Ferguson was burning.
It was the summer of 2014, and each night young Black people and white police violently faced off in this small, mostly working-class Black suburb outside St. Louis, Missouri. An unarmed Black teenager named Michael Brown had been shot in the street by a white cop. His body was left to lie in the August sun throughout the afternoon, infuriating people already distressed that Brown had been killed by police. By sunset, an angry crowd of young Black people began throwing rocks and lighting fires, furious with the shooting and the disrespect for Brown’s lifeless body.
Ferguson was the latest incident in a recent series of white law enforcement killings of Black men. Two years earlier, in 2012, another unarmed Black teenager, Trayvon Martin, was shot to death in Florida by a vigilante community watchman. The gunman was found not guilty, sparking a national outpouring of rage and grief. Next, a forty-three-year-old unarmed Black man, Eric Garner, was jumped by New York police in July 2014 for selling single cigarettes on the street. He died while in a white policeman’s chokehold. More protests followed. Now, a month later, the latest victim was eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. These stories of racial violence received front-page coverage in the daily papers and led the evening news on television. It also fed finger-pointing and blame around the clock on Black social media.
A new phrase and hashtag had entered the public discourse, calling attention to the insensitivity of the police—and of the broader society—to these deaths: Black Lives Matter.
The nation’s first Black president, Barack Obama, watched on television as flames and tear gas became the lead story on every national news program for the next week. His senior advisers debated whether he should go to Ferguson. The idea of sending the president of the United States into a race riot had never come up at any other White House. All the previous presidents had been white men. With the first Black president the idea became relevant, however. Certainly he would have something unique to say to stop the rage and violence from spreading nationwide.
Obama was in an impossible situation—walking “between the raindrops” as one congressional ally would later put it—unable to deliver the justice that many protesters and online activists were demanding while failing to effectively counter the racist elements at the root of the problem.1 He was unwilling to take the risk of speaking out against politicians and right-wing pundits who glamorized police to justify racist treatment of Blacks.
The difficulty Obama found himself in obscured the fact that he had started this new civil rights movement ten years earlier by raising expectations for a higher level of racial justice when he burst onto the national scene at the 2004 Democratic convention. He spoke to a national audience about an uplifting vision of America as a nation no longer defined by Black and white or red state and blue state. He was immediately hailed as christening a “post-racial” era.
This biracial man in so many ways was the fulfillment of the mid-twentieth-century civil rights movement’s fight to end strict segregation between Black and white. His winning the presidency in 2008 was a dream come true, almost a fantasy of twentieth-century civil rights aspirations to enact voting rights protections that would increase Black elected officials. His intellect and character were widely appreciated as first-rate. He was handsome and spoke often of his love for his family. His speeches became celebrated events, a reminder of how earlier generations were stirred by words coming from Lincoln, Kennedy, or King. He was glorified by magazines, musicians, athletes, comedians, public figures of all colors as he built trust across the racial divide as the nation’s leader.
But talk of the post-racial dream had turned into a cruel illusion. By 2014 and with smoke rising in Ferguson, Obama was his own man, trying to find his way in this new world but still chained by racial realities that he could not escape.
Obama was dealing with a nation radically different from what it was during the earlier civil rights era. The demographic mix was like nothing seen fifty years prior. For one, Hispanics had become the largest minority in twenty-first-century America. And although segregation was no longer legal, problems of racial injustice remained, especially when it came to police brutality in Black neighborhoods. It was also an America where politics and culture were being shaped by incredible advancements in technology. Instantaneous threads and memes were in everyone’s pocket twenty-four hours a day, allowing events in a small town like Ferguson to become national fire.
Racial protests are nothing new in American history. In fact, much of the success of the First Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s was precisely because of protests. But those protests had been conducted with precision by established civil rights organizations executing long-term strategies. Groups like the NAACP carefully planned picture-perfect marches of peaceful, well-dressed people. They condemned riots. They combined carefully planned protest with legal action in the courts, advancing lawsuits to outlaw discrimination as unconstitutional. Charismatic leaders like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. arranged boycotts, sit-ins, and nonviolent marches, and accepted time in jail—all in the service of compelling white politicians to pass new laws protecting Black rights. And it worked. Congress enacted landmark legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Nearly half a century later, Ferguson confounded Obama. His election in so many ways marked the culmination of decades of struggle to win Black Americans access to the halls of power, but it was clear to anyone watching the news that racial tensions in America hadn’t gone away. Suddenly, the values and tactics of the First Civil Rights Movement seemed old and out of sync with the urgent racial issues of the new day. White cops were killing Black people, and Black people were rioting. History was shifting under the feet of the first Black president, driven by new realities, new goals, different players, and expanded possibilities. It reached beyond the compromises made by white-majority power, culture, and money in the last half of the twentieth century to keep race relations stable. New demographics of the twenty-first century had created new political coalitions that made Obama’s election possible, planting the seeds of a new Second Movement. But as the fighting in Ferguson showed, this new movement was changing into something he had never expected.
