New generation plugged in and ready to dream even bigger
WASHINGTON — Saraya Ashley prayed the butterflies away before she approached the microphone Friday in a hotel ballroom full of activists.
She wanted advice from a panel of “contemporary movement leaders” gathered a day before the 50th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
“In our schools, they don’t teach us what we need to know” about civil rights and her history, the 13-year-old said.
What should she do to learn more? And how can
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she spread that information to her peers in a way that improves their future?
Her questions made the panelists beam.
They’d just issued a call for the “We Can’t Wait” generation, idealists possessed by the fierce urgency of now, and here she stood, in cowboy boots and cut-off jeans, with shoulder-length braids and hands that gestured like someone born to speak truth to power.
The panelists, none of whom was under 30, rattled off suggestions. When the session ended, Saraya, a rising eighth-grader from Durham, N.C., approached the stage. She handed her iPhone to journalist-activist Jeff Johnson, who typed a note with his e-mail address, phone number and several resources she should consult, including A tourist points to the location where Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington. The 50th anniversary celebration of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom will be held
Proverbs 3:5- 6.
This is today’s justice movement, hyperlinks and hashtags (#mow2013, #redeemthedream, #marchonwashington, #wegotnext, among others). The revolution may not be televised, but you’ll get updates by text messages. (Data and message rates may apply.)
The immediacy of Twitter and Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr makes the old guard look quaint.
That morning, 58-yearold Al Sharpton of the National Action Network took the same stage with a phalanx of leaders whose average age is near that of AARP’s target audience.
When Marc Morial, the 55-year-old president of the National Urban League, talked to the media, he held just under his chin a spiral-bound deadtree edition of the “21st Century Agenda for Jobs and Freedom,” an updated version of the original march’s list of demands.
But by early afternoon, when Saraya mustered the courage to speak, a Twitter stream scrolled on screens in the ballroom.
A tension between generations is common to every social justice movement, as it should be, said Johnson, a former NAACP youth director.
“Most of the people I see don’t even like young people,” Johnson said.
“They are scared of them,” he went on. “They are scared of people coming in and taking their seats that they’re not doing anything in.
“There are way too many old people and not enough elders,” he said. Dozens sprang to their feet and cheered.
If the young people’s visions are tame, if their dreams aren’t terrifying, the elders have failed.
“I want my children to dream so big in the world that they’re in that I have to ask them to explain … . That means we’ve lifted them on our shoulders high enough that they can see what we can’t see.”
Saraya’s grandmother, Alice Long, had a week to spend with her grandchildren before they start school Monday — so she brought them to the march.
Long, aka G-momma, wouldn’t cop to outright tears when she saw Saraya step to the mic.
But she did tear up as she listened to Saraya tell me how she planned to weave her poetry and love for music into her own version of activism.
“Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve been passionate about civil rights,” Saraya explained. (No, I didn’t have the heart to tell her she was still a little girl.)
You’re never sure if children are listening to their parents and grandparents, said Long, 59.
But Saraya absorbed all the stories about Long’s childhood at the back of Southern buses and her 10th-grade algebra teacher, Miss Wilson, who ignored her raised hand in a newly desegregated Corinth, Miss., school.
Saraya now had her own stories, of the time in third grade when a white classmate offered a black classmate $5 if he could burn his Obama T-shirt. (She was struck speechless.)
Or the incident in fifth grade when another white classmate relayed her mother’s words: That Saraya was dumb if she liked the country’s first black president. (By this point, Saraya was older and wiser, so she told her classmate that they could agree to disagree.)
“That’s how I learned racism is a taught thing and there are kids my age who feel this way,” she said.
Saraya, her 5-yearold brother Martin, her grandmother, and tens of thousands of others will walk Saturday from the Lincoln Memorial, past the King Memorial to the Washington Monument, or at least until Martin’s legs tucker out.
And if Saraya gets a chance to make an oldschool sign, it will say this:
“I am the future and I am here to stay.” Contact Wendi C. Thomas at thomasw@commercialappeal. com.or 901-529-5896.