An overwhelming number of commentators, including President Obama, compared what is happening in the United States to the 1960s. Indeed, every issue we struggle with today – police brutality, American militarism, LBGT rights, voting rights – has its antecedent in the ‘60s, and an informed view of history can provide insight into the present moment.
The ‘60s saw the political triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act, both seismic historical events. However, each was a day late and a dollar short. While that was going on, a new generation came of age that felt no gratitude for America finally “giving” us what we were entitled too.
That generation concluded that the problems of the black community weren’t an issue of bigoted individual behavior, but a function of the power imbalance between black and white people as a result of the structural racism endemic to America. The ‘60s produced the Black Power Movement, and this decade has produced Black Lives Matter.
The Black Power Movement provided the energy and talent for black progress for 30 years. Whether you’re talking about affirmative action for higher education, minority participation in economics or the expansion of black political representation, they are products of the sea change in black political and social thinking during the ‘60s. But the generation that produced that effort is now old and tired. Worse, we didn’t prepare the next generation of leadership. The result is morally unacceptable conditions in too much of the black community.
Just as the call for Black Power sprung organically from the protest of the shooting of James Meredith in Greenwood, Mississippi in June 1966, Black Lives Matter was the organic black response to the killing of Michael Brown Jr. in August 2014. Opposing the murder of unarmed black men and boys by local police was the moral imperative that guided the mass movement, then and now.
What the two movements have in common is a refusal of young black people (and their multiracial allies) to compromise with an American power structure that marginalizes the lives of black people. They demand a governance structure with a different value system. They claim no allegiance to a culture that does not protect the rights and well-being of all its citizens, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, religion, sexual identity or country of origin.
This is lifetime work. Mass social movements are successful when they create broad-based, informed support. Everyone, from the operational leadership to the causal volunteers, must have the same theory and practice. You need thinkers, theorists and writers to develop, define, defend and disseminate your agenda for change.
Elections matter. Unfortunately, America has a flawed political system that often produces terribly flawed candidates. But mayors pick police chiefs; presidents pick attorneys general. So the relative fairness of the criminal justice system is a function of who’s running it, which is decided on election day.
In 1968, in our anger and youthful arrogance, we considered the political system morally bankrupt and irrelevant. We were half right – it was morally bankrupt, but a long way from being irrelevant. It did matter whether the next POTUS was Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon, but we didn’t care – and Richard Nixon won. So thousands more young Americans and tens of thousands more Vietnamese died. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark never got the chance to be old men, but were murdered by police.
To sustain the struggle, you have to care whose hands are on the levers of power. You need to produce and elect a generation of politicians who have been baptized and forged in the fire of struggle. In the words of Lin-Manuel Miranda, you must make sure you are in the room where it happens.
Mike Jones, who has held senior policy positions in St. Louis and St. Louis County government, is a member of the St. Louis American editorial board, as well as the Missouri State Board of Education.
