The approaching 50th anniversary of the historic March on Washington offers an important milestone to reflect on race relations in America. It’s natural to ask: How far have we come? And what brought us here?
The March on Washington helped convene a national conversation about race and policy that pushed us toward a more multicultural society. Decades later, it also provides us enduring lessons about the contours of American democracy.
Indeed, the evidence to support a narrative of racial progress since the Washington march is all around us: in the size of the black middle class and the emergence of entrepreneurial black businesses, in political and cultural figures as different as Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Jay-Z. Barack Obama’s status towers over the nation as a symbolic and substantive example of the long journey from the harsh night of racial segregation into the glorious morning of equal opportunity.
Almost 50 years after the march, during the 2012 presidential election, black voters’ turnout rate surpassed that of white voters for the first time. The fact that black turnout, according to an Associated Press analysis, ensured the margin of victory for the re-election of the nation’s first African-American president offers an extraordinary instance of historical progress on race matters.
U.S. Census Bureau data, suggesting that 66.2 percent of blacks turned out to vote (in contrast to 64.1 percent of non-Hispanic whites), represents a potential game changer for American politics. While black voter turnout increased by roughly 1.8 million from the 2008 election, white participation declined by about two million. Black women, the unsung heroes of civil-rights struggles, are also the primary drivers of change today. The news speaks to a hard-earned political maturity among black voters and the unique convergence of historical events that made it possible in 2008 and 2012 for African-Americans to cast ballots for Obama.
Democrats have hailed the results as an opportunity to build an enduring coalition led by racial minorities aligned with a plurality of white voters. Republicans, who have vowed to increase their share of the Hispanic vote, maintain a stubborn insistence that the robust black participation in the past two elections was a simple anomaly brought on by the Obama phenomenon.
What both of those narratives dismiss is the political intelligence and sophistication of black voters. They are among the most issue-oriented voters in America, relying less on racial and ethnic affiliations than on substantive policy and programmatic initiatives.
For generations of black voters, the civil-rights movement served as a national classroom that taught enduring lessons about race and democracy. Voter-education projects in the South resisted efforts to deny the black vote, while similar programs in the North sought to convince residents of some of America’s most dangerous and poverty-stricken neighborhoods that their voices were powerful enough to be heard.
While the Democratic Party currently receives the majority of the black vote, that was not always the case. Civil-rights activists in Mississippi and Alabama organized separate independent parties (the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and the Lowndes County Freedom Organization, nicknamed the Black Panther Party) to outflank the Democrats’ resistance to black citizenship rights. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, that relationship had undergone profound changes. Through a combination of racial backlash against civil-rights legislation and bruising struggles toward a more open and inclusive party, Democrats found themselves identified primarily with the struggles of black and poor people. For a while, as exemplified by George McGovern’s crushing defeat in 1972, that seemed a formula for failure, with Democrats losing five of six presidential elections between 1968 and 1988.
Yet Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of a multiracial democracy did not die. It was, in retrospect, simply deferred: a sleeping giant waiting for demographic changes to come.
The shifts in white and black voting patterns suggest that the Democratic Party has yet to recover from its identification in the minds of many white voters as being primarily concerned with civil rights. But demographic changes, sometimes called “the browning of America,” coupled with increased voter participation among blacks and Hispanics, may turn the party’s identification with racial minorities from a political negative into an enduring electoral majority.
Blacks and whiltes are still more likely than not to live, work, socialize, and die apart.
Contemporary narratives and recollections of the civil-rights movement recognize the struggle for racial equality as a national and moral good. That was not always the case. The struggle involved social, political, and legal conflicts over the scope and meaning of citizenship and democracy.
The “culture wars” of the 1990s saw the arena of conflict shift from the ballot box to memory, with liberals and conservatives arguing over the meaning of the 1960s. Conservatives railed against social-welfare programs that, they argued, promoted irresponsible behavior and a culture of poverty. Progressives countered that civil-rights-era victories had reshaped the makeup of American political, social, and educational institutions.
