Ronald Walters, Carolina Peacemaker
- As the new opportunities for social change are opened by the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, along with a Democratic House and Senate, we continue to need a concept that defines the struggle that will take for us to achieve equality.
I believe that the acquisition of Civil Rights remains the goal. However, there is considerable confusion around the term.
The primary problem I feel is that the concept of Civil Rights is trapped in the iconography of the 1960s in the minds of many people and therefore, it is a project that takes on an ‘old’ connotation with respect to the agenda and strategies and tactics.
However, the concept of Civil Rights is defined as those rights that citizens in society enjoy that enable them to achieve their respective individual and group goals. Since Blacks enjoyed these rights unequally, the primary goal of the 1960s struggle was to establish, through the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the principle of anti-discrimination and equality in the use of federal resources across the board.
