that supported the rights of people of color were decided by courts of 9 justices, 8 white and one lone Black.

Those white justices were relatively liberal and were appointed by relatively liberal presidents including the Republican, Dwight Eisenhower. It was Eisenhower, a white president and not ultra-liberal president, who enforced Brown v. Board of Education in Little Rock.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education

True, Black people, supported by white activists, demonstrated non-violently but persistently for civil rights under the direction of Martin Luther King, supported by a lot of liberals including Robert F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey and Lyndon B. Johnson. But their movement would have failed had it not been for the fact that we had a liberal majority in Congress that was elected thanks to the liberal ECONOMIC POLICIES of FDR and subsequent presidents prior to passage of the Civil Rights Act.

The Civil Rights Act was passed by a majority including many white members of Congress with no support to speak of from white Southerners. It took a president who was liberal on both social and economic issues, Lyndon B. Johnson, to sign the Civil Rights Act.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1964

All of these decisions and laws were decided or passed by relatively safe Democratic majorities in the Supreme Court and Congress that were won in a nation that had a strong industrial base, strong unions and an liberal economic policiies.

The tide against liberal majorities in Congress and the Supreme Court date back to the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the Viet Nam War. Following the signing of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, Goldwater won five states in the South in the presidential election.

n 1968, Nixon ran on the Southern Strategy,, which was opposed to Black equality at the most elementary level. He won the South, and the South which had prior to the Civil Rights Act voted Democratic thanks in great part to FDR's economic policies.

Since the 1968 election of Nixon, we have elected only three Democratic presidents, two of whom were from the South. The third was a Black president. Thanks to our failure to elect sufficient numbers of liberal Democrats, regardless of race, to Congress, we are unable to pass legislation either on important economic issues, voting rights or justice for Black people on the streets, in their contact with the police and in general. Really vital law enforcement reform as well as the passage of environmental legislation, the repeal of damaging trade agreements and the passage of trade agreements that support the rights of humans and not corporations, as well as domestic economic reform will only be possible when we have both a very liberal president AND VERY A VERY LIBERAL MAJORITY IN CONGRESS AND ON THE SUPREME COURT.

So, no, we don't get to vote for just whomever we want to vote for if we want to change our country. Certainly, Obama's administration is proof of that. I like Obama very much, but he has not been able to make the changes he probably wants to make because he has not had the support of a liberal Congress. To get a liberal Congress, voters have to think strategically. You have to choose candidates who are very liberal but who know how to appeal to a very broad base of voters and to attract new voters to the polls. Describes Bernie Sanders to a tee.

. . . .

It was FDR's economic policies that improved the lives of white and Black Americans, white Americans more than Black Americans, but ultimately, all Americans that made it possible to have a majority in Congress that would pass the Civil Rights Act, and other legislation that was necessary to improve the lives of Black people.

Today, minorities are potentially a larger portion of the electorate in the past, but in spite of the urgency and importance of Black issues including Black Lives Matter, judging from the past, especially our losses in 2014, we Democrats cannot expect to elect a majority in the Congress unless we all work together.

To gain votes and to get out the votes of all Democrats in the US we have to focus on both equality and justice issues and above all environmental issues, because there will be very little for any of us to argue about if we continue to destroy our environment at the current rate: economic equality and justice, racial equality and justice, gender equality and justice, environmental equality and justice. All of these issues.

We will not succeed in one area without succeeding in all of them.

We cannot win elections if we focus only or overwhelmingly on racial and gender issues and do not focus also on economic and environmental issues. The majority, thus far, is just not there if we narrow our focus.

It is not a choice between these issues. We have to choose all of them.

If Black people want to continue the current situation in which the federal government does not have the legal authority to do much about the police brutality at the local level, they cannot make the mistake that the union members made in 1980. They need to support the truest, strongest progressives in the country. In the presidential elections, that means voting for Bernie Sanders.

If Black people or union members vote for right-wing or our middle-of-the-road, slow-to-move-toward justice candidate, Hillary Clinton, we will lose in the general election.

It's our failure to emphasize and explain the need for economic justice that ended the Democratic majority in Congress. We need to return to emphasis on economic issues if we are to have a strategy that will elect enough truly liberal Democrats to Congress to make progress on environmental and most of all on racial issues.

We are nearing a time when people of color will have a majority. I think we may already be there in California. That's great. But we aren't there in many states including mid-western states. The political reality is that we need liberal members of Congress from many states including Southern states. We can't wait until people of color are in the majority in enough states to elect a strongly Democratic Congress.


BLM is absolutely right on their issues, but from what I can tell, they are wrong on electoral strategy. They have to work with white liberals to get what they want. Politics is a matter of mutual support,, of coalitions. I know that Black DUers don't like to hear this, but we have to work together, and we need to support liberal Democrats who will go further on justice issues, racial, economic and especially environmental than the Carter, the Clintons and Obama have gone.

That's the reality. It may not be fair, but it is the reality. Think about it.

Until we get a strong, strong liberal majority in Congress, the racial injustice in police departments and neighborhoods is in the control of local authorities. The president can't do much about it.

So the strategy to achieve racial justice and to stop the killings of Black people by law enforcement has to be to elect a strongly liberal, a truly liberal majority to Congress as well as a truly liberal president.