We received the following comment from a reader who complains about our rhetoric of results as though any concept of economic and racial justice could be indifferent to actual results. A reply follows the comment below:

“Old line civil rights organizations, like LDF, run a severe risk of being marginalized with rhetoric like your last sentence above. Further, the challenges that black people face today aren’t close to those that Plessy threw at them. LDF should not be advocating for “our fair share” like the radical historical relics argued for. Instead, LDF should be arguing for equal opportunity and access; creative law making; rigorous law enforcement; and well informed stimulus plans. Then LDF should let the shares fall where they might.
LDF and the broader civil rights community should get off the rhetorical soap box and put forth specific plans that guarantee equal opportunity and access. There is a “Donate Now” box at the top of the page but to what exactly are we donating? Most of your blog readers are undoubtedly current on public events, so they don’t need a recitation of well known facts and statistics. What they need
is a well reasoned argument to support the work of LDF and others as they put forth specific plans. We know the house is on fire. But we don’t need a town
crier yelling “fire”. What we need is somebody who knows how to put out the fire.”

We did not write that the current economic crisis was a repetition of the challenge blacks had to overcome during the Plessy era. Rather, we wrote that this recession, global in scope and more severe than any since the Great Depression, presented blacks with their “greatest test since” Plessy. We used just a few of the many statistics that could have been used to make that clear.

Lee