Rev. Jesse Jackson is going to Washington next month to lead a Rainbow/PUSH march on behalf of organizations from all over the United States With him will be students from 200 colleges and universities.
Once again, the nation's master of mobilizing people on behalf of honorable causes will invoke justice through public action; this time to protect affirmative action in our educational institutions.
In the grand sweep of history, peaceful protest has been mostly ineffective. History gives us no indication that pyramid builders got relief from the Pharaoh by protesting the onerous labor required to lift those blocks of rocks or that Rome's leaders obeyed citizens shouting "Down with Caesar."
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, workers suffered from billy club-wielding police officers while on strike for better pay from factory owners.
Progress and justice in the United States come from our legislative halls and high courts, where the blessings of law are rendered, where reason and devotion to Constitutional ideals are observed.
On April 1, Rev. Jackson and his followers will march at the very center of our source of American justice, the U.S. Supreme Court, as it hears arguments in a case against the University of Michigan that would cripple affirmative action in admissions of minority students.
Rev. Jackson said last week that a decision against the university is the most significant threat to civil rights in our lifetime.
The civil rights leader is heir to history's greatest civil rights genius, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., one whose public action and moral stature in less than a decade transformed American civil rights law.
Rev. Jackson's leadership of thousands to the ultimate sanctuary of American law in the nation's capital is in itself a stroke of genius. It dramatizes in the form of living witnesses those principles for which Rev. King gave his life.
Were the court to rule in favor of those who are trying to eviscerate America's affirmative action admissions policy, it would reduce higher education to old, primitive levels.
Rev. Jackson believes that were the high court to destroy the affirmative action principle, the results could be catastrophic. Rules that give women college athletes equal access to sports under Title IX could end, and even racially balanced voting districts could be abolished.
Some day the need for affirmative action in college admissions will itself be history. Until then, the high court must not deal a fatal blow to a popular and effective American policy that's exercised in the halls of academe, that enriches our nation and that advances the very purpose of education itself, to enlighten the entire populace.
During an hour in which vocal protesters are wringing their hands about a Washington war policy which they call failed in retrospect, Rev. Jackson is acting with vision about the future, not with complaints and lament about questionable past policy.
His Washington march has a goal. It is based on a conceptual framework into which he leads serious thinkers and dedicated activists who insist that the future not be damaged for millions of minority students by a court decision that would itself become failed policy.
Article copyright REAL TIMES Inc.
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