White politicians stoked white resentments as the “silent” majority shouted that they were the true victims rioted in hard hats against anti–Vietnam War protesters violently resisted forced busing and eventually elected Ronald Reagan, a man as notorious among Black activists as the segregationist Alabama Governor George Wallace.

And they witnessed King’s dream shattered to pieces like windowpanes facing hurricane-force winds.Īmerica’s betrayal of the civil rights movement gave way to urban explosions across the country, declarations of Black Power and interminable debates about the slogan’s meaning. They watched as friends and fellow travelers ended up at the bottom of the Mississippi River. They suffered the billy stick, fire hoses and police dogs.

and countless others risked everything to persuade the country to live up to its stated ideals and to rid itself of the insidious view that white people mattered more than others. We now face a moral reckoning: Americans have to decide whether this country will truly be a multiracial democracy or whether to merely tinker around the edges of our problems once again and remain decidedly racist and unequal. An odd admixture, but an understandable consequence of our troubled times. The videos of George Floyd and Rayshard Brooks dying have combined with the vulnerability caused by COVID-19 and the feeling that the country is broken to bring us all to the brink of madness and, apparently, to the precipice of significant change.

Books by eddie glaude jr