Part one of a two part guest blog from, Ira Grupper, my hell raising friend and comrade in the movement for forty years.
Sisters & Brothers:
Where the KY Commission on Human Rights needs to go depends on its past history, and how its work comports with the work of city and federal agencies.
Where the KY Commission on Human Rights needs to go depends on its past history, and how its work comports with the work of city and federal agencies.
The 1960s saw masses of African American people, with participation and solidarity of other minorities and decent white people, rise up and bring down enforced racial segregation, Jim Crow--apartheid made-in-the-USA. De jure discrimination and segregation, at long last, were outlawed.
This struggle was a war, producing casualties, with participants jailed, beaten, fired from jobs, and even murdered, forcing authorities to make certain concessions. Among these were a series of laws giving everyone, regardless of color, the right to vote, the use of public accommodations, and access to fair housing and employment.
The Movement inspired other so-called "protected classes," to demand justice. Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, women, the disabled, older people, lesbians and gays--were on the move. They had fought for dignity and rights all along, but the Movement provided inspiration and demonstrated what a cohesive militant people's force can accomplish. Federal, state and municipal enforcement agencies, like the KY Commission on Human Rights, were created as a response.
These agencies had to contend, in the 1960s, with a society wherein the rich profited by exploiting the poor — a society that kept Black and white people apart. White workers accepted their own exploitation by internalizing that, as badly off as they were, at least they weren't Black. Inheriting the detritus of the war on the poor and the non-white back then, the agencies had to develop rules and regulations to try to root out unfairness at the workplace, and otherwise.
Today, approaching 2011, have these government agencies succeeding in creating a climate where discriminators fear paying a high price for their actions? Sometimes, yes. Usually, no.
During the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan dismantled protections won during the Civil Rights Movement. He appointed Clarence Thomas to head the EEOC and do the dirty work of gutting enforcement, of destroying equal opportunity. Mr. Thomas was rewarded for his nefarious deeds by being appointed to the US Supreme Court.
How are things today? Marcelles Mayes, president of the Metro Disability Coalition here in Louisville, recently told me: “Even with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, so many disabled are unemployed or under-employed. For the severely disabled generally it’s 75%, and for the blind and visually disabled it is 91%”. As recession wreaks havoc on poor and working people, millions of Americans are further prevented by racism, sexism, ageism, homophobia, and anti-disabled bias from access to the workplace.
Where do unemployed teens wind up, to an alarming degree? They wind up in prison resulting in drastically rising incarceration rates with a devastating racial breakdown. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the KY Commission pushed for restoration of voting rights for ex-inmates as proof that the penal system has faith in its rehabilitation program?
TO BE CONTINUED: Read part two next week on Zellner Blog.
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