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The Rev. Jesse Jackson once again stood up his supporters in Cincinnati last week, but neither his absence nor a driving rain diminished the vigor of a Dec. 6 civil rights march.
About 400 people marched from the University of Cincinnati to Fountain Square in support of affirmative action in colleges and universities. Organized by the Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action and Integration and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the march and rally drew college students from as far away as Berkley, Cal.
“Black, Latino, Asian and white,” the marchers chanted as they came down Vine Street through Over-the-Rhine, “by any means necessary we will fight!”
At Findlay and Vine streets, Cynthia Hill of Cincinnati stood watching the march with her 5-year-old grandson.
“This is so he can go to school,” Hill said. “The fight’s been going on so long. The generation after me, do they have to keep going through this? This is what my grandfather’s generation had to do.”
That very exigency is what motivated some of the marchers, such as Montaze Trumbo, a student at Western Kentucky University.
“The wheels of justice turn slowly,” Trumbo said.
“The results might not affect us. This is about education for the younger generation coming up.”
All along the route, marchers passed fliers on utility poles announcing that Jackson and the Rev. Al Sharpton would speak on Fountain Square. But neither man showed. Jackson had also been expected to speak at a rally on the square Oct. 23 but canceled.
The marchers, monitored by police officers on motorcycles and on horseback, stayed on sidewalks all the way from UC to Seventh Street. But on crossing Seventh, the demonstration took to the street, surging into stopped traffic on Walnut Street until it had passed the U.S. Courthouse on the way to Fountain Square.
As a measure of the movement’s strength, that moment — when the march seemed ready to bring downtown traffic to a halt — was more telling than the absence of the two national civil rights leaders.
Besides, Cincinnati was more than up to the task of providing the kind of fiery stump speech one might have expected from Jackson and Sharpton. The Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who was prominent in efforts to desegregate Birmingham, Ala., in the late 1950s and early 1960s, rose to the occasion.
“In Birmingham, people younger than the people in this crowd went to jail three and four times, and they stayed in jail,” Shuttlesworth said. “We must tell people in this country, ‘We will fill up all your jails unless we get some freedom. It’s time to fight, fight, fight like hell until we win. It’s time for a movement. It’s time to eliminate racism and discrimination.’ ”
Not everyone in attendance was in support of affirmative action. On a balcony overhanging the speaker’s podium on Fountain Square, a scuffle broke out when a white man started waving a sign saying, “Affirmative Action Poisons Equality.” An African-American man grabbed the sign and tore it to shreds. The man who owned the sign ran from the square, visibly upset.
More than a dozen police officers were on the square, but no one was arrested.
No room at the court
The reason for the rally was a hearing before the U.S. Sixth Circuit of Appeals, which meets in Cincinnati, on a case that could mark the death of affirmative action in higher education. The court heard arguments on the use of race in admissions at the University of Michigan College of Literature, Science and the Arts and the University of Michigan Law School.
The Center for Individual Rights, a Washington, D.C. public-interest law firm, filed both class-action lawsuits against the University of Michigan, representing hundreds of plaintiffs who claim to have been hurt by the admission policies — regardless of whether they would qualify for admission under a color-blind policy.
The university asserts it has complied with the law in using race as a factor to promote diversity. Student intervenors in both cases argue that, in addition to contributing to diversity, race is a necessary factor in admissions in order to remedy past and present discrimination against minorities.
A federal district court in Michigan ruled in favor of the university in the undergraduate case and against the university in the law school case.
The case is pivotal to prevent the re-segregation of colleges, according to Robert Richardson Jr., student body president at the University of Cincinnati.
“This opportunity to be here today to fight for affirmative action is so very important to me,” Richardson said. “This is just one step in what we need to do. I know we can build this even bigger by the time we get to D.C., so we will be more than a million people.”
Richardson’s reference to Washington, D.C., reflects the expectation, shared by many, that the case will go from the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.
But Richardson’s prediction of a million marchers is almost certainly a stretch. At the Oct. 23 rally, organizers had called for supporters to gather 100,000 signatures on a petition supporting affirmative action in higher education. But just before the Dec. 6 rally, BAMN reported it had only about 38,000 signatures — a goodly number, to be sure, but far below the group’s goal.
As popular entertainment, appeals court hearings typically are dry affairs. The appeals judges accept brief oral arguments but largely base their ruling on legal briefs written to supplement a trial court’s record.
But for the Dec. 6 hearing, the demand for seats was extraordinary. All of the approximately 100 seats in the courtroom were filled. An overflow crowd of about 250 watched the proceedings on a television monitor in rooms upstairs. ©
This article appears in Dec 12-18, 2001.
