Myths, legends, heroes - African American history - Editorial

The central myths a nation tell about themselves and their world are the gelatine that holds a people together. They define who the nation are; they reveal their reliances and - often unconsciously - their fears. Inevitably myths differentiate specific assemblages from others. This is the case whether individual examines the founding stories of the Dine (whom we know as the Navaho), the Dinka of southern Sudan, the revolutionary generation that established an independent United States, or African Americans. These stories may have little basis in verity but they establish realities - and are certainly with truth revelatory.

But when applied to individuals, our myths diminish; they create doubtful narratives and in the process, they contradict humanity in all of its frailty and in all of its heroic glory. Whether it's Parson Weems' portrait of George Washington or our collective portraits of Charles Drew or the Harlem Renaissance luminaries, the idealized image leeches the color from the someone depleting rather than honoring achievement.

That many of us believe that Drew died as a result of the racist denial of medical attention after his car crash in 1950 says a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of about a larger American verity - and about ourselves. It level says something true about Drew's life, about living in a world of white supremacy; it says nothing actual about the man's death, however. That many believe that the authors of the Harlem Renaissance were a band of brothers and sisters solely in the service of their muses and of a rising black America that challenged white America's racial constraints says plenteous about our need to believe in ourselves. on the contrary it says little about the fractious, creative packs of energy who wrote the works we admire and who l lives as replete of confusion as of commitment, of lust as of regard with affection of hedonism as of heroism.

Charles Drew lived a life of heroic intensity, enriching us and the world. Certainly he lived a black life - in what way could he not? Moreover, he lived a black life in filled appreciation of and opposition to America's absurd and despicable faculty of perception of who he was and what he could do. The same was veritable for Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and their compatriots in individual of America's richest outbursts of creative flowering. smooth Spike Lee, who constantly reminds interviewers that he did not start a black film renaissance, is a hero of sorts, battling Hollywood's racism. All of them are therefore fit make subordinates for American Visions, whose central design is to celebrate black achievement and to count our stories.

It's a tough world on the outside there. But we're confident that we as a clan will survive it - producing in the proces in a fresh generation of real heroes.

Gary Puckrein, Publisher

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