Community Voices Reflect on the 2023 Civil Rights Agenda: Pressing Issues for the Civil Rights Movement
Unfinished Business
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."
— Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. penned those words from an Alabama jail cell in 1963, but they could have been written today. Nearly sixty years later, there remains an imperative to acknowledge our interconnectedness, and act in response to the unfinished business of achieving justice.
As my campus and community colleagues and I continue our daily efforts to create and promote equitable and inclusive living, learning, and working environments characterized by social justice, racial justice, equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging, I am reminded of Dr. King’s efforts around this holiday honoring him. It brings into sharper focus the things we’ve accomplished and the things we are yet striving for. This work is challenging and sometimes the reward seems unreachable. While we have benefited immensely from the work of Dr. King and other civil rights leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, Thurgood Marshall, Julian Bond, Grace Lee Boggs, Medgar Evers, and Harry T. and Harriette Moore, we are reminded through current day challenges that there remains unfinished business.
Growing up in Detroit, MI, I was hardly the activist and barely conscious of the sociopolitical issues of the day. I was the go along to get along type, ever so conscious of not rocking the boat and not bringing unwanted attention to myself. However, the injustice I regularly witnessed consistently gnawed at me, whether it was abuses by law enforcement or other incidents of bias. But what bothered me most, more than the injustice itself, was my inaction toward addressing it. That inaction ate at me from the inside out; I’d walk away literally sick to my stomach. Fast forward 30 years and I am grateful for the mentorship and training I received during my educational and professional journey, readying and equipping me with necessary tools to boldly combat discrimination, oppression and injustice. I am grateful for colleagues who work tirelessly for the most vulnerable in our community. I laud them as their efforts mean I am never alone in this work.
While civil rights activists like Dr. King and other changemakers paved the way for action in many areas, we must now relentlessly carry the torch of justice into spaces that threaten to drive out the very memory of that work.
As a higher education scholar, it is clear to me that we are witnessing a censorship of truth telling, a silencing of a full accounting of history that grapples with the racism that is inextricably intertwined with this nation’s founding and will continue to shape our future if it remains unchallenged. Reputable academic scholarship that has provided a critical lens through which to examine the way race has shaped policies, practices, programs, and curriculum for nearly half a century is now being censured across the nation. Meanwhile, the First Amendment is being used as a cover to weaponize language against marginalized groups. These are among the most pressing issues of our day.
A complete telling of our history includes the insights uncovered by scholars who study race, who have studied the ways racism and the law interconnect with one another and have shaped the systems through which we navigate daily. However, I believe more is at stake of being lost than just a method of effectively analyzing the past. This censorship aims to erase the historically accurate recounting of much of what has shaped many of our persistent challenges related to equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging, with the ultimate goal of negating civil rights gains and stifling future efforts. To be sure, we have unfinished business.
From executive orders to newly introduced legislation and countless interrupted school board meetings across the country, we are seeing persistent and well-funded attacks that threaten civil rights for historically marginalized communities. I believe this threat to democracy is fueled by the same racism and efforts to silence the parts of our history that Dr. King and other civil rights leaders warred against. While it can be uncomfortable to illuminate ugly truths, these truths help us to not repeat the mistakes of the past. Without this recognition and the actions that go along with the knowledge of injustice, true civil rights for all will remain elusive.
I remain convicted by Dr. King’s writings from that Alabama jail cell 60 years ago. And while his life’s work has undeniably moved us forward toward a more just society, it is up to us to continue the work and address the unfinished business of seeing this shared dream of equity and equality come to fruition. The arch of the moral universe is indeed long and bends towards justice, but only if we bend it.
The Freedom Road of Education
The fight for civil and human rights has been an ongoing struggle for Black Americans since they were first enslaved on what is now U.S. soil by Spanish (1526), French (1685), and British (1619) colonizers. One of the tools of liberation typically denied these enslaved persons of African descent was education, due to its potential to transform social, political, and economic understandings of the nature of innate and inherent rights of personhood, regardless of transitory changes in civil and legal standing. Controlling the enslaved population’s access to information was critical to colonizers maintaining control of a geographically widespread system of labor exploitation which extended coast to coast, and both north and south of the Mason-Dixon Line. As the U.S. moved from being a series of colonial territories to a “sovereign” nation, making sure education was largely unavailable to Blacks assisted in the young nation’s ability to grow economically, because extracting nearly all the value of Black labor and Indigenous land benefitted the agricultural and industrial development of the emerging empire.
This historical overview illustrates the system of chattel slavery in Colonial America having extensive and global roots based on a need for economic exploitation. To preserve key remnants of this system, during and after slavery, it was necessary to dehumanize Blacks and other groups with darker pigmentation worldwide using a psychological approach which solidified various caste systems. Therefore, Abraham Lincoln’s 1863 executive order, which freed slaves in states which were in armed rebellion against the U.S., was a political, economic, and military move to weaken the resolve of Confederate states relative to remaining outside of the Union. This tactical maneuver played on moral sentiments around the abolition of slavery; however, it would take winning the Civil War and passing the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to give the formerly enslaved any semblance of U.S. citizenship.
