Rhetoric Race and Religion
The rhetoric last summer at commemorations of the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington was quite different from that heard at the original march in 1963. Lament replaced the determination to gain “jobs and freedom.” Speakers deplored the Supreme Court’s rollbacks of affirmative action and the Voting Rights Act. They condemned the not-guilty verdict in the George Zimmerman trial. Instead of celebrating the great march, the anniversary events sounded a plea for a new civil rights movement.
Largely missing from that call, however, was the strong prophetic voice of black religion that Martin Luther King, Jr. had famously articulated from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Fifty years later, many black leaders were advising young African Americans to honor King and other heroes and heroines of the movement by altering their personal behavior.
Reverend Al Sharpton passionately declared, “Don’t you ever think that men like Medgar Evers died to give you the right to be a hoodlum or to give you the right to be a thug. That is not what they gave their life about.” President Obama similarly observed,
[W]hat had once been a call for equality of opportunity, the chance for all Americans to work hard and get ahead, was too often framed as a mere desire for government support—as if we had no agency in our own liberation, as if poverty was an excuse for not raising your child, and the bigotry of others was reason to give up on yourself. All of that history is how progress stalled.
Both speeches represent an important shift in focus: from denouncing structural racism and equality to viewing the dysfunctional behavior of some African Americans as a key cause of the continued economic gap between the races.
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