My boys are only a few years out of high school, and I still think about their African American friends from that time and wonder.  Did they understand just how short was the time that separated them from the brutality of Jim Crow?  Did they understand that most of the civil rights that they – and others – enjoy had been won during my lifetime?

• Schools were segregated until 1954, when the Warren Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, overturned an 1896 decision, Plessy v. Ferguson, that had sanctioned "separate but equal.”
• It was not until 1956, that the first African American was admitted to the University of Alabama. 
• In 1957, Federal troops were sent into Little Rock, Arkansas after Governor Orval Faubus pledged that “blood will run in the streets” before Little Rock would integrate its high school.
• In 1961, “Freedom Riders” headed South to test court orders to desegregate.  In Birmingham, Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama, and other places, they were beaten by mobs. 
• In 1962, the United Farm Workers Union first gave bargaining power to Mexican Americans, and the first African American was admitted to the University of Mississippi.
• It was not until 1964 that The Civil Rights Act finally outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.   
• In was not until 1965 that The Voting Rights Act ended literacy tests and other obstacles to minorities trying to vote.
• As late as 1984, the Supreme Court said that states could outlaw homosexual acts between consenting adults.   

The list is highly attenuated; many heroic and many heinous events have been left off for brevity.  It is enough, though.  The country that we know today, in which all are equal to an extent like never before, that country is younger than am I.  The aspiration dates to the Revolution.  The realization, though, started only recently, and its culmination still eludes us. 

The absence of tradition makes civil rights in this country just that much more vulnerable.  Reactionaries lurk always just below the surface.  Hate lives there as well, and hate gives ground grudgingly.  Did those teenage friends of my boys understand that history rarely permits hard lines of demarcation, that the events above triggered decades of struggle, of fights, of riots, violence, and death, and that their rights are much younger than even the dates above suggest?     

Even as late as 1964, The Civil Rights Act, called for by President John F. Kennedy and pushed by President Lyndon Johnson, was not a given.  Passage required considerable maneuvering.  When the Act was barely 20 years old, the Supreme Court defanged it (Grove City College v. Bell, 1984).  In 1988, Congress passed the Civil Rights Restoration Act to overturn that Court decision.  President Ronald Reagan, chief demigod in the Republican pantheon, vetoed this restoration of civil rights.  Congress overrode his veto.  But, in 1989 and again in 1993, just 23 years ago, Supreme Court rulings further eroded the government’s ability to fight racism and discrimination. 

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 lasted less than 50 years, before a conservative, Republican Supreme Court gutted it.  That was in 2013, and ever since, despite repeated calls to act, the Republican-controlled Congress has refused to restore it.  It is no coincidence that Republican controlled state legislatures now are busy suppressing voting rights to, as they have admitted, win elections. 

I never asked those high-school kids, but I had been politically aware as a teenager, so I still wonder, especially now that the Republican candidate has been chosen. 

Did they understand that historical perspectives are important?

Did they understand how tenuous are our rights, that reactionaries and hate always are probing for weaknesses?

Did they feel in their bones that we never can relax, not in the streets, not in state legislatures, and not in the Supreme Court?

Did they understand that politics matter, that voting matters?

Do we?  Election years make me wonder, watching the clamor and the flailing of the inevitable circus.  Because, despite all its sound and fury, it does signify something.  We ignore that at our peril.  Jefferson may not have said that “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” but that doesn’t make the quote less relevant. 

If enough of us do understand that any right can be taken, that any freedom can be stolen, that hate can take power at any time, if we do understand that we never have been that far from oligarchy, maybe that is what we can come together over, as Democrats, and run on: a platform as the anti-hate party.  It just might be the year for such a party.