The Burden of Leadership

Nationally, a lack of strong black leaders for today's African-American youth is a much-debated issue. Locally, much has been made of the issue, and words like "plantation" have taken on a loaded meaning for Duke community members: Blacks too often are found in low-level positions--not ones invested with policy-making and influence-wielding power. A dearth of black leaders results in too few role models for aspiring African Americans, educators and other critics say, and to a great extent, they're right.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist William Raspberry has at one time or another written about the lack of effective black leaders in this country, but as one of his editors pointed out, what hasn't he written about in his 30 years with the Washington Post? It nevertheless remains somewhat ironic that Raspberry, whose modesty might preclude him from hailing himself a national or even a local role model, could be just what Duke needs: a success story with old-fashioned values for young blacks to emulate.

And yet, cautions the Post's editorial page editor Meg Greenfield, "There's something very incomplete and misleading in describing him that way. He's a role model for white people as much as black people. I think he's a role model for everyone."

With his quiet adherence to family values and his thoughtful wisdom, Raspberry has the potential to be a primary player on the Duke leadership scene when he begins teaching in the fall at the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy's DeWitt Wallace Center for Communications and Journalism. But at an institution from which several big-name black faculty members already have departed and where many black men and women continue to complain about an inhospitable atmosphere, one wonders if Raspberry will fulfill the role of community leader.

It's 1:30 p.m. on a summer Mon- day in Washington, D.C. William Raspberry briskly walks toward me through the fifth floor newsroom of the Washington Post, quickly shakes my hand, asks me to wait for a second, and then walks right by. It is an odd first encounter. He then proceeds to walk behind a wall, into something of a back room, from which he emerges with a box of mail.

I'm pretty sure that this is a daily occurrence, because as one enters Raspberry's office, one is confronted by the complete disarray that results from a constant barrage of correspondence. Papers are everywhere. Letters and magazines are strewn about the two tables upon which he works. He even had to clear off a chair for me to sit in--it, too, was covered with faxes and other papers.

The description is probably what one would expect of a newsroom, although Raspberry's small office is self-enclosed. And yet this disarray is all but forgotten as soon as Raspberry speaks; that is, it is not remotely reflected in his mindset, one that is dominated by keen insight, impressive logic, and the wisdom of 30 years in the commentary--and public observer--business.

This insightful, clean logic became evident as we discussed the role of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as a black leader.

"The caring comes from just seeing what is happening in my world and I suppose worrying, perhaps more than some of my contemporaries worry, whether we are going to be all right," he says. "It's true that every generation that reaches my age starts wondering about if the world's going to hell ... and whether we'll ever be OK again. So, I suppose I'm typical in that regard.

"But I do see what strikes me as some fundamental and ominous changes and they do make me wonder whether we'll be all right. And the two key ones are the loss of that affinity we call community and the crumbling of the family structure."

As do his words on the op-ed pages of the Post, his voice exhibits much feeling and concern on this issue, one that surely has deep roots for him. Raspberry himself has three children, the youngest of whom graduated college in May. Perhaps he looks at himself and asks, "Where would I be without the support of my family?" Or maybe as colleague David Broder, Raspberry's predecessor in the DeWitt Wallace Center's Knight Chair, says, he just loves young people. Either way, Raspberry's worry is clear.

"There are certain things that are mere fashions that go up and down ... like skirt lengths. And the thing that is shunned by one generation is recoverable by the next," he says. "If the family breaks down, I'm not sure that it's really quite possible for a generation to decide to put it back together and manage to do so. It's tough enough for those of us who watch this thing happening and have tried to make a difference and stop the deterioration and nudge a track in the other way. And if we have a generation where most people don't try, it may be beyond hope."

Nevertheless, in typically humble fashion, Raspberry notes he does not have the answers. "I'm not smart enough to figure out whether a family structure that has been some millennia in the building can be replaced in a decade or two," he says. This is something commonly found in his writing, wherein Raspberry often raises issues and problems for public discourse rather than providing hasty solutions.

