In the past week and a half, we have seen various milestones pass us in the struggle for civil rights in America. Foremost of those events, was the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. The majority of the things King stood up for in his illustrious but short career are still with us today. In the 50s and 60s, people were far more open in their racism and bigotry, and were more likely to express it openly (without fear of retribution). Today it seems as though those same attitudes were just suppressed and became part of society’s larger working. For example, people controlling mortgages for homes do not lend to minorities in certain areas and historically, black institutions have never been allowed to take on those functions in black communities to help their own people. The racism and bigotry we think of from the 50s and 60s has been there since America’s inception and has simply been institutionalized instead of treated. Therefore, the roughly 13% of the population that is African American is never going to get the fair shake the majority of society receives.
The second event was the airing of Hope & Fury, the very aptly named documentary by NBC News; “hope” being the optimism of the 60s and early 70s that things were going to change along with the Civil Rights Movement, and the “fury” comes from that in 50 years later although some things have changed, there is still an extremely long way to go before gaining racial equality in America. This documentary, through actual news footage, painted a very real picture of what 1955 was actually like. Although the police at the time were are an active part of the hate-filled mobs, they have taken a step back from blatant society supported assaults on blacks to a more inconspicuous attack on black society through “justified” killings of black men as their position as the police. Until there is a fundamental change in the mentality of the policing in America, nothing will change in the black community because the people who are doing the policing have no stake in that community and no incentive to see that community thrive.
I was distressed to find out that the day after the airing of Hope & Fury, that Linda brown, aged 75, passed away. She was the lead plaintiff in Brown v Board in 1954. Her entire life was defined by the Civil Rights Movement and the court case that changed America’s schools forever. I personally found it very tragically ironic that the day after Hope & Fury aired she would pass. Could it possibly be that she lived through the hope and ended up at the fury of realizing how little things had really changed in the scope of her lifetime? If we take the events discussed here, 50 years since the death of MLK, the Airing of Hope & Fury, and the one week anniversary of Linda Brown’s death, and juxtapose them over 50 years, are race relations better off 50 years later, or if you scratch the surface are they just as bad as 50 years ago?
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