I first wrote The Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights Movement essay in September 2006. Due the emergence of Barack Obama as a Presidential Candidate, in 2008, I feel the necessity to update this article.

In the last quarter of 2007 alone, Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton each raised about $25 million apiece. During the course of the primary election fight they will spend Hundreds of millions of dollars! In fact, they are on a record setting pace for total spent for Presidential elections. So far, “Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama place first and second place in terms of the most money raised (at $116 million and $102 million respectively). Republicans' funds are less in comparison, with frontrunner John McCain raising $41 million, and Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee respectively at $88.5 million, $60.9 million, and $9 million.” [1]

The capitalist ruling class is voting, with most of their money, for a Hilary/Barack "change" and a side bet on a McCain "change" to maintain the status quo. But there will be no change in how the government is run, whether Clinton, McCain, or Obama win the election. Does anyone seriously propose that Obama or Clinton will oppose the money and power that elected them? Or that Obama will remember where he came from when his is elected, even though he does not come from the Black Community in the United States?

Clinton and Obama state that they will somehow end the war against Iraq, but they vote for funding the war, while they vote for the cuts for much needed social services and health, education and welfare. They say they oppose the racist drug laws, but they do not oppose these in the Senate, where they both hold power. Do people really believe that we will win national health care, in this country, when social services are being cut or privatized by the government? The only time when national health care has been won, anywhere in the world, has been when the working class has built their own political power, organized independently of the capitalist class. As Frederick Douglas often said, “power only recognizes power.” Where is our power? Where is own party? Where is our movement? - It is yet to be organized. Social Security would never have been won during the depression if it were not for the rise of the CIO and a mass Socialist Party.

They have no real position on any question that opposes the status quo. One thing to which they give lip service is that they support the rights of Blacks. But, while they are both opposed to the genocide and aids epidemic in Africa, they say nothing about the Black genocide - the infant mortality rate amongst Blacks (14 deaths per thousand), and the aids epidemic here in the United States, where the majority of aids victims are now Black.

Dr. Ahimsa Sumchai in her article, Black Flight, about the gentrification of Bay View Hunters Point (BVHP) in San Francisco, concludes her well written article with:

Prior to Hurricane Katrina it would have been very difficult for the ruling rich to remove the majority Black population of New Orleans. But as Greg Palast commented on the divisions in society, in his article, Burn, Baby, Burn - the California Celebrity Fires:

From New York to San Francisco and from Chicago to New Orleans - nationwide - the Democrat- and Republican-led Federal, State, and Local governments has been displacing the poor Black inner city populations to the countryside, leaving them to fend for themselves. Always remember, that the Democrats would have won the election in 2002, if they had stood up for the civil rights of disenfranchised Black people. The lesson that should be understood is that they do not support and defend civil rights, even if it means the Presidency!

It is important to point out that the demise of every social movement in the United States can be marked from the point that the leadership of the different movements subordinated those movements to support to the Democrat Party as the lesser the lesser evil to the Republican Party. It is especially important, in this day and age, to tell the truth that both of these political parties are owned by the ruling corporate rich in this country, just as they own over 95% of the mass media. [2] It is their government - not ours!

What I wrote in 2006 is being proven true during the Barack Obama Presidential Election campaign. Some in the Black "talented tenth" are even calling ex-President Bill Clinton, “the first Black President”. What a joke. “Slick Willie,” who very proudly states that he ended affirmative action, was proud of his racist drug laws, etc., and who, when he was out of office, moved his office to Harlem as part of that area's gentrification process!

In her recent Black Commentator article, Lenore J. Daniels wrote:

In her February 7, 2008 Black Commentator article, Dr, Daniels, who was organizing against slumlords in Chicago while Obama was working for them, states:

From my experience in San Francisco, where the powers that be elected Willie Brown, as the first Black mayor in order to start the final process of its gentrification in the Bay View Hunters Point area, the last Black Community in San Francisco, the ruling capitalist class is betting their money on Obama to overturn the gains made by the Civil Rights Movement.

Remember, the Emancipation Proclamation did not overturn slavery, when it comes to prisoners. The Prison Industry is now a growing capitalist concern, while the majority of prisoners are non-white and poor. The racist drug laws provide labor to these prison industries. It is not just segregation that is now coming back; slavery is also coming back through the prison system!

Footnotes: