“This Is a Time for Action”: On This MLK Day, We Honor Our 75-Year-Old Coalition’s Legacy, Courage, and Resilience
“Throughout our history men and women of all colors and creeds, of all races and religions, have come to this country to escape tyranny and discrimination.” With this reminder, President Harry Truman delivered a special message to Congress on February 2, 1948, urging lawmakers to enact a package of civil rights legislation unlike any before. It included a permanent fair employment commission, an anti-lynching law, a repeal of the poll tax, more adequate voting rights protections, and more to protect the “basic civil rights which are the source and support of our democracy.”
“Unfortunately, there still are examples — flagrant examples — of discrimination which are utterly contrary to our ideals,” President Truman wrote. “We cannot be satisfied until all our people have equal opportunities for jobs, for homes, for education, for health, and for political expression, and until all our people have equal protection under the law.”
President Truman repeated this call during his State of the Union address the following year, acknowledging that fulfilling the promise of equal rights and equal opportunities was among the highest purposes of government. Though Congress remained unreceptive, the civil rights community quickly swung into action.
Civil rights leaders — including A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, and Arnold Aronson, the eventual founders of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR) — knew the conditions were unpromising but were determined to support the president’s proposal and to continue fighting for the changes they’d long sought to the nation’s inadequate laws. They summoned more than 4,200 delegates from 33 states representing 58 organizations to Washington to lobby, over the course of three days, for civil rights legislation. Though no bills passed immediately following this National Emergency Civil Rights Mobilization that took place 75 years ago this week, it laid the groundwork for the formation of the LCCR — now The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights — the coalition that would eventually advocate for and win passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957 and every major civil rights law to follow.
Today, The Leadership Conference remains the oldest, largest, and most diverse civil rights coalition in the nation, counting more than 240 national organizations as members and continuing its role — established all those decades ago — as the lobbying arm of the civil rights movement.
The coalition is not backing down as the nation faces an incoming administration that has demonstrated a deep and dangerous hostility to the nation’s civil rights progress and that threatens real harm to communities across the nation.
The result of last year’s election does not change what people in America need, what the laws and the Constitution say, or what our values are as a nation. While governments change, our priorities do not. Inauguration Day and MLK Day — which share a date this year — are both powerful reminders that the work to protect and defend civil rights and multiracial democracy is worth it and must accelerate. They are also reminders that throughout the nation’s history, civil rights advocates have always faced “gigantic mountains of opposition ahead and prodigious hilltops of injustice,” as Dr. King said.
In the iconic 1967 “Where Do We Go From Here?” speech delivered fewer than eight months before his assassination, Dr. King, while acknowledging the progress that had been made, underscored the long way to go before the “promised land of freedom” would be reached. Dr. King stated that “This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action.”
The Leadership Conference is committed to this action — action that is meaningful, people-centered, and aligned with Dr. King’s yet unfulfilled dream. The coalition continues its work to protect the ability of all voters to equally and meaningfully participate in our democracy to ensure they have a voice in the decisions that affect their lives, their families, and their futures. This includes supporting passage of federal voting rights legislation, aggressive enforcement by the Department of Justice of the Voting Rights Act, efforts to improve accessibility and to protect and modernize the nation’s voting systems, measures that would rescind or overturn felony disenfranchisement laws, and action to ensure voters are free from the dangers of digital misinformation, disinformation, and hate speech.
Democracy can also be strengthened by ensuring a fair and accurate 2030 Census, as census data shape the future of all communities, including how federal government resources will be distributed each year and how many congressional seats are apportioned among the states. The federal court system is also critical to safeguarding democracy and civil and human rights. The president must select — and the Senate must only confirm — fair and independent judicial nominees who have a demonstrated commitment to civil and human rights, who are reflective and representative of the nation’s diversity, and who will commit to adhering to a binding code of ethics.
At the heart of the civil rights movement has always been a recognition of the basic human dignity of all people and of their right to live freely with justice and equal opportunity. This must include ongoing work to protect the rights of immigrants and to strongly oppose inhumane measures such as mass deportation, family separation, and privately run for-profit immigrant detention. It includes fighting for a criminal-legal system that operates in a just, equitable, and fair manner that allows all people to feel safe and be safe in their communities. And it must include supporting meaningful solutions to address the drivers of mass incarceration and racial disparities in incarceration and removing barriers to the successful reintegration of formerly incarcerated people back into society through access to employment opportunities, voting, education, housing, and public benefits.
