Second Civil War

Rebirth of a Realist
Report from the Manhattan Insitute For Policy Research.


There is a wide disparity in the graduation rates of white and minority students. In the class of 2002, about 78% of white students graduated from high school with a regular diploma, compared to 56% of African-American students and 52% of Hispanic students.
• There is also a large difference among racial and ethnic groups in the percentage of students who leave high school eligible for college admission. About 40% of white students, 23% of African-American students, and 20% of Hispanic students who started public high school graduated college-ready in 2002.


From the book The Second Civil War by David Truskoff

The first time that I met LeRoy Jerome Moton was in March of 1965, one hundred years after the first battle of Selma. He was in his late teens, and the Messiah had come to his hometown. The six-foot four gangling youth glowed in the Messiah’s reflection.
It was all a beautiful dream. Martin Luther King, that very articulate, internationally famous, Black man had come to Selma Alabama to lead them to the Promised Land. LeRoy was ready to follow no matter what the cost; no matter what sacrifice had to be made, no matter what dangers had to be faced.
LeRoy Jerome Moton is an intense person, but he has a smile that could turn the Wicked Witch of the West into Mother Teresa. His very presence added to the excitement of being part of the worlds greatest love in, the 1965 Selma March that seemed to shake this country out of it’s one hundred year long Racist stupor.
When ever he came marching into town singing and laughing with a group of students behind him, you couldn’t help but get caught up in the excitement generated by the young pied piper who walked, always, like the Alabama mud was too deep.
The last time that I saw LeRoy we both shared a podium at the University of Hartford on Martin Luther King day, in 1997. His hair was silver and his young son sat in the first row of the audience. He was doing quit well. He had a good job, nice home and he was free of the frightening grip of depression and frustration that plagued him in the seventies and part of the eighties. It was a joyous reunion. I was so glad to see him, but I soon learned that his disappointment about America’s progress in ending racism that he saw as not only alive and well, but also developing new roots among both Blacks and Whites, was the same as my disappointment.
When students ask me the question, what has happened to white liberals in America, and why do they seem to be moving away from civil rights. I told them how I felt when Jessie Jackson called New York City “Hymie Town.” I felt betrayed. If I, as a white man, called New York “Nigger Town” I would be cast out of the society, but Jackson was not cast out. He is still accepted in the Black community as a leader, and he has his own TV program. I shall never forgive him, nor should anyone. If that kind of phrase comes out of his mouth, then it is part of his thoughts. To me he is a bigot. I do not think that Black people have ever assessed the lasting damage that Jackson has done.
I feel obligated to tell the students about the depth of the impact the O.J. Simpson trial had on race relations vis-a-vis white liberal America. I had to put that into perspective for them. I told them that in March of 1965 a Beautiful person named Viola Liuzzo was murdered by a group of cowardly, racist thugs as she drove along the highway in Alabama. She was on her way to pick up freedom marchers that wanted to return to Selma Alabama from Birmingham where the historic Civil Rights march ended.
I knew her and I knew how proud she was to be helping Doctor King and all the young people who she thought would get a better chance at life once segregation was defeated. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind who the killers were. The FBI. had a paid informer in the car that pulled along side of her car and emitted the fatal shots.
The men were brought to trial in a small segregated county in Alabama. The lawyer for the killers blamed “Communists” for the killing. He also tried to convince the all white jury that Leroy Moton the young black man riding with Viola might have been the killer. The defense lawyer, Imperial Klonsel Matt H. Murphy Jr. said, in his address to the Jury, “The nigger is an African, and everybody knows that the African lived by the tooth and the claw for three thousand years and never built anything on earth more advanced than a hut with a thatched roof.”
It was all a shame and a disgrace to American jurist prudence. The killers walked out of the courtroom free men and signed autographs as they left. Two members of the all white jury, frightened of what the K.K.K. might do to them, could not bring themselves to convict. But wait, I hear you saying isn’t that awful. How could that happen in an American courtroom? Yes, the lawyer who got them off; the racist jury and the frightened judge should all be condemned.
Now I ask you, dear reader, how could I not tell those students to think about what Black attorney John Cochran did in the O.J. Simpson trial? Did he not play the same race card? He even went so far as to have Minister Louis Farrakhan’s body guards come into the courtroom and menacingly stare at the almost all Black jury during the last days of the trial, just as the Klan stared at the all white jury during the Liuzzo trial. I ask you, where is the condemnation? Cochran is a hero in the Black community. He even has his own TV show, as does Jessie Jackson, although I doubt if many white liberals watch either one of them. Many liberals feel betrayed, as I do, and many take their hidden rage into the voting booths with them.
While Black intellectuals talk at each other, and the Black middle class seems preoccupied with escaping Black, the rage among poor blacks increases with each passing day, and the danger exists that when a spark ignites the rage, white liberals will have their own rage to deal with.
It appears that most African American people today cannot determine if they, as a group, are moving forward or backward. In the face of present day media control it is difficult to determine if we, as a nation, have made two steps forward and one step back, or one step forward and two steps back. Perhaps in the sixties we made one giant step and have been moving in inches ever since. LeRoy had no such problem that day in 1997, his speech was full of pessimism and anger.

Today in 2006 I ask you,Is America moving ahead, back or not moving at all?