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in Texas, California's Proposition 209 and Washington State' Initiative 200. Everywhere we see clear racial fault lines which divide American society as much now as at anytime in our past.

We meet in sad recollection of the murders of Matthew Shepard in Wyoming and James Byrd in Texas and Billy Jack Gaither in Alabama — innocents butchered because they were different. But their grieving families' response to this brutality gives us reason to be hopeful in the midst of all the horror. Matthew Shepard wanted to work for human rights; even as protestors spewed anti-gay venom at his funeral, his mother said, "We'll never forget the love the world has shared with this kind, loving son."

James Byrd's family has started a foundation in his memory to work "for more dialogue and more tolerance among the race."

Thus the picture we see is not without its brighter side. Taken over several decades rather than in snapshot moments, our portrait shows clear progress throughout this centruy. No more do signs read white and colored. The voters' booth and schoolhouse door now swing open for everyone, no longer closed to those whose skins are dark.

But for may, despite these successes, today's civil rights scene must seem like an echo of the past.

The removal of earlier legal barriers which underpinned apartheid in America consumed most of this century and consumed lives and passions too.

Many stand now in reflection of that earlier movement's successes, confused about what the next steps should be. The task ahead is enormous — equal to if not greater than the job already done.

Today we are three decades past the second Reconstruction, the modern movement for civil rights that eliminated legal segregation in the United States, and thirteen decades past the first Reconstruction, the single period in American history in which the national government repeatedly used armed might to enforce the civil rights of black Americans.

One hundred years ago, black Americans faced prospects eerily