TSU professor outlines work America at 250 demands

This article was written by Dr. Michael O. Adams, a political science professor at Texas Southern University and director of TSU’s Executive Master of Public Administration (eMPA) program.

When America marks 250 years on the Fourth of July, I will not be contemplating an abstraction. I have lived through a long and consequential stretch of this nation’s story, and I come to its anniversary not only as a political scientist but as a witness.

I am looking at my own life braided into the country’s. I was born into segregated Jackson, Mississippi, into a world of separate water fountains. I did not read about Jim Crow. I drank from it. I grew up two blocks from the driveway where Medgar Evers was shot down by Byron De La Beckwith in 1963.

So, when I say the distance between America’s promise and its practice is the central fact of Black life, I am not making a scholarly argument. I am describing a neighborhood I walked as a boy.

Coming of age

I came of age inside the movement. I saw Freedom Summer, and in 1970, when police killed students at Jackson State, I protested alongside my mother.

That is where my political education began, before any classroom. It later became a vocation.

I graduated from Tougaloo College, the centerpiece of civil rights activity in Mississippi, and earned my doctorate at Atlanta University in the halls where W. E. B. Du Bois had taught under Mack Henry Jones. The movement I watched as a child became the discipline I have studied ever since. That is why I hold a particular view of what 250 years means.

Enforcement required

The American founding was a proclamation, and a magnificent one. But a proclamation is not the same as its enforcement, and Black people have always lived in the gap between the two.

Frederick Douglass named that gap in 1852, asking what the Fourth of July meant to the slave. Martin Luther King named it again in 1963, the year Evers was killed, when he called the founding documents a promissory note returned marked “insufficient funds.” Black Americans have been the most faithful readers of this nation’s promise, precisely because we have waited the longest for it to be kept.

I hold two truths at once. The first is that the progress is real. I have measured it as a researcher and lived it as a man. The vote that was theoretical for my grandparents became real in my lifetime. The man who killed Medgar Evers walked free for 30 years and was finally convicted in 1994. I will never tell a young person that nothing has changed; people I knew paid for those changes with their lives.

The second truth is that enforcement is never permanent, and that is the sober lesson of this anniversary.

In the very year we celebrate the founding, the courts have narrowed the machinery that made its promise real for Black voters. We have watched the Voting Rights Act weakened, congressional maps redrawn to shrink Black and Latino voting power, and hard-won opportunity districts erased. I do not say this as a partisan; I am not one. I say it as a researcher reading the data: a right announced and then left unenforced is not yet fully a right. At 250, that is not history. That is the morning paper.

Closing the gap

This is why I am wary of a semiquincentennial that is only a celebration. For Black Americans, a 250th birthday cannot be only a party. It has to be an accounting. We should light the candles and read the ledger.

The genius of Black political life has never been to reject this country’s creed, but to insist that it apply to everyone, and to do the patient, generational work of closing the distance between what was proclaimed and what is enforced. My ancestors did that work without the vote. My mother did it in nonviolent protest marches. My teachers did it in the seminar room. The men who wrote the promise in Philadelphia in 1776 and the man who died in his Jackson driveway in 1963 belong to the same unfinished American sentence. At 250, the work of finishing it is mine, and it is theirs, and I intend to keep at it.