UNITED STATES: WALKING THE TRAIL OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

  • by Kerry Kennedy
  • Inter Press Service

Recently, I joined some of our nation's heroes walking the trail of the civil rights movement in Alabama. No one has done more to stop hate groups in the United States over the past three decades than Morris Dees through the Southern Poverty Law Center. Morris pioneered the strategy of holding hate groups accountable through civil suits awarding damages so expensive that the defendants are forced into bankruptcy and closed. Over thirty people have gone to prison for plots to assassinate him, writes Kerry Kennedy, President, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Center for Justice and Human Rights and Honorary Chair, RFK Foundation of Europe, Onlus.

Morris drove me past the State Capitol, where Jefferson Davis took the oath of office for the Confederacy. That's also where, as Attorney General, my father, Robert Kennedy, flew in demanding that Governor George Wallace comply with the Constitution, end segregation and allow African-American students to register at the University. The day of their meeting, April 25, 1963, Wallace removed the American flag and raised the Confederate flag from the Capitol dome. His vision of a divided America did not prevail.

We visited the Rosa Parks Museum, with its surreal reenactment of the scene on December 1, 1955, when the white bus driver demanded that Ms. Parks relinquish her seat to a white man. It was a woman, Jo Ann Robinson, who, after learning Ms. Parks had been jailed, gathered volunteers, mimeographed 35,000 handbills, and called for a boycott of the city bus system. Three days later, citizens formed the Montgomery Improvement Association and elected Dr. Martin Luther King as President. He became the moral voice of the boycott. Starting Monday morning, 90% of the black community shunned the municipal bus system. The boycott lasted for thirteen months, until a Supreme Court decision declaring segregated buses to be unconstitutional took effect.

(*) Kerry Kennedy, President, Robert F. Kennedy (RFK) Center for Justice and Human Rights and Honorary Chair, RFK Foundation of Europe, Onlus.

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