Repelling the siege

Black Enterprise, August, 1996 by Earl G. Graves

Nearly 40 black churches have been mysteriously burned to the ground in the South during the past 20 months. The wrong-headed California Civil Rights Initiative, a referendum aimed at blowing away affirmative action policies that have dammed the tide of discrimination in the state, remains a bomb timed to go off in this November's elections--with other initiatives across the nation poised to follow suit.

And in June, in a continuing judicial assault on the record of 41 black representatives in Congress, the Supreme Court--for the second time in three years--struck down districts created to eliminate the apartheid tradition of the world's proudest democracy. It's no coincidence that the states affected by these rulings, as well as others to come--North Carolina, Texas and Louisiana--are among those Southern states plagued by the church burnings. Not only are black churches anchors of the communities they serve, they are the traditional power bases of economic and political progress, as well as traditional targets of those who see violence and intimidation as a means to their often misguided ends.

If I were you, I'd check the pulse of those who have yet to respond to these wake-up calls. The malicious rhetoric of national politics over the last 15 years, ranging from "welfare queens" and Willie Horton to "reverse" discrimination and The Bell Curve, is gaining on us--but fast. These seeds of destruction also include persistent misrepresentation of the impact of affirmative action and minority business development, and the systematic construction of a High Court whose decisions are marred by the corrosive conservatism of Justice Antonin Scalia and his shadow, Justice Clarence Thomas. Now bearing strange and bitter fruit, they were planted by the policies and political appointments of the Reagan-Bush "revolution."

While the head of that movement was removed when the Republicans lost the White House nearly four years ago, the body, as represented by the Dole-Gingrich Congress, remains alive, undisciplined and dangerous. A central part of their agenda remains: a return to the "traditional values" of yesterday's America, when black voting power was a contradiction in terms and 100% of business and educational opportunities were reserved for presumably deserving white Americans.

We must respond to these baldfaced attempts to co-opt the American Dream of equal opportunity. We must rebuff those who would limit, then neutralize the potency of our voting power. We must repel the seige on our hard-won economic gains of the past quarter century. In November, and beyond, we must send a wake-up call of our own: We will be heard--and heeded. Our votes and our dollars make us more of a force to be reckoned with than ever before. And neither fiery acts of violence and destruction, nor the unjust rulings of a flawed Supreme Court, nor cooly malicious political manipulation will turn us back.