In May 2016, during the last year of his presidency, Barack Obama, the man whose rise in national politics marked the start of the Second Civil Rights Movement, gave the commencement address at Howard University. To most observers, it seemed like a victory lap for the first Black president.
But in fact, Obama was addressing an audience that put him face-to-face with people questioning the promise of a post-racial society. These young people were living through the Second Civil Rights Movement, and they wondered why so little had changed in America with the first Black president. They had only just started high school when Obama’s election pumped up their hopes of a new morning for Blacks in America. Then they were traumatized by Trayvon Martin’s murder and the Ferguson riots. New reasons for hope again filled their hearts and minds with the explosive success of Black Lives Matter. And all along they marched into a new church of activism, faithful people taking part in a conversation on Black Twitter about better days to come. Yet as they sat in their college graduation regalia listening to Obama, they were experiencing a threatening spike in white grievance that was driving the political rise of Donald Trump. Their social media feeds were full of stories about the resurgence of outright white supremacy.
So, despite Obama’s election, despite Black Lives Matter, these educated young Black people were fatigued by the daily reality of ongoing racism in American life. They respected Obama but had questions about racial progress.
“Let me say something that may be controversial,” Obama told the graduates, “and that is this: America is a better place today than it was when I graduated from college [in 1983].” The president cited lower poverty rates, lower crime rates, more women with jobs, more Black high school graduates, and Black college graduation rates rising from 10 percent in 1983 to more than 20 percent in 2016. It was impossible, Obama said, to deny the amazing work done to improve racial equality by “your mothers and your dads, and grandparents and great-grandparents, who marched and toiled and suffered and overcame to make this day possible.”
But Obama did not paint a totally rosy picture. “I am not saying gaps do not persist,” he went on. “Obviously, they do. Racism persists. Inequality persists.” Still, he told his audience that despite challenges they faced, there was no better time for them to be coming of age. “If you had to choose a time to be, in the words of Lorraine Hansberry, ‘young, gifted, and black’ in America, you would choose right now,” the president said to applause.
Obama warned any impatient listeners to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. He wanted them to recognize that in their short lifetimes the nation had been pushed to higher levels of racial awareness and empathy than ever before. He argued that the students had played a role in successfully making America more woke when it came to racial wrongs, and that they should take pride in their idealism and their progress in creating a “more perfect union.” Obama saluted them as part of the Second Civil Rights Movement.
“It’s thanks in large part to the activism of young people like many of you, from Black Twitter to Black Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have been opened—white, Black, Democrat, Republican—to the real problems, for example, in our criminal justice system,” Obama said. But he warned them that “awareness is not enough” and that more was required: mobilization, votes, persistence, and further changes in the law to address deep structural disadvantages for the poor, immigrants, women, Blacks, and other racial minorities. You need “not just hashtags, but votes,” he said.1
Commenting on the evident tension separating Obama from many young Black people listening to him, Al Sharpton said, “I understood the [young people’s] pain, but I think that it was misguided. Because what we ended up getting, we ended up getting Donald Trump. So, the question is, was Barack Obama everything that we wanted? Maybe not. Was he your best alternative…? Absolutely. And I think politics is about being able to advance the ball. And I think they’re not going to score a touchdown every time but when you get some yards toward the goal line, you take them.”2
From a veteran political perspective, Congressman Jim Clyburn agreed with Sharpton. He said that “Obama had the weight of history on his shoulders. And I think that he had to be strategic in doing and saying things…. Everybody wants fast food and instant gratification over here.”3
In spite of Trump’s eventual rise to the White House, Obama laid the foundation for Joe Biden’s election in 2020, which came with the first Black woman to serve as vice president and the appointment of the first Black woman to the Supreme Court. Obama also achieved the lowest level of Black unemployment in fifty years and spearheaded health care legislation that was the biggest help for the poor since the Great Society.
Obama hit the nail on the head in his Howard speech. His presidency, Black Lives Matter, and even the Trump backlash are all essential parts of the Second Civil Rights Movement. And today’s movement is making progress.
The young Howard graduates who listened to Obama, now in their thirties, may be understandably impatient with what they see as slow-moving change. But no matter the speed, it is also true that they are living through an epoch of historic impact.
