Matt Bai’s essay, “The End of Black Politics” stayed on the NYT’s Top Ten list for several days and has spawned a sharp reaction from Black activists like Dr. Ronald Walters of the University of Maryland.  Walters argues that the Black middle class is backing away from civil rights activism because they don’t want to upset the white folks.  Civil Rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr. have always made the white establishment uncomfortable, Walters argues, and that is the last reaction upwardly mobile African Americans want to create.   The prime beneficiaries of the civil rights movement are content with the status quo not because they think it’s just but because its good for business.

Walters has a point, but he hasn’t come to grips with Matt Bai’s thesis.  The issues have changed.  You can get 200,000 people to drive to the national mall to dismantle Jim Crow segregation or to rally for the right to vote; but is mass action the best tactic when the locus of oppression shifts from the schools and the lunch counters to the courts and the prisons?

The jury is still out on that one.  Walters slips Jena into a litany of civil rights cases highlighted by marching feet and suggests that the September 20th protest saved the Jena 6 from “a legal lynching”.

Not so.  The march on Jena demonstrated that segments of Black America are deeply concerned about the impact of the criminal justice system on young African American males.  That much is true.  But the current team of top-flight attorneys representing the defendants was in place prior to the march and did not assemble because of it.   Friends of Justice worked with a wide variety of civil rights organizations to put the legal team together.  Jena 6 attorneys were scared to death of the September 20 march because they were afraid it would make their job harder.  I had difficulty talking them into allowing the defendants to be a part of that historic event.  Subsequent events (especially the BET fiasco in Atlanta) validated these concerns.

The September 20 revealed the depths of concern within the African American community, but when the vast throng of protesters left town the only people with a long-term plan were the attorneys representing the defendants (many of whom are white).  The men who led the march didn’t understand the legal issues in Jena and didn’t particularly want to understand.  They came for a photo op, they got what they were looking for and they hit the road.  They had no long-term plan.  They came to Jena because the cameras were there; and they left the moment the cameras were gone.  Without the attention of the media, the civil rights celebrities wouldn’t have come in the first place. 

The household names who attracted big crowds to a small Louisiana town had a role to play–nobody was coming to Jena because Friends of Justice asked them to.  The presence of civil rights celebrities swelled the crowd and expanded media attention–at least momentarily. The cameras love Mr. Sharpton as much as Mr. Sharpton loves the cameras.  But Friends of Justice got the injustice in Jena to the national media and hard working attorneys put Reed Walters and Judge JP Mauffrey on the defensive. 

Was Jena the beginning of a new civil rights movement?  Not at all.  Jena demonstrated the potential for such a movement, and that’s important.  But a genuinely new civil rights movement will require new strategies crafted in response to new issues.  Applying old methods (mass marches, for instance) to new problems (like our broken criminal justice system) won’t get us where we need to be. 

The justice system disproportionately affects Black America, no doubt about it; but it also damages Latinos and poor whites.  The problems are systemic and cross racial lines.  Only a unified, multi-racial coalition can bring long-term change. 

The criminal justice system as we now know it was shaped by white politicians exploiting the paranoia of white voters.  So long as the white electorate responds to law ‘n order, lock-’em-up, tough-on-crime rhetoric, mass incarceration will persist.  Meaningful reform will come when the white electorate moves beyond fear.  A strictly black politics can’t make that happen.