Bad Check Regarding Civil Rights

In Martin Luther King's famous speech which he gave at the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 "March on Washington" civil rights demonstration, and which I was privileged to attend, he spoke of how Rainbows, then called "the Negro people," had in a very real sense been given a bad bank check that had been returned to them unhonored and marked instead with the notation, "insufficient funds." He was speaking of the promises made to the former slaves following the Civil War, few of which had been kept, and the most recent evidence of that was the heinous system of discrimination, segregation, and lynch law called "Jim Crow," which, at the time of that demonstration and only 46 years ago, was still very much the "law of the land."

Now, using the cover of the image of President B. Obama and the supposed integrity and wisdom of the U.S. Supreme Court, an attempt is being made to stamp the same cold notation and to return forthwith and no longer redeemed another check that was written to the same people in the form of the promises made to them by the victories of King and many others during the Civil Rights era of the 1950's and 60's.

The high court is considering a case originating from ...er ...Texas, in which the plaintiffs are seeking to roll back the provision that requires states that historically led the way in preventing Rainbows from exercising their voting rights to check in with the Federal Government and get its approval every time those states make a change in their voting laws. And the conservative element of the Court, put in place there for life by several callous Republican presidents, and which includes four of the nine justices, is showing by its questions that it intends to push hard to get that fifth vote from somebody and so show the large Rainbow component of the American citizenry once again that unlike most of the other components, especially the ones who are more desirably pigmented, that they can never rest easy in their supposition that they, too, are full Americans with the same rights as are enjoyed by others and that they can likewise comfortably take for granted.

It's all a part of a pattern that shows that for the descendants of the slaves brought over from Africa, the millennium has not yet arrived, despite the current Presidency. And sometimes I feel as if the antipathy still felt toward them by too large a component of the European majority is so strong that that day might never really come.

Near the beginning of "The Coming Fury," the first volume of his trilogy on the "Centennial History of the Civil War," Bruce Catton, one of the foremost historians of recent times, made the very apt and true statement that people resent those whom they have mistreated in the past, and, as with the case of Jews in Europe, the history of Rainbows in this country is a telling example of that practice, repeated time and again. Any amelioration, even if slight, in the hard conditions suffered by so-called "black" people is regarded as being as much as they could ever have expected and actually more than enough, and that is accompanied by indignant outcries of "What do they want?" and "What more could they want?"

And now, under cover of the election of nothing less than a so-called "black" U.S President -- which, by the way, these same haters of the Civil Rights advances fought hard to prevent -- this regressive component of the American populace sees their perfect chance. They argue that all that Rainbows would ever want has now been achieved. Never mind the huge array of staggering problems that they still have to confront every day throughout the nation. All that matters is that the U.S. has (gulp, gargle) put into place a black President. So now, the right wingers propose, let's abolish those civil rights laws that have been so onerous that they have nearly broken the American back. Those measures are no longer needed. The edifice of equal rights has been completed, so it's time to take down the scaffold and burn it.

But....

A gothic cathedral ...or a World Trade Center tower is one thing, but an institution like civil rights is much different, seeing as how it is not rooted in rock and the earth but instead purely in the good will of human beings, and that is always a fragile and even evanescent matter, when it comes to groups among them seeing others as being unacceptably different from them.

So it isn't nearly time to start rolling back the provisions in the laws that made such advances for equal rights for Rainbows in this country, especially when there are still so many like me -- and the much maligned former adviser to B. Obama, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright -- who are still alive and who well remember the insidious pain of being born into the sting of a culture that needed to take only a single glance at you to enable it, by law and by custom, to automatically throw you into the bin of the naturally inferior beings, purely because of your skin color, your hair texture, your lips, or anything else that indicated that your immediate ancestors came from.certain dark corners of Africa, probably from gorillas, instead of from glorious, "always enlightened," but frequently murderous European Cro-Magnons.

In other words -- though even among Rainbows, who are as deficient in consulting memories as anyone else, few will feel that I need or deserve it -- I need evidence that there is enough goodness in the American heart that the scaffold of legal protection of the civil rights of Rainbows can safely be removed just yet. Instead it could take as long as several hundred years, if ever, before that evidence becomes ...evident.

I'm sorry to say this, but the bad faith in regard not only to Rainbows but also to other groups reaches correspondingly too far back into U.S. history, to its very beginnings and its very basis for being, for any good intentions of today to be fully trustworthy.

Actually it reaches too far back into human history, period. How else to explain why only one of the numerous human offshoots that appeared on our evolutionary tree, not to mention many species of contemporary wild animals, made it through to keep company on the earth today with just the one human species, homo sapiens? For instance, those same Cro-Magnons are believed to have wiped out the Neanderthals, and who knows what the Neanderthals themselves did in turn to others, before that!)

And another postscript. --At the time of the First World War the Jews in Germany, a number of whom had served faithfully in the battle against the Western allies, most likely disregarded history and instead thought that they had it made, too. But with the onset of the Second World War just 20 years later, look what happened....