WASHINGTON - The Trayvon Martin case has revealed deep discontent among blacks, Ernest Green, one of the Little Rock Nine group of black students who integrated the city’s Central High School in 1958, said Monday.
Green told a crowd at a Washington symposium on civil rights that the acquittal received by George Zimmerman in the shooting death of Martin, and the intense debate that followed, have put a spotlight on the unfinished business of the civil-rights movement.
“The events of the past month have proven we’ve got a lot to do,” he said.
Since the verdict was announced July 13, dozens of rallies have been held nationwide protesting the verdict, with protesters saying race played a factor in Zimmerman’s acquittal after he killed the unarmed black teen. Others have responded that race was not a factor in Martin’s killing and that his defenders - including the president - are bringing it up to score political points.
“As a senior student at Little Rock Central High, did I think that 50 years later, we’d be arguing this? Yeah, I did,” he said.
He said President Barack Obama was “spot on” in his remarks on Friday, in which he said he strongly identified with Martin’s experience. Like the president, Green said it is a common experience among black men to be followed, questioned and treated with suspicion.
Green said minorities in America will outnumber the white population in the near future and that the nation will need to adjust to this “new normal.”
“It’s a changing world,” Green said. “We have to figure out how to adapt to it, or we’ll be looking out the window as the world passes us by.”
Green, 71, served as an assistant secretary of labor during the Carter administration and currently lives in Washington.
He made his remarks at “The Unfinished March,” a conference hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal Washington think tank. The event was held to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. At the march, which was Aug. 28, 1963, civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. gave his famous “I Have a Dream” speech.
The success of the civil-rights movement is obviousin some ways, according to Clarence Lang, a history professor at Kansas University who also spoke at the event. For instance, the election and re-election of a black man to the nation’s highest office indicates the nation has come a long way since the turbulence of the 1960s, he said.
However, he said recent events, including the Zimmerman verdict and the June decision in the U.S. Supreme Court case Shelby County v. Holder, provided evidence that hard-fought gains had slipped. In the Shelby case, the high court ruled that extensions to the Voting Rights Act of 1964, which was designed to break barriers for blacks at the ballot box, were unconstitutional.
“It’s essentially been gutted,” Lang said.
Green, who drove to Washington from graduate school at Michigan State University a half-century ago to attend the march, later worked for its organizers, civil-rights leaders Bayard Rustin and A. Philip Randolph.
He said young people often don’t appreciate the sacrifices made by people who took a stand and demanded racial equality in the 1950s and 1960s. While he said the construction on the National Mall in Washington of a monument to King was a huge achievement, younger people look at it as if it appeared by “osmosis.”
“They see that structure on the mall and think it just fell out of the sky,” he said of the landmark, which opened in 2011.
Organizing the March on Washington and pressing for civil rights required intense devotion, sacrifice, willingness to face violence and an acute attention to detail, he said.
“Bayard and Randolph didn’t have cellphones,” he said. “They didn’t have computers. They did this march on 3-by-5 cards.”
Front Section, Pages 4 on 07/23/2013