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Wednesday, December 07, 2005
Fifty Years Later
Rights Movement Going Wrong Way
By Jesse JacksonDecember marks 50 years since Rosa Parks sat down on that bus in Montgomery and the young Dr. Martin Luther King emerged as a prophet for the civil rights movement. How far have we come as a nation since then?
The movement ended legal apartheid in America. African-Americans have a right to sit anywhere on that bus, to use the restaurants and libraries, to go to the same schools. Separate-but-equal has been condemned by the courts; integration and equal opportunity is the law of the land. And African-Americans have the right to vote, backed by a Voting Rights Act that affords the Justice Department a prior review of all changes in voting procedures in the states marred by a history of legalized discrimination.
But we still have a long road to travel. We can ride on the bus, but public transport is less accessible and more expensive than ever. We can go to the same schools, but neighborhoods segregated by race and class have produced schools more segregated than ever. And those separate schools are still scarred by a savage inequality in funding, quality of teachers, and facilities and equipment. Some students go to schools with computers in every classroom. Others go to schools that can't afford to give them each a textbook.
One of the fastest growing industries in states across the country, particularly those of the segregated South, is the prison-industrial complex. Our prosecutorial system, which is scarred by continued discrimination, is locking up record and disproportionate numbers of African-American men. We have the right to vote, but record numbers of African-Americans are stripped of that right by laws permanently barring people convicted of felonies from voting, even though they've paid their debt to society.
Once more, states' rights advocates dominate the halls of Congress and the Executive Office and their doctrines are being wielded by right wing judges intent on rolling back constitutional guarantees.
The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division has witnessed a wholesale departure of career professionals, dismayed at the retreat in enforcing the law. The Washington Post reports that, after a 40 percent drop in "prosecutions for the kinds of racial- and gender-discrimination crimes traditionally handled by the division" over the last five years, nearly 20 percent of the division's lawyers left in fiscal 2005, "in part because of a buyout program that some lawyers believe was aimed at pushing out those who did not share the administration's conservative views on civil rights laws."
Additionally, it was reported that "dozens" of those who remained with the agency were reassigned "to handle immigration cases instead of civil rights litigation." The Civil Rights Divisions turmoil is mirrored at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and in enforcement of contract compliance to civil rights laws.
Now the Voting Rights Act is in question. The president has failed to commit to renewal of its enforcement procedures. The Justice Department punted on the laws Georgia had passed that put new obstacles in the path of poor and black voters. It took a court appeal to challenge those laws.
All this is truly dangerous because, as Katrina exposed in its wake, the gulf between rich and poor grows larger. Since the public face of poverty is not white, America's poverty programs are impoverished. We deny poor children an equal opportunity from the start -- and pay far more in truancy, crime and sickness at the back end. And this is true even though most poor people are not black. They are young, single and white.
The rollback of voting rights and civil rights enforcement must be confronted and stopped. But the true unfinished agenda for America is equal opportunity in fact, not in theory. This means a fair and healthy start for every child; investment on the front side of life over paying the costs on the backside; a full employment economy with jobs that can lift a family out of poverty.
Fifty years later, the forces of reaction are gathering strength, even as we see how far we have yet to go. It is time for this nation to move forward once more or face a reckoning that none of us wants.
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Posted by fm on December 07, 2005 at 12:48 AM