Top Civil Rights Official: Discrimination Persists in 2010
After eight years in which “critical civil rights protections gathered dust,” the Obama administration has made enforcement of civil rights laws a major priority, the nation’s top civil rights official said over the weekend.
Thomas Perez, assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights, told the AFL-CIO King Day celebration in Greensboro, N.C., which ended Jan. 18:
In 2010, we have an African American president. And yet discrimination persists—both blatant discrimination and the dangerously subtle kind—in so many of our institutions, showing up in our schools, in our workplaces, in our health care system, in our financial system.
Civil Rights Pioneer: Post-Racial World Doesn’t Exist
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The Martin Luther King Jr. holiday is a good time to assess that post-racial world we’re supposed to be living in now. So, how’s it working out?
Not very well, according to Franklin McCain. He’s one of the four trailblazing students whose sit-in 50 years ago at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., ignited a nationwide effort that resulted in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Says McCain:
I don’t know where I was when racism disappeared from these United States of ours. This new right and the Tea Partiers have taken the position that anybody who talks about racial discrimination or affirmative action is a whiner or a civil rights pimp. We have to get off the sidelines and attack [that kind of language]….They are taking parts of our gains and using it against us. And it’s ridiculous.
King’s Legacy: Fighting for Justice, Community
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While people of color have made tremendous progress in the past 50 years, there is still a long way to go before Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of justice and equality is realized. The union movement can play a big role at the front of the effort to create that new America, many participants said during the annual AFL-CIO King Day celebration.
One of the hallmarks of a more just society is that people take care of each other. On Friday, the more than 400 participants in the King Day celebration, which began Jan. 14 in Greensboro, N.C., spent the day in a mass community service project sorting clothes, supplies and other goods for distribution to local homeless shelters, unemployed people and others in need.
Arlene Holt Baker: Without Jobs, Civil Rights an Empty Promise
Without good jobs, the gains of the civil rights movement are empty: Just as Martin Luther King Jr. fought to secure basic rights for all Americans, we must now fight for economic justice, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said.
Speaking this morning at the Martin Luther King Prayer Breakfast in Atlanta, Holt Baker said:
The freedom to sit at a lunch counter or in the Oval Office was won for us.
Now it is our time to win for the next generation the economic strength to take advantage of those freedoms. Today more than ever, we understand that without jobs, civil rights is an empty promise. And without good jobs, there is no real freedom.
The annual prayer breakfast is sponsored by the Atlanta-North Georgia Labor Council.
