Kwame Speaks: To Work Hard or Hardly Work

"How many successful Negroes have forgotten that uneducated and poverty-stricken mothers and fathers often worked [until] their hands bruised so that their children could get an education? For any middle-class Negro to forget the masses is an act not only of neglect but of shameful ingratitude...the salvation of the Negro middle class is ultimately dependent upon the salvation of the Negro masses."

As Martin Luther King Jr. penned these words months before his death, he pinpointed a central challenge facing the Black world today: community-mindedness. In building community, it is important to remember the poor, on whose shoulders the educated have stood (and stand today), and to offer instruction and inspiration in this work. It would therefore be good to heed their example.

A distinction could be drawn between the degree of work-ethnic of low-income workers and their more educated counterparts. The lower income workers' idea of work is defined by intensity and importance that exceeds the educated classes'. The labor of an educated class is typically less burdensome or taxing than their working class, lower-income counterparts. Low-wage work is often tiresome, laborious, but necessary. Moreover, for the low-wage earner whose work is often charged with the immediacy of securing survival needs, leisure is often unfamiliar. The desire to guarantee survival would also seem to suggest that having and doing productive work is an important goal for low-income workers. For the formally educated however, the idea of work is seldom motivated by necessity, and if it is, it is unlikely to be separated from the idea of leisure. Having a disposition that views work as invaluable and leisure as secondary is significantly important.

The American Negro Academy is an important model of this ideal. The ANA began in 1897 under the leadership of Alexander Crummell as an organization dedicated to the "special race problem of the Negro in the United States." In his urgency to meet these concerns, Crummell built an organization for the uplifting of the Negro race. Today, in an institution very similar in form and function to the ANA, the educated class must again meet and overcome, with the whole of the black race, the challenges ahead.

Crummell explains that the obligation of the educated is race-service, or servant-leadership. Crummell thought leadership should be "feeding the living soul." One must know as Crummell and King did, that human beings, in their mortality, face problems and have weaknesses. He also knew that these weaknesses must be embraced, both in individual and collective circumstances-and their source must pinpointed. Crummell and King dealt with the realities of human beings in the environment of black life and pinpointed the source of their challenges as the "special race problem."

Today, our diagnosis would declare a similar disease with little improvement, and the particular effects of our sickness, especially in our economic, political, and social lives remain to be determined. In this respect, the educated classes have the benefit of study and as a result, the encouragement of work. Hence, we must ask ourselves in working to find the cure: Do we work hard or hardly work?

-
Damarius Johnson
(Published 1-26-11)