Until recently you should have humbly counted among the nation’s truly great steps of progress the important changes in race relations in this country. As horrid as was the need for it to happen, things did change.

For centuries white Americans oppressed black Americans in a fashion indistinguishable from oppression by tyrannies everywhere. In my lifetime black people were legally and to high applause by racists and the citizenry in general not allowed to vote, were not allowed to attend schools, were not allowed to live where they wanted to live, not allowed eat, drink from water fountains or even go to the bathroom where where white America did its business.

More, in the hearts of much of America, while so much of America looked on approvingly, white Americans hated black Americans, beat and killed black Americans, belittled black Americans, treated black Americans as if they were dirt.

I saw it with my own eyes. In my lifetime. Maybe in yours.

This is not ancient history but only a few years ago. Just yesterday. Racism is our national poison, more than any other.

But black Americans defeated their oppressors. It took violence and struggle, violence against the blacks by the whites as so much of America smirked in approval, but, with struggle by blacks and their friends, progress was made. Liberals in government, in the courts and occasionally in the pulpits and hearths of the nation, worked with the victims of America’s racism to change things. For that, liberals are hated with a special intensity.

 Civil rights laws were passed. Social change was started. The vast, catastophic injustices of the American legal system were rudely set aside in the name of the very liberties the nation purports to champion.

The racists did not go quietly, and they found welcome and shelter in the Southern Strategy of the Republican party which formally opened its arms to the vile and hateful conservatives who are defined by their hate of black Americans and those who demanded equality. The Republican party recently apologized for its actions but the enclave of intolerance it established continues on to this moment.

Watching the 50th anniversary commemorations of the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School (at the resolve, particularly, of President Eisenhower and a Supreme Court which once stood for American justice and liberty, in contrast to what it has become now) you can think that things have come so far. And they have. That cannot be denied and it must not be denied lest the heroes of the Civil Rights War be diminished.

But there is so much farther yet to go. The resegregationists on the Bush-stacked Supreme Court today would unravel progress in name of asterisks and footnotes, stopping the process of progress for Americans of all color with the fig leaf of technicalities which are, in fact, a welcoming to the racist supremacy thinking of yesteryear. Yesterday. Today.

 The Coast Guard Academy investigates lynching symbols — nooses — left for black cadets and others working for tolerance and understanding. Racial affronts and intolerances show up in so many low and high quarters. The enabler George F. Will sees white Southerners as the victims, the aggrieved minority – “A candidate can succeed in giving an aggrieved minority a voice — e.g., George Wallace, speaking for people furious about the ’60s tumults,” he wrote as if George Wallace’s people were furious at rock and roll music or hippies dancing in parks. No, the “tumults” they were furious about was the movement to treat black Americans as Americans. Will knows that but prefers to launder the Wallaces and their segregationist ways because  they are the backbone of his party. 

Top GOP presidential aspirants avoid a black sponsored debate, lest their vital constituencies of racial hatred find offense. Today’s  Republican Uber-spokesman Bill O’Reilly is openly amazed that black people are humans, expressing astonishment that they don’t swear in restauarants and, mirable dictu, act almost like white people. His audience smirks, knowing that Old Bill is just kidding.  Alabama school systems are going back to their segregationist, separate but equal ways knowing that they once more have friends in high places to allow it to happen.

America’s heart has changed, though. As much as the haters may bemoan it and the despise the “tumults” that brought it to pass, justice and tolerance will not be easily vanquished. It is inconceivable that the American people could devolve to the terrible, terrible days of repression. But the pockets of hate remain — too often in the hearts of power.

We must not take a single step backward. Not one.