Cinema: Manhood and The Power of GLORY

The movie Glory is, as the historian James M. McPherson has written, the most powerful and historically accurate film ever made about the American Civil War. But Glory, which tells the story of one of the war’s first black regiments, has deeper meaning. The movie addresses the most profound theme of race in America in 1990. Glory is about black manhood and responsibility.

The worst problems of the black underclass today — young black men murdering other young black men; young black males fathering children of females who are virtually children themselves; young blacks lost to crack and heroin — all connect directly to black manhood and responsibility.

Perhaps Marion Barry, Washington’s mayor, and Benjamin Hooks, executive director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, should celebrate Black History Month by watching Glory. When Barry was arrested for cocaine possession last month, Hooks’ most visible reaction was that the mayor had been the victim of a plot by law enforcement to persecute black elected officials. Presumably, the mayor of the nation’s capital (not exactly an unemployed ghetto youth, but, absurdly, a role model for unemployed ghetto youths) is not responsible for being in a hotel room with a fashion model, smoking crack. A white conspiracy must have put a pistol to his head and made him do it. Hooks’ reaction harmonized with something the late Whitney Young said 23 years ago. Young, then the head of the Urban League, told white leaders, “You’ve got to give us some victories.” But if a victory is “given,” it is not a victory. It is a dole.

The freemen and runaway slaves of the 54th Massachusetts Infantry regiment were not given anything in 1863: certainly not victory. The blacks of the 54th were actual men who died actual deaths in a redemptive violence that they sought. The lesson that Glory teaches — and it is finding an audience — is this: it was not the Great White Paternalist alone who freed the slaves and made them American citizens. It was also blacks who freed themselves. These were the blacks who enlisted, trained, suffered, endured condescension and insult, disciplined themselves, fought for the right to fight and the opportunity to die in the pursuit of their freedom and manhood.

On July 18, 1863, the blacks of the 54th Massachusetts led a virtually suicidal assault upon Fort Wagner, a massive Confederate earthwork guarding the approach to Charleston, S.C., harbor. At a critical moment in Glory’s version of the attack, Trip, the runaway slave-soldier played by Denzel Washington, seizes the American flag and runs forward with it to his death. His death says this: “I did not want your white man’s flag; earlier I refused the ‘honor’ of carrying it. But I will do it now, dying with other black men, because, understand me, we are citizens, we are Americans, not white Americans, but black Americans . . . but Americans!” In that historical protomoment, at the instant of death, blacks become, incontrovertibly, Americans. They won it. It was — is — theirs.

Every generation forges its own conscience. Glory reaffirms an older, persistent moral theme in the black community that in the past 25 years seemed to go out of fashion, at least at the leadership level of the civil rights movement: self-determination, responsibility. This sterner theme, developed well before emancipation and repeated by Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King Jr. and generation after generation of struggling black fathers and mothers, instructed: the antidote to racism is excellence.

But after the Great Society, the emphasis on dignity, struggle and pride in accomplishment was replaced in the rhetoric of some black leaders by a toxic seepage of self-pity, of the victim theme. Passivity, grievance and denial became the psychic orthodoxy. The culture of victimization came to replicate in an eerie way the configurations of slave days — the Government functioning as benevolent slave master, dispenser of all things. Many blacks were trapped in ghettos as surely and hopelessly as slaves on plantations. Perhaps civil rights organizations, designed to battle discrimination and hardening over the years into institutional mind-sets, could not adjust to new realities and needs after the structure of Jim Crow had been torn down. At worst, the Great Society turned the leaders into petitioners, even while thousands upon thousands of working-class blacks toiled in the hardest, dirtiest jobs rather than accept welfare.

Those who suggest that the solution to black problems lies in the minds and wills of blacks are always accused of blaming the victims. But that is a futile line. Forget blame. Presumably, black America long since abandoned the delusion (if it ever harbored it) that white America was going to ride to its rescue. The only authentic black fulfillment will be achieved by blacks.

Jesse Jackson is one black leader who over the years has consistently preached self-help. Now he warns, “Our failure to become introspective and responsible takes away our moral authority.” Nelson Mandela worked the same vein last week: “All students must return to school and learn.” The lesson of Glory, proceeding out of black history, is that blacks are not powerless in the face of racism or poverty. The battles fought and won by earlier generations of blacks were immensely more difficult than those that face most blacks today.

Once, in 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. told some black college students about the Aristotelian bigot. This bigot, said King, constructed a syllogism: All men are made in the image of God; God, as everyone knows, is not a Negro; therefore, the Negro is not a man. The black soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts, and 180,000 other blacks who served in the Civil War, took that syllogism and burned it to ashes.