Restarting the Civil Rights Movement
http://www.theroot.com/views/restarting-civil-rights-movement
It was never a powerful monolith but, rather, a wide range of groups
with different styles and -- usually -- common goals. Many movement
veterans say that approach could work again.
By: E.R. Shipp
December 19, 2010
Ask most Americans to name the most powerful image of the civil
rights movement, and it would probably be Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
at the Lincoln Memorial sharing his dream of a color-blind society.
The masses at the Aug. 28, 1963, March on Washington for Jobs and
Freedom and his landmark speech symbolized a powerful, united
movement that was forcing change on America.
Truth be told, that historic Kodak moment didn't truly reflect the
movement that everyone, from folks at the conservative Fox News
Channel to the hip-hop generation to the White House, lays claim to
today. The civil rights struggle was fragmented and contentious and
had serious internal divisions.
But the need to dream and do remains. "Today we face a new set of
challenges," says Brian Smedley of the Joint Center for Political and
Economic Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank devoted to issues of
concern to African Americans, "and one of the most significant
challenges for the movement today is to somehow tackle the notion
that the United States is now color-blind or post-racial."
Here's a history lesson according to Wade Henderson, president of the
60-year-old Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights: Were
there no NAACP, founded in 1909, there would have been no Martin
Luther King Jr. to answer the call in Montgomery in 1955 and no March
on Washington in 1963. And if that had not happened, there would be
no Barack Obama accepting the Democratic Party's nomination for
president on Aug. 28, 2008, and there would be no President Obama
about whose effectiveness those concerned about a civil rights agenda
are now debating.
Ask Mary Frances Berry, former chair of the U.S. Civil Rights
Commission and a longtime history professor at the University of
Pennsylvania, or Roger Wilkins, professor emeritus of history at
George Mason University, if there is a discernible civil rights
movement in 2010 and they will say no.
No Movement Today
Like most of us, they focus on the intense activity -- much of it
dramatized in daily newspaper and network television coverage -- in
the period starting with Rosa Parks (1955) and Martin Luther King Jr.
(1955-1968), when blacks still faced the very real possibility of
lynchings and church burnings.
"The crux of the problem today is there is no civil rights movement,"
Berry says, "and the reason that there is no civil rights movement is
that President Obama is the prize in the minds of most people. Obama
was the prize at the end of the struggle, and people poured all they
wished, hoped, thought of and everything into him. People did not
even pay attention to what he promised, didn't promise or anything."
His becoming president, Berry says, "was our payoff." But Obama lost
his voice -- the one that drew so many to him in the 2008 campaign,
she says -- and many go-to civil rights "leaders" muted theirs. As
she sees it, they do not want to forfeit support from black folks who
still spend lots of Sunday church-service time praying for Obama
regardless of his performance on issues that could make their lives
better. Just look at the concessions on taxes and unemployment
benefits that he has been forced to make to the GOP over the
objections of so many Democrats. Or a whole lot of other policies,
including those involving health care, housing and employment.
"There is a sense of betrayal," according to Henderson, because the
president does not seem to be fighting for the principles he
represented while campaigning for the job. Hope has bowed to "the
reality of governance."
Obama Is a Burden
"Obama is a cross to bear," Berry says, and leaders of traditional
civil rights organizations find themselves "carrying the
administration's water." They are no longer just "wholly owned
subsidiaries of the Democratic Party," she says. "They are wholly
owned subsidiaries of Obama."
Smedley, director of the Health and Policy Institute for the Joint
Center, has a different response to the question of whether there is
life in the old movement. He sees a movement defined not by a single
1940s-to-1960s goal, such as destroying Jim Crow, or by that 1963
Kodak moment, but by "many interconnected efforts." "There is
significant work to be done," he says, and he is encouraged that some
of it is being done by the NAACP, the National Urban League and,
perhaps more important, community-based grass-roots organizations.
His perceptions are not all that different from those of Al Sharpton,
the mentee-rival of Jesse Jackson, the PUSH founder who considers
himself King's civil rights scion, much to the chagrin of those who
had more direct connections to King. Even in the 1960s, Sharpton
observes, the movement relied on an interconnectedness of groups with
separate agendas and strategies. "In the hindsight of history,"
Sharpton says, "it all looks coordinated because it did get results."
The Civil Rights Act of 1964. The Voting Rights Act of 1965.
President Johnson's Great Society. President Nixon's support for
affirmative action.
Collective Action
Egos and testosterone had some of the more established participants
on Aug. 28, 1963, questioning why King was being crowned that day.
"That essentially was a one-time event," says Wilkins, who recently
retired as publisher of the NAACP magazine, Crisis. "Yes, they were
all in it doing something, but they were not all together focused on
one thing."
Well before Rosa Parks refused to give up a seat on a Montgomery bus
on Dec. 1, 1955, people -- including Parks -- had been doing what
would be described as civil rights actions, including a 1947 freedom
ride to contest segregation in interstate transportation. Most of
this gained little attention beyond their communities. Not long ago,
I learned that in March 1950, my father and his World War II and
Baptist-church-deacon drinking pals had burned down the shanty that
was the "colored" school in Conyers, Ga., because, while studying for
what would now be called a GED on the GI Bill, they had learned that
the state would have to build a modern 12-classroom school with a
library and a cafeteria for the black kids of the county.
After 1955, when the calls went out, as they increasingly did -- from
clergy, from teachers, from chapters of organizations like the NAACP
-- these localized efforts became part of a bigger movement. And
sometimes those bigger movements, starting with the Montgomery bus
boycott, actually gained national attention.
