Inaugurating a Quest to Renew Common Bonds

Even as the United States soars into a new millennium, Bill Clinton reminded us Monday, the basic American quest remains the same as it was more than 200 years ago: the struggle to build a nation in which diverse peoples live in a spirit of harmony, united by a common bond of equality under the law.

Clinton confronted the sobering matter directly in his second inaugural address, declaring “the divide of race has been America’s constant curse.”

The president took his oath of office at the Capitol on the holiday marking the memory of Martin Luther King Jr. He gazed down the Mall to the Lincoln Memorial and recalled King’s celebrated speech there in 1963. Thirty-four years may have passed, Clinton said, but King’s dream remains the American dream.

In the 1960s, King and others used civil disobedience to fight institutional segregation in the South. King’s crusade was translated by President Lyndon Johnson and Congress into landmark civil rights legislation and affirmative action programs. In 1865, Abraham Lincoln took his second oath of office as a dreadful civil war was in its waning months. Lincoln had been forced to wage his fight to end slavery with devastating force.

Today, the struggle takes a different and subtler form on the streets of South Los Angeles, the new Asian communities in places like Los Angeles’ Koreatown, Long Beach and Westminster, and wherever immigrants from Latin America settle. And it has moved to the political theater with initiative campaigns such as those in behalf of Propositions 187 and 209.

Clinton observed, correctly, that “prejudice and contempt, cloaked in the pretense of religious or political convictions are no different” from the old prejudices. “They plague us still,” he said.

Clinton promised to carry forth King’s dream of equality into the 21st century. Today’s challenge may be even more complex than in the past as the forces of the political right marshal the argument that pursuit of civil rights has gone too far. But the president was correct when he declared that for any one American to succeed, “we must succeed as one America.”

That is a lofty ideal. But it is also a moral imperative. If it is not pursued with renewed vigor, the very idea of America will remain unfulfilled.