Affirmative action, welfare reform, equal opportunity, poverty: The conversation about race in America seems far more complicated in the 1990s than it was in 1960s.
Thirty-five years after the legendary March on Washington, many people are wondering whether the spirit of the '60s has been lost, whether the generation of children who watched the demonstrators on television and studied their messages in classrooms possess the leadership necessary to move social justice forward.
President Clinton has become concerned enough about the subject of race to place it high on the national agenda.
Taylor Branch's new book, "Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years, 1963-65," recalls the spirit of those early struggles, when civil rights was about giving black Americans the same access as white Americans.
It still is, observers say.
"We don't have to worry about public accommodations any more, we can go anywhere we want if we've got the money," says the Rev. Marion Bascom, a '60s civil rights leader in Baltimore. "But things more subtle have come into being. I don't think you can get a handle on cold, hard economics the way you could on public accommodations. I can go anywhere in this town I want to if I've got the money. But you don't find too many blacks in board rooms where the decisions are made."
Over the years, the term "civil rights" has expanded to embrace women, people with disabilities, gays and lesbians, and other ethnic groups. To carry on these struggles, there are thousands of unsung activists. They are providing after-school havens in unsafe neighborhoods, fighting to get wheelchair users on the bus, finding better ways to feed and shelter the hungry and homeless.
They are still pursuing what Bascom calls "America's ought-ness rather than its is-ness."
Here are just a few of Baltimore's unsung activists:
The Rev. Douglas Miles, pastor of Koinonia Baptist Church, remembers watching the riots in Baltimore after Martin Luther King's assassination.
And he remembers his shock at the inability of the churches to stop the violence, an impotence that showed him how distant the churches were from the people they claimed to serve.
Doug Miles vowed to do things differently.
"It shaped my ministry to be inclusive of social ministry and of the need to push for the issues of poor people, for people in the cities, for the need for the church to be an integral part of community."
He became the first community organizer for Reservoir Hill, graduated from Johns Hopkins University with a degree in humanistic studies and went on to a career of building faith and communities. He spent 15 years at his first church, Brown's Memorial Baptist, building the congregation and working for Baltimoreans United In Leadership Development (BUILD), a coalition of religious and civic leaders dedicated to improving life in the city.
In 1992, Miles founded his present church in one of the poorest and most drug-infested areas of the city: 21st Street and Greenmount Avenue. The church sponsors Narcotics Anonymous meetings and other community meetings. Miles also started Project Safe Haven, an after-school program that provides about 50 children with computer learning, sewing, arts and crafts, Afrocentric studies and values education.
"Koinonia is the Greek word for fellowship, for community, and that's what we wanted to build," he says.
Miles decries welfare reform, the changing nature of work and health care, and the erosion of relationships between the black and white communities and the Jewish and African-American communities.
4 Yet the 48-year-old minister remains optimistic.
"I think as baby boomers start thinking about their tombstones and the legacy they will leave, there will an attempt to build coalitions," he says.
"We were the generation -- African-American and white, Christian and Jewish -- that was the best-equipped generation in the history of this nation. We were the best-provided-for in terms of material possessions. We were the best-educated. And we have achieved less than the generations before us in terms of advancing social causes, in terms of just generally improving the quality of life in America."
When Kap Park came to America 17 years ago, he walked straight into a job at his sister's carryout shop, and into the grim reality of inner-city crime: His brother-in-law was murdered by a drug addict in front of a friend's store.
"After that, I wanted to stay away from the city," the 40-year-old merchant recalls. "I went to community college and took a job in a 7-Eleven in Glen Burnie. I tried to stay away from the city. But I felt really uncomfortable. God was telling me to go back."
