The United States of America, “a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” began as a slave society. What can rightly be called the “original sin” slavery has left an indelible imprint on our nationa’s soul. A terrible price had to be paid, in a tragic, calamitous civil war, before this new democracy could be rid of that most undemocratic institution. But for black Americans the end of slavery was just the beginning of our quest for democratic equality; another century would pass before the nation came fully to embrace that goal. Even now millions of Americans recognizably of African descent languish in societal backwaters. What does this say about our civic culture as we enter a new century?
The eminent Negro man of letters W. E. B. Du Bois predicted in 1903 that the issue of the 20th century would be “the problem of the color line.” He has been proven right. At mid-century the astute Swedish observer of American affairs, Gunnar Myrdal, reiterated the point, declaring the race problem to be our great national dilemma and fretting about the threat it posed to the success of our democratic experiment. Du Bois must have relished the irony of having a statue named Liberty oversee the arrival in New York’s harbor of millions of foreigners, “tempest tossed” and “yearning to breathe free,” even as black Southern peasants–not alien, just profoundly alienated–were kept unfree at the social margins. And Myrdal observed a racist ideology that openly questioned the Negro’s human worth survive our defeat of the Nazis and abate only when the Cold War rivalry made it intolerable that the “leader of the free world” should be seen to preside over a regime of racial subordination.
This sharp contrast between America’s lofty ideals, on the one hand, and the seemingly permanent second-class status of the Negroes, on the other, put the onus on the nation’s political elite to choose the nobility of their civic creed over the comfort of longstanding social arrangements. Ultimately they did so. Viewed in historic and cross-national perspective, the legal and political transformation of American race relations since World War II represents a remarkable achievement, powerfully confirming the virtue of our political institutions. Official segregation, which some southerners as late as 1960 were saying would live forever, is dead. The caste system of social domination enforced with open violence has been eradicated. Whereas two generations ago most Americans were indifferent or hostile to blacks’ demands for equal citizenship rights, now the ideal of equal opportunity is upheld by our laws and universally embraced in our politics. A large and stable black middle class has emerged, and black participation in the economic, political, and cultural life of this country, at every level and in every venue, has expanded impressively. This is good news. In the final years of this traumatic, exhilarating century, it deserves to be celebrated.
