3-01-2026 10:07pm

How Civil Rights Legislation Seems to Have Done More Damage Than Good to Black Communities

S RENEE GREENE Editor

“Black people were fighting for equality at that time. Had they not integrated, what would they have had to measure that equality against? What were they fighting to be equal to?”

Good question, but to get at the gap between belief and lived experience, reality has to be conceptualized.

For instance, what if that ONE Civil Rights Movement (there were four) in the mid-1960s had not happened and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had stayed in his "place" as a quiet southern Black Baptist preacher and waited for things to change as a matter of time?

When I was a child, I wrote an OP-ED to the Ledger-Enquirer about the ‘Stocking Strangler’ (Carlton Gary, supposedly, but they never found the real killer), and I caused a stir and mini panic after I received a letter from the Ku Klux Klan for speaking out about the racism that was automatically embedded in the investigation.

That was back when the newspaper policy of printing the names and addresses of people who wrote Letters to the Editor was changed--because of me. They started printing only first initial, last name and city/state after what happened in response to my Letter to the Editor.

The KKK sent to my home a news clipping of a lynched Black man hanging from a tree and a small plastic bag with a sample of gunpowder in it. Attached was a scribbled note: The answer to Black Power is Black Powder.

I was 12.

And I was grateful for my Black teachers who had taken notice of my skill and ability at writing when I was only five years old. My mother had taught me to read and spell very well by the time I was three, so I entered kindergarten already so far ahead of the others in the class that my teachers remembered having to bring newspapers to class for me to read because I had gone through every single grade school reader ever printed at the time. I was writing some of the most entertaining stories and poetry by then, had slammed the highest score in my sophomore class on the Regents Test, and ended up in my freshman year in college with a personal invitation from the Chair of the English Department at Columbus College, telling me that I could immediately proceed to my Junior/Senior level English classes if I wanted to do so.

If I see one of my grade school teachers to this day (most of them are deceased now), they still call me the "smart girl."

An article was written on Medium.com suggesting that “Civil Rights Did Harm Whites,” or words to that effect, and I could not disagree with the writer.

Many were so very butt-hurt about losing control over the descendants of former slaves, angry that they were no longer allowed to just lie about us, or treat us any kind of way and walk.

Yet even with the invoking of Dr. King’s name on the King National Holiday, the racism in the USA continues and persists, made even worse by our children being taken subject to what was allegedly so much "better".

But our teachers did better even with substandard accommodations and second-hand books. It was like music--the hungrier we were, the harder it made us work to BE better and DO better.

Those incentives to BE BEST are no longer there.

After civil rights legislation, mass incarceration, redlining, and unequal policing replaced overt segregation.

Freedom on paper did not translate into freedom in daily life, and though President Barack H. Obama tried his best to re-direct those years of injustice into something more equitable for everyone, many Black people missed the memo, too.

They pushed back against him as if they didn't understand the mental enslavement attached to doing so.

Welfare wasn't OUR problem, it was the fact that it was declared wrong and just totally unjustified for Black people to sit and eat at the same tables they built and eat the same food that they had fed everyone else with.

Trump entered the White House with racist tropes barking at his heels, just to take the kinds of actions meant to hurt Black people and end up hurting the ones who voted for him instead.

Did it take all that for him to discover that, overall, nationwide, more than 70-percent of the people on welfare are not Black? Until his time in office, less than twenty percent of people on welfare were Black.

Due to Trump's economic policies, the number of Black people who needed public assistance nearly doubled. That has not improved in the past year, and our jobless numbers have gone back into the double digits or close to it.

We haven't seen double digit unemployment since Obama left office, until now.

I know that without my Black teachers, I likely would never have learned to read, write, spell, pronounce my words correctly, learned the mathematics that I did learn ... everything I know, I learned from Black English and Math teachers, Black science teachers, et al.

But all I rememer after integration was not much being expected of me in school by white teachers, who would give me funny looks or push me off as if I was 'stupid' if I so much as asked a question a normal child would ask.

Many school policies were framed as “race-neutral”, but functioned to exclude Black children. I only surpassed most of it because I had been trained by my mother and my teachers in a segregated school in the 1960s before they got their hands on me.

But why do those who "have it all" still go into overdrive to keep us from 'arriving,' and still don't seem to be happy or satisfied with the fact that our ability to move is still pretty much constricted by race.

Is it because they won't be satisfied until they see us starving to death and foundering so they can 'prove' how ignorant we are?

The myth of progress silenced truth.

America often celebrates civil rights as a completed story, centered on a few heroic moments (Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr., the March on Washington, voting right, et al).

This created a false belief that racism was resolved. And Obama’s election created a false belief that racism had ended. Yet and still, there was some 'hope' that this faction of the Americas was finally past the ‘race piece’ and had CHANGED.

Most Black communities knew that the schools remain segregated even after it was against the law, and it appears to be to Black children's benefit that it did.

On the crux of integration, educated, “rich,” and middle-class Black people are still targeted, as was the case with Delory Lindo and Michael B. Jordan at the recent BAFTA Awards. Children are still belittled and brutalized in school. Churches are still bombed as lately as of the mid-2000s, and another small crowd of Black parishioners in an AME church in South Carolina was -in this era- gunned down during Bible study and prayer.

The system adapted and this made civil rights feel present though injustice persisted.

Perhaps, and most importantly, oppression evolved, but it didn’t end.

When explicit racism became acceptable during Donald Trump’s prior reign of terror, civil rights law was replaced by fascist policies and narratives that achieved the same ends as the Klan without exactly saying the same words or bringing out the dogs and fire hoses.

The words “law and order” replaced police brutality. “States’ rights” replaced white supremacy, as it was before, and “personal responsibility” replaced the refusal to acknowledge systemic hatred and generational harm.

In the longer term, Civil Rights were worse for Black people than many believed.

Those so-called “rights” existed without protection and enforcement.

The laws changed while white power structures stayed intact, mainly through evangelical mega-churches and political violence, with the nation declaring victory way too soon.

For Black Americans, civil rights were never just about laws.

We made the boots and the straps, and then were told we weren't good enough to wear them.

Civil Rights were supposed to be about the safety, dignity, economic security, and the right to exist without fear for ourselves and OUR posterity in the same land that we built, weaned, fed, and kept safe for everyone else.

This has yet to be realized.

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