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The truth is that true equality requires an increase in unwanted competition the new States Righters can ill afford; their all-white old boy networks, in academia or in industry, cannot tolerate federal imposition of equal opportunity.
They argue that the civil rights laws of the 1960s eliminated all discrimination, that the playing field is now level, that every contestant stands equal at the starting line. That some contestants have no shoes and others find their legs gripped by heavy baggage from the past is of no consequence to these champions of the new order.
Even the undeniable success of the government's feeble anti-poverty efforts stands discredited at the hands of this loud and powerful minority. Johnson's War on Poverty - at full strength only between 1964 and 1968 - saved lives rather than took them and spent infinitely fewer dollars than America's foreign war. And the war at home won real victories.
Like 1988's Democrats, unable to mount a successful defense against Willie Horton, and, unable to fend off sleaze attacks
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from the sleaziest collection of moral miscreants in modern times, yesterday's liberals acquiesced in accepting blame for failed policies which actually worked.
The War on Poverty decreased the percentage of poor Americans and increased the numbers of poor who saw doctors. Head Start provided a head start, unsafe housing stock diminished, and the poor began to feel their potential for power.
Today the movement for civil rights suffers not from its supposed and imagined excesses, but from the lies, distortions, and untruths of its opponents.
Its opponents tell us discrimination against minorities is not a problem; society has to protect the majority from reverse discrimination instead. They tell us school teachers and unemployed mothers are "special interests." They tell us civil rights leaders are special pleaders, earning excessive incomes from the problems of the poor. They tell us civil rights remedies produce civil wrongs. These arguments were first raised in Montgomery in 1955 and 1956.
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They tell us class, not race, produces racial inequity, that culture, not color, divides black from white.
They reject the intergenerational effects of racism as a cause of black disadvantage. Discrimination is dead, they shout, and cannot be blamed; but blacks will face discrimination as long as they exhibit discrimination's badges.
When the topic is black unemployment rates - twice those for whites - past and present bias plays no role. But when the subject is welfare burdens or family break-up or other so-called "pathologies", these neo-segs never tire of listing the cumulative effects of our racist past.
There is an unfinished civil rights agenda for the 1990s and beyond, and it begins with eliminating racially enforced economic inequality.
Martin Luther King lost his life supporting a strike of garbage workers in Memphis; the right to decent work at decent pay is as basic to our freedom as the right to vote.
"Negroes," King said in 1961, "are almost entirely a working
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people. There are pitifully few Negro millionaires and few Negro employers."
That there are more black millionaires today is a tribute to the movement King lead. That there are fewer blacks working today is an indictment of our times and our economic system, a reflection of our failure to keep the movement coming on.
Vigorous enforcement of existing laws against discrimination is a necessary first step toward achieving that goal.
The 1960s opened opportunity for all Americans. The civil rights movement produced legislation and a receptive culture that - in the 1990s - has begun to welcome yesterday's outcasts into the American family.
But race - as in 1960 and 1860 - remains the salient issues in our politics, and in the lives of the American people.
At the least, it will take another mass movement to unseat racism from the American throne.
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