Those debates implicitly recognized civil-rights struggles as a contestation over American democracy. Such an understanding counters a one-dimensional characterization of the movement as one that promoted exclusively black advancement. Black America’s relationship to democracy has remained a historically fraught one, by virtue of the original status of black people as legal property and the subsequent Jim Crow system that denied them full citizenship rights. Yet blacks have remained perhaps the biggest champions of American democracy—even as they have railed against its hypocrisies.
A focus on the civil-rights movement’s individual stories—Rosa Parks refusing to give up her seat in Montgomery, Ala.; Emmett Till’s lynching in Mississippi; the Freedom Riders and sit-in demonstrators jailed—at times obscures a more cohesive vision of the stakes such activists were fighting for. Voting rights, equal employment and housing opportunities, public-school desegregation, and fair treatment by the justice system required transforming democratic institutions. Black activists, out of necessity and vision, led efforts to expansively reimagine democracy and, in the process, helped make America a different nation. Barack Obama’s presidency is simply the most obvious example of that.
The historic makeup of the Obama coalition can be directly traced back to events that took place a half-century ago. King’s soaring rhetoric against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial allowed millions of Americans (including President John F. Kennedy and Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who watched on television) to come as close to participating in a mass civil-rights meeting as they ever would. The demonstration’s official title, the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, hinted at the larger issues of economic security, class struggle, and citizenship beneath the surface of a battle for equality that many viewed, then, primarily through a racial lens.
Key to transforming democracy was reimagining race relations between blacks and whites. The civil-rights movement, especially during what is known as its heroic period, between 1954 and 1965, jump-started a long-overdue and supremely contentious national conversation about race and democracy in America. That conversation reached a fever pitch in 1963, the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. That year James Baldwin published The Fire Next Time, a searing examination of race relations that is still unequaled in bringing a frightening clarity of expression to the toxic feelings of resentment, anger, and rage harbored by blacks and whites alike.
Baldwin’s passionate words resonated in Birmingham, where King and Fred Shuttlesworth faced increasingly violent resistance in their campaign to desegregate the Magic City’s public accommodations. King’s “Letter From Birmingham Jail,” smuggled out on scraps of newspaper, disputed critics who insisted that he halt the demonstrations. In one of the most potent passages in his eloquent corpus of speeches and writings, King characterized the young black women and men who faced down German shepherds and fire hoses as heroes whose stoic grace had transported America “back to those great wells of democracy” that the nation’s founders had first dug.
On June 11, President Kennedy voiced full-throated approval of King’s words. At 8 p.m., Kennedy turned the announcement that the National Guard was required to integrate the University of Alabama into a milestone of presidential conviction. “Who among us,” he asked, “would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in [the Negro’s] place?” His admission that “this nation, for all its hopes, and all its boast, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free” anticipated parts of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech two months later. The president concluded by defining civil rights as a “moral issue” as ancient as Scripture but in dire need of public-policy, as well as spiritual, intervention.
The assassination of Medgar Evers, the brilliant NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, in the early hours of the next day gave new urgency to Kennedy’s televised address. It also set the stage for the Walk to Freedom, on June 23 in Detroit, a march that, until it was eclipsed in Washington, stood out as the greatest civil-rights demonstration of the era. King served as keynote speaker at the Detroit gathering but shared the stage with local militants such as Albert Cleage, an ally of Malcolm X.
The August 28 March on Washington seemed to cull the year’s triumphs and tragedies to carve out what King described as a “stone of hope” from a mountain of despair. Less than three weeks later, four girls were killed at the 16th Street Baptist Church, in Birmingham. Kennedy’s assassination, in November, created the moral high ground absent while he was alive, which assisted President Johnson’s successful legislative maneuvering, in concert and in tension with King’s activism, toward the Civil Rights Act 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
But a half-century later, race relations between blacks and whites (an overly simplistic binary that nonetheless resonates along a continuum that sees various racial minorities grouped by skin color) remain contested. Obama’s election was greeted with an initial burst of euphoria that unleashed the myth of “postracialism” backed by optimistic assessments that race mattered less than ever before in American life. Soon, however, some commentators began highlighting enduring racial animosity. In 2012 only 39 percent of whites voted for Obama, a decline of 4 percentage points from 2008. That total was lower than for John Kerry (2004) and Michael Dukakis (1988), but still surpassed McGovern’s dismal 1972 showing of 32 percent.
