Dr. King

We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of “separate but equal” has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.

—United States Supreme Court, 1954
Brown v Board of Education of Topeka

Summaries

• Civil Rights
• Milestones
• Resources

One of the great paradoxes of American history lies in the fact that as the American colonists wrestled with the British Empire beginning about 1761, their rhetoric often asked the question, “Are we to remain free, or become slaves”? Even as they contemplated their own bondage to British authority, thousands of Americans existed in a harsh slave system. The founding fathers and mothers well understood that paradox and worried about its implications for the future. Even as the men in Philadelphia crafted the Constitution, one of them, George Mason of Virginia, himself a slave owner, predicted the “national calamities” that would inevitably be the outcome of the “peculiar institution.”

Following the “calamity”—Civil War—the Reconstruction period was focused on the issue of what to do with almost four million people who had been slaves all their lives and now were free. Thus the post-Civil War period saw the real birth of the modern civil rights movement.

Now, in the dawn of the 21st century, new issues regarding civil rights confront us, often in unwelcome form, driven by religious intolerance, terrorism and the demands of emerging ethnic minorities seeking the freedoms that Americans have always cherished. If Nietsche was correct, the 21st Century may bring us all we can handle, and the struggles of the past may well pale by comparison. What is needed is clearly a growth of understanding and insight into the concerns of our neighbors in an ever shrinking world. Here again, we are not yet out of the woods. Much remains to be done.