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 From The Desk Of
Ron Walters
Columnist Page
Friday, February 25, 2005; Page 21
Respect for Ossie Davis
The recent passing of renowned actor Ossie Davis causes me to pause and acknowledge someone who was important in the cultural life of Blacks because of the depth of the meaning and direction that he gave to the leadership of our community. Ossie was in a category of Black conscious artists such as Jimmy Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Amiri Baraka, John Oliver Killens, Sonja Sanchez, Haki Madthubiti and others.
Like these individuals, he did not separate his art from its origins in the struggles of Black people; on the contrary, he linked the two as the primary dynamic in his life. And perhaps it is uniquely the business of artists, especially as cultural warriors, to speak the truth to power as they see it, unvarnished and unafraid.
As someone who studies Black leadership and who knew Ossie Davis, not intimately, but well enough, I respected this quality in him. We all saw this quality in him when he eulogized El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz (Malcolm X) at his funeral on February 27, 1965, referring to him as ''our own Black shining Prince, who didn't hesitate to die because he loved us so.'' But when asked later why he eulogized Malcolm X, he said that he was taken by the fact that the nature of Malcolm X's integrity caused him to keep snatching away the lies about race, harbored by both Blacks and Whites, and to keep shouting the painful truth that no one wanted to hear.
Ossie had that same kind of integrity. I once called him to come to Washington, D.C. in the mid-1970s to speak about Paul Robeson. A Black writer, Philip Hayes Dean, had just crafted a play about Robeson which many people, including Paul Robeson, Jr. rejected as soft-pedaling the revolutionary character of Robeson to make him acceptable to the audience at the National Theater. Ossie agreed to come and speak to the concerned and he was simply spell binding and informative about the nature of Paul Robeson's commitment to Black people and the lengths to which he went, as an artist and an activists, to display his commitment. He viewed it as a lesson we all should follow, saying also that we should never turn away from our leaders who exhibit such commitment, as many of us did when the American government went after Robeson.
I was also taken by Ossie's role in giving some initial instructions to the Congressional Black Caucus at its inception in 1971. In his speech at the founding dinner of the CBC, on the night of June 18, 1971, he counseled them to use their offices to devise public policy in the interest of the Black community. Then he cautioned them that, ''it's not the man, it's the plan and for those of us who need more explicit information, those still caught up in the dream that rhetoric will solve our problems, let me state it another way... it's not the rap, it's the map.''
In other words, Ossie was giving the new organization instructions to become strategic, to plan to devise substantive public policies and to attempt to get them implemented. He understood the moment, that this was an historic place for the Black community to be, in the Congress of the United States after so many years of absence, that it was a logical step in the movement for social justice and that the stakes were very high. In fact, he was not dismissive of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s dream, rather he felt that if Dr. King had lived to see that moment, rather than saying he had a dream, he would say that he had a plan to affect public policies that would help to deliver freedom.
Ossie Davis closed his speech to the CBC with the plea to ''give us a plan of action... a Ten Black Commandments, simple, strong, that we can carry in our heart and in our memories no matter where we are and reach out and touch and feel the reassurance that behind everything we do is a simple, moral intelligent plan that must be fulfilled in the course of time, even if all of our leaders, one by one, fall in battle.''
Where are we today in the fulfillment of Ossie Davis' immortal vision? Do we have a plan that is universally Black and that's geared to our knowledge of the challenges that we face in this age and the strategies and tactics we must employ to overcome? My feeling is that the Plan is not as powerful and visionary as it should be: it is not approached with the degree of unity that is necessary to build an undeniable force to assert our interests; it is not as strategic as it should be to evoke surprise and offense when necessary; and it is not as visible as it needs to be so that it can be consumed by the masses at every level.
Ossie Davis has fallen, but he was a muse to our leadership and we should take his instructions seriously. And although he will be missed, his life is an eternal light that will continue to give us hope and light the way to freedom.
Dr. Ron Walters is Distinguished Leadership Scholar, Director of the African American Leadership Institute and Professor of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland College Park. His latest book is: White Nationalism, Black Interests, by Wayne University Press. |
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