Living Legends Gone, So Now What?

Now they are gone. Over the last two weeks, two civil rights giants and living legends transitioned. Now we must carry the torch of the work that they started. I feel saddened by the loss but at the same time encouraged. Why? Many will keep their legacies alive. It was once said that “the best way to predict your future is to create it.”

The loss of civil rights legends Benjamin Hooks, former director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and Dorothy Height, former director of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) reminds us that it is imperative to move forward keeping in mind great accomplishments of living legends.

Hooks was a trailblazer when managed to turn the then ailing NAACP around by boosting membership before the end of his tenure in 1992. He once told Ebony magazine that “Black Americans are not defeated. The civil rights movement is not dead. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop agitating, they had better think again. If anyone thinks that we are going to stop litigating, they had better close the courts. If anyone thinks that we are not going to demonstrate and protest, they had better roll up the sidewalks.”

Similarly, Height led the NCNW for more than fifty years and co-founded the Black Family Reunion project held every year in Washington, DC. For years, she was recognized as the only woman among major figures in the Civil Rights Movement. This just reminds us that there is much work to be done with the equitable treatment of women at traditional leadership tables.

In part seven of Leadership Building Blocks: An Insider’s Guide to Success, I highlight the importance of legacy. Like Hooks and Height, we should all be leaders who create legacy and pass along wisdom to the next generation. What will be our legacy? How will we pass it along? What mistakes did you make and how did you overcome them?

Without reflections before we transition from our leadership posts, we are destined to have generations of rising and current leaders left worshipping living legends from afar wondering, “Now what?”