The long African American struggle for civil rights has blossomed into an oak tree of justice whose large canopy protects all of us, no matter our color. And these days there are more of us Latinos huddled under its branches, seeking shelter from discrimination, than any other group.
Let's start with the basic fact of our citizenship. Like thousands of others Angelenos, I am the son of immigrants. I thus owe my citizenship to Dred Scott, a slave who sued for his freedom in 1857, and to people like Frederick Douglass, who took up his cause.
Scott provoked the Supreme Court into one of the most shameful rulings in American history. Scott vs. Sandford declared that no one of African descent could be a U.S. citizen.
After the Civil War, the black struggle to erase Scott vs. Sandford from American jurisprudence led to the passage of the 14th Amendment, which grants citizenship to those born in the United States. But these days, the children of Mexicans and Central Americans are its chief beneficiary.
Scott and Douglass lived a long time ago, it's true. But they're not the only people who helped pave the way for us.
If you're Latino and have had the pleasure of voting for someone with a Spanish surname, if you live in an integrated neighborhood, you have the dead and battered of 1960s Birmingham and Selma, Ala., to thank for it. Their martyrs are our martyrs too, because their sacrifice made the civil and voting rights we now enjoy possible.
Every Latino civil rights leader knows this. It's why Cesar Chavez treasured the telegram he received from Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, just a month before King was killed.
"As brothers in the fight for equality, I extend the hand of fellowship and goodwill . . . to you and your members," King wrote. "Our separate struggles are really one -- a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity."
There's history and then there's present-day reality. There, too, our debts are clear.
Many of the new Latino neighborhoods in Los Angeles and surrounding cities have been established in historically black communities.
There was no organized black resistance to the "browning" of South-Central Los Angeles or Compton. Yes there were isolated crimes against Latino people in those places, but the more common, everyday truth was that African Americans accepted the arrival of strangers into their neighborhoods.
