49 years ago today, President Lyndon B. Johnson had his proudest moment in office, signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and then following up with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Finally, the tragedy of the years after 1877, the end of Reconstruction, was being rectified, 88 and 89 years after African Americans in the South were abandoned by the Republican Party in preference to an alliance with big business and industry committed to economic aggrandizement, and political insensitivity to not only African Americans, immigrants, women, children and even native born men that made up the industrial labor force, exploited until the Progressive Era started to rectify the worst evils of industrial capitalism!
And now, a half century later after Lyndon B. Johnson, it is the Republicans on the Supreme Court who are allowing unbridled capitalism to be seen as “people”, and in the process corrupting the system again, including victimizing all of the groups above, and negating the protection of minorities, the poor, elderly and college students in the states that had a long history of discrimination in voting rights, and now will have open access to do it once again, as if the civil rights era never occurred!
The Supreme Court majority is attempting to negate the Warren and Burger Courts in the great progress they made toward social justice and legal equality for oppressed groups, and this is a tragedy that will continue to emerge until and when Democratic Presidents can select more members of the Court to replace aging Justices, including Antonin Scalia and Anthony Kennedy.
But sadly, the impact of Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, the legacy of the two Bush Presidencies, is likely to continue for the long haul, and set back the nation on so many issues over the years to come!
Hello Professor,
I say the degrading is one of an ecomomic aspect. Labor is prior to, and independent of, capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration. Capital has its rights, which are as worthy of protection as any other rights.
As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.
Thanks, Engineer, for your thoughtful, insightful comment about labor and capital!
“I don’t think we can undo the past. In fact, the past is going to be with us for a good many years…. We have to do the best we can now. That is what we are trying to do. I don’t think quotas are a good idea. I think it is a mistake to begin to assign quotas on the basis of religion, or race, or color, or nationality. I think we’d get into a good deal of trouble. Our whole view of ourselves is a sort of one society.” -JFK
Will we ever be able to get back to Kennedy’s “one society� It is not going to be easy with all the race hustlers, the ethnic hustlers, the special pleading hustlers, out there trying to make a buck and to speak for their richly elaborated upon aggrieved group. Yet there is hope, and this week’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin by a 7-1 Supreme Court margin provides a glimmer of hope.
In the Fisher decision the SCOTUS did not let affirmative action, quotas, and all the painful language and legal arcana that goes with them simply go poof. It could have done so by reversing Grutter. Instead it has directed the lower courts to re-examine the case. Yet affirmative action will again be on the Court’s docket when it returns October 1 in a case testing whether states violate the Constitution by abolishing affirmative-action programs. Moreover, the University of Texas could again appear before the court over its racial preference programs. Let us wish the Court’s majority another year of good health.
As the Wall Street Journal editorialized Tuesday, “… the Court could have saved years of trouble and legal cost if it had simply adopted the principle that Justice Clarence Thomas explained in his stirring concurrence. Justice Thomas wrote that he would have overturned Grutter and thus the whole convoluted legal structure of racial preferences as a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.†Justice Thomas’s concurrence is worth reading. Justice Thomas writes very well. In fact, he has written one of the finest biographies of his generation. Let us raise a toast to that tireless advocate of a color-blind America, Justice Clarence Thomas!!! CHEERS TO JUSTICE THOMAS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Obama’s Trayvon Problem
By Luther Campbell Thursday, Jul 4 2013
http://www.miaminewtimes.com/2013-07-04/news/obama-trayvon-martin-george-zimmerman/
I hope President Barack Obama is tuning in to the George Zimmerman murder trial. It is showing off his greatest failure.
Last week, media pundits, trial commentators, and internet racists ridiculed Rachel Jeantel, the 19-year-old star witness who was on the phone with Trayvon Martin right before Zimmerman shot the boy. This cruel crew made fun of her manner of speech and her embarrassing admission that she cannot read or write in cursive.
Her shortcomings personify the first African-American commander-in-chief’s refusal to help this nation’s blacks obtain the same opportunities he and his wife had. First-class education helped the first couple become articulate, productive members of society.
Jeantel represents the Obama generation. She began high school in 2009, the first year of his first term. She is one of the hundreds of thousands of African-American children who were supposed to benefit from his promise that change was coming. Almost halfway into the president’s second term, most kids attending inner-city high schools speak like Jeantel; that includes everyone from those struggling to maintain a 2.0 grade point average to honor students posting better than a 3.5. I understand Jeantel’s plight, because as a public high school volunteer, I mentor teenagers just like her. But when no one is teaching children how to speak proper English, how can anyone expect them to survive in the real world? Forget crumbling on the witness stand. They won’t stand a chance during a job interview.
Obama has been too busy spying on Americans and quibbling with Republicans over immigration reform to help fix illiteracy, the greatest challenge facing educators at inner-city schools such as Miami Norland High, where Jeantel is a senior. Just as Obama couldn’t do squat about banning guns that kill thousands of African-Americans in cities like Miami and his hometown of Chicago, he has done little to improve literacy and grammar skills of black teenagers like Jeantel.
I want our first black president to do only one thing: Afford all African-American children the opportunity to speak the same way he does. The clock is ticking on his legacy.