By Major W. Cox
This article discusses integration from the perspective of descendants of former African slaves. The challenge of incorporating these Americans into a unified democratic nation continues today. In Montgomery and across the nation, an individual's opportunity to obtain an education, access to any public or private facility, employment, and ownership of property, should not be denied or limited by reason of race, ethnicity or skin color.
Our nation’s 129 year journey toward integration has required its citizens to travel a tortuous path. After ratification of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, former slaves and their children struggled and hoped to integrate with a reconstructed white America.
Their struggle ended abruptly in 1896, with the U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson. With the Plessy decision, the Supreme Court squelched all hopes of integration until that decision was overturned in 1954 by Brown v. Board of Education. In the years between the Plessy and Brown decisions, White Americans legally separated from Black Americans lived the manifested lie of the legal doctrine: Separate But Equal.
In a 1994 article chronicling black leadership for The New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes: "In the early years of this century, black leadership was divided into two supposedly irreconcilable camps, ‘integrationists,’ led by W.E.B. Du Bois, a founder of the N.A.A.C.P., and ‘accommodationists,’ led by Booker T. Washington, the founder of Tuskegee Institute." Professor Gates says, "Du Bois called for a civil-rights agenda, to be secured by the political and legal transformation of American society." "Washington," he says, "championed a form of group uplift, to be secured by vocational education, with civil rights left down the road."
But as civil-rights dominated the African American political agenda, Gates says, "…the camp of accommodationists gave way to that of separatists." Marcus Garvey of the back-to-Africa movement and later Elijah Muhammad, of the Nation of Islam, were two leaders of the black separatist movement. Black Separatists stood in opposition to civil-rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P., the National Urban League, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC founded by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.)
The civil-rights movement succeeded in bringing favorable change from all branches of government once the Supreme Court overturned Plessy. In the executive branch, President Eisenhower, manifested the nation’s resolve to integrate public schools, by sending Federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas for that purpose. At the Supreme Court, the justices continued to issue decisions dismantling the then existing legal framework supporting racial segregation in the southern states. In the Congress, legislation, securing both the civil-rights and voting rights of African Americans, became law in the 1960s.
The success of the civil rights movement brought about unprecedented social change. Millions of African American families have moved into middle class status since 1960, when only a small number held that status. The number of elected officials at all levels of government, claiming African heritage, has never been higher. The American workplace is the most racially integrated on earth. From New York to California, integrated neighborhoods abound. Only impoverished African Americans remain trapped in black urban ghettos living in virtual-segregation.
In West Montgomery, the African American neighborhoods that developed as viable institutionalized communities during segregation, do not exist today. When segregation ended, these communities gradually lost viability as many families moved to new integrated communities in East Montgomery. This eastward migration left in its wake a biracial political structure tainting Montgomery politics. This is not acceptable. It is imperative that West Montgomery neighborhoods be reconstructed into viable integrated communities.
The city’s white/black leadership must unite and claim ownership to West Montgomery’s social pathologies. Today, too many students fail to complete school. Too many men and women are without meaningful work. Too many youths commit violence upon each other. Too many children grow up without fathers. Too many young men get sent to prison. And too many of the rest of us don’t seem to care, because this appears to be happening on the west side of the city.
West Montgomery can be as integrated as the rest of the city. Montgomerians can do it. To begin, the city can establish new administrative and political boundaries drawn without the imprint of institutional racism. Council districts can be redrawn to reflect a population more closely to the racial makeup of the city. We can really do it. Let’s make Montgomery, not only the "Heart and Soul of the South" but of America.
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Originally Published: 26 March 1997, Montgomery Advertiser
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