Fifty Years of American Civil Rights
"I didn't experience concrete changes. What I experienced was more a kind of psychological change. The Civil Rights Act settled one huge ambiguity and that had to do with the status of African-Americans in the U.S. For the first time the federal government said, 'Yes, African-Americans are to be considered full-fledged citizens of the United States.'"
"You grew up in an environment where things just happened as a matter of course. These are the schools you are supposed to attend and, to a lesser extent, these are the ambitions you are expected to have. These are the things you can do. You might expect to go to college, but certain professions may be closed off to you."
"I noticed a little white kid drinking out of a little silver water fountain. I had never noticed that water fountain before even though we had stopped at that service station many times. I mentioned that I was thirsty and my aunts let me out of the car and I remember running over to this wonderful shiny water fountain and pressing the button and watching the water perform the arc, and before I could take a sip the attendant shouted at me and said, 'Boy, that's for whites. You drink out of a hose on the ground over there.'"
Ed Dorn, 69, formerly assistant secretary of defence, now dean of the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas
The United States held its slavery of black Americans close to its bosom for 250 years. Black slavery was a boon to the country's production and trade. By the year 1840, 59 percent of American exports emanated from slavery-based cotton industry. The asset value of the country's four million slaves in 1860 surpassed that of the U.S. manufacturing infrastructure and its railways combined. That represented a valuable asset in the aggregate as well as for enterprising slave-holders.
 |
| Washington Mall, National Memorial, Dr. Martin Luther King |
Slavery was an institutionalized good. And although the vast majority of slave owners were white Americans, well-off black Americans also became slave-owners. In 1863 an Emancipation Proclamation freed three million slaves in ten states, excluding the slaves in Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware and the counties of what is now West Virginia. In 1964 the Civil Rights Act proclaimed an end to racial discrimination, followed a year later by the Voting Rights Act.
And, in 1968 the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and riots broke out in the United
States. This very day, July 2nd, the United States commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, one of the most vital pieces of legislation in the history of the U.S.A. A Texas Democrat, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought in that Act, following a decade of protests and civil disobedience in the long battle for equality fought by African-Americans.
The political and ethnic landscape of the United States was forever changed. In the South, whites left the Democratic party to join the Republicans while moderate Republicans, outraged their party had opposed the Civil Rights Act, became Democrats. And blacks made the switch from the party of Abraham Lincoln to that of Lyndon Johnson. How times do change.
The extreme partisanship that has since resulted has been exacerbated by the advent of the popular election of a Black-American president; who could have foreseen it?
The success of Black American activists led to other civil rights successes in the United States, even as the congressional black caucus grew to its current 43. The Hispanic movement followed, along with women's rights, employment rights, rights for the handicapped and immigration reform. Careers in government at every echelon gradually opened for African-Americans. Though not those necessarily living in big-city ghettoes where racism remained alive and, well...silent but effective.
Where in some states property tax and banking infrastructure actively discriminated against blacks, perpetuating poverty. The tax systems maintained by municipalities ensured that wealthy white neighbourhoods use property taxes for their own schools exclusively even while poor black neighbourhoods made do with their failing misery. In Texas, property taxes for education are not pooled.
Even where African-Americans earn the same or more than their white counterparts, for African-Americans it remains more problematical to secure home-financing loans, build family equity and move up the social ladder. Upward mobility stall is seen in the income gap between blacks and whites; little has changed there, in the last fifty years.
Labels: Human Rights, United States
posted by Pieface @ Wednesday, July 02, 2014
<< Home