Two hundred fifty years into America’s history as a nation, we desperately need principled leadership to reinvigorate our founding ideals. Some people despair of meeting today’s daunting challenges. Yet courageous Americans have always been willing to step forward in difficult, even dangerous times.
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Consider the civil rights activists who fought against segregation and Jim Crow. There were the famous, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and those, like Andrew Young, who marched alongside him and later served as Atlanta mayor, United States congressman, and United Nations ambassador. Perhaps even more important, however, are the many people largely unknown to Americans today, who also risked much to combat pervasive injustice.
For instance, Rodney Cook, Sr., was one of the first Republicans elected in Georgia after the end of Reconstruction. In 1962, he spoke against the “Peyton Wall,” erected to preserve all-white neighborhoods in Atlanta, which led the Ku Klux Klan to burn a cross on his lawn. He later was one of the few white legislators to vote to seat African-American Julian Bond in the GA legislature. Cook became a close collaborator and friend of Dr. King as well.
We need similarly brave Americans to step forward today across the country. Such a revival is most likely to begin among the young, as the coming generation prepares to guide America through an increasingly turbulent future.
Americans must come together as they have so often in the past to forge a better future. That requires explaining the perils ahead, encouraging people to act, and challenging them to confront the future with courage.
Toward this end, the National Monuments Foundation is working with two non-profit organizations, the Andrew Young Foundation and Good of All, to promote next-generation voices as democratic ambassadors. The program will recruit leaders of the future to read quotes from leading national figures tied to the latter’s monuments. Kiosks will be established at monuments to play related videos and act as an online educational resource. New videos will be released annually, and the program will expand to state as well as federal monuments. This initiative will build upon the Ambassador Young Fellowship program, launched at Anderson University in partnership with the Andrew Young Foundation, to raise new ambassadors of peace with Dr. King as the exemplar.
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At a time when America appears to be regressing toward violent confrontation and even assassination, their vision remains vital. Many, if not most, American young people know little if anything about the civil rights struggle. Today’s rising generations need to learn and live this unifying, transcendent, and peaceful vision. Andrew Young Fellowships will help identify promising young leaders and train them to embrace the life of service and sacrifice necessitated, even demanded, today. Indeed, Amb. Young applauds the program for bringing “the work of Martin Luther King and other great leaders to the young people who are our future.”
We have surmounted great challenges in the past, overcoming division, hatred, violence, and even war. In doing so we relied on heroic Americans like Dr. King, Abraham Lincoln, and others who are rightly memorialized in our nation’s monuments. Their successors, who will lead us into the future, are currently in our nation’s homes and classrooms. We must help identify and support them as they take their place in academia, business, culture, media, and politics. Through them we will demonstrate that America’s best days are yet to come.
Rodney Mims Cook Jr. is the founder of the National Monuments Foundation and the Chairman of the DC Fine Arts Commission
Matthew Daniels, JD, Ph.D., is a Distinguished University Professor of Law, Political Science and Human Rights at Anderson University and founder of the Ambassador Young Fellows program.
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Image: National Monuments Foundation