Pittsburgh. -- The right to vote is perhaps the most symbolically important achievement commemorated by Black History Month. Tragically, this right seems pale and meaningless this year. The electoral system as it stands has abandoned most African-Americans, and perhaps the time has come for us to abandon hope in electoral politics.
This might sound like heresy, but the current political climate is agonizingly indifferent to the poor, and callously, viciously disrespectful of people of color. Both major parties attack us and scapegoat us, even as they neglect our needs.
Consider the possible options of poor, black voters in 1996:
Bill Clinton, who in 1992 made only token efforts to court the black vote. He has since betrayed those lukewarm promises, and has cynically played the race card with his welfare and crime policies. His poor public treatment of Lani Guinier and Joycelyn Elders reveals his shallow commitment to diversity.
The Republican Contract With America gives a clear sense of the GOP's intentions for 1996. The document is a thinly disguised and racist assault on the poor. After one careful reading you can understand why no Republican candidate in any national election since the late 1920s has enjoyed any significant African-American support.
Jesse Jackson may also be on the ballot, but while he enjoys significant support from white liberals and an elite group of African-Americans, he speaks for himself, not for the urban poor. In 1993, Mr. Jackson betrayed the civil-rights community when he announced that "black on black" crime -- not a prejudiced economy -- was the essential cause of the disaster in urban America.
He repeated the performance on "Meet The Press," where he was asked about the "predatory nature" of inner-city black youth. When he should have challenged the questioner's stereotypes, Mr. Jackson chose political expediency instead, urging the citizens of downtrodden inner-city communities to think of themselves as vigilantes and to round up these "predators" and turn them in to the authorities. Mr. Jackson has abandoned analysis for easy political points, and it is a bitter pill for the urban poor to swallow.
With these choices, ballot-box politics will never hold the answer to the problems of African-Americans and the urban poor. But I remember my history well enough to know that, even when we couldn't vote, we took extraordinary and sometimes dangerous measures to correct injustice. We revolted on the slave ships. We surreptitiously broke tools on the plantations and sheltered runaway slaves.
In 1941, we threatened to march on Washington unless the defense industry opened its doors to black workers. In 1948, A. Philip Randolph threatened to march again, and the result was President Truman's Executive Order No. 9981, ending segregation in the armed forces.
Then came the civil-rights movement, with bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, the lunch-counter sit-ins, and the Freedom Rides of the 1960s. The violent response of the authorities to two marches in Selma shook the conscience of America for its horrendous treatment of African-American citizens.
Because of activities like these, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed. But as I survey the carnage in the inner cities, I have to wonder what good it is doing us now. We must begin hTC again to utilize alternative strategies to alleviate the social, economic and political pressures burdening our communities.
It is time to resurrect the boycott, our most effective tactic. Peter Mason, an activist from North Carolina, is leading the way by organizing a boycott of Texas. Mr. Mason wants Texas to stop using the death penalty, a tool of oppression used disproportionately against African-Americans and poorer citizens.
He wants conventions to avoid Texas, and he is also trying to get young African-American athletes to boycott the NCAA Division 1 schools in that state. Mr. Mason, who played college football himself, argues that poor black athletes often come from the same circumstances as other poor people who, without opportunity, end up unemployed, on welfare, or in prison. This kind of solidarity can help mend the class fracture that is rapidly widening in the African-American community.
Mr. Mason's work is taking one step down a long road. If the spirit of the civil-rights movement is to live on, we must join him. It will certainly accomplish more than voting for dumb or dumber.
Carl Upchurch is president of the National Council for Urban Peace and Justice.