We wish you all the success in coming years. We will be reporting on the triumphs and failures of your Administration in the genuine hope that you are able to deliver on your promise to strengthen our nation and improve the lives of every American.
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court, I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch
counter and order as long as I could pay for it I’d be o.k. But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth,
and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in
society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to
characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break
free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding
fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and
Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the
Constitution is a charter of negative liberties. Says what the states
can’t do to you. Says what the Federal government can’t do to you, but
doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on
your behalf, and that hasn’t shifted and one of the, I think,
tragedies of the civil rights movement was, um, because the civil
rights movement became so court focused I think there was a tendency to
lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on
the ground that are able to put together the actual coalition of powers
through which you bring about redistributive change. In some ways we still suffer from that.
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