The Changing Vocabulary Of Civil Rights

Graying men in handcuffs and prison jumpsuits, unrepentant of their pasts even as their limbs stiffen with age, have become a kind of modern archetype of the southern fringe. A bleak procession of them, a few only months away from death, trickled through courthouses across the region over the past decade, sometimes fingered as killers by aging prosecution witnesses dragging oxygen tanks.

So begins a dramatic front page article in today’s Washington Post on what may the last of the trials dealing with old cases from the violent response to the civil rights movement in the South.

The whole article is worth reading, but I confess that I was most struck by an unintentional revelation it contained of how much things have changed since the heady civil rights summer of 1964. Edgar Ray Killen, now 79, is on trial, the article says, for “the 1964 murder of three young men who had come to his home town to tell black people that they should have the same rights as whites.”

Now, of course, anyone who claims that that rights and privileges should not be distributed on the basis of race is regarded as a reactionary racist.

I had the same reaction in reading the following sentence in this article from the Chronicle of Education today about the surprising (to some) success anti-preference organizations have continued to have even after their apparent defeat in Grutter (discussed in more detail above, here):

The groups have found a sympathetic ear at the Office for Civil Rights, which has been more forceful in looking into racial-discrimination complaints than during the Clinton administration.

As practiced, affirmative action is racial discrimination, but it is rare to see that acknowledged, even implicitly, as here, except in conservative blogs and media.

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  1. Rich January 14, 2005 at 10:25 am | | Reply

    ## The whole article is worth reading, but I confess that I was most struck by an unintentional revelation it contained of how much things have changed since the heady civil rights summer of 1964. Edgar Ray Killen, now 79, is on trial, the article says, for “the 1964 murder of three young men who had come to his home town to tell black people that they should have the same rights as whites.” ##

    It’s ironic that today, their message (if that was their message) would be considered anti-black. You won’t find Cobra hawking such wares, nor any of the so-called Civil Rights blacks.

    Rich

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