Just as the First Civil Rights Movement ignited the national consciousness—the defiant Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man and the brave John Lewis being beaten bloody as he marched for voting rights—Obama’s appeal across racial lines caused the Second Civil Rights Movement to catch fire. He spoke to the reality of so many Black men being sent to jail, so many bad public schools, the harsh reality of low pay for most Black workers, and shocking cases of police violence against Black people. Current demands for racial equality are clearly built on the work of earlier generations that began the fight by breaking through even more severe segregation. People working for racial justice today have a legitimate claim as leading figures in the next chapter in the history of civil rights struggles.
“I think the impact of the Trayvon Martin case was very significant. It raised the consciousness level in America,” said the noted civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who played an important role in many of the police violence cases that were the hallmark of the Second Civil Rights Movement. Crump saw progress even when Trayvon Martin’s family lost its fight to get the man who shot their son convicted of murder. It was a step forward, Crump said, because the fury generated by the teenager’s tragic death had a significant impact on public opinion. It launched Black Lives Matter, pushing the Second Civil Rights Movement and racial justice to the forefront of the larger society.
“I think Emmett Till is one of those cases. I think Rodney King was one of those cases. I believe Trayvon Martin was one of those cases,” he continued. “And because of Trayvon Martin, we see other landmark cases like George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery. You know, without Trayvon Martin, and there’s no way you get police officers convicted” in the George Floyd case and other police brutality cases.4
It can be hard to see the Second Civil Rights Movement’s achievements through the blizzard of constant backlash, especially the rising public profile of white supremacists. That understandably leads to frustration among young people looking for quick results. But they are wrong to think of the backlash as evidence of failure or diminishing the value of their entire movement. It is simply another phase in a long-term fight, a struggle across time for equal rights. It stands in line with “Massive Resistance,” the historic backlash the First Civil Rights Movement dealt with after the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954.
Wayne Frederick, the president of Howard University when Obama spoke in 2016, saw the issues of race and American democracy as a pendulum. “It corrects based on what has happened before,” he said. “So, the reality is that you don’t have an Obama if you did not have a George W. Bush,” he said, referring to the economic troubles at the end of Bush’s tenure as well as an unpopular, lingering war effort in Afghanistan. “He gives rise to an Obama and Obama gives rise to a Trump. Whether or not we like that or not, it’s a reality.”5
The truth is that civil rights activism is never finished. Trump’s 2016 campaign exploited white grievances and delighted in the worst stereotypes of Black people as scary, poorly educated criminals. In Trump’s first year in office, white supremacists violently rallied in Charlottesville. Hate crimes spiked across the country, and the FBI noted that the biggest threat to the safety of American citizens was not foreign terrorism but domestic white supremacy. Attacks against synagogues, Hispanics, Asians, and gays all exploded, with Trump as the leading figure in the backlash.
It took the video of the torturous nearly-nine-minute killing of George Floyd to fully awaken and mobilize a broad coalition across class and race around the nation. Americans of all backgrounds filled the streets and provoked responses from corporate leaders and mainstream media. They came from the largest urban centers. They even came from white suburbs and small towns. This contributed to Biden’s victory over Trump in 2020. But inevitably, it sowed the seeds of another backlash. Soon a Confederate flag was paraded through the halls of the Capitol, as Trump supporters violently attacked Congress in the hopes of denying certification of Biden’s victory in a democratic election.
The Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol are playing the role of villains in the Second Civil Rights Movement, in another parallel to the First Civil Rights Movement. Their insurrection evoked the image of Governor George Wallace of Alabama standing in the schoolhouse door to prevent integration. Wallace’s actions also sparked riots and deadly violence.
Trump’s “Make America Great Again” theme succeeded as an emotional trigger, stirring rage in people who felt uncomfortable with the rapid demographic changes that had led to increased attention to racial differences. They saw themselves being eclipsed. They feared that the rising number of minorities undermined their political and economic status. More off-putting, Trump’s followers saw any celebration of multiculturalism by the Second Civil Rights Movement as a threat to their own place in society. In their minds, they were being displaced as the heroes of American history. People trying to hold on to past visions of a white-dominated nation, saw themselves as victims of politically correct thinking, as more minority voices complained about white colonialists, slaveholders, and segregationists. Extremist politicians fed them fear of their identity being washed away by changes beyond their control, provoking them to violently lash out.
Just as former Confederates waylaid the post–Civil War Reconstruction efforts in the nineteenth century, Trump’s insurrectionists hoped to delay the inevitable changes coming in the twenty-first century. But despite their efforts, it is impossible to stop the reality of demographic and cultural shifts.
