Molly Guinness

50 years on, the battle for civil rights continues in America

Fifty years since the first civil rights march from Selma to Montgomery, America still has huge problems with race. Only this week a federal investigation into the killing of an unarmed black man in Ferguson last year concluded that the police there were racist. They’ve been making millions of dollars by targeting black people and issuing tickets for minor traffic infractions. Across America, black people are still poorer, less educated and more likely to go to gaol than white people. In 1962 The Spectator’s New York correspondent Murray Kempton wrote:

In the best of cases, to be a Negro in America is to have a station below your capacities… The American economy sometimes seems almost designed for the care and feeding of incompetent and unproductive white men. The trade union flesh-peddler, the sheriff of Holmes County, the television producer, the loud man in the saloon, all those luxuries of a wasteful society, have really no excuse for our contributions to their comfort except being citizens and white.

There were signs though that things were changing.

The white South is at the unpredictable mercy of its coloured children, they arise one morning and decide that today is a day to go to prison and they go down to a restaurant in company and ask for service and are arrested. Albany has lost count of them, now; there are perhaps 200 of them, ranging in public stature from the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, the American Gandhi, to little boys vaguely remembered as Willie Something-or-other.

For nearly three years now, at unexpected Southern places, Negro adolescents have sat down at lunch counters habitually reserved for White customers, and have gone to prison. Most of them endured this once or twice and are now forgotten. But a few—perhaps fifty—found a commitment, and wander the South, supported by the charity of poor Negroes, going in and out of gaol, arrested some of them twenty times.

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