Jesse Jackson: “The Fight for Civil Rights Continues”

Explanation and Analysis of the Document

Jackson's purposes in this 2005 article from Ebony magazine are twofold. One is to summarize the progress of the civil rights movement. The other is to suggest the future direction it should take. His overall themes are that every generation is a “Civil Rights generation” and that genuine freedom can be achieved only if progress is made on the economic front.

In the opening paragraph Jackson begins by noting that concepts of the civil rights movement should not be restricted to the 1960s. Rather, the struggle for civil rights, he states, has been going on since before the nation's founding. He goes on to say that it extends back at least 346 years, which would place the year at 1659. Until the 1650s slavery did not exist in what would become the United States. Some blacks were indentured servants, meaning that they were obligated by contract to function as servants or laborers for a fixed span of time. Upon the expiration of that time period, however, they were released from their indenture, and their children were not born into a condition of servitude. Blacks until the end of the 1650s enjoyed access to the court system, owned land, and in general were not regarded as property. But as a shortage of white indentured workers began to develop on the colonies' growing tobacco plantations and as consciousness of race-based differences began to grow, statutes were passed that in effect created the institution of slavery in such colonies as Virginia.

Jackson also points out that as early as the 1830s “Colored” men began to form organizations whose goal was the end of slavery and the achievement of civil rights. Jackson is likely alluding to the efforts of such activists as Austin Steward. Steward was a former slave who settled in Rochester, New York, and who actively supported runaway slaves and contributed to the establishment of a black settlement in Wilberforce, Ontario. His book Twenty-Two Years a Slave and Forty Years a Freeman became an important document in the struggle for abolition. Steward served as vice president of the First Annual Convention of People of Color, held in Philadelphia in 1831, the first of several such conventions to call for the end of slavery.

In the fourth paragraph Jackson alludes to the hundredth anniversary of the Niagara Movement, which led to the creation of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in 1909. The Niagara Movement was the result of efforts by W. E. B. Du Bois and other black leaders, who had to meet on the Canadian side of Niagara Falls because they were barred from registering in any hotel in New York State on the American side. The goal of the meeting was to draft a list of demands to end discrimination and segregation and to foster economic opportunities for African Americans. The Niagara Movement had little immediate impact, but it laid the groundwork for civil rights struggles later in the century.

In the same paragraph, Jackson speaks about the efforts of southern whites to block implementation of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution. These three amendments, often referred to as the Civil Rights Amendments or the Reconstruction Amendments, were passed during Reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War. The Thirteenth Amendment abolished slavery. The Fourteenth Amendment, written to secure the rights of former slaves, calls for “due process” and “equal protection of the laws” in each state. The Fifteenth Amendment was written to secure the right to vote regardless of a person's “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” While these three amendments created hopes that the nation could put its history of slavery behind, many states found ways to thwart the intentions of the amendments. So-called Jim Crow laws, particularly in the South, led to a deeply segregated society. (“Jim Crow” was the name of a pre–Civil War minstrel show character, and the term came to be applied to both laws and customs that kept African Americans in a subservient position.) Fear was spread in the African American community by lynchings (nearly five thousand recorded from 1882 to 1968, though the true number was undoubtedly much higher) and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan. Blacks were routinely denied their right to vote through such measures as poll taxes and literacy tests, and black participation in governmental affairs was negligible.

Jackson then notes that changes began to take place in the second half of the twentieth century. One factor that promoted these changes was “Black migration to the North.” Such migrations had already begun in the 1910s and the 1920s. Chicago's black population, for example, grew from forty-four thousand to 110,000 between 1910 and 1920. In New York City the black population grew from approximately fifty thousand in 1914 to 165,000 in 1930. Similar patterns developed in such cities as Detroit and Cleveland. This movement of people, coupled with the demands for troops and manufacturing workers during World War II and the cold war (the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet bloc) that followed, created conditions that would lead to the civil rights movement in the 1950s.

