Review”An crucial and inspiring collection of essays by a heap of of the most essential African-American leaders of the last 50 years.”
— Ebony
“The ‘elders’…share portions of their lifelong stories with humor, poignancy, and good old-fashioned ‘mother wit’ that may only come from years of living, loving, and overcoming.” — Chicago Sun-Times
“Inspiring, enlightening, and informative…. A associate to the slave narrations by our 19th-century forebearers.”
— Black Issues Book Review
About the AuthorCamille O. Cosby is a producer and educator. She coproduced the Tony Award-nominated Having Our Say, which won a 1999 Peabody Award for television, and has also served as executive producer of a good deal of film projects, including the documentaries Ennis’ Gift, No Dreams Deferred, and Sylvia’s Path.
Renee Poussaint is a veteran network journalist and winner of three Emmy awards. She is the president and CEO of Wisdom Works, Inc., a major documentary production company, and a Senior Fellow at the University of Maryland’s Academy of Leadership.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
One of the most terrifi and systematically discouraging and hindering parts of being a television journalist for so a lot of years was finding myself perpetually rushing back to the station midafternoon to get my report ready for the six o’clock news, excessively affected emotionally regarding a good deal of arousing and attention holding person I’d just interviewed and all of the lengthy stories and worthful perceptivities captured on videotape, only to face the reality that all but a sliver of that material would end up on the figurative cutting-room floor. No one would be competent to learn from them, be inspired by them. None of the young people, glued to their television sets, struggling, at times self-destructively, into adulthood, would gain from these wise voices.
I lived in a world of varied, arousing and attention holding persons and stories, but worked in a world of thirty-second sound bites. The contradictions were obvious. My precarious balancing act led to various Emmy Awards — and a bleeding ulcer.
What I genuinely wanted was to do pretty much what I’d done growing up in Spanish Harlem; in Queens, New York; and in little Tennessee towns like Humboldt and Brownsville, where my maternal grandfather pastored a little church. I wanted to listen the elders’ stories. On my mother’s side, I wanted to listen regarding my great-grandmother, part Cherokee and tough as nails; when it comes to my late grandmother Gustava Maclin Vance, a pharmacist and the basi African American woman to own a drugstore in her small, rigidly segregated town. I wanted to recognise how they pulled through the now and then terrible hardships they faced.
On my father’s side, I would occasionally plague my New York family with ceaseless questions when it comes to where we came from….How did we get the strange name Poussaint? Why did our faces look so much like photos of strangers I’d seen in places like Mali and Martinique?
The elders in my family helped to fill in the blanks of who I was, by sharing stories of who and where I had come from. Those stories given a healthy elasticity to me in ways I am still discovering, by giving me a sense of the vast, rich African American foundation on which I stood.
What a wondrous gift! As a young girl, it made me want to listen with regards to other people’s stories, other cultures, other ways of thinking, acting, and responding to life’s challenges. Each story was like the opening of a door to a new, unexpected imagination of life. Each door gave answers to dissimilar questions, answers that meant there was no need to keep attempting to reinvent the wheel; that a lot of the hard, rudimentary work had already been done on some of society’s (and my) contemporary problems. I did not have to get started from the beginning. I could build on an existent foundation devised by my elders.
I grew up wanting to percentage that gift with everyone. It seemed in particular indispensable for numerous of the bothered young humans I reported on, who kept making the same errors over and over again. They lived in a world where the dissimilar generations had little contact, where they and their young friends seemed to drift, ofttimes with no evident moral compass. I continued to believe that if a good deal of of these kids could have consistent, open access to their elders’ counsel and life stories, it might make a difference, perhaps a little difference, but still something. This book and the National Visionary Leadership Project are the terrifi extensions of that lifelong belief.
When Camille Cosby and I joined forces to invent NVLP, we agreed, firstborn of all, that it had to be intergenerational. We necessitated to find ways to fetch the elders and youth together on a consistent basis. We were driven by a real sense of urgency.
Some of the elders whose stories we wanted to capture on videotape were in their late eighties or early nineties. Some were younger, but battling health problems. They were the repositories of much of America’s history in the twentieth century. Some of that history had never been shared beyond the confines of the black family, where the truth in regards to their lives in a majority-white world could safely be told. Once those memories and stories were gone, that queer history could never be retrieved.
Some of the young humans we wanted to reach, including those from solidly middle-class black backgrounds, were running headlong into respective educational, social, and professional glass ceilings, unprepared for the remnants of racism that still plague our country. Some of them had no real sense of their inheritance of struggle, and could not imagine life beneath segregation. They did not know what their elders had gone through to win the rights to the life they enjoyed, and for the most share felt little concern with regards to protecting those hard-won victories — that is, until they themselves hit one of those glass ceilings. That lack of noesis with regards to their past made their futures vulnerable. Our intention in founding NVLP was to support by bringing the generations together for better, open communicating when it comes to our shared history.
One thing that became abundantly clear as we interviewed these visionaries was that it’s not possible to know an elder’s entire story, but it’s always arousing and attention holding to discover whatsoever we can. A Wealth of Wisdom gives glances of the visionaries’ varied stories and experiences, a mix of the severe and the lighthearted.
We hope that young people, in particular, will see these elders as complex, finish persons they may relate to — not icons, but vibrant humans who laugh and cry, who’ve made mistakes, fallen down, but managed to get up and keep going, ofttimes with remarkable good humor.
We want young humans to recognise these elders as children, much like themselves, being a feisty tomboy like Coretta Scott King or attempting to imitate the dance moves of a cool older brother, like Geoffrey Holder.
We want them to recognise these figures as young adults on the front lines of the civil rights struggle, some of them facing continuous violence, like Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who describes in this book the sound of the KKK bomb exploding at his family’s home on Christmas Eve.
We want them to learn regarding long-term relationships, such as that of Ruby Dee and Ossie Davis as they talk frankly with regards to the decades they expended attempting to build a strong family, and the financial price they salaried for refusing acting roles they could not be proud of.
Finally, we want every one to see that in fact age is a very relative thing. These elders are shifting gears, not stopping. Katherine Dunham, at ninety-plus, a unfeigned grand dame of dance, still directs the occasional class. Carmen de Lavallade was not so long ago photographed in liquid motion for a national fashion ad campaign. Now in his late eighties, Dr. John Hope Franklin is finishing a new book, and sharing bright stories from a recent trip to the ancient city of Timbuktu, in Mali. And Dr. Dorothy Height, in her nineties, is still running the National Council of Negro Women, and journeying the country on a book tour for her new autobiography. And they are not alone.
These elders astound, exhaust, and inspire me. Hopefully, they will do the same for you.
— Renee Poussaint
Copyright © 2004 by National Visionary Leadership Project
Wealth of Knowledge – History’s Truths
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