This morning is the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Like most Washingtonians did in 1963, I’ll be avoiding the traffic by not going downtown today. But the similarities between me and my counterpart in 1963 end there. And that fact demonstrates just how far we, as a nation, have come in the last fifty years.
There have been plenty of reflections on the anniversary, so reading one more, especially by a white guy who wasn’t born then, may not be something you’re interested in. If it isn’t, there’s always another Miley Cyrus article. When I read the Washington Post this morning, there was included an op-ed by Martin Luther King III which, frankly, said exactly what I expected it to say – it glossed over the journey we’ve taken as a people and listed the ills that still remain. Despite the litany of Democratic Party talking points included in his op-ed, what I was frustrated most by was how glibly he glossed over the last fifty years of progress made towards civil rights for all. His entire acknowledgement of that five decade long struggle was summed up as “Although significant progress has been made in some areas…”
Fifty years of solid progress didn’t even get a full sentence.
That, to me, ignores the enormity of the cultural changes that we have seen in just one lifetime. My mom was born in 1946. The world she was born into – a southern world of white and black poverty, state sponsored and state sanctioned racism, where segregation and the mixing of races in public and private was more than just frowned upon, it was enforced with violence and terrorism – no longer exists. The culture that she was born into has evolved so far from what it used to be, and that did not happen overnight. Things that were accepted as commonplace when my mom was born are now pilloried on the national stage, and the people who utter or express those opinions are ostracized, not applauded.
What is most striking about the Civil Rights movement is how little government actually had to do with its success. For most of the early part of the Civil Rights era, activists were fighting against the government, not trying to use it to expand rights. It was a grassroots movement focusing on changing hearts and minds, and it wasn’t until those hearts and minds began to change that the glue that had frozen our political institutions into inaction began to melt. The culture changed, then the laws changed. This was almost unprecedented.
While the landmark Supreme Court and Congressional legislation of the era helped move the process along, the change that the Civil Rights movement began and sustained was cultural. It was far more than the Voting Rights Act or Brown vs. Board of Education. It represented a sea-change in how Americans of all walks of life would teach their kids, would respond and react to one another, and how we would approach one of the most fundamental and difficult questions of humanity: how do we treat people who are different than we are?
The answer to that question is far different today than it was just 50 years ago, when Washington was the scene of one of the largest peaceful protests in American history.
What happened between 1963 and today represents one of the biggest, swiftest and bloodless cultural revolutions in history. It deserves more than a sentence fragment.
While we continue to move forward, and we continue to try to remedy the issues that remain before us, we should take a moment to look at the enormity of the change we have seen, and many of us have lived through, since King told the world about his dream for America, fifty years ago today.
