Civil Rights are Human Rights Too

In the summer of 1964, hundreds of young people from both the North and the South, descended on Mississippi to take part in Freedom Summer. Doctors set up “freedom clinics” to provide basic health care to poor blacks shut out of the mainstream health care system. Legal clinics helped to protect the basic constitutional rights of the largely exploited, share-cropping population of the Mississippi Delta. Freedom schools, though illegal, were set up to teach the undereducated black populace traditional academic subjects and black history. Photos from the time period show the majority white, college-age volunteers knocking on doors at wooden shacks, sitting on floors or on porches chatting with black residents and a young Bob Dylan singing flock songs with volunteers and Delta natives in a backyard.

Looking back, the activism of the civil rights movement appears idyllic, but we know better. Before the volunteers left their training sessions in Ohio to go to Mississippi, James Forman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was frank about the danger they all faced: “I may be killed. You may be killed. The whole staff may go.” And of course, Andrew Goodman, James Chaney, and Michael Schwerner, none of whom had reached the age of 25, were killed by Klan members that summer in an attack that shook the nation.

Reading about those brave kids of yesterday reminds me of my contemporary friends and colleagues. They are deeply interested in and dedicate time and money to causes for worldwide human rights. I applaud the dedication to international human rights on the part of thousands of U.S. citizens. As our world becomes smaller, concern for our overseas neighbors is an important part of building a global village that allows all of its denizens to fully self-actualize free from government oppression.

Once my applause dies down, however, I am frustrated. The concerns of the rest of the world are pressing, but we’re not finished here yet! The battle for equality of opportunity, better education, housing, health care, access to employment and freedom from discrimination is hardly won. Our parents’ and grandparents’ generations did remarkably well pushing American along another step on its journey toward fulfilling its promise. The civil rights movement was step in a series of steps that began when the nation was in its infancy. It is unacceptable that the younger generations should now sit down on the job and turn its attention almost exclusively to injustice in other lands. Although the plight of minorities and the poor has improved since the late sixties, we have not arrived as a nation and I would appreciate it if we would stop acting as though we had. The status of the civil rights fought for so jealously are eroding in the areas of voting, protection from arbitrary and capricious police violence, access to equal housing and access to decent (dare I say “integrated”) education. So why do America’s young people largely ignore the status of civil rights to focus on international human rights? Civil rights are human rights.

International human rights are certainly glitzier. When I mention my desire to move to Montgomery, Alabama to work for the Southern Poverty Law Center (I do, and if you have an in, post a comment here), people turn up their noses and ask me why in heaven’s name would I want to move to Alabama. Yet, I have friends who have gone to Indonesia, Afghanistan, Iraq and Paraguay to do relief work and they are met with glittery-eyed oohs and ahhs. I suppose we prefer our poverty Third World style.

I don’t seek to set up a pecking order of rights-related work that makes one cause worthier than another. All humans are precious, regardless of the place of their birth. I do want to put America back on the map in the pantheon of places that need dedicated, energetic and idealistic human rights workers.

The people living in Appalachia hunting “nutrarats” for food need your energy and imagination to create a sustainable way of life. School-age children are in desperate need of tutors. Organizations that fight for a wide spectrum of civil rights would be deliriously happy for your time and selfless effort. If you want to adopt a child and you don’t mind that the child is not of your race, consider adopting a minority child. Since a study from U.C. Berkeley found that Caucasian children are five times more likely to be adopted that African-American children and 2.5 times more likely to find adoptive parents than Latino children, minority kids could use your love.

Please don't neglect the world's richest country; the world's poor are here too.