Spring Break
Group Discusses Unfinished Civil Rights Issues
Heather Murdock
Issue date: 1/31/08 Section: News
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"Many of us have been - I don't want to say hoodwinked or bamboozled," said panelist Jeffrey Ogbar, the director of the Institute for African American Studies, "but many of us have a very narrow myopic understanding of what Dr. Martin Luther King was."
The speakers also included Davita Silfen Glasberg, the head of the sociology department, and Manisha Desai, the director of the women's studies program. Ronald L. Taylor, the vice provost of multicultural and international affairs hosted the event.
Desai and Glasberg discussed some of the current civil rights issues that would have concerned King. Predatory lending, according to Glasberg is a "modern example of the legacy he left of economic justice." Predatory loans have interest rates that can increase to a level that makes it impossible for borrowers to meet their monthly payments, she said. As a result, banks repossess their homes.
Racism in lending practices, according to Glasberg, is rampant. "In stark terms, African American borrowers in Hartford are three times more likely to receive high cost mortgages, regardless of their income." This inequity is echoed by studies done in many other cities, she said.
Desai discussed the relationship between King and the pacifist Indian leader Mahatma Gandhi. She called their work "unfinished revolutions in both racial injustice, in particular, and social justice, more generally."
A key to finishing those revolutions, she said, would be to reexamine King and Gandhi's approaches to reform. Both leaders focused on non-violent protest, a "consistency between the ends and the means," and the relationship between the powerless and the powerful. They worked to defeat unjust systems, not unjust individuals.
Ogbar talked about remembering King's legacy within the context of his time. He said that most Americans were "bamboozled by a very sanitized version of what civil right were about in the first place." The legendary bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., and the fight against segregation in public spaces are how people remember the civil rights movement, he said. Considering the "gross human rights abuses in the United States" at the time, "these were the least of their concerns."
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