As an author and journalist, I have been telling the story of the Civil Rights Movement my entire career. I’m seventy years old, so that is a long time.
More than thirty years ago, I wrote my first book, Eyes on the Prize: America’s Civil Rights Years, 1954–1965. The book tells the story of America’s great fight for racial equality—the dramatic, inspiring Civil Rights Movement of the twentieth century. The book was part of a collaboration with a celebrated television documentary series that aired on PBS.
My second book, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary, was a prize-winning biography of the first Black person to serve on the U.S. Supreme Court, Justice Thurgood Marshall. When he was in his late eighties and near the end of his life, we talked for six months about all he had witnessed, his dive into the changing tides of race relations in America. Since then, I have written books and television documentaries on Black religion, historically Black colleges, and Black politics. And all along, as a working journalist, I have participated in the movement by writing books, magazine articles, columns, and speaking about injustice and the continuing drama of America’s racial struggle.
Today I see a great fight for racial justice taking shape in the twenty-first century, a new civil rights movement. It is built on the achievements of the First Movement, but it’s not an extension of the First Movement, and when we try to judge this new movement by comparing it to its predecessor of the twentieth century, we fail to see its true shape. Such comparisons are inevitable, but they are ultimately misleading. At my speaking engagements, I’m often asked, “Who is today’s Dr. King?” There is no new Dr. King. The First Movement offers some context—a reference point—for what we are going through today. But this Second Movement is distinct. They cannot fairly be compared.
The First Civil Rights Movement was about getting Black people out of the back of the bus. It was about integration, breaking down segregation not just in busing, but in schools, housing, and voting. It put an end to “Whites” and “Colored” signs over water fountains. Its victories began in the courts in the 1950s. Later activists turned to the streets in the 1960s to demand that those constitutional rights be protected. In the 1970s politics became the main battlefield, with civil rights groups working to elect more diverse people to local government and Congress. Those elected politicians passed further protections in civil rights, including voting rights, housing, and affirmative action laws.
These victories formed the backdrop to the early days of the Second Movement. In the early 2000s, America’s political leaders were more diverse than ever. Barack Obama, a Black man, had just become president. But a post-racial America continued to elude us. This Second Civil Rights Movement had to deal with persistent, deep-seated cultural issues that the First Movement had left unresolved and, in some cases, new issues that arose in the backlash to its legislative and political victories. The Second Civil Rights Movement was about police violence and reducing the number of Black people in prison. But it was also about standing up to persistent racism, such as daily intimidating experiences with police, lower achievement in schools that were no longer segregated by law but in practice, and widespread economic inequality as compared to the nation’s white majority.
In some ways, it employed tactics used by the First Civil Rights Movement, but the context was radically different. The First Civil Rights Movement activists faced white segregationist violence led by government officials like Alabama’s Bull Connor. The Second Civil Rights Movement saw Black people angrily taking to the streets in places like Ferguson to demand that police be held accountable for violence. No one even thought to protest Bull Connor’s brutality. Their protests were against segregation at downtown stores and lunch counters. Connor’s cruelty was a fact of life that no one dared to challenge. And where the First Civil Rights Movement simply called for desegregation, the Second Civil Rights Movement wants police officers jailed when they wrongly harass or kill Black people.
The First Civil Rights Movement’s most successful tactics of nonviolent marches, and its strategy of filing lawsuits, was passed on like Moses’s Ten Commandments to women’s rights groups, LGBTQ groups, Latino rights groups, disability rights groups, Native American rights groups, and more through the latter half of the twentieth century and beyond. The movement’s legacy served as the foundation of civil rights progress from affirmative action in schools, to increased racial diversity in corporate hiring, and the rise of political power with the election of more Blacks to local office, Congress, and eventually the presidency.
The Second Civil Rights Movement was born out of Obama’s rise to the presidency and the hope that came with it. But frustration also came from still needing to confront the continuing reality of deeply rooted racism.
