NorthStar News - Walter L. Fields Jr.:
While there were allusions to the partisan preferences of civil rights leaders during the 1950s and 1960s, there was never a public expression in the advocacy of the ‘Big Four’ – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Whitney Young of the National Urban League and James Farmer of CORE – that made partisanship the centrifugal force of their demands for justice and equality. It was the strength of their demands for constitutional protections, based upon the equal application of rights, that served as the basis for their making no distinction of the parties controlling the White House or Congress. It is a lesson we need to re-learn as a movement that once rested upon the idea of full emancipation and citizenship has been compromised by the accommodations we make in deference to partisanship.
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