When I watched coach C. Vivian Stringer and the student-athletes on the Rutgers University women's basketball team handle with strength, dignity, and grace the degrading racist and sexist insults they had received from Don Imus and some of his fans, I couldn't help but think of Jackie Robinson and the courage and character he showed in the face of the intense bigotry that greeted him as the first black major league baseball player.
There is a kind of historical synchronicity to the fact that the nationwide revulsion at Don Imus was taking place the week before the 60th anniversary of the day - April 15, 1947 - that Robinson integrated the major leagues.
Robinson has been a hero of mine since my little league days. When I was a kid dreaming of becoming a professional ballplayer, Robinson was leading the Dodgers to a World Series victory over the New York Yankees and inspiring Americans who were eager to see the walls of prejudice and discrimination dismantled.
Sixty years later, Don Imus provoked a national firestorm that reminded us of the persistent presence of prejudice in our society and its lingering power as a hurtful and divisive force. The good news is that the reaction to his comments has demonstrated that America has changed, and is changing, in truly significant ways.
Imus, of course, is not the only media figure who has used a powerful broadcasting voice to spout bigoted, mean-spirited comments. And this certainly wasn't the first time for him. But the shockingly cavalier way in which he demeaned and insulted a group of exceptional young African American women, students who had together accomplished great things as a team, provoked disgust, outrage, and anger across America.
It clearly provoked a lot of thinking in the executive suites of powerful media companies and the corporations whose advertising dollars support them. In a society that cherishes free speech, what is the responsibility of those who hold immensely powerful platforms that reach millions of Americans at once? How should Americans respond when those platforms are used to sow division, peddle prejudice, poison the culture in ways that make even civil debate - much less unity - difficult to achieve?
One way that this is not the same America as Jackie Robinson's is that the doors of opportunity he helped open, and others have worked hard to open wider, have broadened the mix of people in positions of cultural, economic, and political power. Former NAACP chief Bruce Gordon is a director at CBS, which fired Imus. Kenneth Chenault, the African American chairman and CEO of American Express, made that more likely when the financial giant pulled its advertising from Imus's shows. Company officials have said that it was the voices of their own outraged employees that pushed MSNBC and CBS to cut their ties.
In the midst of the Imus controversy, the 39th anniversary of the 1968 Fair Housing Act passed largely unnoticed. The Act, introduced by Walter Mondale and Edward W. Brooke, put the weight of federal law behind the principle that in this country race should not be a barrier to living anywhere you chose.
I called Sen. Brooke, my first boss (1973-1979) to talk about the anniversary and the Imus controversy, how far the nation has come, and how far we have to go. (I was unable to follow my childhood dream of becoming a major league baseball player, but working for Sen. Brooke and the privilege of having a 35-year career as a civil rights advocate fulfilled another kind of dream.)
As the first African American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate, Sen. Brooke faced and overcame a lot of barriers that institutionalized bigotry puts in the way of opportunity. And he also provided a powerful example of speaking truth to power, even when it meant taking a stand against the leaders of his own party. We saw that kind of personal courage on display as people like Al Roker weighed in to bring public pressure against his own employer to stop being a conduit for poison.
There's a good bit of "what's next?" in the air, as Americans consider the ways in which we have grown to accept a coarsening of our culture and politics, and consider our responsibility to speak out. While women hold unprecedented positions of political and economic power, women are frequently degraded in music and popular culture. In a time that cries out for engaged citizenship, too much of our public discourse has seen actual debate replaced by scream-and-spin shows. Pundits like Ann Coulter cynically enrich themselves by spouting outrageous insults designed to swing the television cameras their way.
Finding ways to hold people accountable for hateful speech doesn't mean that we have to strip our public discourse of provocative material. More than 30 years ago, Norman Lear's All in the Family and subsequent shows broke television taboos on race, war, poverty, women's rights, and more, using humor and storytelling in ways that made people uncomfortable but generated needed conversation about difficult issues facing our society. Today, those boundaries get pushed by any number of comedians, commentators, and the "they didn't really say that" humor of South Park.
The marketplace of ideas so central to our vibrantly diverse and free society allows for a wide range of give-and-take, and a wide range of disagreement about when unacceptable lines are crossed. The indescribably precious First Amendment applies equally to the shock jocks, their listeners, their targets, the employees of the companies that promote them, the people who decide how to spend advertising dollars, and all of us who are shaped by the culture. Let's work to ensure that the broad consensus that developed in this case is not just the end of the story, but the beginning of a sustained national conversation about prejudice, freedom and responsibility.