Central Task at the Second Stage of the Civil Rights Movement Will Be More Difficult to Accomplish Than Was the Core Goal at the First Stage

Any meaningful observance of Black History Month will include recognition that the overhaul of K-12 education is the central task at the second stage of the Civil Rights Movement. That task will be even more difficult to accomplish than was the core goal at the first stage.


At the core of the first stage of the Civil Rights Movement was the matter of equal political rights for people, regardless of race or ethnicity. This was the concern of W. E. B. Dubois when he and others in the Niagara Movement launched the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1910. Dubois had not agreed with Booker T. Washington that economic issues should be resolved first. The latter had argued that African American people should train themselves for adroit mastery at gainful occupations, securing themselves economically before making an aggressive push for equality of political participation. DuBois and his fellow founders of the NAACP touted a strategy in joint pursuit of full political and economic rights under the United States Constitution as promised particularly in the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments.


The years between 1910 and 1954 represented the heyday of the NAACP. Patiently and persistently, NAACP lawyers chipped away at the Jim Crow framework of segregation until desegregation of schools was recognized as mandatory in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision won by Thurgood Marshall and his team of NAACP lawyers in 1954.


The main thrust on the first stage of the Civil Rights Movement for another ten years continued as agitation for political rights. Martin Luther King and others made good on the seminal idea of A. Philip Randolph for a March on Washington. Participants in this event of mass mobilization of 1963 joined those who rode buses as integrated contingents of riders into the heart of the segregated Old South, and those who conducted sit-ins at lunch counters, in applying the kind of political pressure that culminated in passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.


At this point, the goal that had animated W. E. B. DuBois was substantially accomplished. The Old South would not give in easily, but the end of Jim Crow was in sight as of 1965. There followed a bevy of legislative initiatives that ended segregation in residential areas and gave people long denied access to the halls of higher education and the seats of corporate power a genuine chance to realize professional success of the middle class sort.


As violent and difficult as the struggle for political rights had been, though, there remained the even harder task of achieving the goal that had motivated Booker T. Washington and that became the prime focus of Martin Luther King during the last two years of his life: equity of economic opportunity. The legislative initiatives of the 1960s had forged a viable path for those African Americans positioned to grasp the newly opened opportunities for middle class economic success.
But left behind in central urban districts, festering with anger, were the poorest of the poor, those who saw little path of the own for a better way of life.


In this Black History Month of February 2014, we must realize that only with the overhaul of K-12 education can those dwelling in varying moods of dissolution and rage find their path to economic opportunity. The issues involved in this struggle are more complex than were those that could largely be accomplished by winning court cases and passing enforceable political legislation.


The education establishment is labyrinthine, loaded with vested interests at many points in the maze. There are education professors who impart to the teachers whom they train an impoverished curriculum and weak pedagogy, embarrassingly bad teacher training programs that are nevertheless huge lucrative revenue producers for universities, teachers unions that will always fight against merit pay and objective evaluations of their performance, and K-12 administrators and officials occupying highly remunerative sinecures while overseeing schools that deliver a quality of education of the most egregious sort.


Thus, attainment of the key goal of economic justice at the second stage of the Civil Rights Movement will be even harder to achieve than was the goal of political parity that was central at the first stage. The opposition is located in a more convoluted system and is not always as prominently positioned as were execrable personages such as Bull Connor and Lester Maddox.


This opposition is entrenched at many positions in the education establishment. To uproot this opposition will require an informed strategy for persistent struggle and will necessitate the personal involvement of many of you reading this article. But the effort is of paramount importance: Only a revolution in K-12 education can resolve the issue of economic justice that was the central concern of both Booker T. Washington at the advent of the 20th century and Martin Luther King in the late 1960s.


Attainment of economic justice necessitates a revolution in K-12 education with you, the public, as participant. The struggle will not be easy. It will be opposed my many entrenched interests. But nothing could be more important. Only with economic justice for all citizens will the United States become the democracy of our imagination.