Yet the towering racial
improvements that the 1963 March on Washington symbolized, mask the harsh
reality that the times and challenges fifty years later are far different and
in some ways far more daunting than what King and the civil rights leaders that
organized the famed march faced.
When King marched in 1963 black leaders had already firmly staked out the moral
high ground for a powerful and irresistible civil rights movement. It was
classic good versus evil. Many white Americans were sickened by the gory news
scenes of baton battering racist Southern sheriffs, fire hoses, police dogs,
and Klan violence unleashed against peaceful black protesters. Racial
segregation was considered by just about anyone and everyone who fancied
themselves as decent Americans as immoral and indefensible, and the civil
rights leaders were hailed as martyrs and heroes in the fight for justice.
As America unraveled in the 1960s in the anarchy of urban riots, campus takeovers,
and anti-war street battles, the civil rights movement and its leaders fell
apart, too. Many of them fell victim to their own success and failure. When
they broke down the racially restricted doors of corporations, government
agencies, and universities, middle class blacks, not the poor, were the ones
who rushed headlong through them. As King veered toward left radicalism and
embraced the rhetoric of the militant anti-war movement, he became a political
pariah shunned by the White House, as well as mainstream white and black
leaders.
King's
murder in 1968 was the turning point for race relations in America. The
self-destruction from within and political sabotage from outside of black
organizations left the black poor organizationally fragmented and politically
rudderless. The black poor lacking competitive technical skills and
professional training, and shunned by many middle-class black leaders, became
expendable jail and street and cemetery fodder. Some turned to gangs, guns, and
drugs to survive. A Pew Study specifically released to coincide with the 50th
anniversary celebrations graphically made the well-documented point that the e economic and social gaps
between whites and African-Americans have widened over the last few decades
despite massive spending by federal and state governments, every imaginable
state and federal civil rights law on the books, and two decades of affirmative
action programs. The racial polarization that has been endemic between blacks
and whites on everything from the George Zimmerman trial to just about every
other controversial case that involves black
and white perceptions of the workings of the criminal justice system.
A
half century later the task of redeeming King's dream means confronting the
crisis problems of family breakdown, the rash of shamefully failing public
schools, racial profiling, urban police violence, the obscene racial
disparities in the prison and criminal justice system, and the HIV/AIDS crisis.
These are beguiling problems that sledgehammer the black poor and these are the
problems that King and the civil rights movement of his day only had begun to
recognize and address. Civil rights leaders today also have to confront
something else that King did not have to confront. King had the sympathy and
goodwill of millions of whites, politicians, and business leaders in the peak
years of the civil rights movement. Much of that goodwill has vanished in the
belief that blacks have attained full equality.
Then
there's the reality that race matters in America can no longer be framed
exclusively in black and white. Latinos and Asians have become major players in
the fight for political and economic empowerment and figure big in the
political strategies of Democratic and Republican presidential contenders.
Today's civil rights leaders will have to figure out ways to balance the
competing and contradictory needs of these and other ethnic groups and patch
them into a workable coalition for change.
It's
grossly unfair to expect today's civil rights leaders to be the charismatic,
aggressive champions of, and martyrs for, civil rights that King was. Or to
think that fifty years later another March on Washington can solve the
seemingly intractable problems of the black poor. The times and circumstances
have changed too much for that. Still civil rights leaders can draw strength
from King's courage, vision and dedication and fight the hardest they can
against racial and economic injustices that have hardly disappeared. This is
still a big and significant step toward again redeeming King's dream.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. He
is a frequent MSNBC contributor. He is an associate editor of New America
Media. He is a weekly co-host of the Al Sharpton Show on American Urban Radio
Network. He is the host of the weekly Hutchinson Report on KTYM 1460 AM Radio
Los Angeles and KPFK-Radio and the Pacifica Network.
Follow Earl Ofari Hutchinson on Twitter:
http://twitter.com/earlhutchinson