Prevail or Fail
By Mowahid Hussain Shah
50 years ago in America, blacks were systematically segregated from whites. In the South, there were separate public bathrooms for blacks and whites, separate drinking-water fountains, separate seating on public buses. The state of Georgia prohibited restaurants from serving both white and black customers; Kentucky required all public parks, athletic games, and social functions to be segregated; West Virginia law stated that whites and blacks could not attend the same schools. Many states followed similar practices. Into the 1930s and beyond, blacks were restricted in where they could work and live and what professions they could follow. Blacks were not even permitted to worship in many churches. The majority of states had prohibited marriage between whites and blacks; the US Supreme Court ruled the last of these laws unconstitutional in 1967.
Slaves were formally emancipated in 1865. But attitudes don’t change overnight. The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winning book, “Slavery By Another Name,” by Douglas Blackmon, documents the brutal subjugation of blacks and Federal indifference to it in post-1865 South.
It was quite a course-correction then to see a black family being serenaded and saluted during the US Presidential Inauguration.
It is fashionable to add to the bouquet of Martin Luther King; subordinated blacks, taking cues from the dominant white hierarchy, remain reluctant to acknowledge the sacrifices of Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.
Kennedy is perceived as the knight in shining armor. In reality, Lyndon Johnson did far more for blacks, including passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which barred discrimination in public places, and in employment, on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. This law also created a federal agency to enforce laws against discrimination in the workplace. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 banned practices that, in effect, had denied the right to vote to many American blacks.
Only now, 50 years after the fact, the Kennedy clan has disclosed that it believed all along that President Kennedy’s assassination was a product of a conspiracy. His nephew, Robert Kennedy, Jr., debunked the official account of the Warren Commission, which was empanelled to probe the slaying. The Commission was headed by US Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren and included Gerald Ford, later to become US President in 1974.
What was novelty yesterday is familiarity today. Come the 2016 presidential race, an entire new voting generation bloc would have grown up seeing a black family with a Muslim-sounding name in the White House.
Freed from the constraints of re-election, Obama’s inaugural speech of January 21 was notable for its sweeping message of inclusivity. While Muslims shall still be vulnerable, it will be harder now to target others on the basis of color, creed, gender, or gay orientation.
Whether Obama, during his second act, would prevail or fail depends a lot on his capacity and resolve to fight what the New York Times of January 27 characterized as “the atmosphere of intellectual dishonesty that swirled through the highest levels of America’s war on terror” and whether he can clear some of the mess created in the Muslim world by unwise Western actions.
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