2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: Imagine if our civil rights champions had the same disdain for pragmatism as some BS supporters have [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)Nothing that left segregation legal ever contained a victory for the anti-racist side.
I suppose you're going to try to tell us that we should see the 1957 "Civil Rights Act", the act that did nothing at all to stop white violence against blacks, that did nothing to prevent the killings of the Freedom Riders, the blowing up of those little girls in Birmingham, or what happened to Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman, as some sort of a victory.
Or the MFDP getting offered a trivial two seats in the Mississippi delegation at Atlantic City, because LBJ didn't want to piss off the white southerners that were already certain to vote GOP for the rest of eternity no matter what by then.
Yeah, right...that sort of "compromise" is worth having.
The only civil rights victory that mattered was the end of Jim Crow, in '64.
Brown V. Board, for example, turned out to be meaningless. As Thurgood Marshall's secretary, when she heard the lawyers gloating about that ruling(I'm paraphrasing, but her words were close to this)said...get a dictionary, look up "deliberate".
To say that anything that happened before '64 was a victory is to dishonor the memory of everybody who ever died in the freedom struggle.