The civil rights movement failed. That is why the wokies say America is racist.
I was on both sides in 1964.
On the one hand, I was made president of the San Francisco organization that was created to save Lowell High School, the merit-based high school that the school board wanted to make open to all students. We won that battle and then had to fight it again,70 years later, in 2022. I still believe that merit is a core ingredient in the structure of America. All three of my children later went to Lowell.
On the other hand I played a significant role in the design and implementation of school busing in San Francisco, the first city outside the South to have court-mandated busing. I vividly remember making a presentation to the parents at Hoover Jr. High on the busing plans for their school. I have never faced an audience with so much hatred in my life. Parents couldn’t stand the idea of busing for racial integration.
Busing was a total failure. Half the population of public school children left the public schools. From 80,000 enrolled in 1964 to 40,000 by 1984. Parents with school age children moved out of San Francisco or enrolled their kids in private schools. The black school children did not improve their test scores. Nationally school busing was a failure.
Add to that failure, the generous Civil Rights payments to blacks from 1965 for the next two decades did little to change the status of the general black community. Since it provoked the destruction of the black family, it degraded the status of blacks and brought on the greatest expansion of black crime in the 20th Century. The second failure.
I also brought the first and most successful employment discrimination lawsuit on behalf of minorities and women in 1971. This had positive benefits for all groups but ended up having two perverse effects.
It was not appreciated by any groups, though the reality was impressive. The results were viewed as failures partly because the homeless population grew rapidly, made up largely of black men, who became very visible. Leading to the growth of the perverse DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) of today.
It also brought women into the higher ranks of business, successfully. Which had the perverse effect of raising the income of married couples which in turn dramatically increased the price of housing in America. An increase in prices that today is a major barrier to home ownership by everyone in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s.
Multiple failures and I was there at the start. These failures have resulted in the ‘wokies’ of modern life who have tried to create more equal outcomes in life for blacks, primarily, due to the failures of the past five decades of government programs.