Civil Rights

To add insult to injury, the Erie police department issued a badly written, typo-filled letter of apology to the victim’s mother. And there has not yet been an apology from the mayor or police chief.

On this date in 1853, Harriet Tubman began her work with the Underground Railroad. This was a network of antislavery activists who helped slaves escape from the South.

On her first trip, Tubman brought her own sister and her sister’s two children out of slavery in Maryland. A year later she rescued her brother, and in 1857 returned to Maryland to guide her aged parents to freedom.

Over a period of ten years Tubman made an estimated 19 expeditions into the South and personally escorted about 300 slaves to the North

Reference:
The Encyclopedia Britannica, Fifteenth Edition.
Copyright 1996 Encyclopedia Britannica Inc.
ISBN 0-85229-633-0

LETTER FROM BIRMINGHAM JAIL
April 16, 1963

King helped end legal segregation; gap persists culturally, economically
By Adam Parker
The Post and Courier

Since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. , blacks have secured positions of power and influence that many of their ancestors could not have imagined.

Since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. , blacks have secured positions of power and influence that many of their ancestors could not have imagined.

When Erica Nicole Veal moved to South Carolina from California in 1999, her race suddenly mattered.

She was 14 years old, poor, black and living with her mother in a hotel room temporarily while attending public school in Columbia. The black students shunned her because she was perceived as an outsider, she said. She didn’t use slang and had a Latino-tinged accent.

“My friends made fun of the way I spoke,” she said.

But she didn’t make white friends, either, because that would have marked her, making it even more difficult to join the school’s black society.

So during her middle-school years she was a loner. In Los Angeles she had a diverse group of friends. They were all poor, but didn’t really realize it, she said.

In South Carolina, race and class differences became more pronounced, she said. But by high school, she began to feel more comfortable hanging out with black friends.

For Veal, the experience pointed to the black struggle for self-esteem, identity and achievement. Now 23, she is a graduate student at the College of Charleston, studying African-American history and culture.

What she knows about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement she learned from books and stories. She said the struggle today has little to do with those historic legal obstacles and government- sponsored racism, and more with culture, identity and economics.

How can blacks break the vicious cycle of poverty and failure? By discovering who they are, where they come from and what they have in common with all other people of color throughout the world, Veal said. Only then will the stigma of slavery and the self-hate that is its most insidious racial legacy be left behind once and for all, she said.

Today, some Americans are pondering the state of race relations, the progress the country has made and the problems that persist.

The progress is pronounced. Since the 1960s blacks have secured positions of power and influence their ancestors could not have imagined. The chairman of Charleston County Council, Tim Scott, is a black man. The chief of the State Law Enforcement Division, Reggie Lloyd, is a black man. The third-most-powerful person in Congress, House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, is a black man.

Still, problems fester.

The divide was set in high relief recently when comments by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of presidential candidate Barack Obama, surfaced in the media. Some said Wright was guilty of hate-speech; others defended his right to criticize his country.

Videos that have recently surfaced of white South Carolina troopers’ allegedly harsh treatment of black drivers also caused an outcry. NAACP officials and other observers, such as political activist Andy Brack, have asked: When white drivers are pulled over, do troopers aim guns at them and handcuff them to their cars?

Politics vs. culture

The great achievement of King and the civil rights movement was the end of legal segregation. The integration of blacks into white society was the political outcome based on a political agenda, said Brack, publisher of the S.C. Statehouse Report and president of the nonprofit think tank Center for a Better South. King was fighting laws that were designed to keep blacks without rights.

Integration called for full participation in civic life by all Americans, and government has done a pretty good job removing the legal and political barriers that stood in the way, he said. But while the political process can help resolve political conflicts, it can do little about cultural differences.

It’s important to remember that there is such a thing as a distinct black culture, especially in the South, Brack said, and it is at its most visible in church on Sunday morning. “That’s the way it is.”

John Simpkins, professor of constitutional law at Charleston’s School of Law, said America’s cultural differences are not strictly black and white.

“It’s not just an issue of race, but of values inherent to cultural viewpoints,” he said.

Black culture tends to be more collective, and this tendency often can conflict with the predominant American value of individualism, Simpkins said.

“The legal system is based on the individual,” he said. We value property rights, say every vote counts, encourage consumerism and the singular pursuit of the American Dream.

Meanwhile, most blacks maintain a set of values that accommodates the group, he said. The property one person owns is shared, exemplified by the problems related to heirs property, Simpkins noted. For blacks, communal ownership is legitimate, he said.

“It’s the exposure that culture has had to a legal system favoring the individual that has resulted in problems,” Simpkins said. “African-American communities are in decline because there is no longer a collective to which a variety of people contribute.”

Getting over it

W. Marvin Dulaney, 57, the director of the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture at the College of Charleston, knows that blacks must make their way in the broader community and take responsibility for themselves, but he bristles at the notion that just because segregation is over, blacks should let go of the past.

The legal structures of Jim Crow may have been toppled decades ago, but the effects of that era are still acutely felt, he said. Blacks were systematically denied access to wealth in the United States for nearly three centuries, he said. They were kept relegated to their own neighborhoods where they were subjected to discriminatory economic and political policies.

The result, he said, is an inextricable intertwining of class and race. “The civil rights movement was good at removing race as a specific factor of oppression,” Dulaney said, but it still left blacks poor. The government in recent decades has not addressed the problem of poverty very well, he said.

It has retreated from its obligations to the poor and middle class, perturbed by what government officials perceived to be the social program excesses of the 1960s and 1970s, Dulaney said. Today, the middle class is increasingly squeezed, and the ranks of the poor growing, he said.

The answer, in Dulaney’s view, is twofold: Government should introduce a new “New Deal” — large-scale economic programs that put people to work by improving the country’s infrastructure and institutions — and it should invest in education “to turn out students who can compete.”

“Someone is going to have to do something radical,” he said, citing a recent experience. A group of young, low-income black men came to the Avery Center last week for a college preparatory program, led by Dulaney. Most of the men were hostile and inattentive, he said. They did not want to learn.

“They are so conditioned to be angry and rebellious that even in a program designed to help them, they couldn’t partake of it,” Dulaney said.

Piecemeal solutions will not fix the problem, he said. Society must change its priorities, setting access to a good education for everybody at the top of the list.

Pessimistic no more

U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn says he’s a problem-solver, but there’s one problem, the achievement gap between the older and younger generations of blacks, he can’t remedy.

Not long ago he would have expressed dismay and disappointment, he said. Despite the obvious gains since the civil rights era, he would have questioned whether the U.S. could ever transcend its racial problems.

But in recent weeks he said he’s had a change of heart, inspired like so many others by Obama’s message of reconciliation and unity, a message informed by history and the candidate’s own unique experience in America.

“I’ve been saying for the last three or four weeks that there is a renaissance taking place among young people today that I’ve not seen since the 1960s,” Clyburn said. “I thought I’d go to my grave never seeing that flame ignited again.”

Black Man’s Killing by Police Shakes La. Town

73 year-old man shot and killed by police officers in Homer, La.
A peaceful man gunned down in another senseless act of violence.