A few nights ago I was reading a history of the Civil Rights Movement. It’s a history that I know well but I found myself in tears. The values that advocates for African-Americans have fought for are the values that we prize as Americans, values that make us feel safe and welcome – that we don’t have to account for where we pray or whether it’s in English, Latin, Hebrew or Arabic; we don’t have to account for where we or our parents were born; whether we’re the children of laborers or executives; whether we’re covered by the pale skin of Scandinavians, the swarthy skin of Italians, the red skin of Native Americans or Indians from the Asian subcontinent – we respect each other and each other’s struggles, “merit and conduct.”[1] Our values are universal human values, not tribal ones. That was a huge advance in human history, and although it dates from the European Enlightenment and was rooted in reaction to centuries of religious wars there, America was its exemplar, proudly so, with the Statue of Liberty lifting her “lamp beside the golden door!” How painful that it’s those fundamental American values, the values of our Founders, though too often honored in the breech, values we fought for in a very bloody Civil War, that we now have to defend again against people claiming America as their birthright.
It’s not just what happens to someone else, though it would have been enough for a young Dodger fan first encountering the abuse heaped on Jackie, the team’s Black hero, or for a musical family to encounter the abuse heaped on Marion Anderson, the incomparable Black contralto, but all this was going on in the shadow of World War II which killed more than sixty million people for the sake of Hitler’s racial pride, six million of them in his specific attack on people of Jewish descent in the Holocaust. No one had to explain to me that loving our neighbors, a part of all of our fundamental scriptures, has to be either universal or it becomes a cruel joke. And coming on the heels of the Great Depression of the 1930s I equated the movement for labor rights with the movement for racial justice – both movements for decent treatment of people who had not been treated decently.
Working white men and women once understood that slavery was aimed at them as well as Blacks, that slavery kept their wages down and made it hard for them to support themselves and their families. Rich whites have long understood that the way to maintain their power was to drive a wedge between whites and blacks. White workers could satisfy their desire for status by disparaging Blacks. And everybody lost except the rich. Divide and conquer was their path to victory. And Americans repeatedly bought the pride and went to the soup kitchen.
Some of the unions also understood that. Soon to be Supreme Court Justice Arthur J. Goldberg submitted briefs to the U.S. Supreme Court, on behalf of a major union federation that shortly after became part of the AFL-CIO, urging an end to segregation.
But now the rich have poor whites fighting poor Blacks and both are worse off for it – again.
[1] Cong. Globe, 39th Cong., 1st sess. 3148 (1866) (June 13, 1866).
Steve Gottlieb’s latest book is Unfit for Democracy: The Roberts Court and The Breakdown of American Politics. He is the Jay and Ruth Caplan Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Albany Law School, served on the New York Civil Liberties Union board, on the New York Advisory Committee to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, and as a US Peace Corps Volunteer in Iran.
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