The Decline and Fall of the SCLC

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference declined into irrelevancy soon after the death of Martin Luther King. Ralph Abernathy proved unable to steer the SCLC ship into a relevant future, in no small part because the civil rights movement found itself rudderless without King and without a clear agenda. The movement never regained its power in this country. Major players such as Jesse Jackson and John Lewis are still around and active, but as a whole, the mainline African-American civil rights movement has followed organized labor into political irrelevancy.

This decline is certainly not helped by the SCLC's embrace of Michael Vick. I'm not sure what they see in defending Vick. It's true that many African-Americans see the treatment of their sports heroes like Vick and Barry Bonds as part of a broader racial war against them. We can't ignore those sentiments because they are grounded in truth. But they are also somewhat wrong-headed. No one is going after Vick because he is black. They are going after him because he fights dogs.

There are a million issues for the SCLC, NAACP, and other civil rights organizations to work on. African-Americans still receive a raw deal in this country. Police brutality, poverty, drug use, unequal education, housing that is desegregated in name only, etc., etc., are deeply important issues. To subsume these issues in order to defend a millionaire athlete who enjoys blood sports seems wrong-headed at best.

Via Good Nonsense.