Reckoning with Race by Gene Dattel

Author:Gene Dattel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781594039102
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2017-08-22T04:00:00+00:00

The Struggle for Civil Rights

With fifty years’ hindsight we can see what happened legally and practically to end the ossified racial caste system that had evolved after Emancipation. The South’s overt legal segregation and its resistance to integration, voting rights, and racially discriminatory laws are well-trodden territory. The fifty-year anniversary commemorations in the form of ceremonies, museum exhibitions, books, TV series, and movies about the 1960s civil rights era repeatedly show the often violent and stark images of a struggle long in coming. A partial checklist is familiar: the callous murders of Emmett Till in 1955 and Medgar Evers in 1963; the travesties of justice with failed prosecutions and ultimate convictions; the taunts, physical assaults, and humiliations that accompanied the 1960 lunch-counter sit-ins; the 1961 burning of the Freedom Riders bus; the violence-plagued admission of James Meredith to Ole Miss; the 1963 March on Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech; the Birmingham church bombing with young girls murdered; the Selma march; the brutal slaying of three civil rights workers in Mississippi in 1964 during Freedom Summer; and the assassination of King in 1968. Extensive coverage and TV and documentary footage of conspicuous images—“Whites Only” signs, photographs of lynchings, dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham—provided drama, moral clarity, and instant recognition. As overt legal segregation gave way to the complexity of de facto segregation and urban ghettos, the distinct lines of good and evil blurred. The twin dragons of slavery and legal segregation had been slain, but what next?

Discrimination in public accommodations and resistance to voter enfranchisement were eliminated with difficulty, but within a generation the oppressive Jim Crow system cracked. Simultaneously, not sequentially, events in the North exposed the true depth of the racial divide. Racial violence was not an exclusively Southern phenomenon.

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