The Unfinished Dream of Civil Rights
By: Source: AARP Bulletin Today Date Posted: 2004-04-30 14:50:00-04:00
Throughout his decades of civil rights activism, the Rev. Walter E. Fauntroy, the former Washington, D.C., delegate to Congress, has deployed a secret weapon to galvanize his audiences: his lyrical tenor voice. At just the right moment in a political event, he unleashes his spirited rendition of "The Impossible Dream."
The song, written originally for the Don Quixote character in The Man of La Mancha, in some ways has been a secondary anthem for the civil rights movement, at once elegiac and forceful. But today, 50 years after the Supreme Court decision in Brown vs. Board of Education and 40 years after passage of the Civil Rights Act, the title has, perhaps, become all too prophetic. America is still trying—and failing—to become a color-blind society.
The demise of government-sanctioned segregation has brought important gains for minorities, among them a sixfold increase since 1970 in the number of black elected officials nationwide. The number of black households earning more than $50,000 a year has tripled since 1968. The workplace, to an impressive extent, has been integrated, as have the images we see in the media.
But these and other important advances mask the dramatic gap that remains between rich and poor and between middle class and poor. We seem to live in an age of integration fatigue and compassion burnout. Eleven o'clock Sunday morning, as the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, is still the most segregated hour in America.
Roger Wilkins worked for the Justice Department during the height of the civil rights movement. Now 72, Wilkins, a history professor at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., has witnessed plenty of change from close range, but from the window of his home in Southwest Washington he can still see a ghetto where poor blacks live on the margin of society.
"There is a readiness to believe the worst of black people or to believe that blacks really—with exceptions—are inferior," Wilkins says, "and I think an assumption by most white people that no black is really qualified to do the job I do."
Fauntroy, now 71, is thinking back 40 years. "I was in the East Room of the White House when President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964," he recalls. "It was all I could do to keep from breaking down in tears. I realized my people for 100 years had longed for that day."
So many people had sacrificed their livelihoods, health and even their lives to get the nation to that powerful moment. But as they left the White House, the people who'd witnessed Johnson laying pen to paper—a who's who of the civil rights movement—talked about what they had to do next.
"Now our struggle is related to access to five things." Fauntroy ticks them off: "Income. Education, to make money. Health care, to live long enough to enjoy it. Housing. And justice."
Whether they advocate more government intervention or less, black activists, academics and other leaders are no longer seen as a monolith. They can now disagree in public, where once making a show of unity before the white man was the rule. And from the deeply conservative Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court to the rapper Chuck D., who uses his distinctive brand of street talk to campaign for voter registration and literacy, the conversation is often unpredictable.
Floating above all the talk about the future, however, is the sound of something very much like grief. It's a feeling that Americans lack the moral will to acknowledge the enduring legacy of slavery and that society is too balkanized and too selfish to change.
"Why is it that when white people drive by black guys hanging out in front of a liquor store they don't say, 'Why?' " asks Jerry Watts, a professor of American studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. "You can't explain the levels of poverty of some folk and the lack of empathy without understanding they are being objectified as less American. The black poor are not a ward of their ethnic group—they are Americans."
"What we see is what is called structural racism—not individual to individual, but built into the warp and woof of American society," says Eddie Williams, president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington for 32 years. "If you can't get a good job because you have a poor education, which you have because you live in a poor neighborhood, it's a vicious cycle. In some ways we have gone a great distance in a relatively short time. But to those of us affected, it seems forever. We have to develop the mentality and a strategic plan that is different from the old civil rights movement."
NEW DIRECTIONS
Sheryll Cashin, a professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, knows exactly where she'd like the new civil rights movement to begin. Cashin, 42, went to jail at the age of 4 months when her activist mother was arrested at a sit-in, and in the ensuing years she reaped the benefit of integrated public schools. In her book, The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream (PublicAffairs, April 2004), Cashin argues that nonwhite Americans do not grasp the cost—financial as well as personal—they are paying for voluntary segregation.
"Housing was the last plank of the civil rights legislation," she says, pointing to the tepid and loophole-ridden Fair Housing Act of 1968. "Where you live is so definitive in America in terms of schooling, the type of people you live around, the models of success you see. And housing is the area where most Americans accept the idea that it makes sense for people to live amongst their own kind. It's not state-sponsored segregation, but separate housing patterns are fundamental to a lot of inequalities."
Solutions to some of these problems are at last emerging.
"There is an interesting possibility for alignment of interests among white suburbanites frustrated with traffic and inner-city advocates who want more for the people they represent," Cashin says. Neighborhoods that successfully integrate, she's found, have a mix of at least three races, supportive religious institutions and community groups, and common meeting grounds, like corner stores and athletic fields.
Journalist Debra Dickerson suggests another starting point. In her provocative book, The End of Blackness (Pantheon Books, January 2004), she argues that blacks spend too much time thinking about whites—what they've done wrong, what they should do right.
"Are we trying to end racism or trying to fix the real practical problems in the black community?" she asks. "You can say white racism is still real, and you can say 'shame on them,' but that shouldn't keep us from doing something about crime in the black community or after-school tutoring."
Dickerson criticizes the black establishment for failing to nurture a new generation of leaders and for disdaining the hip-hop entrepreneurs who have the ears of youth. The establishment has thus lost the authority to influence the rappers and hip-hop magnates, to "hold their feet to the fire" for destructive trends like "misogyny and violence and nihilism in music—and associating with gangsters."
Dickerson may be a little behind the times. The National Urban League recently introduced a new reading program, Hiphop Reader, with a rally joined by Loon, Cam'ron and Roc-a-Fella Records co-CEO Damon Dash.
Others are focusing on a new Civil Rights Act, which aims to fine-tune the 1964 law by enacting protections against age, sex, disability or religious discrimination and harassment of students and by beefing up the Equal Pay Act. But the legislation doesn't yet seem to have earned a spot on the nation's political radar screen.
Yet every day impassioned activists seek to complete the movement's unfinished work.The Boston-based National Voting Rights Institute, for example, is challenging what it calls "the wealth primary"—the basic inequality wrought when monied interests dominate the political process.
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University is fighting the "resegregation" of America's schools. Dozens of "innocence projects" have sprung up around the country, in the footsteps of the original one at New York's Yeshiva University Cardozo School of Law. "We started out with a very simple goal, and that is to walk innocent people out of prison," Peter Neufeld, a co-founder of the project, told a reporter a few years ago. "And what it has evolved into is nothing less than a new civil rights movement in this country."
The great glory of the civil rights movement is that the vast majority of Americans have embraced the ideal that no one should be excluded on the basis of race. "That change in consciousness was a huge achievement," Cashin says. "What's missing is to take that value and make it real. That is the unfinished work of the movement."
But the civil rights movement as a social vision focused on black people may well be over. Hispanics are now the largest ethnic group in the United States. A coalition of blacks and browns would make up about a quarter of the total U.S. population.
Can you say "We Shall Overcome" in Spanish? Venceremos.
Megan Rosenfeld is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.
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