Apartheid. USA 1988

February 17, 1987:

Civil rights activists are questioning whether methods that defeated institutional racism in the 1950s and 1960s can prevail against the more subtle racism of the 1980s. Activating familiar responses civil rights leaders immediately organized protest marches against racial outbursts at Howard Beach or Forsyth County. But veterans of previous civil rights battles are now debating the value of such marches in countering the type of grass-roots racism underlying recent violence.

‘The chief barriers to racial justice today,’ says black psychologist Dr Kenneth B Clark, ‘are more subtle and much less conducive to media coverage. Such problems as inferior Northern schools that resist attempts at desegregation, deteriorating urban ghettos, persistent unemployment and a myriad of handicaps of single-parent black families do not elicit the same moral indignation on the part of the American public as did earlier forms of injustice.’ In the 1960's, the demands were clear: the immediate passage of a comprehensive civil rights bill guaranteeing equal protection under the law and black access to housing and public accommodations, to integrated schools and the workplace. The target was Congress, the courts and the White House. For many civil rights leaders the issue now is not whether blacks can win new legislation but how to muster enough political strength to force strong enforcement of existing

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civil rights laws and prevent the erosion of gains made in the 1960's. ‘Racial justice in this country has only come as a result of sacrifice, loss of life, sweat and tears, said the Reverend Benjamin L Chavis jr, Executive Director of the United Church of Christ's Commission on Racial Justice. “Black youths seem to be saying if there has got to be some suffering and dying, they are not going to be the only ones who are going to suffer and to die.”^51.

51. The New York Times, from a report by Lena Williams