Civil rights lessons focus on 'opportunity'

Tuesday

Mar 4, 2014 at 5:25 PM

Derrick Johnson is the president of the Mississippi NAACP and displays a passion for civil rights, the civil rights movement, and the history of civil rights in America. Johnson spoke at the 20th annual “Blacks in Government” (BIG) scholarship luncheon held Feb. 27 in the Oak Ridge Civic Center — providing a history of the U.S. civil rights movement and the modern lessons everyone can take from it.

Russel Langley/The Oak Ridger

Derrick Johnson is the president of the Mississippi NAACP and displays a passion for civil rights, the civil rights movement, and the history of civil rights in America. Johnson spoke at the 20th annual “Blacks in Government” (BIG) scholarship luncheon held Feb. 27 in the Oak Ridge Civic Center — providing a history of the U.S. civil rights movement and the modern lessons everyone can take from it.

Johnson began his presentation by marveling at the fact Oak Ridge was one of the “homes” to World War II’s Manhattan Project. He said he knew of the project, but thought that “it was in a desert in Arizona somewhere.”

He said that the men and women of all races and nationalities who came to work on the project came for the “opportunity.” From that point on, opportunity was the centerpiece of his speech.

Blacks in Government was founded in the 1970s to not only give blacks a voice, but to provide scholarships to help people be better positioned for numerous opportunities, he said.

This year is the 50th anniversary of the 1964 “Freedom Summer” in Mississippi, which Johnson referenced as the culmination of a concept centered on opportunity.

The infrastructure for the Freedom Summer movement was provided by black WWII veterans who returned home and noticed they didn’t have the opportunities they had been fighting for, Johnson said. While Johnson spoke of opportunity as a good thing, he also warned of the negative aspect of opportunity. Those in power have often used opportunity to divide those whom they manage, and those divisions have come along the lines of race, gender and class, Johnson said.

As his focus turned to U.S. civil rights history, he made a statement that caused an audible reaction from the audience — reminding those in attendance that Martin Luther King Jr., who gave such an historic speech at the March on Washington as a participant, was not the architect of that event.

“Martin Luther King was invited to the march and gave the best speech,” Johnson said.

The organizer of the march, according to Johnson, was a man named Bayard Rustin. An Internet search revealed that Rustin was a night club singer and peace activist in as early as the 1930s and 1940s.

Johnson also spoke of the Mississippi Project of 1964. He said that those who returned to Mississippi from the March on Washington soon realized that the march did little to change reality in Mississippi. This project, according to an online search, was a push in the summer of 1964 to register as many African-American voters in Mississippi as possible.

Johnson transitioned his speech to modern issues with a discussion on health care and the impact that “race politics” has had on the issue. Health care is not an American right, he said, it is a basic human right. Johnson spoke of an unnamed poll that asked people what they thought of “Obamacare” versus the Affordable Care Act.

“We don’t like that ‘Obamacare,’ but we like the Affordable Care Act was the result of the poll,” Johnson said.

Johnson’s next target was what he called the privatization of public education. According to his statistics, 17 percent of charter schools perform better than public schools, 34 percent perform the same as public schools, and 43 percent perform worse than pubic schools. He said the privatization of education is more about profit than preparing children for opportunities.

“Children currently have less opportunity than their parents did,” Johnson said.

In his closing comments, he said that societies are measured by: how well they prepare their children, how well they care for their elderly, and how well they protect the disadvantaged.

He also admonished the audience to look forward and not focus on the past.

“The lessons of Black History Month are not about yesterday, but about all the days to come,” Johnson said.