years after Brown.

Oseola McCarty didnt live to hear the Cosby speech. But her voice echoed in every moment. The speech was simply the latest version of an anthem to the virtue of struggle and the belief that we shall overcome. Just before she died, McCarty told an interviewer: If you want to feel proud of yourself, then do good. Take action that will make you proud. Black or white, dont make excuses, dont blame anyone, and if you really want to feel proud, then do something to help someone else.

The end of segregated schools had come too late for Ms. McCarty. By the end of third grade in her rundown school in segregated Hattiesburg, Mississippi, the nine-year-olds family pulled her out of classes. She washed other peoples dirty clothes all her life and then the Little Colored Lady in the Mississippi Delta gave her entire life savings of $150,000 for college scholarships aimed at black students. The example of an eighty-seven-year-old third-grade dropout using her small pocketbook to open school doors for the next generation of black children drew national attention. People called her a strong, determined, and sacrificing soul, a living black American saint.

At her lifes end, she said, the prize she wanted most of all was that the children wont have to work so hard like I did. More than six hundred other people were moved by McCartys example to add to the scholarship money she gave the University of Southern Mississippi. In her actions, black and white Americans saw the best of African American traditions come alivethe tradition of defying the odds to overcome and help others get over. President Clinton called her to the White House and gave her the Presidential Citizens Medalthe second-highest honor a president can give an American civilian. Harvard University gave her an honorary degree. The United Nations held a special ceremony to honor her. Media mogul Ted Turner said he felt compelled to act by the example of the the little colored lady washer who gave away everything. Inspired by McCarty, Turner gave a billion dollars to charity. Five years after she died, sixteen young people had already had their education paid for by Mama Os act of grace.

McCarty was no educator. But her actions put her in a long tradition of black people striving to open school doors for black children and succeeding despite the seemingly insurmountable barriers of racial oppression and poverty. Black women such as Harriet Tubman, Nannie Helen Burroughs, and Mary McLeod Bethune all created schools to educate slaves and their children. They acted to lift a veil of ignorance from people who had been held down, condemned to slavery, and denied the chance to learn to read and write, thus limiting them to working as unskilled, cheap laborers. McCarty energized the legacy of uplift by lending a helping hand to the next generation in a new era. Her action in helping others was in line with such seemingly disparate black activists as Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X. Despite their wildly different political philosophies, all of these leaders understood that all hope for progress began with self-help, education, and decisive action.

Cosbys speech never mentioned Oseola McCarty, but in many ways it spoke in her voice. Cosby called on black Americans to keep their self-help traditions alive. His speech challenged black people to take a hard look at poor parenting and the cultural rot preventing too many black children from throwing off the veil of ignorance covering them, a situation rooted in twenty-first-century problems of poverty, disproportionate fatherlessness, bad schools, high rates of unemployment, and lives wasted in jails.

Of course, if McCarty had been alive to praise the substance of Cosbys message, she might have been harshly questioned. Hip critics wise to the street life surely would have dismissed her as country and old. They might have asked if she was authentically black, and pointed out that she knew nothing about thug life or keeping it real. Her humble, striving, up-from-the-bootstraps approach might have been attacked as pretentious, the tactics of a black woman who forgot where she came from, an Uncle Tom or Aunt Jemima. Thats what happened to Cosby.

The Supreme Courts 1954 Brown decision was as large an event in American history as the Civil War. The war, fought to prevent slavery from dividing the union, ended in 1865, almost a century before