To be Black six decades after the passage of the Civil Rights Act is still to live in fear of police. The fury in Ferguson emerged from deep wells of anger and distrust between Black people and police across the years and across the nation. As a Black man, I am more likely than my neighbors of other races to be shot dead or mugged. To be Black today is still to feel less safe in your neighborhood. To be Black today is to live with the fear of being twice as likely to be killed by guns as whites—and tragically, most of the violence is Black-on-Black. More gun violence occurs in big-city Black and Latino neighborhoods. All neighborhoods need policing. But because of my race I don’t expect officers to treat me fairly.
Despite the end of legally sanctioned segregation, racially segregated neighborhoods are still the unspoken rule today, even as America’s population is now far more racially diverse than it was when the First Civil Rights Movement took flight. Looking out the car window in big cities I can tell when I’m in an affluent white neighborhood. It doesn’t matter if I am in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Houston, or Atlanta. The differences are even starker in segregated small towns and rural areas, like Ferguson, Missouri. Race still matters.
Between 1950 and 2020 the U.S. population shifted from 90 percent white to 61 percent white.2 One aspect of this transformation is that Black people are no longer the largest minority in this country. They are not even the fastest growing group—that’s Asians. Latinos are now biggest. Meanwhile, the number of Black people in the nation has grown by about 30 percent in the last twenty years, even as the proportion of the total population remains at about 13 percent.3 And Black people are more educated than ever. In the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the percentage of Black people with a college degree rose from 15 percent to more than 23 percent, with 9 percent of Black Americans having a master’s degree or higher.4 And while Black Americans remain far behind white Americans in family wealth—home ownership, stocks, and savings—more than 60 percent of Black Americans now classify as middle-class, according to a study by Brookings.5 Even so, it’s clear to any open eye that there are big socioeconomic differences, and big differences in social status, among races. These barriers continue to separate most white people, especially affluent whites, from minorities of all stripes, especially low-income Blacks.
In another surprising wrinkle, despite the remaining segregation, demographic changes have led to more Blacks, Latinos, and Asians living next door to one another. These working-class to middle-class neighborhoods remain separated by race and culture from the more affluent areas, which remain predominantly white. The same story holds in the suburbs, too. There is more racial diversity, but high-end houses, even gated suburban communities, separate most whites from people of color living in suburban apartment buildings and row houses in middle- and working-class neighborhoods.
Today’s shifting racial composition in every corner of America does indeed create new incentives for more people to take an interest in improving race relations. But increased racial diversity is not a sure road to better race relations. Diversity can also inflame racial tensions, as elements of the majority group react to perceived loss of dominance. And it doesn’t resolve ingrained racial stereotypes and fears. It doesn’t create diverse neighborhoods by itself. And it doesn’t solve the problem of police violence against minorities.
The line of division is strongest when it comes to education.
American public schools saw a gradual increase in Black and white students attending school together beginning in the 1970s. But since 1990, school segregation has increased. Today more than 40 percent of Black and Latino students go to public schools that are “hyper-segregated,” or more than 90 percent Black and Latino.6 Most of these schools have a high poverty level, astounding truancy rates, and lower academic achievement than white-majority schools.
There are shocking consequences to school segregation, such as Black children being more likely to end up in jail. As a father of two sons, it breaks my heart to know that one of every three Black boys will be incarcerated in his lifetime, and that 35 percent of the people executed in the last forty years have been Black, even though African Americans are only slightly more than a tenth of the population.7 These are chilling realities seventy years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which promised to deliver equal education to Black and white children.
And where is the shining star of economic equality we hoped for in the First Civil Rights Movement? Stark disparities in income and wealth between Black and white households remain a fact of American life. Over the last seventy years, financial inequality between whites and racial minorities has grown starker as the economy has moved away from farm and industrial work to gleaming skyscrapers filled with college-educated workers in media, finance, health care, and technology.
This is the reality that Barack Obama faced as he took office as the first Black president of the United States in 2009, and it’s a reality that persisted through the presidency of Donald Trump, who succeeded Obama and was viewed by many Americans as a racist. It is a reality that persists today.
In light of all this, it’s not shocking that the new generation of civil rights activists has often felt deflated. They wondered why things didn’t change more quickly after elevating Obama to the White House. Instead, they saw the Supreme Court gut the Voting Rights Act and affirmative action. They watched the rate of Black men in jail remain sky-high. They watched, appalled, as the government failed to protect racial, religious, and ethnic minorities from a rise in white supremacist violence. Their daily experience was that the First Civil Rights Movement and its hard-fought achievements were being battered, sometimes slipping away.
