TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022690/0226420.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 119 lines

                                                                                CINEMA, Page 68

Manhood and the Power of Glory


By LANCE MORROW


    The movie Glory is, as the historian James M. McPherson has
written, the most powerful and historically accurate film ever
made about the American Civil War. But Glory, which tells the
story of one of the war's first black regiments, has deeper
meaning. The movie addresses the most profound theme of race in
America in 1990. Glory is about black manhood and
responsibility.

    The worst problems of the black underclass today -- young
black men murdering other young black men; young black males
fathering children of females who are virtually children
themselves; young blacks lost to crack and heroin -- all connect
directly to black manhood and responsibility.

    Perhaps Marion Barry, Washington's mayor, and Benjamin
Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, should celebrate Black History
Month by watching Glory. When Barry was arrested for cocaine
possession last month, Hooks' most visible reaction was that the
mayor had been the victim of a plot by law enforcement to
persecute black elected officials. Presumably, the mayor of the
nation's capital (not exactly an unemployed ghetto youth, but,
absurdly, a role model for unemployed ghetto youths) is not
responsible for being in a hotel room with a fashion model,
smoking crack. A white conspiracy must have put a pistol to his
head and made him do it. Hooks' reaction harmonized with
something the late Whitney Young said 23 years ago. Young, then
the head of the Urban League, told white leaders, "You've got
to give us some victories." But if a victory is "given," it is
not a victory. It is a dole.

    The freemen and runaway slaves of the 54th Massachusetts
Infantry regiment were not given anything in 1863: certainly not
victory. The blacks of the 54th were actual men who died actual
deaths in a redemptive violence that they sought. The lesson
that Glory teaches -- and it is finding an audience -- is this:
it was not the Great White Paternalist alone who freed the
slaves and made them American citizens. It was also blacks who
freed themselves. These were the blacks who enlisted, trained,
suffered, endured condescension and insult, disciplined
themselves, fought for the right to fight and the opportunity
to die in the pursuit of their freedom and manhood.

    On July 18, 1863, the blacks of the 54th Massachusetts led
a virtually suicidal assault upon Fort Wagner, a massive
Confederate earthwork guarding the approach to Charleston, S.C.,
harbor. At a critical moment in Glory's version of the attack,
Trip, the runaway slave-soldier played by Denzel Washington,
seizes the American flag and runs forward with it to his death.
His death says this: "I did not want your white man's flag;
earlier I refused the `honor' of carrying it. But I will do it
now, dying with other black men, because, understand me, we are
citizens, we are Americans, not white Americans, but black
Americans . . . but Americans!" In that historical protomoment,
at the instant of death, blacks become, incontrovertibly,
Americans. They won it. It was -- is -- theirs.

    Every generation forges its own conscience. Glory reaffirms
an older, persistent moral theme in the black community that in
the past 25 years seemed to go out of fashion, at least at the
leadership level of the civil rights movement:
self-determination, responsibility. This sterner theme,
developed well before emancipation and repeated by Frederick
Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and
generation after generation of struggling black fathers and
mothers, instructed: the antidote to racism is excellence.

    But after the Great Society, the emphasis on dignity,
struggle and pride in accomplishment was replaced in the
rhetoric of some black leaders by a toxic seepage of self-pity,
of the victim theme. Passivity, grievance and denial became the
psychic orthodoxy. The culture of victimization came to
replicate in an eerie way the configurations of slave days --
the Government functioning as benevolent slave master, dispenser
of all things. Many blacks were trapped in ghettos as surely and
hopelessly as slaves on plantations. Perhaps civil rights
organizations, designed to battle discrimination and hardening
over the years into institutional mind-sets, could not adjust
to new realities and needs after the structure of Jim Crow had
been torn down. At worst, the Great Society turned the leaders
into petitioners, even while thousands upon thousands of
working-class blacks toiled in the hardest, dirtiest jobs rather
than accept welfare.

    Those who suggest that the solution to black problems lies
in the minds and wills of blacks are always accused of blaming
the victims. But that is a futile line. Forget blame.
Presumably, black America long since abandoned the delusion (if
it ever harbored it) that white America was going to ride to its
rescue. The only authentic black fulfillment will be achieved
by blacks.

    Jesse Jackson is one black leader who over the years has
consistently preached self-help. Now he warns, "Our failure to
become introspective and responsible takes away our moral
authority." Nelson Mandela worked the same vein last week: "All
students must return to school and learn." The lesson of Glory,
proceeding out of black history, is that blacks are not
powerless in the face of racism or poverty. The battles fought
and won by earlier generations of blacks were immensely more
difficult than those that face most blacks today.

    Once, in 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. told some black
college students about the Aristotelian bigot. This bigot, said
King, constructed a syllogism: All men are made in the image of
God; God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro; therefore, the
Negro is not a man. The black soldiers of the 54th
Massachusetts, and 180,000 other blacks who served in the Civil
War, took that syllogism and burned it to ashes.