Thanks to Obama, Black Lives Matter, and activists of all colors, there is more positive thinking about racial diversity and it is impossible to ignore. It is evident in the culture, which celebrated arts and music from well beyond Black and white categories. Bad Bunny, rapping in Spanish over reggaetón beats, became a best-selling American artist. Hip-hop, now beyond its fiftieth anniversary, has become the nation’s top musical genre. Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie with a predominantly Asian cast, won the Academy Award for best picture, and Shohei Ohtani is widely considered the best baseball player of his generation—with a $700 million contract to show for it.
The Census Bureau estimates that by the year 2045 the United States will cease to be a white-majority country.6 This tectonic shift on the horizon remains the driving factor behind the new era of racial consciousness. Hispanics will make up a quarter of that future population. Asians will remain its fastest growing racial group. Blacks have already lost their status as the nation’s biggest minority group, and many in the Black community already fear the loss of recognition for their past as slaves and any presumption that they deserve a leading role in future movements for equal rights. Now there is fear that the Black experience and Black leadership will lose their primacy and will no longer set the tone for debates over equity and racial justice.
Leading the fight for racial justice has been an almost sacred space for Black people in America. Iconic leaders like Frederick Douglass fought slavery. Dr. King inspired with his dream of Black and white coming together. Jesse Jackson raised Black pride when he proclaimed, “I Am Somebody.” These are hallmarks of American history. The Black role in American society has been to take the lead in reminding the nation of the great American promise that all men and women are created equal.
A 2023 poll by USA Today/Ipsos found that “two in five (40%) say they consider ‘woke’ to be an insult, but about a third (32%) consider it a compliment.” Again, this reflected a political divide in the country, with Democrats being far more likely to embrace the term and Republicans being more likely to reject it.8
The concept of being “woke” itself came directly out of the heart of the Second Civil Rights Movement, signaling another success by Black Lives Matter at changing the terms of the debate in the United States around issues of race. The question for this growing, diverse population will be whether it can successfully build coalitions across racial and economic lines. Can poor minorities and poor whites come together to unite around their mutual interests? Can people awaken across economic lines? Can people awaken to find common ground, regardless of their ethnicity, gender, or religion?
That means the coming movement for racial justice will be a search for common ground among people with different experiences of America, people of different races and ethnicities. Wade Henderson, the former head of the largest coalition of civil rights groups in the country, said the key to the next generation’s success will be coalition building. He points to the enduring presence of some groups, such as the National Urban League and the NAACP, as a testament to their success in attracting allies.7
Stacey Abrams has argued that this variety of voices has the potential to move from a cacophony to a harmony of previously unseen solutions: “We’re looking forward. You have to educate; you have to engage. Demographic changes are real. And that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing the speed of the [counter] attack.” In her mind, “Demography is not destiny. It is opportunity.” And that opportunity is to join with new allies to gain leverage for more powerful change.
For example, the leaders of America’s biggest businesses kept their distance from civil rights activism for most of the country’s history. But now America’s businesses see a need to appeal to a new generation of workers and consumers, no matter their religion, race, or country of origin. This is especially important as the white population is aging. “If I can convince you that the cost of your racism is more expensive than the purity of it, then that’s how we make progress,” Abrams said.9
The positive potential coming from demographic diversity is also increasingly reflected in America’s elected leaders. The 118th Congress, which took office in January 2023, was the most diverse ever elected—more than one hundred members were non-white—and included a twenty-five-year-old from Generation Z as its youngest member. The two houses of Congress had 153 women (28 percent), and this diversity in gender representation is representative of profound shifts elsewhere in American society.10 Almost half the U.S. workforce is female, and 60 percent of U.S. college students are women.11 These facts indicate that future political leaders, corporate bosses, and workers will also be more heavily female, and potentially another engine driving social justice.
There are also new multiracial categories. As marriages across ethnic lines continue, we will see more multiracial couples and multiracial children, whose experiences and expectations about race will be vastly different than those of the people who made up the First and Second Civil Rights Movements. In the decades since the Supreme Court made interracial marriage legal in 1967, with the case Loving v. Virginia, there has been an explosion of interracial couples. In the 1960s, only 3 percent of marriages were interracial; that number has grown to more than 20 percent today. According to Gallup, 94 percent of Americans, across all racial lines, approve of interracial marriages.12 Support for gay marriage also stands above 70 percent approval.13 These changes reflect wide social and demographic realities that will only increase through the twenty-first century.
