As the assassination of a Black icon turns 50, a recent death and a killing by the police are both grim reminders of challenges before America when it comes to fighting racism.
Several events on April 4 will commemorate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, when he was only 39. A Baptist pastor and civil rights activist, King worked for ending legal segregation of Blacks. His “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington in August 1963 still inspires racial justice activists around the world; in 1964, at the age of 35, he became the youngest man to receive the Nobel Prize.
His assassination in Memphis, Tennessee, was preceded by a massive protest by the city’s African-American sanitation workers, who were subjected to extremely dehumanising work and pay. King arrived there in support of the protesters, and gave his life before the African-American union was recognised by the city and its demands met.
Fast forward by 50 years. Linda Brown, aged 76, died earlier this month, on March 25. As a child in Topeka, Kansas, she was forced to travel a significant distance to elementary school, due the practice of racially segregated schools. Her father challenged the practice in court. In 1954, through the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, the Supreme Court held segregation at schools as unlawful.
A week before Brown’s death, on March 18, Stephon Clark, an unarmed 22-year-old Black man suspected of being involved in a break-in, was shot at eight times by the police in Sacramento. Police gave the familiar explanation — that they feared for their lives. They mistook the i-Phone Clark was holding for a gun.
Clark’s death is not the only indicator that for African Americans, life may not have changed much half a century since King’s assassination. For one, it is estimated that members of the community are three times more likely to be killed by the police. In 2017, the police killed 1,129 people in the U.S., of which 25% were Black — this even though they comprise just 13% of the population. Police officers fear for their lives three times more when they encounter an African-American suspect, compared to a white one. In Memphis, where King was shot dead, the poverty rate at present for African Americans is double that for the white population.
It begins at school
However, nothing is more alarming than the racial segregation that is creeping into American school system, reversing the social progress achieved in the immediate decades after the Brown verdict. As of today, 37% of American public schools are essentially single race — nearly all-white or all-minority. In New York, two out of three Black students go to a school that is 90-100% single race. At the root of this reversal of progress is several Supreme Court rulings that made enforcement of desegregation difficult or not required.
A study by the ‘Civil Rights Project’ at the University of California at Los Angels noted in May 2016: “Intensely segregated nonwhite schools with 0 to 10% white enrollment have more than tripled in this most recent 25-year period for which we have data, a period deeply influenced by major Supreme Court decisions (spanning from 1991 to 2007) that limited desegregation policy... We call the country’s attention to the striking rise in double segregation by race and poverty for African-American and Latino students...”
“The nation is sick,” King had said in his last speech at a church in Memphis, before his assassination 50 years ago. “Trouble is in the land.” It could ring true today too.
Varghese K. George works for The Hindu and is based in Washington
