Stalled Movement

At some point in the last thirty to forty years the progress of the Civil Rights Movement has been dramatically stalled. The lost of affirmative action, continued police brutality (Amadu Diallo, Shawn Bell), and the unequal distribution of wealth and power in America serve as evidence for this claim. Because of this, the movement is almost never discussed in a present tense. Instead it is celebrated and admired (as it should be) but not carried on. The ideal of the movement was to affirm the humanity of African Americans within the United States. It seems clear that is goal that this goal is still in limbo.
It is not my intent to suggest that progress of the Civil Rights Movement has been completely halted. Remnants of movement progress are clearly visible in today’s society. The progressive number of African American college graduates is complemented by the continued rise of African Americans ascending into the middle and even upper classes (Gates and West, vii-xvii). I justify my claims of a stalled movement with the knowledge that African Americans make up less than 12% of the country’s population, yet take more than 50% of the country’s prison population. It is evident that movement progress has slowed when in 1995 the infant mortality rate of African Americans was 15.1 per 1000 births, while the infant mortality rate of Whites was just 6.3 per 1000 births. Furthermore, the number one cause of death for African American males between the ages of 18 and 31 is violence related death (Marable 4). The problem is not that these statistics exist, but that they have not gotten better over the years.
Isaac Newton notes that an object in motion will remain in motion until it is acted upon by an outside source. Newton’s first law of physics can be used to address the claims of this essay. The ‘object in motion’ is representative of Civil Rights Movement, and the removal of the ‘outside source’ is the key to the revival of the movement. The problem is that this outside source is as invisible as gravity, but just as powerful. In many cases authors, social commentators, and critics claim that they have found this outside source. Most commonly it is labeled structural racism, immorality in the Black community, and even the laziness of minorities. I have concluded that none of these issues can be the source stalling the present day Civil Rights Movement because they were all present during the core of the movement.
Perhaps this outside force is a “we’ve made it” feeling that plagues the American psyche. Between 1940 and 1975 the consciousness of African Americans reached a peak, consciousness being ‘to know that you are oppressed’. Not only did African Americans have this consciousness but many did something about it. Instead of participating in athletics, social clubs or cliques many African American youth participated in groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE). These courageous youth chose jail cells over school dances and football games. They took action in order to change their communities. This type of consciousness and dedication is for the most part absent in the African American youth of today. Instead of understanding what is going on around the world, we are only concerned with what is happening the largely irrelevant hip-hop community. Discussions of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King’s philosophies have been replaced with conversations of who has beef with 50 cent and the latest Lil’ Wayne track. African American youth are not the only guilty party. For many African Americans once the status of middleclass is reached they too become infected with the ‘we’ve made it’ feeling (Dyson xi-xiv, 1-15). There is no middle ground in the Black community where the middleclass is too rich to struggle and the underclass is too poor to. Whites are not without this ‘we’ve made it’ feeling. This is ever so clear in Michigan where affirmative action has been recently voted down, conveying that the original concerns for which it was enacted in the first place are no longer issues. Claims by many Whites that affirmative action policies are oppression of the majority by the minority only reiterate this claim. There are many guilty parties in this problem which suggest that the solution cannot be in any one of them singularly.
The mention of hip-hop culture in the previous paragraph brings the question of leadership to the forefront. I’ve mentioned that the public dialogue has replaced civil rights concerns with rap beef discussions. Perhaps this is because leaders such as Dr. King, Malcolm X, and Thurgood Marshall have not been replaced at all.
There has not been a time in the history of Black people in this country when the quantity of politicians and intellectuals was so great, yet the quality of both groups has been so low.
-West 35
Dr. Cornel West’s chapter The Crisis of Black Leadership sums up the issue of leadership in the Black community better than I could ever articulate. Arguably, the most influential people in the Black community today are the least qualified to be so. Even the intellectuals and orators such as Michael Eric Dyson, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and Henry Louis Gates are guilty of commercializing the plight of Blacks. This is evident in the number of books that they’ve written in comparison to the number of books Dr. King, Malcolm X, and other activist wrote. The activists of the Civil Rights Movement were too busy doing. The Black intellectuals of today are too busy writing. It seems that the since the core of the movement passed we where left only with social commentators and no social changers. When Dr. King and Malcolm X died, the torch was not passed to anyone that was concerned solely with the continued progress of the Civil Rights Movement.
This essay would be incomplete if it did not address the unequal distribution of wealth and power through an analysis of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The defining accomplishment of the Civil Rights Movement was the Brown decision that illegalized segregation. This decision is celebrated as ending segregation but in reality it did anything but. It should be noted that the Brown decision only ended de jure segregation, and that de facto segregation still exists extensively in America. Only now instead of Black and White schools there are urban and suburban schools that follow the segregated pattern of pre-1954. Just as the quality of pre-1954 schools was based on color, the quality of post-1954 schools is based on geography. Many urban school districts simply cannot afford to provide the type of education offered in suburban schools, and most urban parents cannot afford to send their children to schools offering better education. This problem is significant to the progress of African Americans because it creates a reoccurring generational cycle. One generation sends their children to unsatisfactory urban schools, because the education isn’t great those children do not go to college. Since these youth do not have college degrees they cannot get well paying jobs which leaves them stuck in the ghetto, and when this generation has children the cycle will be repeat itself once again. The failure to equalize public schools leads to the question, what do we ask for? Education was supposed to be the key to wealth and power, but some how these elements still evade an overwhelming number of minorities in America.
I started this paper with the less than original claim that the Civil Rights Movement has been stalled. I wanted to discover what this outside source was. After my research I am still puzzled on why this is, for the examples that I have offered are merely branches of a tree that I cannot find the roots of. It seems that I may have committed the same sins authors of Black plight have in limiting the scope of the issue. Still, I do not see that I have worked in vein. I have made some progress. I realized that the flaw in this essay was to seek out a single solution to the plight of African-Americans. Through Grace Lee Boggs, Cornel West, Assata Shukur and others I have learned that the solution to this problem is highly complex and does not simply lie somewhere in the Black community. As West and Lee have asserted, Black is no longer a color, meaning that the issues facing the African-American community can not be addressed in solitarily. The plight of African-Americans is interconnected with the plight of oppressed peoples around the world. This means that any group that has been labeled ‘other’ by society must be recognized and affirmed (Marable 1-15/ Benhabib 1-30). This includes minorities, women, gays and lesbians, abused children in Africa, as well as oppressed monks in Myanmar. Oppression is a weed that must be pulled up from the root. Like Dr. King said, “An injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”