Cinema: Manhood and The Power of GLORY

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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.