Among the frequent quotes in Martin Luther King’s speeches is the phrase “a moral world that bends toward justice,” a phrase of hope that, like many, may have been imported from the Baptist preaching tradition.
Today, however, this ideal of progress seems perverted by the Trumpian coup with its rhetoric of a return to the mythic greatness of the past. More than just following a virtuous path, history seems to have been all-rounder, bringing the nation back, in many ways, to the starting point of the many battles fought by Qing, which Qing won at the time.
Many of his achievements are now under direct, coordinated attack. In 2015, a conservative majority on the Supreme Court struck down the federal mandate of formerly segregation states. The provision, which imposed federal scrutiny on every new election law passed by the states, was included in the election law Voting Laws Act. The law, signed by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965, validated King’s key request, guaranteeing equal access to the ballot box for southern blacks. Banning voting through intimidation, tolls, literacy exams, and other pretexts were post-Civil War tools to maintain white dominance even in states that outnumbered freed slaves and supported racial segregation for a hundred years.
access to the elections It remained vital to the New Right, which represented a declining white population, and therefore depended on preventing voting by women, youth, and minorities. Immediately after the 2015 ruling, several states, such as North Carolina and Texas, reintroduced documentation requirements, abolishing mail-in voting and banning criminal records under the guise of “election fraud,” a phenomenon almost non-existent in the United States but relied on horseback. by Trump.
And in Ron DeSantis’ home state of Florida, a new body of “election police” was created. Last year, agents conducted a series of raids by handcuffing at dawn about twenty people, all of them African Americans, for the crime of voting despite having a criminal record. The lifetime ban on voting, like the death penalty, is imposed mainly in former Confederate states (Mississippi currently wants to reintroduce it) and mainly affects a large number of black ex-convicts. It’s not the only tactic worthy of Jim Crow’s darkest years. The Alabama Republican legislature redrawn single-member congressional districts this year, eliminating one of two predominantly African-American districts, a violation so flagrant that it merits a Supreme Court rebuke, but so far the state has refused to back down.
Virtually every one of the twenty-five states governed by the Republican Party has enacted openly racial restrictions. In Florida, and now also in Arkansas, recent edicts have issued restrictions or bans on courses black history as “argumentatively unpatriotic”. Governor de Santis went so far as to declare that slavery was a thing of the past, and that it also eventually benefited from slaves who were able to learn the trade. Some of the nine black high school students who in 1957 had to be accompanied by soldiers sent by Eisenhower to integrate the schools of Little Rock, now in their 80s, have returned, with a nagging sense of repeat, to challenge the decisions of Governor Huckabee-Sanders. Clarence P. Jones, King’s aide and author of the first seven paragraphs of the famous speech, said, Washington Post That the country seemed to be going through a “moment of madness” was far from King’s dream.
current return The reactionary set its sights on many rights that seemed to be acquired, and which, after the historical conflicts of the late twentieth century, became synonymous with social progress. It is no coincidence that historical revision (as with its European counterparts) is central to the New Right’s strategy. In the year 2023 in America, millions of women have lost the right to have an abortion, and the doctors and family members who assist them are subject to severe penalties, including many years in prison. At the end of June, the Supreme Court overturnedaffirmative action The ability to take race into account when evaluating student admissions, a common practice in universities for half a century.
It is a victory of “pure merit” over the concept of social intervention to rebalance historical imbalances and systemic injustices, or the same mechanism that has been implemented in the world. ReconstructionThe years after the Civil War saw a major effort to incorporate former slaves into laws that effectively resulted in a temporary majority of black voters in some southern states. A decade later, the reform was abandoned after an agreement between parliamentarians from the north and the white oligarchy from the south. A century later, the civil rights movement reinvigorated reform momentum and the concept of civil rights A more perfect union Inherent in the Constitutional Preamble: The Idea of Social Progress as a Necessity for the American Project.
If the emancipation of African Americans after 250 years of slavery and a century of apartheid made it probable that the country would finally be able to fulfill the promise of its founding proclamation, the current “original” regression depends on the restoration of values, order and “traditional symbols”. It is a new supremacy that contrasts with King’s struggles and with the notion of an imperfect nation but determined – as in the dream aroused by the March on Washington – to improve itself and climb the mountain of its aspirations.
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