ASSESSMENT
L
ike other mass movements, the US civil rights movement produced a
mixed record. By almost any measure, blacks in America are better off
now than at any time since slavery ended. The most obvious successes
were to end systematic racial terror and the most degrading features of Jim
Crow in the South. Blacks are legally entitled to live, eat, shop, and sit
on buses where they wish. The old tricks that disfranchised black voters
have disappeared, resulting in black legislators, mayors, and sheriffs. Local
officials increased black home ownership, provided better services, including
indoor plumbing and paved streets, and hired and promoted blacks in police
and fire departments. Thanks to government jobs and corporate investment,
black income is the highest in history, and a majority of blacks have now
reached the middle class [Doc. 19, p. 156]. American culture, especially
sports, music, and television, is thoroughly integrated, though blacks are
seldom hired as top administrators. Even the greatest taboo – interracial sex- has been broken as marriages between blacks and whites have soared in
recent years. The movement also helped white southerners escape the closed
society they had designed and encouraged black northerners to return to the
South in a reversal of the Great Migration. With race relations improved,
blacks and whites engineered the South’s robust economy. The movement
also spurred women, Latinos, Indians, Asians, gays, the elderly, and the dis-
abled to use the philosophy and tactics of nonviolence to seek justice for
themselves. And Congress scrapped its 40-year-old immigration policy in
order to welcome all peoples, regardless of national origin.
Despite this progress, America still does not have a color-blind society,
and a large underclass has been left behind. City officials – black and white - are bedeviled by insuperable problems, including the demise of heavy
industry, falling revenues, woeful public school education, toxic waste dumps
in minority neighborhoods, and policemen who employ racial profiling and
assault blacks with impunity. At least twice as many blacks are unemployed
as whites, and many blacks have given up looking for work altogether as