Jackson enumerates some of the successes of the movement in the paragraphs that follow. Among them were the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed school segregation and overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal” enshrined by the Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896); the national attention given to race relations by events in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the infamous case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old Chicago boy who, in 1955, was kidnapped and murdered in Mississippi after supposedly speaking disrespectfully to a white woman; and Rosa Parks's historic 1955 refusal to relinquish her seat on a bus to a white man in Montgomery, Alabama. Parks's arrest for violating the laws pertaining to segregation in public transit led to a major civil rights success. From December 1, 1955, to December 20, 1956, African Americans in the city boycotted the transit system. The Montgomery bus boycott was successful (black taxicab drivers, for example, charged black passengers an amount equal to bus fares, 10 cents), leading to the U.S. Supreme Court's upholding a federal district court ruling that the city's segregation laws for public transit were unconstitutional.

Jackson then recounts additional successes such as the “freedom rides.” These were organized by the Congress of Racial Equality to test the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in Boynton v. Virginia, which outlawed racial segregation in public areas—restrooms, restaurants, waiting rooms, terminals—that served interstate travelers. Similar nonviolent tactics were used to desegregate public accommodations in other parts of the country. The “power of this movement … hit its zenith with the March on Washington” that Martin Luther King led in 1963. The purpose of the march was to urge passage of the Civil Rights Act, which had stalled in Congress. Organizers expected that perhaps one hundred thousand people would attend. In fact, two hundred thousand attended, and it is likely that few ever forgot Dr. King's soaring “I Have a Dream” Speech, delivered on August 28. As Jackson notes, the march had its desired effect on President John Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, leading to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.

Jackson asserts that these civil rights successes helped create a growing black middle class. Blacks could be found in increasing numbers in education, and, thanks to court decisions that upheld affirmative action in the awarding of federal contracts to minorities, blacks were increasingly visible in government programs as well as in major corporations and government itself. He notes that in 2005 the U.S. secretary of state (Condoleezza Rice), third in line to the presidency, was black. The number of blacks living in poverty had declined, and income among blacks was up. Jackson states, however, that while progress has been made, much remained to be done. He points out that the poverty rate among blacks was still twice that of whites. Whites continued to hold a disproportionate percentage of managerial jobs, and gaps in such areas as income and home ownership remained stable—to the disadvantage of blacks. He theorizes that the chief obstacle to black progress is the lack of capital for economic development. This lack of capital made it impossible for blacks to own businesses, and this impossibility had become a form of “structural discrimination”—that is, not deliberate discrimination on the part of individuals or companies but a form of discrimination emanating from the structure of the American economy itself. A further obstacle to black progress, according to Jackson, is that some of the earlier gains were being “rolled back.” The Office of Federal Contract Compliance, which monitored contracting with government agencies, was understaffed and underfunded, and provisions of the Voting Rights Act were under assault. Indeed, Jackson was a highly vocal critic of voting procedures in Ohio, which George W. Bush narrowly won in the 2004 presidential election, giving him the crucial electoral votes that resulted in his victory.

In the final paragraphs of the article Jackson urges black leaders to remain vigilant. While acknowledging that much progress had been made, he notes that there remained plenty of “unfinished business” and asks leaders to “shine the light” on practices such as “redlining” by banks. (The term refers to a bank's refusal to grant loans to buy property or businesses in certain areas of a city, usually black areas, delineated on a map by a red line.) He also recommends that leaders ensure that banks and other lending institutions adhere to the provisions of the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act, which required these lending institutions to offer credit throughout their entire market area and not just to target wealthier borrowers and neighborhoods (and which prohibits the practice of redlining). It is likely that Jackson in 2005 was responding to changes made in the law that year. Previously, smaller banks and similar institutions had argued that the accounting and documentation requirements of the law were too onerous. In response to this concern, the law was changed to apply only to institutions with $1 billion in assets, rather than the $250 million of the original law. Many civil rights leaders and others were highly critical of these changes, for they created the opportunity for medium-sized lending institutions to ignore the spirit of the law. In 2008 the Community Reinvestment Act and similar legislation came under heavy fire when banks and other financial institutions failed because of so-called subprime loans, or loans made to those who could not afford them. Jackson concludes by saying that every generation, not just the 1960s generation, is a civil rights generation, for freedom can be achieved only when blacks achieve economic equality.