Immigration will bring more change to the U.S. and beyond. According to the International Organization for Migration 2022 World Migration Report, migration trends show that more than 280 million people around the world are on the move, with Europe and Asia seeing even more immigration than the United States. An estimated 61 percent of global migrants, more than 170 million people, are moving to those regions. Meanwhile, North America (Canada, the United States, and Mexico) receives about 21 percent of the world’s migrants—more than 59 million people.14
As Stacey Abrams noted, most of the legislative change will come not at the federal level, but from the states: “When I think about this next wave of [the civil rights] movement, 56 percent of Black people live in the South. The Latino population is largely concentrated in the South and Southwest. AAPI communities are growing fast in the South and Southwest. And so, if we want to see antiracism, if we want to see expansion of civil rights, we have to focus on what’s happening in the South and Southwest.”15
Because of the success of the First and Second Civil Rights Movements, America stands out in the international community. It is a model for adjusting to heightened racial and gender diversity. The question now is exactly what the definition of social justice will be for the next or Third Civil Rights Movement as the country approaches 2045 and a majority-minority country.
Whatever the definition, it will have to be accepted by people who see themselves as American but are also multiracial, multiethnic, and multinational. It will have to work for people who speak different languages, practice different religions, and have ties to different countries. A consensus on racial justice will have to attract everyone, from racial minorities with a long history in the United States and women of all colors to immigrants who want economic opportunity, political stability, and a better education for their children. Some of those people won’t know about the First Civil Rights Movement or even have sympathies for the Second Civil Rights Movement. But they will share a common desire that grew out of these movements—to be treated equally, to have protection under the law, and to participate in a democratic system. They will not want to be scapegoated or threatened with deportation by white supremacist demagogues.
Marc Morial, the president of the National Urban League, called this transition a period of extreme uncertainty: “We can’t predict what the millennials, and the Gen Zs are going to bring when they achieve power. I think they’re going to be much more focused on multiracial equity and that those issues become more mainstream.”16
The coming Third Civil Rights Movement, featuring so many immigrants, will inevitably face a backlash. Newcomers will be demeaned as interlopers and not fully American. They will be accused of taking advantage of public schools or a health care system that they didn’t establish. The backlash against them won’t simply be the result of white supremacy.
Though the MAGA crowd remains the heart of that resistance to newcomers, it may also include older Blacks, Asians, or Hispanics who have lived for generations in the United States. The cases engineered by far-right activists to dismantle affirmative action, for example, often included Asians as plaintiffs. Even though some Asians had suffered discrimination in college admissions, MAGA’s cynical focus was not to overcome historic discrimination; their goal was to maintain white racial dominance by assuring that access to elite schools remained based purely on test scores, an area where Blacks and Hispanics have generally underperformed relative to whites and Asians.
The Third Movement will also need to learn from the mistakes of the Second Movement. Black Lives Matter made some big mistakes, ranging from a lack of clear leadership and strong organizational structure, to not doing enough to build a lasting multiracial movement. Many of the people supporting Black Lives Matter are still locked in an amorphous struggle against “systemic racism” that often seems to lack attainable goals. And as Jim Clyburn, a key player on Capitol Hill in the Second Movement, asserts, one of those big mistakes by BLM was the knee-jerk embrace by some after the George Floyd protests of the provocative slogan “Defund the Police.” The phrase ultimately proved to be an instrument that divided Black Lives Matter from some of its allies. The phrase also proved to be a weapon for opponents. It was held up by conservatives to damage the movement and prompted some moderates across racial lines to dismiss it entirely.
MAGA’s exploitation of “Defund the Police” extended to efforts limiting access to the voting booth. Continued voter suppression efforts will generate a Third Movement counteroffensive which must move beyond traditional racial lines to bring people of different races into coalitions. “We’re going to start to see the need for marginalized and disadvantaged communities for voting rights to take on a very different complexion, no pun intended,” said Stacey Abrams. “And that complexion is going to include bringing together strange bedfellows…. We’ve got to build coalitions that don’t rest on us having the same belief systems, but rest on us wanting the same behaviors.”17
Patrick Gaspard, a former U.S. ambassador to South Africa who now serves as the president of the Center for American Progress, argues that it is important to remain optimistic and for people not to lose faith in the power of coalitions: “So I want to see this nascent new civil rights movement have in its core, a set of organizers who have a theory of power, and who understand that power comes from being able to create governing majorities.”18 This is the very point that Barack Obama made to the students at Howard University.
