Jake Moser
News Editor
Despite the legal successes of the civil rights movement and the fact that there is now a national holiday named after Martin Luther King Jr., one of the movement’s most prominent organizers, we are still a long way from racial equality, said Associate Professor of English Dick Reavis in a lecture Wednesday night.
In his speech, titled “200 Days in the Civil Rights Movement,” Reavis recounted his time as a 19-year-old, white southerner working with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in southwest Alabama during the ‘60s.
It was a dangerous time in the Deep South, Reavis said, discussing how his view of race was shaped by the perils he and other civil rights organizers commonly faced, which included murder, kidnapping, police brutality and a racist criminal-justice system.
Though Reavis said Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders are glorified by politicians and the media today, there is still a lot that they don’t tell us.
“When we passed Civil Rights legislation, I thought white people would observe these laws and black people would get jobs,” Reavis said.
However, after almost 50 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1965 passed, African Americans are still being discriminated against economically, Reavis said.
“About one-third to one-half of black people still live in what we would call the ghetto in the ‘60s,” Reavis said. “When black people came [to the U.S.], they did the lowest and the dirtiest jobs that many of them still do now. White people thought that black folk just wanted to be in the same restaurant as them and go to the same schools as them, but what they really wanted was to have the money to sit in these restaurants. They didn’t care who they were sitting with.”
Reavis said part of this problem lies in how the Civil Rights Movement is viewed today, and how the activist agenda in the 1960’s has been misinterpreted.
According to Reavis, the Civil Rights Movement is praised for its non-violent protests and message of peace, while King’s economic message is largely ignored.
King was a socialist who believed economic parity was one of the major ways to eliminate racism and racial inequality, Reavis said.
“People today don’t regard Dr. King as a leader of black people, they regard him as an American hero,” Reavis said. “All he was concerned about was the welfare of his people. He was martyred, but his economic message isn’t mentioned. The reason we still have race problem is because white people have been deceived by economic interests. If Dr. King were here today, he’d still be raising hell.”
Furthermore, Reavis said King’s promotion of nonviolent protests and brotherhood has allowed public figures and politicians, such as Gov. Pat McCrory, to say they support the civil rights movement even though their policies contradict King’s preaching of the importance of economic equality.
“Dr. King gets more ‘white’ every year in the sense that he becomes less black, less red, less socialist in the media’s portrayal,” Reavis said. “McCrory made comments supporting Dr. King, but King died defending the rights of garbage workers to unionize, but there are laws in North Carolina preventing unions. McCrory is not with King, who was to the left of Obama and Clinton.”
According to Reavis, economic equality is key for racial equality.
“[All races] need extended unemployment and medicaid; the safety net is there for all of us, not just black folks,” Reavis said. “But white people don’t understand that. When we, as whites, start looking out for ourselves without thinking about race, black people will be better off themselves. If you look out for yourself, if you want tuition rates to decrease, naturally, it will benefit black people too, but by not looking out for yourself, you victimize all of us.”
“The civil rights movement was a movement of human beings,” Reavis said. “But that’s part of what they don’t tell you.”
Reavis spent his time with the SCLC in Morango County, Alabama, which, to this day, hasn’t elected an African-American to public office. During his time there, Reavis was arrested seven times, jailed at least nine times and sentenced to six months of hard labor.