POLITICAL TIMING AND THE VERY BAD LUCK OF BLACK AMERICANS
POLITICAL TIMING AND THE VERY BAD LUCK OF BLACK AMERICANS
By
David Gottfried
In the early and mid-sixties, enormous strides were made in the fight for civil rights for black people. The civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965 were passed. John F Kennedy said that Civil rights was a moral issue as old as scripture in a television address to the nation. Lyndon Johnson, who had been a senator from one of the states of the old confederacy, said “we shall overcome” at a joint session of Congress.
But something got in the way.
The Civil Rights movement coincided with rebellions against sexual norms, against traditional morality, against family and filial loyalty and against anchoring mechanisms such as the black church. Because of these rebellions, Blacks were shorn of the grit and temperance and sobriety required for true liberation. A new, pernicious nihilism ran amok.
The proportion of children born out of wedlock, in Central Harlem, soared from about 23 percent in 1965 to about 70 percent in 1980.
Black people had more rights, but they had lost their resolve and their emotional backbone and spirit. The middle class blacks of Atlanta who in large measure built the modern civil rights movement were, compared to today’s blacks of New York, practically slaves insofar as their standing under the law. However, in terms of achievement, intelligence and morality, they were kings and queens next to the slouching slatterns, hustlers and adult infants of contemporary black America.
Black culture became progressively debased and dissolute. Once we had black musicians like Scott Joplin and Duke Ellington. Now our black musicians are slutty women who are half naked and men who are thugs.
Actually, I have often welcomed the demise and destruction of conventional morality, sexual taboos and inhibitions. However, as much we might not want to admit it, love, contrary to the wisdom of our finest musicians, is not all you need. Sometimes discipline, delayed gratification and Victorian Virtues with all the splashiness of a tweed jacket and a lace doily are required.