African American Leaders

This is the full text of a letter I sent to the Globe and Mail just over a week ago; a slightly trimmed version was published in the Tuesday August 18 edition of the Globe.

Margaret Wente laments the lack of a Martin Luther King-like figure among African Americans today—someone who would “preach a narrative of hope and forgiveness” and believe that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”(White America Dons the shroud of Guilt—August 15). If he did exist, Wente insists, “no one would listen to him.”

Interestingly, the greatest moderate African American leader today has that very quotation woven into a rug in his office. Perhaps Wente missed the widely-reported eulogy he delivered at the recent Charleston memorial service, a speech praised as one of the most moving and important ever made on the subject of race in America. But has she heard nothing of the eloquence over the past many years of the greatest moderate African American leader since King? Does she not know that he not only exists but has for seven years been President of the United States of America? How could someone have missed this?