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February 21, 2006
Celebrating Community….And Giving Back
Posted at February 21, 2006 10:56 AM in Race Relations .
By David L. Brewer III
VADM, USN
Commander, Military Sealift Command, Washington, D.C.
Achieving racial and gender diversity is harder than rocket science. That's what I tell audiences whenever I speak. In other words, it's easier to intercept a missile traveling more than 2,000 miles per hour in space than it is to achieve full racial and gender diversity. Is this assertion overly pessimistic? Perhaps. However, keep in mind that history informs the future. So, let's examine the facts.
I recently had the privilege of attending The Washington Post Book Club's session with the Pulitzer Prize-winning author, Taylor Branch. Mr. Branch was starting a book tour to introduce the last book in his trilogy on the King years, "At Canaan's Edge - America in the King Years 1965-68."
One of the most profound and prescient perspectives from several of the figures in "At Canaan's Edge" is how humans react to compelling change. After the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights and 1965 Voting Rights Acts, President Johnson correctly predicted that the Democratic Party would lose the South for many years.
Some of the Civil Rights activists, ever mindful of what happened during reconstruction after the civil war, correctly predicted an initial improvement in race relations and progress to be followed by a backlash and decline. After the emancipation of slaves and a period of racial progress during reconstruction, the backlash and decline were legalized in 1896 by the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision: separate but equal. [Read More]