The Colored Waiting Room: Empowering the Original and the New Civil Rights Movements; Conversations Between an MLK Jr. Confidant and a Modern-Day Activist by Kevin Shird & Nelson Malden

Author:Kevin Shird & Nelson Malden [Shird, Kevin & Malden, Nelson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Ethnic Studies, American, United States, Civil Rights, Social Science, African American & Black Studies, Political Science, 20th Century, History
ISBN: 9781948062084
Google: YeqmDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Apollo Publishers
Published: 2018-03-26T07:31:09+00:00

So, what now? What kind of racial reconciliation is possible when we have racists walking the streets of America with no fear of retribution, carrying tiki torches and chanting their hatred in vernacular that was crafted one hundred years ago? In an article entitled “Where Do We Go from Here? Racial Reconciliation in 2017,” Matthew J. Hall asks this question for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He cites the question that Martin Luther King Jr. faced in 1967, a time when “violence, hatred and anger had engulfed much of the country.” Back then, King called for nonviolent demonstrations as a form of direct action and protest. He also spoke of the “fierce urgency of now” in his famous speech at the March on Washington. In his view, this call to direct action was rooted in a “biblical vision of the world and God’s purposes.”

Looking around at the racial violence being perpetrated in America today, some concerned citizens might wonder whether there is realistic hope for an implementation of King’s nonviolent demonstration approach. How can such indifference to human dignity be met with nonviolent force? As Hall emphasizes, King also spoke about love being the highest good. While simple optimism, a belief that others will easily change their minds and see the light, may no longer be enough to inspire us, a more enduring attitude is that in spite of the challenges, we can continue to focus on hope and love—“love for God, love for neighbor.”

The ideal should be to replace hate and anger with love, but we also need to reform the social and legal systems that continue to undermine racial equality in this country. One important aspect of the marches in Selma that people watching them on television may have not understood was that the protests started not with an abstract idea, but with very practical concerns: voter registration and the right to vote without discrimination. Voter registration is important because voting is not only critical for full participation in a democracy and electing the candidates you support, but it also directly affects the court system and the justice system; the connection between the two was critical for black people in Selma.

Registering to vote is also the only way for your name to get into a jury pool. The jury pools for the county courts are compiled from the county’s list of registered voters. If African Americans couldn’t register to vote, that also meant that their names wouldn’t be part of the pools to be called to serve on a jury. So, the phrase “a jury of your peers” was rarely applicable to a black defendant in a Selma courtroom, who most often would be left facing an all-white jury. As a result, there were massive disparities in conviction and sentencing outcomes for black defendants, compared to white defendants charged with the same crime.

Nelson once told me that “It’s important to have discussions today about the lynchings that occurred in the South and

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.