Who and What is the Blackberry Bush Generation?

In biblical terms, I think all African Americans born between 1865 and 1965 are best called the Joshua generation-- we bypassed slavery (hallelujah!) but were born in the wilderness of lynch law and legal segregation. Some of us crossed into the promised land and found it confusing, unfulfilling; full of unforeseen diversity, enemies, and potential allies whose true identity was difficult to discern. We almost got wiped out by integration. My generation was the shock troops of that experience which leads me to call us the “blackberry bush generation”.

Why "blackberry bush"? Not because we discovered ‘black is beautiful” or embraced the phrase “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.” And definitely not because some of us now use cell phones called blackberries. No! We are the blackberry bush generation because the blackberry bush is tremendously hardy and almost impossible to get rid of. The blackberry bush has huge root systems that efficiently store food and suck up water. You can try to dig' em up, burn 'em up, and even bulldoze 'em up, but if one little slice of their roots remains, they will be back.

Those of us born from the mid 1940’s to mid 1950’s are the last generation of African Americans firmly rooted in the sacred culture and spiritual legacy of the ancestors who overcame slavery. My grandparents and parents shared the living testimony of the elders who crossed the freedom line on Emancipation Day 1865. Integration almost destroyed those roots among my generation but just like the blackberry bush that appears dead in the winter, we come back each spring to blossom anew. We are very hard to get rid of because of our tremendous roots.

Yes, we are prickly -- very testy about racism, much more than our parents’ generation. But between the thorns you will find delicious juicy sweet fruits that promote healthiness for all who partake irrespective of race, color or nationality. Our children are not blackberry bushes because we have not taught them what was given to us. (I call them “the Offended Generation” -- see my next blog). We did not do as good a job as our parents in delivering those wonderful fruits to them. But now we have the opportunity to show them and this nation in a living way the true power of our legacy which is to re-shape and re-create a just society based on spirit and faith.

Our challenge is cloudy but if God is calling us to it let us go forward knowing the path will become clearer in the future. Peace

For My Generation

I just had a fruitful conversation with someone my age and we talked about how it is OUR time (those born from mid-1940’s to mid-1950’s) to leave a definitive mark on society. So far we have not done so as a generation. The term “baby boomer” does not adequately describe who and what we are as African Americans born in the dying days of legalized segregation. We are heirs to a tremendous legacy of hope, struggle, and suffering. We have not talked about what that means.

Baby boomer is demographic nomenclature that best describes consumer and economic patterns. It does not encompass the deeper calling of a generation to shape a just and righteous society with equality for all, especially the marginalized. That is what our foreparents longed and suffered for and what Dr. King and many other soldiers of the civil rights movement (formally and informally) died for. We need a name that reflects our legacy and defines our charge as a generation.

Many of us were too young to join the civil rights movement and by the time we were old enough, Dr. King was shot down and the movement quickly disintegrated. We scattered into many corners - career, radical politics, mainstream politics, gender politics, and some were consumed by addictions. Many like me left the church because it offered no voice much less direction for continuing the struggle. Many stayed in church but nothing new came out of that institution save the emergence of the mega-church and tele-preacher. Some continued the legacy of self-help and community outreach but little was birthed toward re-vitalizing the freedom movement and inspiring a new generation.

The slave and post-slavery black church were not revolutionary organizations but they birthed revolutionaries and prophets. The post-civil rights black church with all its resources and education has birthed neither. To borrow a very lame cliché -- something is terribly wrong with this picture. Or perhaps I am looking at the picture incorrectly. Perhaps it is not the sole job of the black church to birth the “savior” in the 21st century but the combined job of all churches across the racial spectrum!

Dr. King said it with great clarity and eloquence

“We must all learn to live together as brothers and sisters,

or we will all perish together as fools.

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny,

caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.

And so we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges

of racial injustice from our nation.

Racism is still the black person’s burden

and the white person’s shame.”

Let us not forget that there were white youth in our cohort who also dared to sacrifice and struggle for the vision of a just and righteous America. We, young blacks, dismissed them then and now as genuine allies because they were marred by the scar of racism and born into racial privilege. Neither side was equipped to take on that challenge in a way that could lead to unity based on respect and understanding. We had no knowledge of faith-based reconciliation derived from the New Testament word “apokatallasso.” This Greek word means reconciliation based on removing all impediments to unity.

Perhaps burdened by the day-to-dayness of pastoring marginalized discriminated against people, black pastors did not turn us to biblical tools of reconciliation, so we stayed focus on the political and legal arena for overcoming racism. Some in our generation even used violence as the preferred instrument for winning (like the US government has done around the world.)

Apokatallasso is not pie-in-the-sky idealized unity but a spiritually motivated process for looking at material things of life like the racial gap where people of color are on the short end of just about every good thing (mm-m-m, James 1:17 says every good and perfect gift comes from God) and are front runners on nearly every negative indicator of well-being. Racial disparities represent serious “impediments to unity.” The faith community ought to be in the lead of this conversation and struggle to declare that this is not just a matter of law but a demand of God, an expression of God’s vision for the world, and an imperative of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Other faiths will find and lift up their scriptural demands for the same vision.

True, none of us from the so-called baby boomer generation will live to see the achievement of apokatallasso in our life-times. Well, Harriett Tubman, John Brown, Nat Turner, Frederick Douglass, Martin King, Jr. are just a tiny partial list of stalwarts who didn’t live to see their dreams realized but they did live (and some died) to initiate them.

Perhaps Dr. King said it best in his sermon “A Knock at Midnight.” King David wanted to build the temple for God but that was not to happen in his life-time. Nonetheless, God was pleased that he wanted to build it. Dr. King warned that we would never complete the task of building the temple but we must begin the journey of building temples of freedom, justice, world peace, racial reconciliation anyway. Let us join that cloud of witnesses who persevered anyway.