DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
29 December 2008
The Triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement
Legal equality leads to large gains and improves the lot of all Americans
This article is excerpted from the book Free At Last: The U.S. Civil Rights Movement, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. View the entire book (PDF, 3.6 MB).
The historical experience of African Americans will always be unique. But meaningful federal enforcement of the right to vote equipped black Americans with the tools that immigrants and other minority groups long have used to pursue — and achieve — the American Dream. In the United States, people who vote wield real political power. With the vote, and the passage of time, legal and political equality for African Americans has produced gains in nearly every walk of life.
John R. Lewis, for example, was one of the Freedom Riders beaten bloody by the Montgomery mob in 1961. Today he represents Georgia’s Fifth District in the U.S. House of Representatives. Nearly 50 of his colleagues are African Americans, and several of them wield great political power as chairpersons of influential congressional committees. In 1963, Denise McNair was among the girls killed when racist vigilantes bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. In 2005, her friend Condoleezza Rice took office as the nation’s secretary of state.
Black secondary school graduation rates have nearly tripled since 1966, and the rate of poverty has been nearly halved in that time. The emergence of a black middle class is a widely noted social development, as are the many successful African-American entrepreneurs, scholars, and literary and artistic achievers.
Although Americans continue to wrestle with racial issues, those issues differ profoundly from those addressed by Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King, and the civil rights movement. While today’s questions are no less real, they also reflect the genuine progress achieved over the decades that followed.
Consider education, the subject of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Recent Supreme Court decisions explore the permissible limits of “affirmative action” policies that seek to redress past discrimination and to require or encourage that public institutions reflect demographically the communities they serve.
Judges are now asked to decide the competing needs in, for example, a school district that allows all parents to select their children’s school. If too many request a particular school, only some students may attend their first-choice institution. In that case, may the district assert, even as a “tiebreaker,” its desire to maintain a racial balance in that popular school to determine which requests will be honored?
Should government intervene when schools are effectively segregated because of new housing patterns, and not, as in Linda Brown’s day, because millions of African-American students were purposely segregated and relegated to shabby, inferior schools?
Americans of all stripes can and do disagree over issues like this. And few American leaders have answers to these dilemmas.
As this book goes to press, Barack Obama, the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas, has been elected President of the United States. In a campaign speech on race in America, Obama said that
the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution — a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.
And, as the President-elect told the nation on the night of his electoral triumph:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
Obama’s victory is one measure of the nation’s progress. Another measure, surely the most important of all, is the emergence, not least among the younger Americans who will build the nation’s future, of a broad and deep consensus that the shameful histories of slavery, segregation, and disadvantage must be relegated to the past.
