Nearly six decades ago, on a warm August day in 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. addressed the 10th annual Southern Christian Leadership Conference, discussing what had transpired since the group was founded in 1957. At that time, King said, Black Americans were denied a seat at the lunch counter, were prohibited from enjoying city parks, and were not allowed in Southern legislative halls except as porters or chauffeurs. Civil rights advocacy and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 changed all that. “But,” King said, “in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved.”
During the 23rd annual Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture in Social Justice, Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor Dorothy Roberts addressed the question “Are Civil Rights Enough?” in a conversation with Marcia Chatelain of Africana studies. The event was co-hosted by the Center for Africana Studies and the Annenberg School for Communication, and attended by students, faculty, staff, and leaders at Penn, including Walter H. Annenberg Dean Sarah Banet-Weiser, Wale Adebanwi, director of the Center for Africana Studies, and Interim President J. Larry Jameson.
In his brief remarks before the lecture, Jameson told attendees that King often reminded us that progress is “a constant struggle,” and change is not “an inevitable consequence of the passing of time,” requiring us all to “be very vigilant.”
Jameson quoted King’s 1967 address where he said, “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice.” And reciprocally, “justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love.”
King showed us, Jameson continued, “that we must think and we must act, guided by this knowledge of power and the feeling of love. That we must walk many different paths to arrive at justice: legislative, moral, global and local, personal and institutional.”
In his speech during the March on Washington in 1963, King spoke of police violence, voter suppression, and housing discrimination, words that, 60 years later, still speak to the Black experience in America, Roberts said. “We might ask each other, ‘Are we satisfied? Are civil rights enough?’”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 marked a tremendous victory, said Roberts, who has appointments in Penn Carey Law and the School of Arts & Sciences. “Congress finally responded to a long-standing demand on the federal government to intervene more aggressively against Southern state officials’ violent refusal to recognize Black people’s equal status. And it served as a foundation for subsequent civil rights acts like the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968.”
The Civil Rights Act, Roberts said, is part of “the long, unfinished struggle for liberation marked by remarkable victories and deep dissatisfaction.”
King shared that dissatisfaction, saying that new laws would not be enough. Roberts quoted his posthumously published “A Testament of Hope,” saying “The Black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws: racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.”
“I reached the conclusion that civil rights aren’t enough by focusing throughout my career on the nation’s devaluation of Black women and our resistance against it,” Roberts said, citing her research on regulation, reproduction, and public health. “The belief that Black women passed down a depraved lifestyle to their children persisted after the passage of the civil rights laws and was crucial to the post-Civil Rights Act retrenchment that Dr. King condemned.”
In discussion with Chatelain, Roberts addressed what legal scholar Kiara Richardson, in a Harvard Law Review Foreword, called “historic resemblance tests,” where, “if acts of racial injury don’t resemble the acts prior to the civil rights laws, the court doesn’t recognize them.”
“Within the legal framework, we are looking for acts of discrimination that have resemblances of the past,” Chatelain said. “Meanwhile, you have an evolving set of structures and realities of how racism actually operates.”
Roberts and Chatelain also discussed the limitations of the Civil Rights Act, which disproportionately benefits people who can afford legal counsel, Chatelain said.
“That’s another limitation of basing radical change on bringing a lawsuit based on protection of individual rights,” Roberts said. “You have to be an individual, not only who seems to be deserving of protection but also someone who has the money or other resources to bring the lawsuit. It’s not enough to bring about the structural changes that Dr. King and others want to see and that would actually bring into this nation a truly equal and democratic society.”
“To the very end, King preached both his dream of a liberated future and the fierce urgency of now, his words at once tragic and inspiring,” Roberts said.
It has always been necessary to imagine new worlds into being, she said. “Abolishing slavery meant believing a radically different society was possible and working to create it, even while still in bondage. It’s amazing, but, if they didn’t do it, where would we be now?”
The passage of civil rights legislation is evidence that years of committed, collective struggle can topple what seem like unshakable regimes of injustice, Roberts said. “That should give us hope to imagine a free equal and democratic society where today’s unjust systems would be unimaginable, and it gives us a mandate to build with the urgency of now, the beloved community that Dr. King dreamed, lived, and died for.”
Marcia Chatelain is the Presidential Penn Compact Professor of Africana Studies in the School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dorothy Roberts is the George A. Weiss University Professor of Law and Sociology, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Professor of Africana Studies. She is a Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor with appointments in Penn Carey Law and Penn Arts & Sciences.
