December 17, 1998 | Read Time: 2 minutes
The vitality that once animated America’s civil-rights movement has largely dissipated — but has not disappeared entirely, writes the novelist George Packer in The Nation (December 14).
The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Congress of Racial Equality, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee — all brimming with energy in the movement’s heyday in the 1960s — are either defunct or pale shadows of their former selves.
Even the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, which four years ago had what Mr. Packer calls “a near-death experience” of debt, financial corruption, and infighting under its former leadership, no longer marshals the moral passion it once did, he says.
Kweisi Mfume, who left Congress to become its president, has rescued the organization from the brink of disaster. He and Julian Bond, the group’s chairman, want to return the NAACP to its original mission: advocacy for equal rights and against discrimination. The organization is therefore giving that area much more emphasis, at the expense of the small-business loans, scholarships, and other efforts that constitute its service programs.
Yet even that mission no longer inspires great passion on the city streets hardest pressed by violence, drugs, and poverty. In those neighborhoods, Mr. Packer says, great strides are being taken instead by people like the Rev. Eugene Rivers, co-founder of the Azusa Christian Community, which operates out of a former crack house in “the most dangerous neighborhood of Boston.”
Mr. Rivers and a staff of 12 people work with gang members, police officers, business owners, and school administrators to try to keep kids from killing one another. Their dilapidated headquarters is alive with activity, argument, and passion.
“What the Azusa Christian Community has is vitality,” Mr. Packer writes. “It drives the staff to feats of endurance and has brought several hundred of the city’s most troubled kids under its wing. And this can’t be mustered on demand.”
Mr. Rivers’s black nationalism and evangelical Christianity form an unorthodox mixture that challenges traditional liberal and conservative political philosophies.
“The movement today is in inner-city churches that talk rights and racism less than responsibility and faith,” Mr. Packer concludes. “The right would like to claim them. The left would be extremely shortsighted to let this happen.”
