President Barack Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court was a poignant moment. For me, as someone who has done civil rights work with the Hispanic community nearly forty years, and for many civil rights veterans, her ascendancy capped many decades of struggle to open the doors of education to competent and skilled Latinos.
The universities and colleges in the northern states and the Ivy League were the first to reach out to minority communities, typically because of pressure from white students on the inside and community leaders on the outside. Much of this came from student sit-ins and protests. Education was always a priority – a key in the movement.
In my own experience with migrant laborers in Michigan, we tried to make connections for scholarships to the state’s colleges. The first migrant high schooler from Texas whom I helped connect to Michigan State University eventually became a lawyer with the United Auto Workers – a dream come true for both of us. It was a perfect example of people in the majority and minority communities striving together for a better future for the next generation.
In the many years during which I had to honor of representing César Chávez in Texas, his message was always two-fold: justice for farm workers, and education for the children. I’ll always remember the mothers in Colonia Las Milpas in south Texas, who would carry their children across the colonia when it flooded, as it often did, to put them on school buses parked along the county road -- so great was their hope that education would lift their children out of the poverty and injustice into which they had been born.
As Judge Sotomayor’s appointment dramatically reflects, progress came; and many leaders rose, locally and nationally. Politics was transformed, and before long there was more room at the table than before.
But there is a downside. We always assumed that simply opening the doors to the next generation would mean that group – our children – would turn around and do the right thing – open the doors of opportunity even further for others – just as Sotomayor did when she was in Princeton undergrad and Yale law.
To be sure, many have walked through academia and excelled at it and have given much back to the community for its future, such as Obama and Sotomayor themselves.
However, to a disappointing degree, we did not do a better job of installing that sense of community responsibility in the next generation; we just believed it would happen on its own.
Many in the “next generation” don’t remember they are where they are because of the struggle that went before them. Nor do they appreciate the need to involve themselves in the next stage of the struggle for equality and opportunity. The years of creative opportunity-building by Hispanic students on campuses, for example, are waning.
Volunteer work, community activism, and attention to molding legislation are sparser. Many focus their attention only on themselves and earning money, but do not continue the legacy of striving for a more just society for those held down from raising themselves up. Their modeling of the American dream often lacks the communitarian perspective many had hoped they would add and make the dream even better.
There are indeed many stars in this firmament, but there could be more.
***
Harrington is director of the Texas Civil Rights Project, a nonprofit foundation that promotes civil rights and economic and racial justice throughout Texas.