This new generation accustomed to seeing Black people like Obama in power expects real change. Previously, it was believed that the absence of Blacks and other minorities at these centers of American power led to acceptance of “systemic” or persistent gaps between whites and Blacks in wages and wealth. But now, with Black people at the table of American power, the younger generation wonders why more progress hasn’t been made.
At its core the Second Civil Rights Movement is a daily, grassroots struggle to separate twenty-first-century American identity from nostalgia for white dominance of American life and culture. That nostalgia is full of winks and nods to negative stereotypes and damning assumptions about people who are not white.
The Second Civil Rights Movement’s struggle against the new face of white dominance produced new tactics and a new type of leader.
In the First Civil Rights Movement, Martin Luther King Jr., Thurgood Marshall, and Malcolm X stood out as public leaders. And behind the scenes were leaders such as the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell, who lobbied Congress to promote civil rights goals, and local activists like Daisy Bates in Little Rock, Arkansas, who worked to organize students to integrate the schools there. Mitchell and Bates are not well known but both fit the traditional definition of civil rights leaders.
Barack Obama as a political leader may have started the Second Movement, but many of today’s leading voices on race relations are different from Obama and past political leaders. The churning of the Second Civil Rights Movement’s revolution can be seen on television, where corporate advertising and prime-time programming shows more doors opening to more people, with more women, Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities competing in the upper ranks of American business as well as in fashion, art, and philanthropy. Often their power to create change, primarily in the cultural sphere, comes from celebrity in entertainment, sports, and politics: Oprah Winfrey, Jay-Z, LeBron James, Shonda Rhimes, George Takei, Jennifer Lopez, Tyler Perry, Margaret Cho, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
The Second Civil Rights Movement is Colin Kaepernick taking a knee during the National Anthem at NFL games to protest police killing Black people, challenging the culture of wealth and power exercised by the white owners of the nation’s largest sports league. Faces and voices of influence in the news media are creating another kind of black leader, too. You see Lester Holt as the anchor of NBC Nightly News. There is Van Jones on CNN, Stephen A. Smith on ESPN, Charles Barkley on Inside the NBA. You see me doing political analysis on Fox News. Whoopi Goldberg is on The View, Steve Harvey hosts Family Feud, and Wayne Brady hosts Let’s Make a Deal. Black people are in white American living rooms daily, exposing white audiences to Black perspectives on news and history.
The Second Civil Rights Movement is also about the millions of people taking to the internet to share their own experiences, thoughts, and analysis, not to mention activists on social media who eschew the older institutions and the old way of doing things. If the movement were only on the streets in Black neighborhoods, it would not have the political and cultural reach and resonance to reshape race relations in a country that is more racially diverse than ever. The faces and voices of people of color reach Americans all day every day, on cell phones, on social media, on the internet, as well as on television and radio. They are telling their lived experiences, their version of history—a story once solely guided by the perspective of white America.
White people remain the largest racial group in the United States. The number of white people as a percentage of the total population is declining, but there is no denying that whites remain the largest, best educated, wealthiest, and most powerful racial group in the nation.
Without a buy-in from white progressives willing to play a central role, the movement would not be growing. These are most often younger, college-educated white people who grew up with unprecedented racial mixing—at the playground, on television, in school, and at work. They have come to know Blacks, Latinos, and Asians as friends, co-workers, romantic partners. They are willing to speak up for racial diversity as a matter of their own belief in advancing social justice and being on the right side of history, though critics have pointed out that there is room for improvement, as even young, white progressives remain generally reluctant to buy homes in Black neighborhoods or to send their children to Black-majority schools.
Progressive whites play another important role: as consumers who use their dollars to reward racially sensitive, socially aware values. They are the hand behind the accelerating consensus among America’s corporate leaders that it is good for the bottom line to embrace racial justice, gender equality, and care for the environment. U.S. corporations have learned that the drive to generate wealth includes consciously avoiding racial division inside the company, or having racism tarnish the company’s brand.
Even so, the rainbow of races backing progressive policies to move the country toward racial equality has produced a right-wing backlash, which has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary politics.