Wilkins, whose uncle, Roy Wilkins, headed the NAACP from 1955 to 1977
and was one of the leaders of the March on Washington, says, "There
was a movement that needed to be gassed up, and it was gassed up by
that event."
With a major fight for control of the future of Obama's agenda after
the "shellacking" on Nov. 2, there has been a renewed push to define
the civil rights movement in 2010, with a black man as president of
the United States, and young leaders trying to make their marks as
heads of the NAACP (Ben Jealous) and the National Urban League (Marc
Morial). Even before the midterm congressional elections, Tea Party
movement mouthpiece Glenn Beck was claiming that, even as someone
very critical of black folks, he is the inheritor of the civil rights
leadership mantle. "This is a fundamentally different country than it
was 40 years ago," Henderson says.
Stuff is happening at many levels with different orders of national
importance. Some of the guys who play basketball with President
Obama, including corporate executives, may be more effective at
pleading the cause than the Congressional Black Caucus. The
networking that goes on among sororities and fraternities may be more
effective than organizations that are trying to place black children
in adoptive homes or to address teen pregnancy.
Structural Inequality
John Payton, who heads the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund,
says: "We still have significant problems. Some are old, but some are
new. A lot of them require local solutions, because whether a local
school board works or doesn't work has to have a local solution. How
your police department deals with kids standing outside schools is a
local police department- community issue. It requires some national
coordination and resources."
Like Payton, many folks, including Henderson at the Leadership
Conference, focus on structural inequality that needs to be -- and is
-- addressed legislatively and legally: de facto segregation in
housing and schools; a criminal justice system that overly
incarcerates blacks -- especially youth; poor health care; and
exorbitant unemployment that makes 15 percent plus the new norm. You
know the litany.
On that big day in 1963, you could count the number of blacks in
Congress on one hand. There were five, none of them from the South --
from William L. Dawson, first elected in Illinois in 1942, through
Augustus Hawkins, first elected in 1962 in California. You could see
that a new day was coming in black political America -- even without
all the drama that accompanied Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who was first
elected from New York in 1944.
Today there are 45 blacks in Congress, including the Nov. 2 class
that gave us two Republican men, from Florida and South Carolina, and
Alabama's first black woman, a Democrat. Among the more than 9,000
black elected officials in the nation these days, there are some we
are less proud of than others. Rep. Charles Rangel's fall from grace
after 40 years serving Harlem has been well-documented. Other members
of the CBC have used some of the perks of office to benefit their
family members or those of their aides, including Rep. Eddie Bernice
Johnson of Texas and Rep. Sanford Bishop of Georgia. Neither has been
charged with a crime, unlike former Rep. William J. Jefferson, who
was sentenced to prison for accepting bribes, racketeering and money
laundering.
In the classic civil rights period, almost all of these people would
have been civil rights leaders at local, state, regional or national
levels. Success after the 1965 Voting Rights Act siphoned off those
folks, and a practice of passing on House seats and other offices to
spouses and offspring has created fiefdoms that benefit their
communities when convenient but almost always benefit the politicians.
Protesters Turned Politicians
In the old days, they might have led protests like Powell did in the
1930s to force businesses to treat their black customers with respect
-- and to hire them. They might have headed chapters of the major
civil rights organizations. They might have published newspapers that
made a difference. As members of Congress, however, they represent
constituencies on a larger stage than the neighborhood, but without
making the sort of noise they might otherwise. And they and their kin
are more likely to be lawyers, university officials, businesspeople,
corporate executives and military veterans than civil rights leaders
in the traditional sense.
Of course, some who participated in the old movement or were inspired
by it are making a difference. Think Marian Wright Edelman and the
Children's Defense Fund; think Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem
Children's Zone. But most leaders of the major, well-known
organizations are best at hosting national conventions; making guest
appearances at the conventions or funerals of fellow leaders; and
making three-minute speeches at gatherings such as the March for
Jobs, Freedom, Justice and Peace in October.
So, who you gonna call? Smedley says that if there is a call for
another major march or rally, the appeal has to come from someone
besides Sharpton and his National Action Network or even Jackson and
PUSH. It must come from a broad array of clergy, businesspeople and
union leaders and must include Latinos, Native Americans, whites and
Asians. So in these times, people start at the local level with their
fingers doing the walking and their mouths doing the talking. They
engage with churches, mosques, civic organizations -- and social
networks such as Facebook and Twitter.
I recently spent hours trying to help a Bronx high school win a
health-and-fitness grant. Efforts like mine are the kind of work that
led to a successful outcome of the Jena 6 situation. Once that case
of black schoolkids being railroaded came to national attention,
thanks to college students' Internet-based campaign and
boots-on-the-ground action, Tom Joyner took it to the airwaves,
Sharpton's National Action Network came in to march and, most
important, the NAACP LDF came in to argue -- and win -- the case.
Consider the case of two black women who have been imprisoned in
Mississippi since 1993 for participating in a robbery that yielded
$11 -- yes, eleven dollars -- and claimed neither life nor limb.
Their sentence is life in prison. Mississippi, goddamn. Check out
Richard Prince's compilation of what's happening. Maybe this can
become a cause bigger than the banquet budgets at civil rights conventions.
Mary Frances Berry says: "There will be a civil rights movement when
Obama is no longer president. Once the glow has gone off and many of
the problems that black people have are still here, there will be a
revitalized civil rights movement."
--
E.R. Shipp, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, is a Southerner
based in New York
.
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