Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Coretta Scott King: 1927-2006

Past may cloud view of rights battles

While mourning Coretta Scott King, civil rights leaders want everyone to know the struggle for equality is not over.

Amid their grief over the death of Coretta Scott King, black advocates say that her passing underscores a growing concern: As the movement's iconic leaders fade into history, much of the focus is on honoring the past rather than pushing for equality today.

"We will now celebrate Coretta Scott King as though the civil rights movement is finished and the mission has been accomplished, but the work is not done," said Bruce Gordon, president of the NAACP. "We should be very respectful of - and encouraged by - the substantial progress that has been made. But in no way, shape or form should we conclude that the civil rights mission is complete."

Social justice activists all said it's important to remember King for the decades of work she devoted to keeping alive her husband's push for equality through nonviolence. That work continued until her death Tuesday after a string of serious health problems. Her body arrived in Atlanta early Wednesday, and funeral arrangements were still being worked out.

The family has not responded to an offer from Gov. Sonny Perdue for a public viewing at the Georgia Capitol. The gesture was a measure of how far the South has come since the civil rights era.

After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, then-Gov. Lester Maddox, a staunch segregationist, refused to close the Capitol for his funeral and expressed anger over the lowering of state flags in King's honor.

But there's also a sense among advocates that modern activism is being overshadowed by a near-constant string of commemorations for bygone victories: the 50th anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education in 2004 and, last year, the 40 years since the historic march from Selma, Ala., to Montgomery, Ala., to win voting rights for African-Americans.

Inevitably, such remembrances intensify in the first months of each year with the mid January holiday for Martin Luther King Jr. that his widow fought to win and with Black History Month, which began Wednesday.

In addition, each time an important civil rights figure dies - be it Rosa Parks, Ossie Davis or now Coretta Scott King - it renews the focus on the movement's history.

Some advocates are concerned about that eagerness to look back.

"Part of that overfocusing on history and not looking at current realities of racial discrimination is another form of denial," said Barbara Arnwine, executive director of the Lawyers' Committee on Civil Rights Under Law. "Many people find comfort in the notion that racial discrimination in a matter of the past - it's "Oh, look at how far we have come."'

Ronald Walters, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, said he's also "suspicious of commemorations."

"In some quarters, there's a feeling that the movement has passed its course," he said. "That's the reaction of the younger generation mostly - the post-civil rights generation."

Advocates note that it doesn't take much searching to find social justice battles left to fight.

Hurricane Katrina unveiled stark racial disparities in New Orleans, and blacks still have more than double the rates of infant mortality, unemployment and poverty as whites, said Gordon.

Many mourned King's death even as they worried about how to keep her mission alive.

"I'm concerned that people don't take her passing as an opportunity to further antique the causes that she and her husband and others stood for," said Theodore M. Shaw, president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund.

"Anybody who thinks that work is over is either terribly ignorant or willfully blind."

Wade Henderson, executive director of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights, agreed: "I think she would be disappointed if the tributes ended with her being elevated to some godlike status without also recommitting ourselves to a social justice agenda that she very much helped symbolize."

[Last modified February 2, 2006, 02:15:36]