The backlash is fueled by grievance. Some whites claim to be victims of what they label “politically correct” posturing by big companies, the media, universities, and celebrities, arguing that they and their children have been denied opportunities in favor of “undeserving” minorities. Today the far right argues that promoting diversity is dividing Americans with “identity politics.” In fact, according to a 2021 survey by political scientists at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, fully two thirds of Republicans—a party that is 83 percent white—say that increasing attention to race and diversity “means that America is in danger of losing its culture and identity.” The survey also found that among people who do not think that whites have an advantage living in America based on their skin color, only 21 percent agree that President Joe Biden won the 2020 election.8
A majority of white voters have not supported a Democratic presidential candidate since President Lyndon Johnson signed the 1965 Voting Rights Act.9 And in our own time, following the election of Barack Obama in 2008, the Republican Party’s opposition to his policies has taken on a racial coloration. For one early example, look no further than Trump’s false claims that the first Black president was not born in the United States and was therefore ineligible to hold the high office. That lie, repeated for years on cable news, propelled his run for the presidency. Once in the White House he advocated for a ban on Muslims entering the country and made insistent efforts to build a wall on the southern border.
In 2016 establishment Republicans found it politically expedient to look away from Donald Trump’s racist and anti-immigrant talk as the party elevated his bigotry into the presidency. Since then, its elected leaders have seen no advantage in trying to win more Black voters at the polls; instead, they’ve opted for suppression, supporting measures that close polling stations in Black districts and that disproportionately purge Black voters from the rolls.
White evangelical voters, a key part of the Trump base, are comfortable with the concept of original sin, which took place in the Garden of Eden and extends across generations. But they reject the idea that slavery, the nation’s original sin, extends its reach across time. Their resistance often adopts the same arguments, complete with the same bitterness, as the segregationists who battled against the First Civil Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s. As they trumpet their appeals to Southern pride and tradition, they repeat well-worn complaints about troublemakers from the North stirring up a previously complacent Black community.
Likewise, in the mid-twentieth century, segregationists complained about how schools taught the roots of the Civil War. They repeated the Confederate refrain that the war was a matter of Northern aggression and states’ rights, an assault by industrialists against a rural farm economy—and not over slavery. Today many Republican leaders oppose allowing public schools to teach the history of slavery and discrimination. Addressing racial ugliness and racial realities has no place for them. They fear it is damaging to the nation’s pride in its history.
Efforts to present an accurate portrait of American history have been recast by the right as a culture war centered on differences over the need to discomfort children by teaching about the history of race. Then there is the fight over school admission policies intended to repair the damage done by a long history of overt discrimination and to help more Blacks advance.
Similar arguments are made over diversity training for public and private sector employees, and over police reforms that would reduce the disproportionate number of Blacks and Latinos jailed by police and killed by police. There are arguments over bail laws and the high number of Black men in jail.
There is no real argument about the fact that a large percentage of Black and brown people continue to struggle to survive in twenty-first-century America.
But whites in Trump’s Republican Party shun the history of America’s racial oppression as well as stories of racial inequality today. Instead, they express fear of the government discriminating against white people. They blame high Black poverty rates on broken families and a lack of personal responsibility. They baselessly demonize immigrants as violent criminals, as rapists, as a threat to the white working class’s jobs, and as minorities who commit voter fraud.
The extremes of racial politics can also be seen in the chilling rise of guns in the hands of violent white supremacist groups.
In 2015 nine Black people attending a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, were shot dead by a white supremacist. Similar shootings have taken place across the country, not just in the South, notably at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in 2022, where ten Black people were killed by a white man motivated by racism.
Most visibly, in 2017 white nationalist groups rallied in Charlottesville, Virginia, armed with guns and carrying Confederate battle flags and Nazi symbols. They chanted “Jews Will Not Replace Us,” a slogan associated with “replacement theory,” a racist and anti-Semitic belief that a cabal of wealthy Jews are secretly funding and masterminding a plot to replace white people as the dominant racial group in the U.S. The idea of whites being replaced is ridiculous at a time when whites continue to dominate the tables of power on Wall Street, in Washington, and in Hollywood. This is where decisions are made about money, politics, and institutions and culture that define daily American life. The leaders sitting at the head of those power centers remain overwhelmingly white, Christian, and male.
But more than at any time in U.S. history, there is a rising tide of Black people, people of color, immigrants, white progressives, and women demanding to be heard and insisting on a seat at the table of power. Black people and their allies are seeking to define racial progress on their own terms. Even as it emerged and matured, the Second Civil Rights Movement has yet to come into focus for many Americans. It is not always in the headlines, in the streets, or on social media. But sometimes, like in Ferguson, it is.
With so much in our politics and culture coming back to race—and with anger and moral arguments wielded by each side—it is important to understand where the Second Civil Rights Movement came from, how it developed, and how it has reshaped our country for years to come. To understand it, you first have to understand the most misunderstood president of recent times: Barack Obama.