Speech concerning on how the new administration has brought our long national nightmare to an end and a review of the recent era of American politics, 1993 (1 of 2)

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6 the planning and work that preceded the speech.

Instead of a series of well publicized marches and protests, we see long organizing compaigns and brave and lonely soldiers often working in near solitude.

And instead of a sudden upsurge in activities in Montgomery in 1955, we see a long and unceasing history of challenges to white supremacy that began in slavery.

When we look back at our times from the 21st Century, what will we see?

If we look at today - at the 1980s and early 1990s - through the same lens we used to use to examine the 1950s and 1960s, we may well see only the electoral and ideological victories and Ronald Reagan and George Bush.

In that narrow view, Ronald Reagan discovered a cultural and electoral backlash against the 1960s and rode it to power. Once in office, he and his successor institutionalized their revolution, discrediting and then weakening the government's efforts to help the poor and powerless, strenthening the effort to reward the rich and powerful.

But Ronald Reagan and George Bush did not create the politics that gave them power, however skillful they become at exploiting racial fears and selfishness.

Instead, they should be seen as the natural descendants and heirs of two centuries of racial politics, modern-day proponents of an ancient series of arguments against equality.

More than 35 years ago, for example, whites in Montgomery used arguments against integrating the buses that were the same

Last edit 11 months ago by shashathree
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7 as those employed against the civil rights bill of last year. Giving in to black demands would give blacks a special status over white people they do not deserve. Having a court order integrate the buses would make blacks wards of the state. Insistence on integration robbed blacks of racial pride. And most importantly, upsetting traditional patterns of white supremacy and black inferiority would alienate whites, destroying an imaginary conception of racial harmony that existed in the segregated world.

It isn't hard to recall hearing versions of those arguments on the floor of the United States Senate and in the White House last year. Recycling old arguments against justice comes naturally in a society that has long embraced the ideal but not the reality of equality.

If there has been a frightening consistency to the arguments made by freedom's opponents, the supporters of justice have been consistent too.

For all of this century, the movement for civil and human rights has followed the program put forth by W.E.B. Dubois in 1905:

"We must complain," he said. "Yes plain, blunt complaint, ceaseless agitation, unfailing exposure of dishonesty and wrong -- this is the ancient unerring way to liberty, and we must follow it ...."

"Next, we propose to work. These are the things that we as Black men must try to do. To press the matter of stopping the curtailment of our political rights; to urge Negroes to vote

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8 honestly and effectively; to push the matter of civil rights; to organize business cooperation; to build schoolhouses and increase the interest in education; to bring Negroes and labor unions into mutual understanding; to study Negro History; to attack crime among us . . . to do all in our power by word and by deed to increase the efficiency of our race, the enjoyment of its manhood rights, and the performance of its just duties. This is a large program. It cannot be realized in a short time . . . (But) this is the critical time."1

DuBois correctly predicted then that the struggle of the 20th Century would be the struggle of the color line.

From before DuBois' time until today, Black Americans have generally followed his prescription for action, pursuing civil rights, economic justice, and entrance into the mainstream of American life.

The years since then saw gains won at lunch counters and movie theatres and polling places, and the fabric of legal segregation was destroyed. What had begun as a movement for elemental civil rights has now become largely a political and an economic movement, and black men and women hold office and weld power in numbers we never dreamed of before.

Despite impressive increases in the number of Black people holding public office, and despite our ability to sit and eat and ride and vote in places which used to bar Black faces, in some ways non-white Americans are worse off in the present than in the

1. W.E.B. DuBois, The Voice of the Negro (Atlanta).

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9 recent years that went before.

Five years ago, when the final phase of the 1988 presidential campaign formally began, both George Bush and Michael Dukakis saw an America many Americans never see.

For both candidates, America was a land of happy families and successful suburbs, where every child waves an American flag and every day is the Fourth of July.

But there was then and is now another America, a shadow America neither candidate dared to show or tell.

As the '80s began, the nation chose a president whose terms could hold awful parallels with the end of Reconstruction almost exactly 100 years before. Then and now, a president, desperate for power, entered into an illicit arrangement, not just with the unreconstructed South, but with the national unreconstructed mentality which believed then as it does now that private profit and public arrogance could be pursued at the expense of those living on the economic edge.

The 1980 election was won by an amiable incompetent whose sole intent was removing the government from every aspect of American life. He intended to take the government out of the business of enforcing equal opportunity. He intended to eliminate affirmative action for women and minorities. He intended to erase the laws and programs written in blood and sweat in the quarter century since Martin Luther King became the premier figure in the freedom movement and an American majority became single-minded in pursuit of human freedom.

For those who came to power with him, conflict of interest

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10 became a precondition for employment in government. A band of financial and ideological profiteers descended on Washington like a crazed swarm of right-wing locusts bent on destroying the rules and laws which protected our people from poisoned air and water, and from greed. But nowhere was their assault on the rule of law so great as in their attempt to subvert, ignore, defy and destroy the laws which require an America that is bias free.

A constituency of the comfortable, the callous and the smug was recruited to form solid ranks against the forgotten. They enforced the national nullification of the needs of the needy, the gratuitous gratification of the gross and the greedy and practiced the politics of impropriety, prevarication, pious platitudes and self-righteous swinishness. They forced a form of triage economic upon us, producing the first increase in infant mortality rates in twenty years and pushing thousands of poor and working poor Americans deeper into poverty. By mid-term, the Census Bureau reported that the number of people living in poverty had increased over the previous four years by more than nine million, the biggest increase since these statistics were first collected over two decades ago. Today the poorest two-fifths of our population receives a smaller share of the national income and the richest two-fifths a larger share than at any time since 1947. Over the last five years, income for the bottom fifth of our population went down by 9%; for the top fifth, it went up by 32%, and for that one percent at the very top, after-tax income went up by 102%/1 If we are to believe with Thomas Jefferson that "the common man is the most precious resource of

Last edit 11 months ago by shashathree
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