The Supreme Court and the Resurrection of Jim Crow South

My grandfather was a Civil Rights foot solider until he took his last breath in 2007. He worked tirelessly to help bring national civil rights leaders to Mississippi during the 50’s and 60’s. In the 70’s and 80’s he urged Civil Right organizations not to seek corporate funding because it would water down their mission. And in 90’s and until he became ill in 2006, he taught the fundamentals of voting and the importance of understanding public issues that affect minority rights, the poor, and the underserved.

I was spoon fed his activism. My grandfather, my first hero in life, was principled, practical and proud. He took tremendous pride in introducing me to many unsung leaders whose names are not in history books but who made historical contributions that addressed living in the Jim Crow South.

Through my grandfather, I met many Mississippi Jews who lived in the Delta. The Delta Jews were a group of Jewish business owners who helped my grandfather fund Civil Right activities throughout the late 50’s and 60’s. The Delta Jews owned local businesses in the Greenville area and down Hwy 61. They were also land owners and leased their properties to larger corporations. I was nine years old when I had my first encounter with someone who owned their own business other than a family member while I was tagging along with my grandfather doing a get out to vote drive in 1975. I met a Jewish family who owned the town bank. I was smitten as I eavesdropped while the banker gave my grandfather advice one afternoon.

My grandfather listened quietly as  his old Jewish friend warn him that marching and boycotting white owned businesses to get White folks to do right had limitations. The Delta Jews believed that keeping an eye on the court system was the best way to defeat Jim Crow and the lawyers who drafted the Jim Crow laws for the White Supremacists. “It takes a good lawyer to outsmart a bad law,” he said to my grandfather. He encouraged my grandfather that our community needed more lawyers willing “to argue a case before the highest court in the land if needed” to address racism. He already knew what I learned later in life; Jim Crows laws were systemic and there would always be another law created by evil men who would have one leg up because the legal system was ran by the same group who instituted the laws that keep minorities from getting ahead. 

That conversation transformed my grandfather on he challenged injustices. It also began his years of watching who sat on the judicial benches and their relationships with elected officials. My grandfather believed strongly the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) would soon become the last option the little folks had against the unjust laws that were often passed at the local and state level that were unlawful and immoral in the Jim Crow South.

Now, let us looked at the role of the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court has two fundamental functions. On the one hand, it must interpret and expound all congressional enactments brought before it in proper cases; in this respect its role parallels that of the state courts of final resort in making the decisive interpretation of state law. On the other hand, the Supreme Court has power (superseding that of all other courts) to examine federal and state statutes and executive actions to determine whether they conform to the U.S. Constitution. When the court rules against the constitutionality of a statute or an executive action, its decision can be overcome only if the Constitution is amended or if the court later overrules itself or modifies its previous opinion. The decisions are not confined to the specific cases, but rather are intended to guide legislatures and executive authority; thereby they mold the development of law. Thus, in the U.S. governmental system the Supreme Court potentially wields the highest power.

Since 2009, the SCOTUS has become a court that is becoming more and more engaged in politics than being guides to help us interpret the Constitution. Black and Brown folks in particular should be alarmed at the number of cases that the SCOTUS has ruled against that were instituted to protect minority rights. At a time when racists are once again proud of their racism, it has been open season on laws that were once upheld by the SCOTUS.

On June 25, 2013, the SCOTUS struck down the Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The decision in Shelby County v. Holder effectively ended the use of Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act which requires any changes to voting rules in covered states and jurisdictions to be approved by the U.S. Justice Department before they can go into effect.

States like Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee where some residents have longed for the Old South to rise again, no longer have to get preclearance when they make changes in jurisdictions. Although the SCOTUS has confidence that our country has changed dramatically since the 60’s regarding discriminatory practices, we are seeing more and more state laws that are limiting times and locations to vote while restricting the types of identification that can be used to vote. That is very Jim Crowish.

On April 22, 2014, the SCOTUS upheld the ban on Affirmative Action for college admissions. In 2006, Michigan voters decided to bar public colleges from considering race in admissions and to prohibit officials from taking race into account in hiring and contracting. The SCOTUS decide 6-2 that a country that practiced denying admittance to colleges based on race and practiced discrimination in hiring and minority contracting for centuries, now say it is okay to pick up where everyone left off. When folks say they want their country back, believe them. They are using the SCOTUS to do it.