"It's almost foolhardy to imagine that anybody has solid answers to all of these things, the situation changes so rapidly," he says. "But it does seem to me that there are a few things that seem relatively constant, and among those is that children do best in families that are more or less traditional families, that is, headed by mom and dad in communities that support families."

Which is not to say that the columnist is a conservative, Christian Coalition, Pat Robertson-type, drumming up the family values mantra for the umpteenth consecutive year. Yes, a strong family is important, and yes, Raspberry is something of a traditionalist. But unlike Robertson and his backers, Raspberry is accepting of the single-parent household. He reflected on his small hometown of Okalona, Mississippi, and his own parents, who were both schoolteachers.

"We were a strong family there and the town, of course, probably all towns at that time were very supportive of families. It doesn't mean that every kid had a two parent family--I mean there are always people who are divorced or never married or widowed or whatever happened--but the two parents were the norm," he says. "And so, if any particular kid did not have a dad around, he just sort of borrowed other people's dads--the old man says, `me and the boy are going downtown. Why don't you come ride with us?' And when he talked to his son, he talked to this boy as well. And if you were going fishing, you'd bring your buddy along."

Raspberry seems to have fond memories of such excursions and it is apparent, in hearing him describe these experiences with acute detail, that they left a distinctive imprint on him. "It was the time spent with responsible older men who cared about you, especially if it's your own dad--sort of without announcing that they were doing so--initiated you into the role of manhood, help[ing] you to know what responsible adult meant, did," he reminisces.

"One of the things that's missing now, especially in the cities increasingly, is not merely that there are growing numbers of children who do not have dad around, as I said, you've always had some of those, but who live in communities where there are no fathers around. And in those circumstances, it's real difficult for boys to know how to move toward manhood, and it's hard for girls to know what to demand of boys as both the boys and the girls move toward adulthood."

Raspberry pauses, as is often the case, before making his next point. Each phrase, each analogy, is thought through, and many times comes out with the polish of an edited essay or a rehearsed commencement address. (He's been doing the circuit for some years now, including giving the address given at his son's graduation from the University of Virginia.) "We throw around the phrase `role modelling' quite loosely these days, but it in fact conveys something important: We do need to learn how to assume our adult roles and mostly people don't sit down and teach us those roles in any organized way," Raspberry cautions.

"We sort of absorb them by osmosis and when there's nothing around to `osmose,' the urge to manhood doesn't go away. And if there's not responsible adult men around to do the leading and the training and the pulling, then the lessons of manhood tend to be taught by the street and those lessons are really quite different than those fathers and coaches and responsible adult males teach."

Perhaps this is what compels Raspberry to teach at Duke: He wants to play that role of the responsible male teacher. But there's also the intellectual side of William Raspberry, the part that looks forward to the stimulation of a university environment and a constant "exchange with bright young people who think I have something worth passing along and who are receptive to it."

That curiosity will also go beyond the classroom, and into the faculty and the community, where Ellen Mickiewicz, director of the DeWitt Wallace Center, looks forward to seeing Raspberry shine. "I have been increasingly convinced of what a fine colleague he will be," Mickiewicz says enthusiastically. "There will be very interesting exchanges and dialogues that will go beyond his courses."

but coming to duke, a major change of environment for the columnist, does not leave Raspberry without apprehension, the biggest of which is "the necessity of having to learn for the first time in 30-odd years how to do something. In my daily work I have to learn things, but I haven't had to learn how to do anything for a very long time," he says. "But that's also the stimulation and the attraction of the thing."

The attraction was obviously mutual--it's quite difficult to get a negative comment about Bill Raspberry from anyone at the University, the Post or anywhere else for that matter. But one would be remiss in not addressing the fact that he is going to join a small group of black faculty members at Duke. "I was obviously disappointed to see the small number of black and minority faculty there," Raspberry says of his visit to the university that gave him an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 1993.