The 14th amendment is particularly important in the discussion of the interplay between education, civil rights, and human rights because of the language in its first section which requires equal protection under the law. Many scholars have argued for the importance of a well-educated citizenry if all Americans are to enjoy equal protection in the form of not being deprived of life, liberty, and property. Hence, the 1896 Supreme Court ruling “Plessy vs. Ferguson”, which denied Blacks access to the educational and other resources needed to give them equal protection under the law, was eventually overturned based on the 14th amendment in the 1954 “Brown vs. Board of Education” decision. Unfortunately, the promise of “Brown” has never been fully realized due to the persistence of de jure and de facto discrimination throughout the U.S., which has been adept at changing forms and resistant to being eliminated. Today, many school districts across the nation are just as segregated as they were in 1954, while other seemingly integrated districts have implemented tracking and other systems of segregation, often under the guise of providing instruction at students’ supposed level of understanding.
In the aftermath of the “Brown” decision, additional judicial and legislative guidance was needed to establish the parameters for truly integrated schooling. As such, the Green vs. County School Board of New Kent County (1968) Supreme Court ruling identified six areas which were required to be desegregated, establishing the “Green Six” factors: facilities; student, faculty, and staff assignments; transportation; and extracurricular activities. Many of today’s advocacy discussions in P-20 education are connected to these factors: adequate public funding for full-day early childhood programming; criteria for arts, honors, and co-curricular participation; tracking in P-12 courses; cost of remedial college courses; and the role of standardized tests in access to college, high-demand majors, and graduate/professional study. Moreover, our debates over education vouchers, public funding for private as well as charter schools, and diversion of resources from instruction to marketing is directly related to society navigating the post-Brown landscape.
Today, we stand at the crossroads between progress and regression, often without modern versions of Harriett Tubman and Frederick Douglass to help us navigate new routes to liberation. The challenge we face on our watch is whether we will honor the sacrifices of our ancestors who boldly proclaimed America’s promise of building “a more perfect union” is worth the effort. Bloodshed, anguish, and economic devastation were necessary to affirm the importance of human decency in the struggle towards adoption of the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. If we are unable to muster the intestinal fortitude and empathy needed to move our nation into the next phase of its liberation, the economic, psychological, and social justice costs will be staggering. Perhaps we should reinvest some of the monies spent to maintain the prison-industrial complex, which has an extremely higher cost per person than the public’s per student expenditures at any point in P-20 education.
Voter Suppression is an Assault on Civil Rights!
The 15th Amendment to the United States Constitution was ratified on February 3, 1870. The amendment reads, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” It guaranteed African American men the right to vote. In addition, the right to vote could not be denied to anyone in the future based on a person’s race. The 15th Amendment was a milestone for civil rights, but it was not until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that the majority of African Americans would be truly free to register and vote in large numbers.
At the signing of the Voting Rights Act on August 6, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson said “millions of Americans are denied the right to vote because of their color. The wrong is one which no American in his heart can justify. The right is one which no American true to our principles can deny.”
The Act was reauthorized by President Richard Nixon in 1970 and President Gerald Ford in 1975. In 1982, President Ronald Reagan signed a 25-year extension saying, “The right to vote is the crown jewel of American liberties and we will not see its luster diminished.” This extension prohibited the violation of voting rights by any practices that discriminated based on race, regardless if the practices had been adopted with the intent to discriminate or not. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush signed a reauthorization bill and Congress passed a joint resolution declaring that day National Voting Rights Celebration Day. Sixteen years later President George W. Bush signed and said “My administration will vigorously enforce the provisions of this law and we will defend it in court.
In the 2013 case Shelby County v. Holder, the US Supreme Court invalidated a key section of the Voting Rights Act, which provided protections in certain jurisdictions which have an established history of state- or jurisdiction-administered disenfranchisement based on race. The Court declared Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA) unconstitutional, which set forth a formula for determining which jurisdictions were required to seek federal approval of any proposed change to their electoral laws or procedures. Immediately following the decision, states began an all out assault on voting rights which continues today.
Lawmakers in 47 states introduced more than 360 bills in 2021 with provisions that restrict voting access, according to New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. In Wisconsin, proposed legislation prohibited anyone other than the voter, an immediate family member or a legal guardian from returning an absentee ballot; bar election clerks from filling in any missing information on a voter's absentee ballot envelope; require voters to provide a copy of a photo ID every time they request an absentee ballot — under current law, voters only have to show an ID the first time they request an absentee ballot — and limit who can identify as indefinitely confined, a status that allows for absentee ballots for those who cannot get to the polls due to age, illness or disability. The current assault is intended to keep power away from the many and in the hands of a few.
Voting is Power!
The overwhelming majority of victims of voter suppression in the United States have been African Americans.
Voting Is Our Right and Privilege: It gives us the opportunity to make our voices heard and our opinions known.
Voting Is an Act of Patriotism: Voting is one of the ways people can show their patriotism for their country. By voting, people express their opinions and let their government know what they want.
Voting Is the Foundation of Our Democracy: In any democracy, the right to vote is one of the most important rights citizens have. This is because voting is the foundation of democracy — it is how citizens communicate their desires and preferences to their government.
Voting Holds Our Leaders Accountable: When we vote, we hold our leaders accountable.
Voting Shapes the Future of Our Country: When people vote, they are not just voting for a candidate, they are voting for the future of our country.
If the assault on voting rights is successful, then Democracy fails. When the electoral process and its institutions are compromised or nullified, the democratic promise is at risk of being broken. Congress can restore that promise and eliminate the suppressive tactics we now see. The For the People Act would create a national baseline for voting access that every American can rely on, and it would foil state efforts to manipulate voting rules to exclude eligible voters or create discriminatory outcomes. It will expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, ban partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders.