“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear.”
My old UCLA coach, John Wooden, used to quote that Walt Whitman poem often, and I’ve been hearing its echoes on the streets lately. The people out protesting systemic racism and vowing change are “singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs” about the America that could be — that should be.
But in my 60 years of social activism, I’ve heard these gospel songs before, and my fear is that once the spotlights go down, the sympathetic audience — now moved to tears by the chorus — simply goes home, the words to the songs quickly forgotten.
You can’t be in the business of social reform without a deep reservoir of hope and faith in the general goodness of people. And some of my faith has been rewarded in recent days: City and state governments are instituting police reforms. Private corporations are drawing up more inclusive policies. Media companies are firing executives, actors and writers for racist or misogynistic behavior. Celebrities and politicians are making public statements in support of Black Lives Matter and other progressive organizations. Sports organizations are offering apologies for past acts of exclusion.
My optimism was further kindled when I saw dozens of police officers across the country hugging and linking arms with protesters. My father was a decorated police officer and I think he would have faced the protesters with sympathy rather than scorn. But I’ve felt hope like this before.
Civil rights activists are not here to fluff the public’s conscience, nor is the cause of “equality for all” a nostalgic throwback, like efforts to recapture Woodstock. It’s a matter of life and death. It’s a matter of lopsided access to health care, of children denied equal educations and therefore unable to claim secure economic futures.
Throughout my life, I’ve seen these cycles of outrage, public protests and political promises. And then comes a silent slip-sliding back to the status quo until another horrific event grabs our attention again.
The cry for civil rights is like a rubber band: Intermittent passionate public support stretches it forward, despite those anchored in the past pulling it backward. It stretches and stretches until that support starts to drift away to something shinier and newer — then it snaps back. The stretching has made it slightly longer, so there’s some progress — three steps forward, two back is still a step forward — but it’s nowhere near what was promised. And we await another horrific act to bring the unaffected back to help us pull forward again.
Meaningful and measurable progress for any marginalized group — people of color, immigrants, women, LGBTQ+ people, Muslims, Jews — can be achieved only when all besieged groups pull together, without waiting for or needing or having to convince others who don’t face the same challenges. We want them, we welcome them, we appreciate them, but we can’t need them. What the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” in 1963 still holds true:
“First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action…’ ”
Where will African Americans be 90 days from now? Will people continue to believe the evidence before them even as the nation begins to reopen and protests grow smaller and less frequent, then disappear?
There are things we can do, benchmarks we can insist on, to keep the freedom train moving ahead. Over the past few weeks, I’ve heard excellent suggestions for reform in our systems of justice, policing, health care, education and economic security. We have no shortage of good ideas. Now what we need is a way to measure improvement, ideally through a website to monitor proposals, manage progress, identify obstacles and centralize information for everyone to access. A user could go to this site to see what legislation is proposed to prevent police brutality, who supports it, who opposes it. We could stay informed on the implementation of solutions and know when to apply pressure. Such a website could mobilize action and focus attention on practical solutions, providing a thermometer to measure the health of social justice.
The moral universe doesn’t bend toward justice unless pressure is applied. In my seventh decade of hope, I am once again optimistic that we may be able to collectively apply that pressure, not just to fulfill the revolutionary promises of the U.S. Constitution, but because we want to live and thrive.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the NBA’s all-time leading scorer, is the author of 16 books. www.kareemabduljabbar.com
