Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America

by Stacey Abrams

Brown, like the freedom promised in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, meant little in real life. Blacks did not have the right to desegregated schools or integrated voting. They could only recite the myth of civil rights progress that they read about in the newspapers or saw on television. Without a state system forced to accept the federal edicts, racial oppression continued for years after change had supposedly come. This is one of the persistent problems of our ideal of democracy: grand, sweeping national laws or legal decisions announce a new way of behavior. Yet, our fifty separate states have little reason to fully adhere to the rules without being compelled to by threats from those higher powers in the federal system. Without the ability to demand obedience to the moral victories, what my parents and others experienced in the wake of civil rights victories was often just more of the same, executed quietly and without consequence. What made the Voting Rights Act real, what forced desegregation, were the local political leaders who made it so.