Backsliding on racial progress
A convergence of things have happened that have exposed ... the fact that we are in a pretty important moment, kind of a democratic crossroads in this country.” Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund This is not the time for nostalgic commemoration. Nor is this the time for self-congratulatory celebration. The task is not done. The journey is not complete. We can and we must do more.” Martin Luther King III, oldest son of the slain civil rights leader
WASHINGTON — This week, the nation’s first black president, a living symbol of the racial progress Martin Luther King Jr. dreamed about, will stand near the spot where King stood 50 years ago and say where he believes this nation should be headed.
Then, like King, President Barack Obama will step away from the hulking Lincoln Memorial, and return to where this nation is now.
As civil rights activists pause to consider the strides toward equality that the 1963 March on Washington helped to spur, they also look at the current political and racial landscape, and wonder: How much of that progress is now being undone?
This march anniversary comes just two months after the Supreme Court effectively erased a key anti-discrimination provision of the Voting Rights Act, unleashing a string of restrictive voting laws and rules in several states.
The court also raised the bar for consideration of race in university admissions, and made it more difficult to bring employment discrimination lawsuits.
There are other new issues, such as demands for a federal civil rights prosecution of George Zimmerman for fatally shooting unarmed black teen Trayvon Martin, and abiding ones, such as persistent unemployment among black Americans that runs at a significantly higher rate than that for whites.
“A convergence of things have happened that have exposed ... the fact that we are in a pretty important moment, kind of a democratic crossroads in this country,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “Crossroads or not, you have to continue the work of pushing forward.”
Two months before the Aug. 28, 1963 march, President John F. Kennedy made a passionate statement about the morality of racial equality.
He introduced a civil rights law that prohibited discrimination in public accommodations and called for stronger action enforcing the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, which struck down segregation in public schools.
William Jones, author of “The March On Washington,” said at the time of the 1963 march, the ideal of racial equality already was accepted by many.
The primary goal, he said, was to call for strong federal enforcement of that ideal, and to push for a federal law prohibiting private employers and unions from discriminating against people because of their race. The current Supreme Court also accepted the ideal of racial equality, Jones said, and stated the need for it in its recent decisions on voting rights, university admissions and employment discrimination cases, but “backtracked” on the ability to enforce that ideal.
“And in a sense that’s exactly the situation that organizers of the march were dealing with,” Jones said.
The Economic Policy Institute has been producing regular reports under the banner of “The Unfinished March” to emphasize what it says is the unfinished economic history of the march.
Demands at the march also were made for decent housing, adequate and integrated education, a federal full employment jobs program, a national minimum wage that would be the equivalent of more than $13 an hour in today’s dollars.
The value of today’s $7.25-an-hour minimum wage is $2 less than the minimum wage in 1968, according to the institute.
“To truly honor the march, we also have to recognize the unfinished demands,” said Algernon Austin, director of race, ethnicity and the economy program at the Economic Policy Institute.
There clearly is far less overt discrimination today than there was 50 years ago, said Gregory Acs, director of the Urban Institute’s Income and Benefits Policy Center. On the other hand, eliminating overt discrimination has bred insensitivity to the impact of policies that on the surface are said to be race-blind, Acs said.