Less than three weeks after the August 1963 civil rights March on Washington, a bomb ripped through a Sunday school classroom at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing four black girls aged 11 to 14. In a New York Times op-ed published later that month, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. expressed his frustration at Congress' inaction on equal rights. At issue: protections against job discrimination, voter disenfranchisement, segregation and the widespread brutality against African-Americans. In his call for federal action, King wrote: “The hundreds of thousands who marched in Washington marched to level barriers. They summed up everything in a word—NOW. What is the content of NOW? Everything, not some things, in the president’s civil rights bill is part of NOW.”
Signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson on July 2, 1964, the Civil rights Act prohibited many forms of discrimination against people of color and women. And while the Act did not end all discrimination and states found other means to deprive African-Americans of their rights, I think it did symbolize the federal government’s first major commitment to protecting all citizens from unwarranted discrimination.
In the two years leading up to the 2012 presidential election, we witnessed the greatest assault on voting rights in over a century. A tidal wave of regressive policies were passed or proposed in a majority of states. These measures included onerous voter ID laws, cuts in early voting, purges of voter rolls, burdensome proof-of-citizenship requirements and easier voter challenges at the polls. Every one of these tactics has been shown to disproportionately affect voters of color, the elderly, the poor and the young.
In 1964, 10 years after the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka – a landmark case in which the ACLU filed an amicus brief – schools remained segregated, and equal educational opportunities for all were sharply limited. Less than two percent of Southern black students were attending integrated schools. In 1963, Governor George Wallace “stood in the schoolhouse door” to refuse the admission of two African-American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood. The Governor’s actions, which were trumped by the arrival of federal troops, were an indication of the obstinacy of segregationists. Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 finally triggered change, empowering the Justice Department to file desegregation lawsuits and allowing the government to deny federal funds to school districts that continued to segregate.
Today, students still face unequal opportunities, with a large and growing number of schools remaining racially segregated. More than one in six African-American children, and one in ten Latino children, attend schools that comprise 90 percent of more students of color – often concentrated in low-income urban areas with middle-class, majority-white suburbs nearby.
In addition, students of color are more likely to face harsh discipline and policies that funnel them into the criminal justice system, a phenomenon known as the "school-to-prison pipeline." In public schools, one out of every 20 white students are suspended, whereas, one out of 6 black students are suspended out of school. These stark racial disparities also persist in expulsions and school-based arrests, even for minor infractions such as being late or violating a dress code. The research shows that these zero-tolerance policies lead to negative school climates, academic failure, dropping out of school and entry into the juvenile or criminal justice system.
At every step, the Right - both the Old Right and the contemporary Right - has opposed across the board democratic guarantees of equal treatment for all, without regard to race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and disability. While claiming to speak for “the people,” the Right’s leaders have for decades supported full rights of some people and opposed full rights for others. An early example is the New Right’s opposition to a guarantee of equal legal, political, and economic rights for women when it opposed the Equal Rights Amendment (the ERA). Passed during the administration of President Jimmy Carter, the amendment went to the states for ratification. In 1984 it failed to obtain the 2/3 state ratification needed for passage of a Constitutional Amendment when Phyllis Schlafly, right-wing leader of the anti-feminist women’s group, the Eagle Forum, mounted a crusade to defeat it. Arguing that the ERA would guarantee that women would serve in combat, eliminate single-sex bathrooms, and forbid preferential treatment for women in the workplace, Schlafly’s crusade paid off when the ERA fell three states short of approval. During her crusade, President Reagan announced that he supported women’s rights but opposed the ERA on the grounds that it should not be a Constitutional Amendment. This anti-ERA position was characteristic of the Right’s historical opposition to civil rights and women’s rights; in fact, the rights of many, such as lesbian/gay/bisexual/transgender people, Native Americans, and immigrants.
For decades, the Right has argued that the Constitution supports “states’ rights." Altogether, the “states’ rights” slogan has an ignoble history. White segregationists raised it time and time again in the South during the 1960s to justify opposing desegregation. At that point, many who led the states’ rights opposition were Southern Democrats. Resisting desegregation of Southern schools, Old Rightist George Wallace stood blocking the steps to a schoolhouse door in Macon County in 1963, defying federal marshals in the name of states’ rights. At his 1963 inauguration as Alabama’s Governor, Wallace declared “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.” “States’ rights” was widely used as code for “white rights” and Southern politicians invoked it when the states’ white power structures opposed federal anti-racist policies.
The New Right’s leadership seldom met a civil rights gain it didn’t attempt to roll back, understanding that many white Americans tired of policies and programs that explicitly challenged racism. So the New Right retained the Old Right’s use of the states’ rights argument to oppose any broadening of rights and protections for people of color, thus courting those white Republicans who had changed party affiliation from Democratic to Republican when they perceived the Democratic Party to have moved leftward. Much of that perception stemmed from the Democratic Party’s pro-civil rights stands. The defection of large number of Democrats ended the Democratic Party’s dominance in the South, while the Right’s policy agenda from the 1970s to the present time reflects a camouflaged white supremacism that belies its claim to have shed the racism of the Old Right.
In several other areas, the New Right and the Reagan Administration attacked the civil rights gains of people of color while claiming not to be racist and to speak for “the people.” The Right both spawned and supported a number of anti-immigrant groups such as the American Immigration Control Foundation (AICF), The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Carrying Capacity Network, Americans for Border Control (ABC), and The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). Using images of immigrants of color as a code to communicate racist messages, these well-financed organizations have been effective in increasing anti-immigrant prejudices by promoting scapegoating and stereotyping of immigrants of color. Their messages include: immigrants are not assimilating; they are often criminals; and they have too many children, and so harm the environment and disproportionately use social services, paid for by white Americans.
The Right’s anti-immigrant sentiment swept into Congress in 1994 with the arrival of a Republican majority headed by Representative Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and his “Contract With America.” In 1996, a “new Republican”-controlled Congress enacted three laws that directly affected immigrants, 85% of whom are people of color: the Illegal Immigration Control and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA or the “Welfare Reform Act”), and the Anti-Terrorist and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA). In each case, legal as well as undocumented immigrants were stripped of individual rights and benefits. PRWORA eliminated Social Security and food stamps for all immigrantlegal permanent residents. The law further authorized states to deny Medicaid, Title XX Social Services, and any state-funded aid to legal permanent residents.
"A heavy account lies against us as a civil society for oppressions committed against people who did not injure us,"-Quaker John Woolman 1769, "and if the particular case of many individuals were fairly stated, it would appear that there was considerable due to them."
Remember we have a politically active right-wing Supreme Court, if the right gains control of the Senate and the White House, you can kiss every gain made in the past 60 years goodbye.
http://www.advancementproject.org/...
http://www.jeanhardisty.com/...
http://www.theatlantic.com/...