While Raspberry's selection, one that resulted from a nationwide search, clearly is not based on affirmative action, his blackness is something that Broder finds to be an attribute sorely needed in the Sanford Institute, where Broder has expressed concern about a lack of minority students. "Having Bill on the faculty will serve as a magnet to bring African Americans and other minority students to the program," Broder says.

"I hope very much that that is one of the results," added Mickiewicz. "Issues of race and Mr. Raspberry's perspectives on them are very important for the Institute and for the University community." Raspberry will teach two courses this fall: one on race and equity, the other on family and community.

And what political views will inform Raspberry's lectures? "The question doesn't particularly excite me. I've always feared that if I spent too much time trying to analyze where I fit on a [political] spectrum, then I would start defending that point on the spectrum rather than letting my ideas and experience take me where it would," Raspberry says. "If Vivaldi had spent his time thinking about the definition of Baroque, he might never have gotten around to writing the Four Seasons. He wrote music that made sense to him, that sounded good to him, and left it to somebody else to define it and place it on a spectrum and give it a name. I'm content to do that with my social and political views."

It may be that Raspberry's views are too complex for something like a political spectrum. "What I like about Bill is that he confounds it," says Greenfield. It also may be that his inadherence to a specific point on that spectrum is what makes his prose so consistently fresh, even after 30 years of column writing.

"After a year or so [of working at the Post], after I did become a reporter," says Raspberry, making a reference to his start as a teletype operator, "they talked to me about taking over a column that somebody else had started." That was in 1966, and at the time, Raspberry was apprehensive about leaving the news desk for a position as a column writer on the Metro Page. "They talked to me into it and it's been that change that's made my career so much fun. For the last 30 years I've had the best job in the world."

In 1994 he received the icing on the cake--the Pulitzer Prize. "Even that's a blessing. I'm extremely glad that happened. I mean, it's sort of an exclamation point, an underscore, and bells and whistles to a career that was already fun," he says. "And it came at almost the perfect time in my career. I could see that if it had come when I was 29, it might have screwed me up."

The move to Durham, where he will continue to write his syndicated column, is one that comes five years before Raspberry would have planned it. But then again, "my great fortune," says Raspberry, "has been that things have happened for me, almost all my life, better than I could have planned and I almost break out laughing now when I think about some of the plans I tried to make."

He planned to leave journalism for a second career in teaching in the year 2000. But when the Duke opportunity came along, it was one he could not pass up. He says he will give it five years, and then make an assessment. "It may turn out I'm a disaster of a teacher and we'll go without mutual regret after a year," he joked. "But I have a feeling that I'm going to like it a lot, and if I like it and I'm satisfied, I'll do it reasonably well, in which case they'll like me too."

in talking so much about leadership, while displaying so much concern for America's youth, Bill Raspberry puts something of a burden on himself; that is, Duke clearly is in need of some community-minded leadership, and Raspberry may be just the man to provide it.

He seems to hint an awareness of this fact, when he says, "I hope that overall, Duke and I will have positive influence on each another," cushioning the statement with "I don't expect to be Duke's moral and spiritual savior."

It nevertheless remains quite difficult to divorce this necessity for leadership and role models--and Raspberry's ability to play the part--from the fact that he is a black man. It's a struggle one has in writing about Raspberry, because as much as I would love to regard him as a colorless success story and "role model for everyone," as his editor Greenfield put it, that may be an inadequate approach.

Raspberry seems to sense this problem, and my evidence comes from a recent column in which he addressed Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens' dissent in a Georgia case that declared unconstitutional congressional districts drawn specifically with race in mind. Regarding Stevens' dissent, Raspberry wrote, "The logic is impeccable, and it points to the trouble the court (and much of the rest of America) has been having reconciling the desire for a society in which race is relatively unimportant with the fact that race still matters a great deal in America."

It isn't that William Raspberry is not a role model for us all. He certainly is. But perhaps the University may be a better place precisely because of Raspberry's blackness. Let's hope he has the desired effect.