The long road to racial equality - From the Cluttered Desk with Keith Roulston

The death of former presidential candidate and civil rights leader Jesse Jackson last week at age 84 demonstrates the immense changes in history the world had seen in the last 70 years.

 

Ironically, Jackson’s death came in Black History Month. It’s hard for those alive today to understand the world that existed when Jesse Jackson was born in a segregated community in Greenville, South Carolina. His mother, Helen Burns, a teenager at the time, had been hoping to make a career as a singer, an ambition abandoned when Jesse was born. She worked instead in a cosmetics shop. Jesse’s father was Noah Robinson, a former boxer and married man.

 

Two years later, Helen married Charles Jackson, with Jesse taking his surname when he was 15. The family lived in a shack in one of the poorest districts of Greenville. 

 

For those alive today, it’s hard to imagine life then for the Black community. Supposedly, the northern states had won freedom for the slaves when they won the Civil War, but the leaders of southern states (mostly Democrats) quickly established a system that made the lives of Black residents little better than slaves. Though they had the right to vote, they had to register to vote and officials made it nearly impossible, requiring them to prove they could read and write and making Black voters answer impossibly difficult questions to prove they were competent.  

 

Whenever Blacks were getting “uppity”, the Ku Klux Klan and others scared them back into place, sometimes killing Black leaders and hanging them from trees.

 

This was the world that Rev. Martin Luther King sought to change, fighting for the civil rights of Black southerners in the early 1960s. He was supported by white northerners who travelled south to sit in segregated shops along with Black natives, being arrested. A key moment was in 1965 when Black leaders led a march along the 54-mile (87-kilometre) highway from Selma, Alabama, to the state capital of Montgomery.

 

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 legally ended segregation, but the situation in Selma changed little. In Alabama, Governor George Wallace led the battle against change.

 

There were actually three attempts to march on Montgomery. The first march took place on March 7, 1965, but was ended by state troopers and county possemen, who charged about 600 unarmed protesters with batons and tear gas after they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in the direction of Montgomery. The event became known as Bloody Sunday and leaders were beaten badly, which the media publicized worldwide, including a picture of a female leader lying wounded on the bridge.

 

That brought King to Selma to lead the next march. The second march took place two days later, but King cut it short as a federal court issued a temporary injunction against further marches. That night, an anti-civil rights group murdered civil rights activist James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister from Boston.

 

The third march, which started on March 21, was escorted by the Alabama National Guard under federal control, the FBI and federal marshals. Thousands of marchers averaged 16 kilometres a day along U.S. Route 80, reaching Montgomery on March 24. The following day, 25,000 people staged a demonstration on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol.

 

The protests against racial segregation began without public support. President John F. Kennedy eventually backed it and, after his assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson advocated for it, sending the National Guard, for instance, to Selma. 

 

Jesse Jackson was among those who were with Martin Luther King when he was assassinated April 4, 1968 on the balcony of his motel in Memphis, Tennessee by James Earl Ray. Along with other civil rights leaders, Jackson continued King’s fight. It’s hard to remember how difficult this was.

 

Jackson made history when he stood for the White House in 1984 and 1988. Although he was unsuccessful, his performance made a Black man in politics less unusual and, some people feel, opened the door to Barack Obama becoming the first Black president in 2008.    

 

But progress is seldom straightforward. There’s a backlash to the progress Blacks like Jackson and Obama brought. When it was suggested Jackson was such an important figure that his body should lie in state in the United States Capitol building, the House Speaker Mike Johnson denied that possibility.

 

Meanwhile U.S. President Donald Trump refused to apologize after Barack and Michelle Obama were portrayed as apes in a video that the president posted on his Truth Social account (he blamed a staffer and deleted it). 

 

We’ve come a long way from the 1960s racial situation. We still have a long way to go.