Bulletin of the Office for Diversity American Library Association ISSN 1554-494X

JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2006 ISSUE
SPECIAL MIDWINTER MEETING 2006 ISSUE

EDITORIAL

Choosing Your Mountain: A New Year's Challenge
Tracie D. Hall

This New Year I am honored to have been asked to present closing words at the Martin Luther King Sunrise Celebration at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting. And though my charge requires only that I offer a reflection of not more than five or six minutes, this is a task that I do not approach lightly for several reasons.

I am a civil rights baby. The year of my birth was punctuated with movements and upheavals domestically and internationally that would change the course of history. Media coverage of Vietnam War atrocities captured images the American public could not look away from. Large student protests in Paris and Mexico City rattled governmental infrastructures. Ludvik Vaculik’s manifesto "Two Thousand Words” calling for a move toward democratic rule in Czechoslovakia rocked Communist leadership. In Chicago, Abbie Hoffman and his Youth International Party would leave an indelible mark on the Democratic National Convention and the city itself. Both Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. would be assassinated. In so many ways King’s life and death embodied and foreshadowed these and other unmentioned events. Anti-war and non-violence sentiments, the involvement of young people in civil rights protests, writing as an effective means of dissent, and the formation of small but unified affinity groups willing to confront the powers that be are hallmarks of the various strategies that King employed so effectively. Like many other leaders he has left us a blueprint for making change in the world.

Even still, I wrangled over what words to reach for to challenge those of us who work in libraries to rise to the higher levels of leadership to which we are called. I am not speaking necessarily of organizational leadership, though that too is important, but of a deeper kind of spiritual and community leadership that transcends the various institutions in which we work. It is this second kind of vocational calling that wakes some of us up at night, that gives some of us pause in the middle of morning commutes, or during our most hectic days. There are some of us struggling with this gnawing feeling that we are called to be more, to climb a higher if not yet visible mountain. Indeed the mountain as metaphor is something that King would call upon in many of his speeches and perhaps most unforgettably in the speech he gave April 3, 1968 during the Memphis Sanitation Worker’s strike when foreseeing his own death he spoke these words:

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life-longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over, and I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land.  And so I'm happy tonight; I'm not worried about anything; I'm not fearing any man.”

King would be killed the next day. He would not have even reached his fortieth birthday. And as I write this I think of another man whose life has deeply effected me, my older brother Scot, who shares King’s January 15 birthday. Though we were raised in a neighborhood where gang involvement, especially for young men, seemed a rite of passage, my brother fought to stay out of one. Times were tough for us then and the streets even tougher. I did not possess my brother’s inherent peacefulness and for a period it seemed I was always “scrapping” as we called it then, standing up to a bully, coming to the aid of a friend, refusing to back down when someone did or said something wrong.

I remember coming home one Saturday afternoon, hair unruly, a long scratch across my cheek, it was obvious that I had been fighting. But I refused to answer my mother and brother’s repeated who, where, and why questions. Fighting was after all a way of life where we lived. I excused myself to the tiny room I shared with our home’s only bookshelf and sulked across the bed with some book or the other. I could feel my brother’s presence without looking up. “You can’t fight everyone,” he told me, “You’re gonna have to figure out some other way”.  I tried to pretend to not know what he was talking about. But those words stayed with me and stay with me still. In order to share this world with each other, we must figure out some other way to come together across our differences and resolve our conflicts. As I look at headlines around the world and see history repeating itself through the racial and ethnic tensions that have spurred violence in Paris’s suburbs and among youth in Australia; as I see the proliferation of violence and mass desensitization to violence; as I see war and excuses for war—I know that it is true. We are going to have to “figure out some other way” or be left with no options at all.

In that last speech, given less than twenty-four hours before his death King reflected on how pleased he was to be alive at a time of enormous challenge and to which he felt uniquely called. He said:

“And another reason that I'm happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men for years now have been talking about war and peace. But now no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”

King chose his mountain or rather he and his mountain chose each other. Which mountain waits for you?

Tracie D. Hall is Director, American Library Association Office for Diversity.

 ©The American Library Association, 2006.  All material in Versed subject to copyright by the American Library Association may be photocopied for the noncommercial purpose of scientific or educational advancement. 

Versed, the official publication of the American Library Association’s Office for Diversity, is published 5 times per year online with paper printings available twice yearly at ALA midwinter meetings and annual conferences.

True to its meaning: practiced, skilled, or knowledgeable; Versed will bring together the most progressive practitioners and the best practices in current library-based diversity work.

Please consider submitting an article or editorial; sharing a successful program or initiative; reviewing and recommending diversity-related books and videos of interest to library service (whole bibliographies and videographies are especially welcome); tackling pressing social or professional issues; and publicizing diversity related events or conferences.  Review the Submission Guidelines and Editorial Calendar for more information.

For questions about information appearing on this web page or for more information on any of the Office for Diversity programs, please direct comments to diversity@ala.org!