Excerpt from the new 'Before the Mayflower: The African-American Century': revised edition of Black history classic says Blacks colored and shaped America's 20th century - Excerpt

Ebony, July, 2003 by Lerone Jr. Bennett

IF there was pain in the struggle, there was also rebirth and regeneration. For it was in The Movement, and in struggle, that Black America was reborn and White America was transformed.

So sweeping were the changes wrought by this event, and so astonishing the Black/White/ Brown results, that some students have called the whole period the first African-American Renaissance.

There had been renaissances and rumors of renaissances before, but they were limited, episodic, and controlled or shaped by others. The African-American Renaissance, in sharp contrast, was a total phenomenon that touched everything--music, dance, scholarship, media, politics, economics, sex--and affected everything. It was a made-in-Black America thing, and almost all Blacks participated, not by reading and spectating but writing their own emancipation proclamation.

By changing themselves, by changing their clothes and their names and their hair, by acting as if Jim Crow signs and bullets and walls no longer existed, by walking through the walls and into the bullets and dying and rising again, by doing it over and over again, by marching, singing, and shouting for seventeen glorious, go-for-broke, no-negotiation years, they changed the color of time and made the twentieth century the African-American Century. A hundred years from now, to paraphrase Harold Washington, Chicago' first Black mayor, men and women of "good will look back ... on this Movement and say, 'I wish I had been a part of them. They had the courage to fight, the will to win. They sought greatness. [They were] the stuff that legends are made of.'"

Chicago, Montgomery, Birmingham, Watts, Newark, Harlem, Detroit, Attica, Columbia, Northwestern, Cornell: one after another the great word-symbols exploded, like depth charges, in the backwaters of the American mind, rearranging neurons, teaching teachers, preaching to preachers, giving us the student movement, the women's movement and the new church movement, changing everything, Blacks, Whites, men, women, sex, everything.

It was in this movement that White students, White women and thousands of White preachers and nuns found their truth. It was during this time, which started in the sixties and continued in the eighties and nineties, that African-Americans made their greatest strides since 1865, tearing down the walls of legal segregation and scoring so many firsts that the phrase, the first Black, lost its meaning.

BUT IT WAS MORE THAN POLITICS.

The cities burned and the demonstrators sang not only for politicians but also for actors, educators, singers, dancers, children, and dreamers; and the burning, internal and external, changed the scales of values.

It was during this magical and mystical time that Sidney Poitier became the first Black to receive an Oscar as best actor of the year and that Thurgood Marshall became the first Black Supreme Court justice and that Bill Cosby and Oprah Winfrey became the most honored performers, Black or White, on television.

Leontyne Price, Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder in music, Alvin Ailey, Arthur Mitchell and Katherine Dunham in dance, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson and Douglas Turner Ward in theater, James Baldwin, Alice Walker and Gwendolyn Brooks in literature: the list goes on and on and includes Alex Haley, Dorothy Dandridge, Rita Dove, Hoyt Fuller, Sammy Davis Jr., Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Whitney Young, Dorothy Height, John Lewis, Harry Belafonte, Ossie Davis, Rosa Parks, John Hope Franklin, John Henrik Clarke, Benjamin E. Mays, Howard Thurman, Gardner C. Taylor, Fannie Lou Hamer, Arthur Ashe, Michael Jordan, Venus and Serena Williams--call the roll--Florence Griffith Joyner, Jackie Joyner-Kersee, Sanford and Son, Denzel Washington, Miles Davis, John Coltrane--has there ever been so much color and so much Black light in such a tight white space?

BUT IT WAS MORE THAN AN INDIVIDUAL THING.

Always, from the beginning, always from the time Rosa Parks and E.D. Nixon and the maids and porters reset the clock, always from the first day of the Revolution, it was a people thing. There they were, wherever you looked, whether in Montgomery or Birmingham or Selma, nameless, anonymous men and women--heroes and sheroes--who not only turned the White South and the White North upside down but who also turned themselves upside down, casting off the grave clothes of segregation and walking the American earth as men and women, not because it was written in some law but because it was written in their hearts. And what is immediately striking about them is that they dared, in an unbelieving age, to believe the impossible. They dared to believe something no one had ever believed before in the United States, that they could with their own hands end segregation and elect Black mayors in Atlanta and New York and Chicago.

And, believing, they did it.

In the beginning, then, was the people. And it was on this rock that the African-American Renaissance was constructed.