Juan Williams, political analyst, journalist and radio and TV correspondent, tells students they must recognize their ability to have an impact on America during his Currier Lecture in the Bowen-Thompson Student Union Oct. 5. Photo by Mike Lehmkuhle.

Journalist Juan Williams delivers message of activism

The greatest leaders have often evolved from the unlikeliest and even most reluctant young people, Juan Williams told an overflow crowd at the annual Currier Lecture Oct. 5.

The Emmy Award-winning journalist, author and commentator exhorted students to recognize that within each and every one of them is the spirit of a young Nelson Mandela or Thurgood Marshall. He encouraged them to defy those who try to lull them into complacency and “surprise yourselves, surprise your parents and surprise your teachers by rising up to become real American leaders.”

Though Williams’s talk was titled “An Insider’s Guide to Washington: Thoughts on the 2004 Election,” he said that, rather than speak from any one political perspective, he wanted to persuade people to take it upon themselves to learn as much as possible about what is happening in the country and to understand that it is the people who actually have the power to bring about political change.

“We are in the midst of a great political storm this year,” he said. Describing the current political scene as having all the elements of a horror show—isolation, unpredictability and authority figures out of control—he said citizens need to realize this is not merely a television program they are watching that will be over the day after the election, but a situation whose impact will be felt in their own lives and even those of their children.

Too often what happens is that young people are given a “sleeping pill” that tells them they cannot make a difference, that they should simply go about their lives in pursuit of a nice home, a nice job and a nice television, Williams said.

“If you take their advice, you’ll end up in a nice cemetery with a nice headstone,” he said. “Defy people who want to give you that sleeping pill! Spit it out and understand that you have a role to play in American society today.”

'Understand that you have a role to play in American society today'—Williams

While marketers vie for the considerable buying power of the nation’s youth, popular culture tells them to focus on their own lives, almost obsessively, Williams said. There is an almost total lack of consciousness about the plight of many of the nation’s children who are born in poverty, for example, and yet television shows and movies are “held up as models for how you might be with your friends and with your family.”

Rarely do they show people organizing for social change and reaching across the discomfort of working with others for the betterment of others.

“You must have a sense not that this will pass but that you have the ability to stick your hands in the muck and mire of American life and begin to sculpt a new reality,” he said.

In addition to his roles as political analyst for Fox news and senior correspondent for National Public Radio, Williams is the author of the biography Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary and Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954-65, the companion volume to the PBS television series.

He described to the audience how neither Marshall nor Mandela set out to lead at all, but, through life’s events, experienced an awakening political awareness that led them to become powerful thought leaders in their respective societies.

He related how, when he was helping Mandela with correspondence following his release from prison after 26 years, the South African leader laughed heartily when Williams said that he must have been bursting with desire as a young man to help free his country from apartheid. No, Mandela replied, he had only wanted to rebel against his parents, leave home and learn to box, to study poetry, to learn Afrikaans and then to go to law school.

Similarly, Marshall was a very reluctant activist as a college student at small, rural Lincoln University in Pennsylvania where, as a “big man on campus,” he was interested only in “talking trash,” chasing women, playing pranks on the administration and going to the movies, Williams said. Even when poet Langston Hughes re-enrolled in college there to finish his degree and tried to recruit the young future Supreme Court justice to fight racial inequality, Marshall refused.

But events in each man’s life propelled them to begin addressing their respective countries’ inequality—Mandela when, as a black lawyer, he encountered difficulty representing his clients, and Marshall when he was barred from sitting in the whites-only section at the movies.

Their initial small efforts eventually grew into nation-changing movements.

As a journalist, Williams said, he tries to engage audiences by making journalism personal and making sure the stories he tells have consequence for readers or listeners. He seeks to arm them with the information they need to go out and create social change.

He has done this by visiting people around the country to see first hand how they are being affected by the current political and social situation—and has been shocked by what he has found, he said.

For example, he visited Austin, Texas, where the Dell computer company has its headquarters, expecting to find the economic base uplifted by the wealth of the company and the jobs it creates. To his dismay, however, he found that residents scorn the so-called “Dellionaires,’ who live in gated communities, eat up the land and do not hire local people, especially not those in the black and Hispanic communities.

The nation’s immigration laws now are shaped to allow immigrants in not for political asylum or economic need, but to fill high-tech jobs, Williams said. “Long-rooted black and Hispanic communities are challenged by this. It is part of the increasing polarization of society,” he said.

Similarly, in Florida he found generational differences between the very large elderly, white, affluent and politically active population and the younger, predominantly ethnic population. "These differences spark people to get involved in the political debate on a whole different level," he said.

And in Minnesota, while visiting a high school, he found the most notable sign that times have changed in women’s roles. They are now the leaders in sports and academics as well as college admissions. “Young women occupy a place and a force in American life that they didn’t a generation ago,” he said. And politicians are courting their votes accordingly.

'Young women occupy a place and a force in American life that they didn’t a generation ago'—Williams

Which all reinforces the point that citizens must wake up to the potential power they wield and force politicians to address the hard questions instead of engaging in the “shouting matches" and meaningless platforms we have now, Williams said. Pressure should be brought to hold them responsible on issues such as the war in Iraq, national energy policy and the need to encompass more viewpoints into the two-party system in order to reinvigorate what he called a “solid political structure.”

There are trends that are transforming America at this moment, he said, which will define the future of the country. He told students to find the issues that touch their hearts and begin to get involved.