Democratic Club
by Mary Larson
LW contributor
Many Leisure World residents are old enough to remember well what it was like in this country in the 1960s. They remember the activism of the Martin Luther King Jr., who led Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the Conference of Racial Equality, the NAACP, the National Urban League, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Today’s civil rights movement is very different from that which LWers witnessed or were a part of over 60 years ago. Perry Bacon Jr., a Washington Post columnist, pointed this out in a recent article. He wrote, “The Black Lives Matter movement is about 10 years old, and its influence is unmistakable. But we can’t tell yet if it will be viewed as successful decades from now. What we do know is that today’s movement for greater Black freedom and equality is very different from the one built in the 1950s and ’60s, and in ways that are important to understand. Some of these differences were obvious in 2013, but many took time to become clear.”
He goes on to say that today’s challenges are not necessarily harder than defeating Jim Crow. They are just more complicated. “At its core, today’s movement is fighting systemic racism.”
Bacon closes his article with, “Today’s movement should be evaluated on its own terms. And what we can conclude today is that the movement has fundamentally changed both how America talks about racial issues and some policies, but hasn’t come close to some of its more ambitious goals.”
His full article is available online at https://www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/2023/03/01/black-lives-matter-sixties-civil-rightsmovement/.
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