Promises to keep

Abstract

PAGE 106 PAGE 106 THE BLA CK LA W JOURNAL THE BLACK LA WIOURNAL PROMISES TO KEEP By J. SKELLY WRIGHT* T HE SECOND RECONSTRUCTION is now 20 years old. The first, one hundred years ago, lasted only half that long. Is this cause for celebration or only a good reason to hold our breath? I am not at all sure. That first voyage toward racial justice was simply deserted by the winds of history. It would be imprudent to ignore that our sails today have gone rather ominously still. The parallels are somewhat disturbing. As in the 1870's, the political landscape has been devastated. Martin Luther King is dead, and Whitney Young, Medgar Evers, Robert Kennedy, John Kennedy, and Lyndon John- son. Gone too is that coalition of Blacks, the young, labor and the churches which broke a filibuster older than the Senate chamber. The liveliest political movement in the land belongs to the man who stood in the schoolhouse door. Congress toys with bills aimed at restricting the equitable powers, and purposes, of the courts. At the highest tribunal in the judicial branch, eight of the nine justices who joined in Brown are gone. Orders of desegregation are no longer unan- imously affirmed; some, indeed, may be destined for reversal. And the remaining branch of government has its own problems, strangely similar in some respects to those of the First Reconstruction presidency. As in the 1870's, the issue of race today has nearly everywhere lost its sense of moral urgency. It is not so much a replacement of virtue by vice as a fading of awareness into in- difference. Having been ingrained for over three centuries, apparently our habits of racial injustice are imperceptible unless we are ex- periencing a veritable fever of the moral senses. Before we could emancipate the slaves, we had to war against each other in a spirit of religious martyrdom: As He died to make men holy, Let us die to make men free. In proposing the original Civil Rights Act, Charles Sumner spoke of the true grandeur in an example of justice, mak- ing the rights of all the same as our own, and beating down prejudice, like Satan, under our feet. So too with us. Martin Luther King gave us all a dream, and James Baldwin, pointing to an old Negro spiritual, convinced us that the dream's fruition was nigh, for continued delay would surely destroy us: God gave Noah the Rainbow sign; No more water, the fire next time. NDEED THE FIRES CAME. In most of our cities, one can still see a great deal of cold charcoal, and the poet of the moment would appear to be Robert Frost: Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I've tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate, To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice. Public discussion today echoes the weariness of 100 years ago. President Grant com- plained: The whole public are tired out with these annual Autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the *Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Co- lumbia Circuit.