Bal Harbour, Fla.
Our nation commemorates two important civil rights landmarks this year, singular events borne of enormous struggle and sacrifice by those who led and participated in America’s civil rights movement. These events—a seminal Supreme Court decision, followed ten years later by historic civil rights legislation—closed one door on the tragic practice of legal segregation in our nation’s history and opened another to realizing, at long last, the promise of equal protection under the law.
In 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas overturned the doctrine of “separate but equal,” holding out the promise that segregation in education and other areas of our society would no longer be the law or practice of our country.
Although the decision had a profound impact on American society, 50 years later the promise of Brown v. Board of Education has yet to be truly fulfilled. As a major study by the Harvard Civil Rights Project recently showed, our nation’s schools are becoming increasingly segregated in all regions for both African American and Latino students. The study, “Brown at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?” documents, among other things: major increases in segregation in many districts where court-ordered desegregation has ended; particularly high levels of segregation in central cities of large urban areas, as well as smaller central cities and rings of large metropolitan areas; and “substantial slippage toward segregation in most of the states that were highly desegregated in 1991.” The report further notes that, with some regional exceptions, most white students have little contact with minority students, and that the “vast majority of intensely segregated minority schools face conditions of concentrated poverty, which are powerfully related to unequal educational opportunity.”
The Harvard report clearly shows a society going backwards toward segregation and inequality—an unacceptable option on the 50th anniversary of Brown. The AFL-CIO calls emphatically for a renewed commitment to securing equality in education, ending educational discrimination and segregation, and promoting educational opportunities and programs aimed at closing the achievement gap. We must do more than merely commemorate Brown a half century after its passage; we must work with urgency to achieve its promise and its purposes for today’s students and for future generations of students.
This year’s 40th anniversary of the historic Civil Rights Act of 1964 also serves as a compelling reminder of how far we have to go to achieve the goals of this important law as well as the goals of subsequent civil rights laws. Today, discrimination remains a stark reality for millions of Americans in housing, employment, education, health care, voting, lending practices, criminal justice, and other critical aspects of life in our society. To make matters worse, some cynical political leaders argue that discrimination is no longer a serious problem. They promote judges that would cut back our civil rights laws, take steps to weaken civil rights enforcement agencies, seek to restrict important remedies such as affirmative action, and attempt to use civil rights issues as a “wedge” to divide Americans against Americans.
We must therefore rededicate ourselves to the enduring struggle for civil and women’s rights in our country. We must hold the line in Congress on judges who would turn back the clock on civil rights. We must take steps to pass laws, such as “Fairness: the Civil Rights Act of 2004,” that would overturn courts’ decisions limiting our civil rights protections and remedies. We must ensure that our civil rights enforcement agencies have the resources and leadership that will enable them to do their job. We must make sure that every vote is counted in the 2004 election and in every election. We must pass new laws, such as the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and the hate crimes bill, to provide protections to groups who remain vulnerable to discrimination and hate. We must defend affirmative action.
A complete list of all the challenges before us would be longer and more daunting, and the opposition we face is formidable. But as we confront these challenges today, we take inspiration from the civil rights activists who succeeded in 1954 and 1964 against challenges that were even more enormous, in an environment marked by even greater bigotry, hate, violence and intimidation. We humbly seek the strength to follow the path these courageous activists set out for all Americans to follow and hope that future generations will view our efforts as a fitting tribute to the civil rights heroes of yesterday.