This Ain’t Your Grandfather’s Civil
Rights Movement
Shaun King and others like to compare today’s
incipient movement to the civil rights era. But that’s a mistake.
Today’s youth confront “a profoundly post-civil rights
phenomenon”: the Mass Black Incarceration State, a national project
that was created as a response to the Civil Rights and Black Power
Movements. Black folks in the early Sixties appealed to the feds for
protection. Today, the feds are the ones who will take you out.
By Glen Ford
“Black folks are not currently
engaged in a repeat of the civil rights
movement, which achieved almost complete success
by 1965.”
November 13, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "BAR"
- Black Lives Matter activist Shaun King writes on his
Facebook page that 2015 saw “the deadliest hate crime against
Black folk in the past 75 years” in Charleston, and notes that “more
unarmed Black folks have been killed by police this year than were
lynched in any years since 1923.” He continues:
“Never, in the history of modern America, have we
seen Black students in elementary, middle, and high school
handcuffed and assaulted by police in school like we have
seen this year. Black students, who pay tuition are leaving the
University of Missouri campus right now because of active death
threats against their lives. If you ever wondered who you
would be or what you would do if you lived during the Civil Rights
Movement, stop. You are living in that time, right now.”
Evidence abounds that police and white supremacist
violence is reaching a post-World War Two crescendo. Los Angeles is
showcased as a model of so-called “community policing," but the
city’s cops are gunning down civilians at
twice the rate of last year. It seems the first response
of LA’s “first-responders’” is shoot-to-kill. “Right now, police
have a down-to-the-bone belief that they have to watch suspects’
hands, and if the hands move, they can shoot,” said civil rights
lawyer Connie Rice.
In Ohio, prosecutor Timothy McGinty appeared to be
channeling the ghost of Birmingham’s “Bull” Connor when he accused
the family of Tamir Rice of having “economic motivations” for
seeking justice in the police killing of the 12-year-old. A local
judge ruled there was probable cause to arrest the two Cleveland
cops on
aggravated murder charges , but McGinty is setting the stage for
a grand jury whitewash.
“The first response of LA’s
‘first-responders’’ is shoot-to-kill.”
According to Shaun King, who was hired last month
as
senior justice writer for the New York Daily News and
whose Twitter account has 187,000 followers, today’s struggle is
much like the “civil rights” period, in terms of violence directed
against Blacks. He makes the historical comparison to motivate a new
generation to rise to the occasion. However, it is critically
important to understand that Black folks are not currently engaged
in a repeat of the civil rights movement, which achieved almost
complete success by 1965. The remainder of the Sixties was about
“Black Power,” and how to get it. The U.S. government’s response was
to declare war against the more radical elements of the Movement –
which they succeeded in annihilating – and to begin creating the
infrastructure of a new national policy to control and
contain the entire African American population: mass Black
incarceration.
Two generations later, the young people that Shaun
King seeks to advise confront an entrenched Mass Black Incarceration
regime that is far more formidable and ruthless than the local and
state security structures – or the freelance white terrorists – of
the civil rights era. The modern mass incarceration regime, which
Michelle Alexander calls “The New Jim Crow,” is more pervasive than
southern segregation ever was, reaching into every aspect of Black
life and warping each social relationship it touches. Its cumulative
effects have been so catastrophic that one out of every eight prison
inmates on the planet is an African American. The Mass Black
Incarceration State killed Michael Brown and Tamir Rice and all the
other martyrs of the current, incipient movement.
“The modern mass incarceration regime
is more pervasive than southern segregation ever was.”
This regime is a profoundly post-civil
rights phenomenon – a national project to re-impose state control
over Black people after the victory of civil rights and the failed
attempt to achieve some degree of Black self-determination. It is
true that Blacks have been subjected to mass incarceration ever
since Emancipation. Indeed, mass Black incarceration was the White
South’s response to Emancipation, a primary tool, along with lynch
law, in enforcing the Old Jim Crow. However, the suppression of the
awakened Black masses in the late 1960s would require a national
project that would coordinate, fund and vastly enlarge the various
local and state police and prison agencies, under central direction.
That process was begun with creation of the
Law Enforcement Assistance Administration , signed into law by
President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, the first federal program to fund
and equip local and state police forces. President Nixon gave the
white backlash against the Black Movement a race-neutral national
mobilizing project with his War on Drugs. For the first time in
history, the U.S. had a truly national security infrastructure – a
police state and gulag created specifically to
keep the Blacks in check, by methodically criminalizing the
entire African American population.
This ain’t your grandfather’s civil rights era.
Rather than a potential protector of Black people, the federal
government is the funder, equipper and coordinator of an integrated
national structure of repression whose primary mission, for almost
half a century, has been to contain and control Black people.
The Movement has no choice, therefore, but to seek
the overthrow of the Mass Black Incarceration State, whose
structures and ideology are embedded in the national government of
the United States.
It’s been a long time coming, but this is the big
throwdown. Not “Mississippi Burning,” but the whole damn country.
