How many lifetimes does it take to see that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice?
Less than a week before he was killed, nearly 4,000 people heard Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say, “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” as he delivered the sermon, “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.”
In 2021, the California Assembly established a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans, with special consideration for African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States. The purpose of the task force was: (1) to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans; (2) to recommend appropriate ways to educate the California public of the task force’s findings; and (3) to recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Task Force’s findings.
The task force, led by Sen. Steven Bradford (D-35th District), held its last meeting on June 29, before concluding its last order of business and submitting its report. Those who are interested in the proposed prescription for reparations that the task force released, I recommend that you visit https://oag.ca.gov/ab3121.
From the U.S. Supreme Court rulings on affirmative action and voting rights over the past month and a half or so, and the ongoing conversations of cancel culture, and ongoing efforts of state legislatures rewriting history or banning reading altogether, I can see we may live to be a hundred and not see justice rendered.
A couple of weeks ago I got to visit Freedom Rider and civil rights activist Mildred Pitts Walter, wife to the chairman of the LA Chapter of CORE, Earl Walter, the organization that pioneered the use of nonviolent direct action in America’s civil rights struggle.
I paid her a visit to see if I could gain some degree of perspective on the coalition politics at play in Los Angeles during the 1950s and ‘60s when the California Fair Employment Practices Act was signed into law and the Rumford Fair Housing Act legislatively and legally ended redlining in this state. That was more than 60 years ago. Most of the activists of that era are gone and buried.
Mrs. Walter however, at the ripe age of 101, is still sharp and has her wits about herself, continues to write children’s books and at least one focusing on the legacy of the Civil Rights movement and the path of nonviolence taken by her contemporaries.
We spoke for nearly two hours at the Glendale senior facility at which she now resides.
Our conversation covered the fight to get the California Fair Employment Practices Act signed into law in 1959 and the Rumford Fair Housing Act of 1963. I was particularly interested in the political coalitions that formed to make these pieces of legislation happen and why the coalition failed to rise to the challenge when the backlash came in the form of the 1964 ballot initiative, Proposition 14, which sought to amend the California state constitution to nullify the Rumford Act, thereby allowing property sellers, landlords, and their agents to openly discriminate on ethnic grounds when selling or letting accommodations, as they had been permitted to before 1963. But our conversation covered far more ground than that.
While talking about her late husband’s stint as chair of the LA chapter of CORE, we got on the topic of the work that still needed to be done from the 1960s forward.
“We saw affirmative action was working in colleges and not very well,” Walter said.
“Of course, housing and redlining were still going on. And I guess it still is,” Walter said ruefully.
At this point, the past became present in her references.
“But things are not good at all for anybody in this nation as far as I can see. Especially poor whites and African-Americans. It is so because the Constitution doesn’t admit that,” She said.
She went on to note that the U.S. Constitution was written to affirm slavery. And that was one of the raisons d’être for the U.S. Constitution.
Walter noted that in order for this country to lend legitimacy to the institution of slavery, it had to be written so that enslavers were given power.
Walter explained that in order to get the southern states into the union, she referenced the Three-Fifths Compromise reached among state delegates during the 1787 Constitutional Convention, which determined that three out of every five enslaved persons was counted when determining a state’s total population for legislative representation and taxation. The words “enslaved” and “African” were effectively interchangeable at that point. We are still three-fifths of a person in the Constitution, although the 13th and 14th amendments were added during Reconstruction after the Civil War.
“This nation is ill and until it recognizes why it is ill. They are ill because even though they declare they were not enslavers, their ancestors were and they benefit from it by their privilege,” Walter said. “They are privileged by that institution and slavery as anybody would admit was a very brutal and destructive institution.”
She noted that the U.S. House of Representatives, in 2008, apologized, explaining, “When you apologize for something that means you have wronged somebody.
“Who had they wronged?” Walter asked. “They had wronged the Africans and the descendants of Africans in this nation. The Jesus that they claimed under Constantine and Paul says, ‘If you have wronged your brother, don’t come to the altar and ask forgiveness. Go to your brother and ask to be forgiven and be forgiven and live in harmony.’ That’s the only way you can live in harmony.
“Do you see what is happening in this nation with all the guns, all the killing, all the anger of African-Americans, and all the fear and psychological illness of whites?
“It’s because of that guilt of not having apologized. There can be no reparations because the Constitution would not allow it. We are property. And the Constitution will permit reparations only if property has been taken … Nothing was taken from us. We were property. And if these conservatives want, they can prevent reparations. And you see reparations are not happening.”
Her conversation wasn’t so much of disillusionment as it was a disappointment. Disappointment passes as our focus shifts to action. Disillusionment takes longer to heal.