TV Reviews : ‘Legacy’ Unites Children of Civil Rights Movement

A spirit of elation--that seems to be the best word--flows through a two-hour special Sunday (8 p.m., KCAL Channel 9) that tries to lay witness to the next steps in the march toward civil rights.

“Legacy of a Movement” is edited from a discussion among a panel of children of “the Movement” during the National Youth Summit Conference sponsored last October in Washington, D.C., by the Congressional Black Caucus.

Writer-producer-host Larry Carroll also intercuts interview bites from veterans of the struggle. One woman sounded a keynote: “One day we knew we would sit at a lunch counter . . . (and ride) in the front of the bus. . . . Now that it’s here, I think (that) some parts of us have stopped dreaming. It’s as if they have reached the Promised Land.” Not yet, she said.

The panel--”shareholders in the harvest”--includes Martin Luther King III, Atallah Shabazz (daughter of Malcolm X), Jesse Jackson Jr., Thurgood Marshall Jr., Pam Gregory (daughter of Dick Gregory), and Mpho Tutu (daughter of South African Bishop Desmond Tutu). You’ll seldom see young people with a more ferocious sense of commitment. “If you walk like a victim, you can’t walk,” Shabazz says. “We cannot ‘march’ slums away,” says Jackson Jr. “We cannot ‘sit in’ the slums away. We cannot ‘protest’ the slums away. We have to ‘finance’ the slums away.”

They rage about political imbalance, dreams thwarted by the drug culture, the absolute need for cultural identity.

There is plenty of rambling rhetoric but it’s largely articulate and wily, often witty, testifying that this next generation will be powered by its own eloquence. They’ll make all of America proud.

The ironies, of course, don’t go away. “Thirty years ago,” one of them notes, “we could not have met in this hotel.”