By The Editors

A black American of mixed racial parentage sits in the White House as President of the United States, buoyed by substantial personal popularity in America and abroad. The ideas, activities and fashions of his wife, America’s First Lady, are followed closely and admiringly here and abroad as well.

Nothing could provide a more dramatic example of American society’s inclusiveness, its openness to talent – and of Black America’s determined drive over the last four decades to claim the full measure of their long-denied American citizenship.

So declared John Payton, President and Director-Counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, in giving the J. Alston Atkins Constitutional Law Lecture at Winston-Salem State University Thursday.

But Payton, speaking at one of the nation’s most historic black institutions of higher learning, also took on the challenging question – and assertion – President Obama’s election has inevitably raised: Does that mean the United States of America has become a “post-racial” society?

Summarizing Payton’s answer in two words: Not yet.

On the contrary, Payton argued, the work of reducing the severity of the problems that afflict black Americans, other Americans of color and poor people generally remains “daunting.”

These problems include: the deteriorating educational quality of inner-city public schools, and the resulting high drop-out rate of black and Latino males; the intensifying patterns of city-suburban residential segregation; the rise of black and Latino unemployment; and blacks’ hugely disproportionate rates of incarceration.

“These realities have democracy consequences,” Payton cautioned. “They can lead to the moral undermining of our ability to see each other as the peers I believe is crucial for our democracy.” That danger, he continued, means that attacking these multiple crises  is critical to completing the mission  set by LDF’s leaders and staff members “from Charles Hamilton Houston to Thurgood Marshall to right now  … to transform our country into an inclusive democracy.”

There could not have been a better forum for the discussion of Payton’s topic. One reason is that, as WSSU Chancellor Donald Reaves told the gathering, the purpose of the Atkins Lecture series, which was begun in 1991, is to explore the most pressing legal and constitutional issues of American society. A second is that the series, underwritten by the Winston-Salem law firm of Kilpatrick Stockton, is set in a state and at an institution central to the African-American freedom struggle. And the third is that it is named in honor of one of the most remarkable black Americans of his era, the late Jasper Alston ‘Jack’ Atkins.

Atkins’ connection to Winston-Salem State was long and familial. His parents were both prominent civil rights activists in early twentieth-century North Carolina and his father was a founder of Winston-Salem State. Atkins graduated with honors from Fisk University and, in 1922, Yale Law School, and practiced law in Oklahoma and Texas before returning home to North Carolina and lifelong service on the Winston-Salem State board.

From the beginning of his legal career, Atkins pressed the courts to recognize black Americans’ constitutional rights. That included arguing two cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. The first, in 1935, challenged the constitutionality of Texas’ all-white Democratic Party primary. The Court upheld the primary’s legality in Grovey v. Townsend, but in 1944, in Smith v. Allwright, reversed that decision and struck down Texas discriminatory voting process. That latter was a key component of the legal battering ram that the civil rights forces used to destroy Jim Crow.

Until his death, Alston continued to challenge every vestige of the once-pervasive barriers that had imprisoned blacks in a small corner of American society.

Most of those overt barriers have been dismantled now. But in his speech John Payton rhetorically asked the audience of WSSU students and faculty and other North Carolinians, “Are we a post-racial society? then added, “That question seems so premature that we often mock it.”

Nonetheless, Payton told those gathered in the University’s Anderson Conference Center auditorium that it could be considered seriously and answered by using the same benchmarks the United Nations applies to gauge how well or poorly any nation’s minority groups are faring. He listed several: education; housing patterns; quality of schooling; the criminal justice system; jobs; access to health care; and “effective political participation.” Payton said, albeit progress, the problems blacks still faced in these and other areas made it all too apparent that a post-racial society was not yet at hand.

Indeed, Payton went on, even President Obama’s election has provoked on the part of some whites a “parade” of hatred and suspicion that “has pushed paranoia” to an extraordinary level, creating an “atmosphere [that] is poisonous and scary.”

Payton, however, urged progressive forces to rise to the possibilities of the moment. Obama’s election was “a watershed event” not because it solved any of the country’s endemic problems, but because it “presented the possibility” of frankly confronting them. “It represented an opportunity,” he declared.

The key to taking advantage of that opportunity was to expand the boundaries of the democracy, to take “an inclusive view” of the opening words of the preamble to the Constitution – “We the people of the United States.”

That ideal, that challenge, Payton said, has always been the foundation of the work of the Legal Defense and Educational Fund – “to make us the democracy that we must become. And that challenge is not completed.”