Better in their words…

Very thoughtful piece worth reading.
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The lead item on much television news since the weekend has been the shooting in Ferguson, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis, of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer. On display was what has now become the fairly standard response in these matters: the inconsolable mother, the testimony of the dead teenager’s friends to his innocence, the aunts and cousins chiming in, the police chief’s earnest promise of a thorough investigation. The death in Ferguson added to the mix three nights of protest and looting, with police using tear-gas and rubber bullets to quell the crowds, but otherwise the feeling was not dissimilar from what we saw two years ago after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. The same lawyer who represented the Martin family, it was announced, is going to take this case.

Missing, not that anyone is likely to have noticed, was the calming voice of a national civil-rights leader of the kind that was so impressive during the 1950s and ’60s. In those days there was Martin Luther King Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; Roy Wilkins of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; Whitney Young of the National Urban League, Bayard Rustin of the A. Philip Randolph Institute—all solid, serious men, each impressive in different ways, who through dignified forbearance and strategic action, brought down a body of unequivocally immoral laws aimed at America’s black population.

King died in 1968, at age 39; Young in 1971 at 50; Wilkins in 1981 at 80; and Rustin in 1987 at 75. None has been replaced by men of anywhere near the same high caliber. In their place today there is only Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, each of whom long ago divested himself of the moral force required of true leadership. One of the small but genuine accomplishments of President Obama has been to keep both of these men from becoming associated with the White House.

The NAACP and the Urban League and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference still exist, yet few people are likely to know the names of their current leaders. That is because no black leader has come forth to set out a program for progress for the substantial part of the black population that has remained for generations in the slough of poverty, crime and despair.

In Chicago, where I live, much of the murder and crime that has captured the interest of the media is black-on-black, and cannot be chalked up to racism, except secondarily by blaming that old hobgoblin, “the system.” People march with signs reading “Stop the Killing,” but everyone knows that the marching and the signs and the sweet sentiments of local clergy aren’t likely to change anything. Better education is needed, politicians say, perhaps a longer school day. Jobs, yes, more and better jobs, that’s what’s required. Got to get the guns off the street, everyone says. The black family—the absence of fathers—is the problem. The old dead analyses, the pretty panaceas, are paraded. Yet nothing new is up for discussion. Discussion itself is off the table. Except when Bill Cosby, Thomas Sowell or Shelby Steele and a few others have dared to speak about the pathologies at work—and for doing so, these black figures are castigated.

President Obama, as leader of all the people, is not well positioned for the job of leading the black population that finds itself mired in despond. Someone is needed who commands the respect of his or her people, and the admiration of that vast—I would argue preponderate—number of middle-class whites who understand that progress for blacks means progress for the entire country.

The older generation of civil-rights leaders proved its mettle through physical and moral courage. The enemy was plain—rear-guard segregationists of the old South—and the target was clear: wrongful laws that had to be, and were, rescinded. The morality of the matter was all on these leaders’ side. In Little Rock, in Montgomery, in Selma and elsewhere, they put their lives on the line. And they won.

The situation today for a civil-rights leader is not so clear, and in many ways more complex. After the victories half a century ago, civil rights may be a misnomer. Economics and politics and above all culture are now at the heart of the problem. Blacks largely, and inexplicably, remain pledged to a political party whose worn-out ideas have done little for them while claiming much. Slipping off the too-comfortable robes of victimhood is essential, as is discouraging everything in ghetto culture that has dead-end marked all over it. The task is enormous, the person likely to bring it off, a modern-day Moses able to lead his people out of the desert, nowhere in sight. Until that person or persons arrives, we can expect more nights like those in Ferguson, with cries of racism, with looters and bottom-feeders turning up, with sadness all round.

Mr. Epstein is the author, most recently, of “A Literary Education and Other Essays” (Axios Press, 2014).
Joseph Epstein: What’s Missing in Ferguson, Mo. – WSJ.