Catharine Dworkin - Pornography and Civil Rights - A New Day for Women's Equality

no Black person lived independent of it no matter where they

lived, because de jure segregation meant that the authority of law

applauded the debasing of Black people. Every Black person

was affected adversely in their rights and dignity by de jure segregation, humiliated by its very existence. De jure segregation also had this deep and pernicious ef ect: it made de facto segregation

look benign by comparison. Institutionalized racism had two

ostensibly distinct, even opposite systems serving to validate it.

In the South, this racism had the authority of law. In the rest of

the country, the social inferiority of Blacks had the appearance

of being natural, not imposed by force.

De jure segregation was destroyed over many years because

vast numbers of Black people with some brave white al ies

fought it, sometimes at the cost of their lives.

De jure segregation was fought in the courts and in the streets.

“The streets” included shops, restaurants, buses, hotels, parks,

toilets, because of the high priority put by the movement on integrating public accommodations. Much of this activity was il egal. The courts and the streets were not separate arenas.

When the Supreme Court disavowed segregation in public

education in 1954, it was left to Black children to desegregate

the schools. They faced white mobs led by armed police and

elected white of icials. The children, not the Supreme Court,

integrated the schools. When Rosa Parks refused to give up

her seat to a white man on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, on

December 1, 1955, she was arrested and convicted for breaking a state segregation law. The Black community organized a boycot of the Montgomery buses that eventually led to their

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Pornography and Civil Rights

desegregation. Endless acts of civil disobedience resulted in

perhaps hundreds of thousands of arrests over a period of at

least a decade; marches led to continuous confrontations with

violent police; civil-rights activists used the courts, sometimes

as litigants, sometimes charged as criminals.

The courts were the courts of segregation; north or south,

federal or state, they had protected segregation. The streets were

the streets of segregation. The police were the police of segregation. The vote was the vote that had kept segregation inviolate. Civil-rights activists confronted the institutions of segregation because they wanted to destroy segregation. They went to where the power and injury were and they confronted the power

that was causing the injury. This power hurt them whether or

not they fought it. In fighting it, however, they forced it to reveal itself—its cruelty and its sadism but also its premises, its dynamics, its structural strengths and weaknesses. Each confrontation led to another confrontation, more and worse social conflict, often more and worse police or mob violence. The courts

led to the streets and the streets led to the courts. The good judicial decisions led to the armed police who did not accept those decisions, which led back to jail and back to the courts. There

were also in time negotiations with two Presidents of the United

States (Kennedy and Johnson) and the Justice Department; then

back to the street, back to jail, back to court. There were battles

and compromises with federal legislators; then demonstrations,

marches, civil disobedience, jail. In the impoverished rural areas

of the Deep South, civil-rights workers taught illiterate Blacks

to read and write so they could pass the literacy tests that were

being used to keep Blacks out of the voting booths. The civil-

rights workers were met with white violence. So were the Blacks

who tried to register to vote, throughout the South.

The social conflict was real. Many were hurt and some were

killed. The conflict escalated with each confrontation, inside

the courts or in the streets. Each confrontation became more

costly, both to the civil-rights activists and to the white-su-

premacist society they were fighting. Each confrontation

forced people throughout the society to ask at least these two

fundamental questions of power and dignity: Who is getting hurt

The Meaning of Civil Rights

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and why? By attacking de jure segregation on every front, however dangerous or difficult, the civil-rights activists made

the cost of maintaining the racial status quo higher and higher.

Eventually it became too high. The Civil Rights Act of 1964

opened up public accommodations, first in the South, later

everywhere, to Black people. The Voting Rights Act of 1965

opened up the voting booths.

The high cost of maintaining the status quo forced change;

and so did the increasing moral authority of the protesters.

They risked everything. Their bravery indisputably expressed the eloquence of their humanity to a nation that had denied the very existence of that humanity. Each assertion of

rights enhanced the persuasive power of those who demanded equality. The moral authority of the protesters eventually exceeded the moral authority of the state that sought to crush

them. They won access to public accommodations and to the

voting booth; and they won the respect of a nation that had

hated them. De jure segregation no longer set the standard for

the contemptuous disregard of the rights of Black people; instead, Black people set the human standard for courage.

Principles:

1. Confront power by challenging it where it is strongest,

meanest, and most entrenched. (For instance, white supremacy was strongest in the legally segregated South; meanest in the streets, including in public accommodations; and most entrenched in the courts. ) 2. Intensifying and escalating social conflict leads to social

change.

3. The status quo must become too costly for the dominant

society to bear.

4. The moral authority of those confronting entrenched

power can be a force for change.

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Pornography and Civil Rights

Our contemporary understanding of civil rights—what they

are, what they mean—comes out of the Black experience: ’the

human rights of Black people—their rights of citizenship and

personhood—were violated in de jure and de facto systems of

segregation. Civil-rights legislation grew out of the specific

configurations of Black exclusion from society, dignity, and

rights. Other groups were also af orded legal protection from

discrimination. Where the pat erns of discrimination experienced by those groups were analogous to pat erns of Black exclusion under segregation, civil-rights laws remedied longstanding, systematic deprivations. For instance, the disabled, now protected under civil-rights legislation, have a right of