Of course, The Leadership Conference supports the robust enforcement of the nation’s civil rights laws — laws whose passage the coalition helped to secure — to protect all people from discrimination. This includes protecting all people against disparate treatment and unfair policies that have a disproportionate effect on particular groups, and it means rejecting efforts to turn civil rights laws on their head by excluding historically marginalized groups from opportunity in education, employment, and in other contexts — instead of protecting them as the laws intend.
The nation needs equal educational opportunity from early care to higher education for students in safe, healthy, and inclusive school settings where they can read books and learn accurate history in ways that support critical thinking, an appreciation for differences, and a readiness for participation in a multiracial democracy. In addition, efforts are needed to preserve diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility programs and policies, raise the minimum wage, require earned paid sick days, create a sustainable system for paid family and medical leave, address gender and racial wealth gaps, foster workplaces free from discrimination and harassment, strengthen the right to bargain collectively, and improve health and safety standards.
Wealth remains stubbornly unequally distributed in the United States. Central to closing the racial wealth gap is addressing the fair and affordable housing crisis with a national, comprehensive housing strategy that includes supply-side and demand-side solutions designed to advance safe, stable, and equitable rental and homeownership opportunities while ensuring robust compliance with fair housing and lending laws. Regulators must end modern-day redlining and ensure that technological innovations help to reduce the effects of past and current discrimination and promote long-term financial health.
Every person also needs full and equitable access to comprehensive, high-quality, affordable health care, without discrimination, and access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health care, including abortion, that allows all people to make their own decisions about their bodies and health. People also need access to social safety net programs — such as Medicaid, CHIP, Medicare, Social Security, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Title X Family Planning Program, and the expanded Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit — that together have worked to reduce poverty in the nation for generations.
Additionally, the nation’s technology platforms and telecommunications systems must be available to all people, and media and Big Tech must respect the rights of and be accountable to the communities The Leadership Conference represents. Privacy rights are civil rights. Ensuring that technology works for everyone also means ensuring that data-driven technologies — including algorithmic decision making, artificial intelligence, and machine learning increasingly used to make important decisions about people’s jobs, economic well-being, access to critical resources and services, and more — protect civil rights, prevent unlawful discrimination, and advance equal opportunity. All communities, particularly those who are underserved, must also gain and continue to have access to affordable, reliable, and high-quality advanced communications services, as reliable internet is essential for work, education, health care, news and information, and access to critical government services and programs.
Undergirding all of this vital work must be the protection of the integrity of federal civil rights data collections. Good data are critical for policy development as well as to identify and remedy disparities that undermine equal opportunity and harm vulnerable communities. Good data can help assess and address the needs of underserved populations. Rigorous collection of reliable and meaningful data for civil rights purposes, and protocols that protect privacy, must remain core activities of federal agencies.
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We remember the nation’s civil rights progress not just because Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s birthday is this week and not just as we approach the federal holiday that honors him, but because this progress is at risk. MLK Day is never just a commemoration — it is a call to action. And this year’s holiday must be the loudest call ever.
Dr. King taught us that the dignity of all people must be respected, that freedom and justice are always worth fighting for, and that hate and darkness will never defeat the love and light that have guided us out of this nation’s shameful past. The majority of people in this nation still believe in solving shared problems, advancing policies to improve everyone’s lives, and shaping the future of all communities so that everyone can access the education, housing, health care, and good jobs they need and deserve.
As Dr. King told us, “we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.” The Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights remains committed to fighting for this future and will not back down during the next administration. The coalition’s 75th anniversary stands as a testament to the power of collective advocacy, and its resilience is rooted in several enduring principles: that progress requires solidarity, that justice demands vigilance, and that equality can only be achieved through persistent action.
The mighty and unified Leadership Conference coalition is up to the challenge as it fights forward together for an America — and for a future — that is more just, fair, inclusive, and free.
“When our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr., August 16, 1967