Even with these lessons, it is important to admit that we are still coping with problems of the past. The Second Civil Rights Movement’s complaints over police violence have not been solved. There is more awareness of the problem and greater accountability for police, but the issue remains.
And there are additional problems with gun violence, high rates of incarceration, and economic disparities that are particularly felt in minority communities. Troubled public schools in poor neighborhoods also belong on this list of ongoing challenges.
The most far-reaching goal for coalitions under a Third Civil Rights Movement will be to create new strategies that break down the fundamental antidemocratic structures that are rooted in America’s founding. At the time the Constitution was written, the elites were all white landowners, and many were slaveholders. They had no interest in the popular vote of people who would rebel against their authority and economic interests.
Such reforms will require rethinking the lack of proportional representation in the Senate and devising creative solutions that recognize the fact that the Senate’s composition cannot be changed, even by constitutional amendment, unless the states vote to do it. While each state has two senators, those senators do not equally represent the people of the United States. California, which is home to 12 percent of the American population, has the same number of senators as Wyoming, which has only 0.17 percent of the U.S population. This disparity also has a strong immigrant and racial aspect. California is already a majority-minority state, while Wyoming remains 92 percent white.19 The Senate’s use of the filibuster compounds this tyranny of the minority, because sixty votes are required to pass certain legislation or to confirm most nominees.
Similarly, the Third Civil Rights Movement will be challenged to reform the Electoral College. It remains radically unfair in its failure to give every American a meaningful vote in electing their nation’s leader. The popular vote for the presidential candidates really does not matter under the Electoral College. Instead, ballots cast by voters are tallied by each state to select a slate of electors pledged to vote for the popular vote winner within that state. But it is possible for individual electors not to support that winner, or—as proposed (without success) during Donald Trump’s failed effort to overturn the 2020 election—to reject the popular vote completely. The Electoral College, even when it works as designed, sometimes rewards the candidate who received fewer popular votes nationally. In fact, Republicans have won the popular vote only once in the last eight presidential races, yet they have held the White House for twelve of those years.
Judges in courts around the country remain overwhelmingly white and disproportionately male. Today’s Supreme Court, despite being more diverse than ever, is ruled by a conservative majority which reveres a doctrine of “originalism.” That thinking is locked into eighteenth-century views of the law, which do not fit with today’s very modern nation. Originalism comes from a time when American society was far less racially diverse and when the voting population did not include minorities or even women. It’s worth noting that until 1967, none of the justices were anything other than white men.
A more fully representative Congress and Supreme Court will have a better chance to create reforms that address issues ranging from voting suppression to police violence and hate crimes. But given the continued antidemocratic composition of the court and Congress, these institutions are unlikely to see changes in the near future.
Correcting this lack of democratic representation will be the greatest challenge for a multiracial, diverse Third Civil Rights Movement. And a backlash to these reforms is almost a certainty.
If it has success in changing these major institutions of American life, the Third Civil Rights Movement has the potential to redefine social justice. It will achieve the goal of a truly democratic American system.
The First Civil Rights Movement was about integration, breaking down segregation in schools, housing, voting. Its victories went from the courts in the 1950s to the streets in the 1960s. Then it went into politics in the 1970s, electing more diverse people to local government and Congress. It produced civil rights legislation, voting rights, and affirmative action laws.
The Second Civil Rights Movement was about justice, police reform, and continued voting protections. But instead of starting with judges who ruled racial segregation to be unconstitutional, the Second Movement started with increased diversity in political leaders that culminated in the election of Barack Obama. Where the First Civil Rights Movement relied on small, orderly, nonviolent marches to change public opinion, the Second Civil Rights Movement created marches of historic number nationwide in response to police violence. Where the First Civil Rights Movement started in the courts, the Second Civil Rights Movement wants to see its work finished in the courts, with rulings that certify that justice is to be found in affirmative action and protecting voting rights.
The Second Civil Rights Movement is the door to a burgeoning Third Civil Rights Movement, and to innovative steps to redefine civil rights, racial justice, and democracy itself. It will be about giving people, whether they are Black, white, Hispanic, Asian, gay, or transgender, a chance to succeed and a chance to decide our country’s future together: to make America excellent—great for the first time.