Shared Vision

A society's life is enriched by its visionaries. In Black America, at least four visions in turn have organized our thoughts, perceptions and achievements. These have been the vision of freedom as developed in the Negro spirituals; the vision of overcoming, as portrayed in the slave narratives during the abolition period and Reconstruction; the vision of a new man in America, the New Negro, as embodied in the Harlem Renaissance; and the vision of civil rights and equality in the civil rights movement of the 1960's. Each of these large and encompassing visions has shaped the actions, politics and education of their respective eras. Each has provided the context from which a people -- "African- Americans" -- could establish and stake a claim in the development of this nation and consequently, the creation of this culture.

African-Americans now need a new shared vision of themselves; a vision that provides a context for us adults to recreate ourselves and to teach our youth. Perhaps such a vision can best be articulated if we understand our role in creating and establishing the American Common Culture. Why Common Culture? Because it is a massively unexplored area. But it is an area that includes all Americans. Common Culture is the interrelated social facts, myths and arts that lay claim on the total society and serves to shape the mind, soul, and spirit of that people. African Americans are a central dynamic in American Common Culture.

Embracing American Common Culture becomes that shared vision, that organizing force that would bring new life and vitality to the education process, and provide a tangible avenue for this great, diverse mass of people to claim this new century. This is a time in which we will need more than civic codes and laws to organize our relationships, our human bonds and our personal and public kinship.

Consequently, common culture becomes the tool through which cultural leadership carries out its work of reshaping our shared vision of America.

The work of W.E.B. DuBois is the source of my definition of cultural leadership. DuBois stated "the talented tenth of the negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people. No others can do this work, and Negro colleges must train men for it". DuBois was right. The leadership of black America, its middle class, its politicians, its educators, its clergy, its businessmen, its tradesmen and its intellectuals must become leaders of thought "and missionaries of culture." In 1981 Dr. A. Knighton Stanley and Dr. Bobby W. Austin wrote "these 19th century American missionaries who sojourned among newly freed persons and who armed them with the bible sought to re-define their own humanity as well as the humanity of those whom they served. Whenever a people attempt to re-define themselves or re-define others, demonic elements always creep in. None the less, the achievement of these missionaries was note worthy. They laid a foundation establishing a common language, a common myth, a common culture, indeed a common ground upon which people of extraordinarily diverse backgrounds could understand and talk with each other. The time is 1981, and we need new prophets, poets, priests, and missionaries from all walks of life who reclaim this old legacy as their own and who develop a new dialogue and vision whereby we enter the 21st century standing on common ground.

As bearers of this profound legacy, we must move forward with the same commitment and zeal envisioned by our progenitors to forge in the 21st century new North American wilderness, a new definition of ourselves, and a new national metaphor".

We determined that we had to be DuBois' new cultural missionaries not only to black America but to all Americans.

21st century missionaries, contemporary cultural leaders who take on the task of shaping and implementing the vision will focus on three tasks: social and civic literacy, cultural citizenship, and moral responsibility.

In September of 1978, Joseph Duffey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, defined social literacy as the sense in which these "basic skills and capacities provide us with the opportunity to become part of society". We must fashion an educational system that provides not only the basics for willing learners but also the social keys to unlock those invisible doors that keep certain youth out no matter their competency.

I have added the concept of civic literacy because the idea is not complete without acknowledging that one cannot become a full citizen of the community, town, or city without participating in the public arena. Citizenship is a privileged responsibility that must be taught and re-taught. One must discuss the issues and strive to further one's political objectives. For example, adults must teach youth not only to understand the price of freedom, but the why and the how of political endowment plus the etiquette, manners and morals which the Polis demands in civic life.

Second is cultural citizenship. Cultural citizenship is the end result of a process of shedding those self-created but sometimes necessary blinders from the eyes of one's ethnic group and one's race. It will require maturing of our insight into the development, definition, and position of the African American or any ethnic group in a nation state. The advent of cultural citizenship as a political and creative force will make various publics aware of the contributions of all of the people of that nation and blend those contributions so that they are digestible into the common good.

Third is moral responsibility. Moral responsibility is the wedge that will ultimately shape the collective consciousness of any ethnic or racial group within a nation. Moral responsibility creates conscience, and that is really what the values battle is all about. Not which values or whose values or secular values or values clarification, but conscience. Frederick Douglass stated "that conscience is to the individual soul and to society what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together. It is the base of all trust and confidence. It is the pillar of all moral rectitude." To teach an individual moral responsibility is to cause his conscience to grab his will and shape his destiny.

The educational process has never stood outside of the social structure and culture. Education is truly important as it transmits to our young and to all of us in the society what the culture is, what it has accomplished, and where it is going. Ours is one of the most difficult times in history, for it is truly a time of change.

We now come to cultural leaders. With all of the foregoing stated, then cultural leaders can be the levers that open the vistas between culturally diverse groups while at the same time sustaining their self concept. More importantly, this type of leadership would be able to translate the various symbols, cultural signs and symbols that must be dealt with if all Americans or all individuals within a given society are to be conversant with their own ethnic culture and how that culture relates to and supports a common culture. Cultural leaders are those individuals and organizations that define, create and interpret various facets of diverse ethnic culture into a nationwide heritage, thereby enhancing the public common culture.

Cultural leaders could lead communities, cities and towns in literacy development for new immigrants and isolated ethnic groups in urban and rural areas. These leaders would expand our accepted ideas of cultural literacy so that they are inclusive and they could provide leadership for understanding the civic, artistic, humanistic and social life of a nation's state.

The following people and icons are examples of what I would consider cultural leaders. They are a) Pushkin, b) Havel, c) Picasso, d) Diego Rivera, e) the Jubilee Singers, f) quilts, g) the Banjo.

Pitirim A. Sorokin, The Crisis of Our Age, E.P. Dutton and Company, Inc., New York, 1945
Albrecht Wellner, The Persistence of Modernity; the MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1993
Focus, W.K. Kellogg Foundation National Fellowship Program, Volume 6, #3, December 1992
Hugh Duncan, Communications and Social Order, Transaction Publishers (June 1, 1984)