In 2010,the SCOTUS ruled 5-4 that corporations were people in Citizen United vs. FCC. Living and breathing people! When Black and Brown folks should have been alarmed, they passively thought the case was about big money funding elections and not a Civil Rights issue. Citizen United vs. FCC was very much a Civil Rights issue as busing and affirmation action were. Black and Brown folks are not likely to spend millions to get someone elected but those corporation will spend billions during an election cycle to get local, state, and federal people who will do their bidding once elected. Who is elected determines what laws are brought fourth that will affect everything from the fairness of a school’s budget to what time the polls will close. We know first hand how an underfunded school system can affect a community for generations and we have come from an era where making it difficult to vote has been practiced. Both thrived well in Jim Crow South.

With theHobby Lobby ruling from two week ago, the SCOTUS is showing us once again they are dogged determined to erode steady legal Civil Rights gains. If you do not think Hobby Lobby issue was closely tied to Civil Rights, you are wrong. When majority women are up arms about an issue, Black folks better get on board, quickly. If they got issues with laws you know community of color got major problems coming to their neighborhoods real soon. 

People of color can no longer sit on the sideline and wait to be informed about issues. By the time the community is informed, it has been devoured. Communities of color must be willing to be sharp as a double edge sword on all the issues, especially, the ones that are before THIS SCOTUS.

The SCOTUS has Justices who are actively engaged in politics outside of the court and are not afraid that we know it. Thinking the SCOTUS will be fair and balance should not be assumed. When the Justices became headliners at close door political fundraiser after the election of 2008, we lost the objectivity of the court. At the same time, we started losing one civil right gain after another. Wake up folks! Folks really are taking our country back...and backwards. 

Photo Credit: Supreme Court, Mississippi Library Archives

The President's Cabinet Appointments Highlight Larger Issues in the Black Communitiy

President Obama made history again with his re-election. But his second term has been scrutinized by the left and the right. In his second term, his first round of nominees for his cabinet was white males. This caused some to question his loyalty to the millions of minorities, women,  and members of the GLBTs who elected him. When another Black business owner asked my thoughts about the lack of minorities being considered or appointed, I replied, “The issue is much bigger than black or white. Black Americans have allowed ‘white is right’ to become systemic in thinking. We, like White folks, have failed to embrace diversity or to accept our own for one reason or another. We have forgotten to look back at history and note that we did NOT overcome by ‘black is maybe but white is right.’ 

Let us take a look at how we arrived at the dilution of diversity by first looking at Affirmative Action. In the 1960s, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, we called on our elected leaders to challenge the country’s acceptance of the discrimination of Blacks in all areas of government contracting agencies. President Kennedy answered through his executive order, 10925, mandating “affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed and those employees are treated fairly during employment, without regard to race, creed, color, or national origin.”* Although a presidential executive order was being implemented and, in many cases, being enforced, Jim Crow, the law of the land in the Old South did not roll over and die. It took on a more covert way of staying a live by heavily saturating its principles of white is right into the enforcement of the new policies.

In the Old South, Jim Crow laws, written and unwritten, mandated where a Black person could sit, shop, eat, or use a restroom. Also, Jim Crow laws dictated how a Black person should look at a White person and how closely he should stand next to or walk beside a White person. Though Jim Crow was not the law of the land in the North, the North had its own insidious version. Blacks were systematically siphoned into areas of cities that were expressively ‘black’ and into jobs, schools, and the like that were considered ‘black’.

With dueling sets of laws--federal vs. state and local--once again our country found itself at war.  Although an undeclared war, our country was still fighting President Lincoln’s war a hundred years later. Instead of Confederate soldiers with cannons fighting for state’s rights to retain slaves in cotton fields, laws were instituted to confine Black people to horrible economic conditions equivalent to slavery with an invisible master.

After the death of President Kennedy, a new president, President Johnson addressed affirmative action. He stated, “Nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny than the revolution of the Negro American...In far too many ways American Negroes have been another nation: deprived of freedom, crippled by hatred, the doors of opportunity closed to hope...But freedom is not enough. You do not wipe away the scars of centuries by saying: Now you are free to go where you want, and do as you desire, and choose the leaders you please. You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair...This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result...To this end equal opportunity is essential, but not enough, not enough.**   

Every President has served a racially divided country. And rules are not always the same for every racial group in interpretation and implementation. There are racial divisions, in spite of all of our accomplishments as a nation; and these divisions seem to pull at the fibers of our country despite our ever increasing growth of minorities who have become national leaders, business owners, college presidents, astronauts, and even pest-control operators. In every genre, great men and women from every ethnic background have defied odds to add to the rich diversity of this nation, even electing a President whose parents are members of two races, not once but twice. Yet the President struggles with an issue inherent in the belief of a very large number of folks in this country: white is right, that is, white American male is right.

Under President Obama, the unwritten rules of how business gets done in our country have not changed. While these unwritten rules present both opportunities and obstacles for working with congressional and business leaders, the President must deal with perception just as much as reality. In reality, a majority of voting Americans voted for President Obama. But the perception is that more did not vote for him. No matter how many numbers show the wide margin of his win, by design, the President’s opposition rack up more air time on cable news shows than those who support him. 

Along the same lines of reality vs. perception, because a corporation says it believes in diversity or has a minority supplier program does not mean that the culture of the company is accepting of diverse individuals, which includes Congress, an entity that governs the business affairs of our country. Although our country has become more diverse, there are members of Congress who struggle with the idea of diversity. One reason, diversity cannot be pigeon-holed into the paradigm, “American white male is right.” 

At one time, Black Americans were the largest minority group. When diversity programs were mentioned, it was the code for “We do business with Blacks.” But in the last decade, doing business with Black Americans was no longer a litmus test for diversity. Diversity has grown to mean global inclusiveness. Women, individuals with physical disabilities, and members within the GLBT communities are all part of diversity inclusion. Many are CEOs or senior management decision-makers for global corporations. 

Because of global diversity, minorities, who may not even consider themselves as a minority, are sitting at the table as decision-makers and do not need executive orders to be given access to employment, housing, or an education. By the way, Hispanics/Latinos are the majority of the minority groups. But Asian business owners are the fastest growing in our nation and are one of the highest income earners.

Culturally speaking, most minority groups turn first to each other’s businesses for goods or services before venturing outside of their communities. By being intentional with their spending dollars, these communities are strengthened economically and engender more buying power. Local power combined with fiscal numbers gives them a seat at the table for national dialogue. These communities become producers vs. consumers. When communities are strong producers of their own wealth by doing business within their communities, they can intimidate or become intimidating to outsiders.

If a community allows an entity to divide and conquer it without much opposition, the community soon becomes a doormat and gets very little to nothing in return from the entity. Instead, the community should take a page out of the book of another community that appears to have successful business practices, especially of diverse ethnic groups, and demand reciprocity at a comparable rate. Black Americans are slow in accepting this concept.

Some local Black business owners rarely have a community-first mindset. In Nashville, Black- owned means ‘last-selected’and 'less-than-your-quoted-price' to other Blacks when buying. It does not matter what area of town one may in reside; it seems to be the prevailing thought. “Nashville’s Black Elite” can be the worst offenders while screaming for economic inclusion from corporate America. When asked about this practice, “You know how we are,” is the standard reply. As far as Blacks have come in leading the way to gain equality for others, we are often last in helping one another to achieve or maintain economic stability in our businesses, to support our families, to give back to our communities, and to prepare to contribute to national dialogue, not photo opportunities.

Our national leaders have much work to do, both moral and legislative work. Our country issues are bigger than Black and White issues, much bigger. As the President works through years of systemic racial biases [he must do] that are woven into the fibers of our country, he must intentionally choose leaders who will embrace our growing global diversity and who will practice inclusiveness. In the same vein, Black business owners must work through years of being treated as inferior. For many have begun to believe that the goods and services of our own people are ‘less than.’ Hence, Black business owners [as a whole] need a new paradigm shift that can remove the systemic thinking that has inculcated and has embedded into the fibers of the community.

To make the shift, Black business owners should begin to intentionally seek out goods and services of one another. This action will help strengthen dialogue within the Black community. They have to become educated in the ways and means of the global marketers and use the finesse of the dialogue of the smaller community to access the larger global market. They must keep in mind that this training is pertinent to opening the doors to financial empowerment.

If Black Americans do not embrace and complement each other like leveling compounds running on an uneven floor, we will continue to be overlooked at the table for national conversations and leadership roles and will continue to be stepped on or stepped over. But in order to change this, we must start with the man or woman in the mirror, not the President. Economic empowerment starts in your neighborhood and local communities not in Washington, DC.

*President John F. Kennedy’s Executive Order 10925 was signed March 6, 1961
** President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Commencement Address at Howard University Commencement June 4, 1965