This is the 2001 quote from Obama that has some people all excited today:
"If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think, tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that."
Basically he is saying that there is only so much you can achieve through the court system because the function of the Constitution is in large part to limit the power of the Federal government.
He goes on to say that due to this over-reliance on the Federal courts, the civil rights movement to some extent missed the opportunity to advance civil rights through non-lawsuit related measures.
Imo he is absolutely correct; for example there really doesn't seem to be much progress made during the past few decades in the number of businesses owned by black Americans.
Some people of course will try to make a big deal out of what is pretty much a statement of fact. |
