New Hampshire's primary grabs headlines today, but if history is any guide, the Jan. 21 South Carolina primary will play a far greater role in determining the Republican winner.
Of that state's population, 28 percent are African American, and could be a major factor in the primary. But Republican candidates have made little effort to reach out to the black community. Republican South Carolina voters are likely to be nearly as white as they were in Iowa and New Hampshire. All the Republican candidates will pay tribute to Dr. King on his birthday next week, but they seem oblivious to one of his greatest contributions: the creation of the New South.
In a time of growing inequality, we forget the scope of Dr. King's victory. When I was growing up in Greenville, S.C., segregation was the law of the land. Blacks and whites attended separate and unequal schools. My friends and I were locked out of public institutions like the public library. We still rode in the back of the bus. Greenville was the home of Bob Jones University, which Africans could attend (if they didn't fraternize with white women) while African Americans could not. If we wanted to play college sports, we either attended a historically black institution or went to schools in the North or West.
South Carolina's political leadership fiercely resisted the movement for civil rights. My first arrest came from trying to use the public library. It took years of struggle, demonstrations, sit-ins, bloodshed and sacrifice, but in the end, Dr. King had a more powerful vision of the future than all of the politicians, sheriffs and elites who stood in the way.
The victory of the civil rights movement helped to forge a new South. In South Carolina, public schools and public accommodations are open to all. Colleges are integrated. Students from Clemson or South Carolina root for their teams, loyalties divided by the color of the uniform, not the color of the players. With the ending of legal segregation, the economy started to modernize. Foreign investors opened plants that would not have come to the Old South. African Americans gained the right to vote.
Now the Republican governor of South Carolina, Nikki Haley, is of South Asian descent. The New South has come a long way, but has a long way yet to go. In South Carolina, the Republican Party consolidated its power through a poisonous race-bait politics, as it did throughout the South. The inequality rooted in 150 years of slavery and 100 years of legal apartheid has not been overcome. African Americans in the New South have less wealth, more poverty and worse unemployment than whites. In South Carolina, 37 percent of African Americans live in poverty, compared with 15 percent of whites.
Dr. King understood that the civil rights movement, having ended segregation and gained the right to vote, had to challenge poverty and economic inequality. In his final days, he was building a poor people's campaign, planning to bring people to the nation's capital across lines of race, religion and region to create a Resurrection City and demand economic justice. He was the true precursor of Occupy Wall Street.
It is fitting that we celebrate Dr. King's birthday the week before the first Southern primary. Republicans still tout Reagan's vision, but it was King, not Reagan or Thurmond who forged the New South. And it is King's unfinished agenda -- how to guarantee equal opportunity and economic justice for all -- that they must address.
Over time, Republicans may just find that a party of white sanctuary and trickle-down economics has less and less appeal in a South where race concerns people less and economic opportunity worries them more.
Follow Rev. Jesse Jackson on Twitter: www.twitter.com/revjjackson
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If Black Americans are ever going to be accepted as equals by anyone, we are going to have to make hard choices regarding our money, our voting power, OUR morality, our faith, our mostly out of control black youth and our educational system. Its very obvious that what works for them does not work for our culture and its time for us to stop trying to be be like them because it has gotten us nowhere. Many things that have been accepted by their culture as "normal" should make us vomit but we don't. Instead we accept what they accept and its enslaving and/or killing us. We hate those who tell us the truth and applaud those who scratch our itching ears.
The most fervent opposition to the bill came from Senator Strom Thurmond (D-SC): "This so-called Civil Rights Proposals, which the President has sent to Capitol Hill for enactment into law, are unconstitutional, unnecessary, unwise and extend beyond the realm of reason. This is the worst civil-rights package ever presented to the Congress and is reminiscent of the Reconstruction proposals and actions of the radical Republican Congress."The President he was speaking of was Johnson, a Democrat.
Ideassoul
But I would kindly say you that the point I was making specifically addresses racial inequality. The correct way to deal with inequality is to make sure all citizens are given equal opportunity and the equal responsibility that comes with it.
The solution is not to engage in racial discrimination or racial hate crimes against white citizens. As a white man, I will not tolerate any hate or discrimination from an African American.
If a white person has committed a hate crime against you in the past, direct you anger at them. Do not take it out on me, period.
Finally, Sansculote, I have been discriminated against. My family is 100% Eastern European Catholic. Western European Protestants discriminated against my parents, grandparents, great grandparents and so on. I AM WORSE OFF TODAY BECAUSE OF THAT DISCRIMINATION. (Yeah, the discrimination blacks faced was a lot worse, but the analogy is valid.)
I have two choices. I can hate all Western European Protestants and try to commit hate crimes against them so as to “get even”. Or I can say simply say, “let’s fix this mess up. Just give me equal opportunity and equal responsibility and we can move forward in peace.”
I have made peace with my Western European Protestant oppressors. It was the right thing to do! Why don’t you follow my example?
still looking for that party for the American people.