Attorney general Eric Holder’s speech to Morgan State University graduates
Published: May 17
... They were courageous individuals – from Reverend Joseph Albert DeLaine, to Sarah Bolling, to Oliver Brown – who stood up and spoke out, often at great personal cost, for what they knew to be right. They were civil rights advocates and attorneys – like Robert Carter, Jack Greenberg, and Baltimore’s own Thurgood Marshall – who translated a growing, restless movement into a focused fight for legal change. And they were eminent jurists like Chief Justice Earl Warren and his eight colleagues on the United States Supreme Court – who, exactly sixty years ago today, unanimously declared, in Brown v. Board of Education, that separate was inherently unequal – and that racial segregation ran contrary to the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under law.
At the time of this revolutionary ruling, I was just three years old and still a few years away from starting school. My generation was the first to come of age in a post-Brown America. And although the vestiges of state-sanctioned discrimination affected many aspects of our lives – and continue to reverberate across the country even today – thanks to Brown and those who made it possible, your generation will never know a world in which “separate but equal” was the law of the land.
Of course, if that era seems like ancient history to you, that’s only because your forebears – including members of the Class of 1964 who are with us today – came together to make it ancient history. In the wake of Brown v. Board, people of all ages – and from every corner of our nation – were inspired and emboldened by the courage, the conviction, and the persistence of those who risked so much in the fight for freedom and justice. Today, as you walk across this stage, each of you will take your rightful place as heirs of these pioneers – from the Freedom Riders who defied prejudice to travel through the segregated South, to the marchers in Selma and Birmingham who risked their lives for a dream they knew they might not live to see; from the hundreds of students right here at Morgan who helped initiate the national sit-in movement, to a young man named Robert Bell, who would go on to graduate from Morgan State, and who – in 1960, at just 16 years old – was arrested for participating in a sit-in at a Baltimore restaurant that served only white customers ...
Chief Justice John Roberts has argued that the path to ending racial discrimination is to give less consideration to the issue of race altogether. This presupposes that racial discrimination is at a sufficiently low ebb that it doesn’t need to be actively confronted. In its most obvious forms, it might be. But discrimination does not always come in the form of a hateful epithet or a Jim Crow-like statute. And so we must continue to take account of racial inequality, especially in its less obvious forms, and actively discuss ways to combat it. As Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote recently in an insightful dissent in the Michigan college admissions case – we must not “wish away, rather than confront, the racial inequality that exists in our society. … The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to speak openly and candidly on the subject of race” ...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/transcript-attorney-general-eric-holders-speech-to-morgan-state-university-graduates/2014/05/17/d6b72284-ddd0-11e3-b745-87d39690c5c0_story.html
