Just as I was sitting down to write a column on the Trayvon Martin tragedy, an e-mail arrived announcing a banquet in Washington next month to mark the 80th birthday of Norman Hill. Though his name is not widely known today, he would be high on my own personal list of the 100 most admirable New Yorkers.
Hill is just the man to talk to when one seeks the long view of where the civil-rights struggle is at in America today. He has spent his whole span in the civil-rights and labor movements. Nearly blind, he still commutes between his office in Washington and home in New York, an apartment in labor-union housing he shares with his wife Velma.
She was a young civil-rights radical when he met her in Chicago. He rose through the Congress of Racial Equality, assigned to integrate restaurants between Baltimore and Washington. He emerged as staff coordinator for the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and was but feet from the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King when he gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
The march was organized by two of Norman Hill’s mentors, A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. Randolph was a towering figure who built the first major black labor union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Rustin was his greatest disciple. They believed in organizing, nonviolence, coalition politics, programs and practical matters.
Practical but tough. Early in World War II, Randolph threatened a massive march on Washington if FDR failed to open the defense industries to African-Americans. FDR complied, cementing Randolph’s reputation as a leader to be reckoned with. Norman Hill eventually succeeded Rustin as president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute.
Norman and Velma were full of energy when I reached them by phone this week. She doesn’t think it would be right if there were no consequences for George Zimmerman over the killing of Trayvon Martin, even if Zimmerman was acting in self-defense. But she and Norman are devoting their time to the strategic issues in the civil-rights struggle.
One thing Norman cites is a famous article Bayard Rustin wrote in 1965. It was published in Commentary magazine under the title “From Protest to Politics: The Future of the Civil Rights Movement.” It was about the transition that would be needed after the decade in which the legal structures of Jim Crow were dismantled.
It was a decade that started with the decision of Supreme Court, in 1954, outlawing the separate-but-equal doctrine in public schools and ended, in 1964, with Congress passing the civil-rights acts. That transition is far from complete, Norman Hill suggests on the eve of his 80th birthday.
The movement has won many of its programs, ranging from the civil-rights acts, to the voting-rights acts, to the vast expansion of spending on education and training, and even a national health-care system. Our nation has also, in a glorious breakthrough, proven itself prepared to elect a black man as president.
My own view is that all this has served to illuminate the fact that the deeper problem is ideological. The state can do but so much; there rapidly comes a point where it retards the growth of jobs and freedom. The more shrill leaders who claimed the headlines in later decades are also losing relevance.
This week, The New Republic is publishing a column by John McWhorter under the headline “The End of Racial Demagoguery: Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are so over.” He writes that “not a single young preacher or politician has even started to acquire national influence by taking a page from their old playbooks.”
Norman Hill himself doesn’t criticize the other leaders. But it will be something to think about as the A. Philip Randolph Institute marks his 80th birthday amid the jubilee of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Who will write the next chapter of the struggle in which Norman Hill was such a hero?