My Greatest Generation

By Esther Iverem
SeeingBlack.com Editor and Film Critic

What did Rosa Parks mean to you? To Black folks? To America? Tell us here!

For several years now, I have been conscious of witnessing an important generation—my greatest generation—slowly pass away before my eyes. That last generation of African Americans who lived well into middle age in a country that unapologetically offered them second-class citizenship. Many recent books, films and television shows have assigned this greatest generation moniker to those who fought in World War II. There is some overlap here because many Black World War II veterans were the mature foot soldiers of civil rights organizations, such as the Deacons for Defense, who believed in arming themselves against the reign of terror against Black communities in the deep South.

But my greatest generation is linked to more than just the cliché of military valor. This generation also fought a war at home for the very rights they were supposedly defending on battlefields abroad. The recent death, or transition we say, of civil rights pioneer Rosa Parks reminded me again of this slow exodus of these nurturers and giants. My grandparents and elderly aunts, all passed on now, were nurturers and giants to me, even though spit on, kicked, swindled and beat down by the larger society. As those of us—born well after Parks made her courageous stand on an Alabama bus, or Fannie Lou Hamer suffered the blows of police—as we settle squarely into the realities and responsibilities of adulthood, we are, at times, awed by this greatest generation's strength, resolution, their ability to love us so and to insist that we love, despite the often visceral hate they faced. Though they were beaten, they were never beat.

Sometimes to soothe our psyches, we turn our awe into bemusement and humor. And sometimes we recognize that what gave them the strength, which we think we lack, was their abiding faith in God, the belief that God was on their side, and that they were doing God's work. Their faith was not of the prosperity theology so in vogue in many of today's Black mega-churches. Their faith was the faith of farmers, sharecroppers, factory workers, janitors and elevator operators. Even into the 1950's, many if not most Black women across the country were forced to work as domestics. Parks' position as a seamstress in a department store probably made her one of the better paid members of Montgomery, Alabama's Black community.

Some Black intellectuals have, in recent years, attempted to create a rift between the civil rights generation and all the post-civil rights generations, including the many gradations of the hip hop generation. In their effort to uphold themselves, some ambitious hip-hop writers have felt the need to belittle their elders, not acknowledging, as many speakers did at Parks' memorial service and funeral, that they would not enjoy the social mobility and opportunities that they do had it not been for sacrifices of this greatest generation.

Even though I recognize the shortcomings of both the civil rights and Black power movements—and resist resting the soul of entire movement in any one person--anything but gratitude to the progenitors of these movements seems, to me, like the reaction of an insolent and churlish child. Instead of rebuffing our grandmothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles and, for some, our parents, we owe them our best, a best that includes some continued sacrifice and stand for the rights struggles of today, for a more just society and world for everyone. Unlike the Japanese, we do not have a name for each generation in the United States. Instead, I just call this era of nurturers and giants the greatest—my greatest generation.

Esther Iverem's new book of poems, Living in Babylon, will be released November 11, 2005 by Africa World Press.

— November 4, 2005

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