September 30, 2006
Another America Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 07:45 PM EST Forty-four years ago today, two important developments helped shape the future of civil rights activism: James Meredith was admitted to Ole Miss, under court order, and Cesar Chavez founded the United Farm Workers, a union then comprising mainly Mexican and Mexican-American farm workers in California. Since 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were unconstitutional, the main battle lines in America’s civil rights struggle were drawn around educational institutions. While it is true that African-Americans were also boldly asserting their right to enjoy free and equal access to consumer venues—from buses, restaurants and lunch counters to department stores and railway-station rest rooms—school desegregation provoked the most intense grassroots activism and white resistance. A year after Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss, George Wallace made his famous stand at the schoolhouse door. But that was mostly theatrics. Meredith broke the color line in higher education, and by the decade’s end, the federal courts would, for better or worse, use affirmative policies like busing and district consolidation to give full force to the Brown decision. September 30, 1962, signaled the end of one era in civil rights history and the dawn of a new one. When Chavez organized the California farm workers, he introduced two important variables into the civil rights equation: economics and ethnicity. Throughout the 1950s most Americans assumed that their prosperous postwar country had eradicated the systematic material want that plagued the country in the 1920s and 1930s. With the publication (also in 1962) of The Other America: Poverty in the United States, by Michael Harrington, a socialist writer and theorist, liberals rediscovered the problem of poverty and began grafting it to civil rights activism. Martin Luther King, Jr., for one, became increasingly interested in the economics of race and race relations, as did a range of activists from Bob Moses to Jesse Jackson. In identifying labor exploitation as a race as well as economic problem, Chavez at once strengthened ties between the civil rights and labor communities (ties that existed, but under some strain) and reminded Americans that civil rights was far more than a white-black problem. By the decade’s end, other ethnic groups—as well as gay and lesbian Americans, American Indians, and women—asserted their rightful place in the era’s civil rights struggles. Meaning Chavez didn’t just introduce ethnicity into the civil rights dialogue. He broadened the dialogue to include a full range of politically, economically, or socially disenfranchised groups. The shift that occurred 44 years ago today was a subtle one but an important one as well.
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