Race Relations and the Nineties: Where Are the Dreams of the Sixties?

Abstract

The sixties were marked by optimistic dreams of color-blind society, of black power, of reparations for oppression. Movements pursuing these goals fell short offull success but had significant impact on society. While the right of every citizen to equality without regard to race was reaffirmed, new principle of rights based on ethnicity emerged. Assimilation lost its luster as goal but significant black power was not achieved. The latest report on blacks in American society shows stagnation and even decline in their economic situation. While white Americans accept the principle of racial equality, they resist efforts to implement it. There is no prospectfor the radical economic refonns needed to reduce the inequalities of class and race. One of the most inspiring events of the 1960s occurred on August 28, 1963, when Martin Luther King, Jr., stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and declared, have dream my four little children will one day live in nation where they will not be judged by the color of their but by the content of their character. I have dream today! (1986:219). This was an era of brave, optimistic dreams. Those dreams began to take shape ten years before King's memorable speech, as the school desegregation decision of 1954 gave rise to brave hopes in the hearts of segregated, downtrodden blacks. The concept a revolution of rising expectations well described their situation. Victories over white southern resistance in Montgomery, Tallahassee, Little Rock, and New Orleans provided black Americans and their white allies with sense of empowerment. The sit-ins of the early sixties, still nonviolent, still interracial, showed-. that the Movement could not be suppressed. As King said in his address, Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but beginning. And those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual (1986:219). Yet as we stand on the brink of the nineties the dreams have dimmed and the nation has indeed returned to business as usual. In his last presidential address *Presidential address to the Southern Sociological Society, Loulisville, Kentuclky, March 1990. I am grateful to Professors Dallas Blanchard and Mary Rogers, Departnent of Sociology, University of West Florida, for their criticisms and suiggestions. Direct correspondence to Professor Lewis M. Killian, 8820 Burning Tree Road, Pensacola, FL 32514. i) The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, September 1990, 69(1):1-13 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.255 on Mon, 01 Aug 2016 06:06:25 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 2 / Social Forces 69:1, September 1990 to SCLC, in 1972, King urged again, Let us be dissatisfied until men and women, however black they may be, will be judged on the basis of the content of their character and not on the basis of the color of their skin (1986:251). How sorely pained he would be were he to witness the state of ethnic relations