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I Fought for Civil Rights and All I Got Was Juneteenth (Part 2)
Juneteenth is a Bait-and-Switch
In Part 1 of this story, I described how civil rights battles were unfolding all around me while I remained unaware. I recalled the moment my interest in history was awakened when I first saw a cotton field near Fort Valley, GA. Juneteenth, while mentioned in the title, wasn’t mentioned once in Part 1. That’s about to change.
The title says that “I Fought for Civil Rights,” which is true. Like many others of my generation, I marched, sang, sat in, and showed up to demand civil rights, equality, and justice. The civil rights struggle has advanced in fits and starts. The moral arc hasn’t always bent towards justice, either. Sometimes it snaps backward; we are experiencing such an era now.
By the time I joined the struggle. The focus was on civil rights, voting rights, fair housing, and jobs. All of those had been covered by recently passed legislation. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The passage of those acts was surrounded by great fanfare, but before the ink was dry, efforts began to weaken those acts, a process that continues to this day.
Hearts and minds can’t be legislated. Working backward, the Fair Housing Act prohibited redlining and…