Liberals and conservatives, to exemplify America’s rough road toward racial equality less than 50 years after Jim Crow, have understandably acclaimed Obama’s electoral victories. They note that younger voters are less concerned about a candidate’s race than their predecessors were, and that whites have made up an impressive part of the Obama coalition.
Yet beneath this narrative of progress is a refusal to taste the ashes of racial animus. Race has deeply informed increasing polarization among political partisans. The racial invective articulated by certain strains of the Tea Party is the most obvious example of the hardening lines. The relatively homogenous racial makeup of the Republican Party has made it more easily associated with the America of 1963 than with the present.
Racial progress between blacks and whites continues to proceed in fits and starts. Obama’s historic presidency, as well as the growing iconography attached to the first lady, Michelle Obama, exists alongside an anti-Obama industry that has questioned the president’s citizenship, religious beliefs, patriotism, and integrity.
President Obama’s recent comments following the acquittal of George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin acknowledged the fact that America has not become a “postracial” nation. In deeply personal terms, Obama recounted his own experiences of being racially stigmatized. The national protests in the wake of the verdict had inspired him to directly confront an issue—racism in institutions like the justice system—that many hoped his presidency would have mitigated. Obama’s comments offered a window into the worldview of black American disappointment over the Zimmerman verdict, while his contemplative tone was bolstered by his hope that his children’s generation was approaching race matters differently. “They’re better than us,” he observed.
But growing racial disparities blunt even the most hopeful optimism. Mass incarceration spurred by the war on drugs has ensnared almost two million Americans in its web; Human Rights Watch estimates that nationwide, blacks account for 62 percent of drug offenders admitted to state prisons. In seven states, that proportion reaches 80 to 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges. Michelle Alexander, a legal scholar, has described the social, legal, and economic stigma brought on by a felony drug conviction as the “New Jim Crow,” plaguing a generation of blacks too young to have experienced the era of separate water fountains, bathrooms, and segregated restaurants and hotels. The elimination of legal segregation did not lead to the integrated nation that King imagined.
Blacks and whites are still more likely than not to live, work, socialize, and die apart. Residential and public-school segregation continue to haunt America, perhaps more so than in 1963, since, unlike in the past, we now remain largely silent about the problem. High unemployment and poverty shape the lives of a majority of black Americans.
King’s faith in American democracy remained anchored by a hope that the nation’s founding documents could spring to life through a fundamental transformation of a political process that shut blacks out of governance. Yet access to the electoral arena—what Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the March on Washington, praised as a shift from protest to politics—has come at a high cost. The number of black elected officials has increased significantly since Kennedy’s and King’s speeches in 1963. Neither man could have envisioned that the son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas would be elected president less than 50 years later.
The civil-rights movement’s strength rested on its ability to transform American democracy. King’s democratic vision galvanized people to organize for a citizenship broad enough to include seamstresses and sharecroppers, ex-convicts and preachers, students and laborers.
The most profound lesson that 1963 has to offer the present is about the power of collective, organized action. Activists of the era, most notably King, took to the streets in nonviolent demonstrations that forced an American president to take notice and choose sides. At a time when the outcome of their story had yet to be decided, they took creative risks and calculated gambles. Most of all, they promoted a radical vision of American democracy with a tenacity that has almost allowed us to forget the long road we’ve traveled since then, and to pay scant attention to the hard journey that remains.
Peniel E. Joseph is a professor of history and founding director of the Center for the Study of Race and Democracy, at Tufts University, and a Caperton Fellow at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, at Harvard University. His most recent book is Dark Days, Bright Nights: From Black Power to Barack Obama (Basic Books, 2010). His biography of Stokely Carmichael will be published next year by Basic.
