In the 1950's and 60's, Justices Black and Douglas formed the core of the so-called Warren Supreme Court, which used the Due Process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to begin the process of leveling the playing field in our nation's two tier criminal justice system for the first time in history The Warren Court began by limiting the powers and prerogatives of both police and prosecutor's against suspects and defendants in criminal cases. The Court's decisions included a guarantee of representation by competent counsel in felony trials at both the state and Federal level (Gideon v. Wainwright), and guaranteeing the right of privacy (Griswold v. Connecticut) in the United States of America.
In spite of these advances, America still has a great distance to travel before the two tier system in both civil and criminal law is consigned to the dustbin of history where it belongs, and our nation realizes John Marshall's dream (stated in Marbury v. Madison) of being ""a government of laws, not of men." Too often our justice system's advances have been a macabre dance of one step forward, and then two steps back, as we seek to advance our quest for basic human rights. Today, the advances we saw in civil liberties for all Americans under the Warren Court have been eroded by a Court that has gone from Centrist, to Conservative, to Reactionary over the last 35 years.
As Professor Henry A. Giroux stated in his 02 December 2013 Truthout article "Hope in the Age of Looming Authoritarianism," "The ruling elites have taken flight from any sense of social and ethical responsibility, and their willing and active repression of conscience has opened the door to new forms of authoritarianism in which the arrogance of corporate power finds its underside in a hatred of all others that threaten its power."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in an 18December 1963 speech, at Western Michigan University, made the following statement:
"All I'm saying is simply this, that all life is interrelated, that somehow we're caught in an inescapable network of mutuality tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality."
Or to put it simply, no human being can claim to be free, if we don't share a major degree of equality in our lives, and I do not mean we should all be reduced to some lowest common denominator of freedom. That was Karl Marx's mistake. I mean a significant degree of freedom such as that enumerated by FDR in his famous Four Freedoms Speech: Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom to Worship in whatever direction your conscience directs you, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear.
Professor Randall Balmer of Dartmouth College wrote an article in Politico, explaining that the organized religious right started as a movement to protect whites-only schools from federally mandated desegregation. Even though the process had been started during the Nixon Administration, Jerry Falwell and his associates used federally mandated busing as the means to convince evangelical ministers to support the divorced Ronald Reagan against the born-again Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election.
As Chauncey De Vega pointed out in his 14 December 2010 AlterNet article "The Cult of Ronald Reagan and the Racist Origins of American Conservatism," --Reagan was certainly no friend of people of color--choosing to begin his campaign by speaking at Philadelphia, Mississippi on state's rights and thus cementing his commitment to the Southern Strategy and "State's rights." [Author's note: Philadelphia was the location where three civil rights workers were brutally murdered and buried in an earthen dam in 1963.] This is the root of my snicker at White American conservatives who proclaim their colorblindness, and at Black conservatives in particular, who defend all things Reaganesque."
Mr. De Vega also quotes from Professor Robert C. Smith's 2010 book on this topic, Conservatism and Racism and Why in America They Are the Same. Professor Smith works through the ambivalence of Afro-Americans towards Ronald Reagan, and the racist roots of the modern American Conservative movement, which this author considers a reactionary movement. I consider it such because it wishes to return to a past of white male dominance in virtually every sector of American life, rather than act as a brake as we advance into the future, which has traditionally been the purpose of a truly conservative, rather than a reactionary movement. To quote from an interview with Professor Smith: [Words in brackets added by author to clarify his own position on the subject]:
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