Some books are written for the pleasure or the zest of it. Other books are written as a painful duty, because there is something that needs to be said—and because other people have better sense than to say it. It has not been a pleasure to write this book but a necessity. Nothing is more certain than its distortion. Yet the growing polarization of the races, the stagnation and retrogression of the truly disadvantaged, and the embittered atmosphere surrounding the evolution of “civil rights,” in the courts especially, leave no real alternative to an open and frank reconsideration of what has been done, and is being done, in the name of those two words.
Civil rights are among the most honored achievements of Western civilization. In the United States, civil rights for all people has been a goal for which an uphill fight has been waged, literally for centuries, at great human cost—including the lives of many who dared to stand up for what was right, even when it would have been far more expedient to look the other way. The Supreme Court decision against racial segregation in May 1954 was a landmark victory over some of the ugliest forces buried in American history. Yet the more honored and stirring any concept is, the more certain it is to be misused for the benefit of special interests. The Bible was used to justify slavery. “Civil rights” has come to mean many very different things—including some meanings that would be both foreign and repugnant to many of those whose struggles and sacrifices made civil rights possible.
Thirty years after the historic decision in Brown v. Board of Education is an appropriate time to reconsider where we have come and where we are going. It is also twenty years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, a legislative landmark comparable to the judicial breakthrough of a decade earlier. How much of the promise of these judicial and legislative events has been fulfilled? How much has it been perverted? How well has the social vision behind the civil rights movement been understood—or even questioned? These are the issues addressed in the pages that follow.