My daughter who is an USA citizen, told me several times- ‘don’t call them blacks. Call them African-Americans, otherwise you will be arrested and go to jail, because ‘Equality’ –equal rights is the basic ideals of American constitution. No American citizen can be discriminated for their colour, religion, ethnicity or any other reasons.

The declaration of Independence is one of the most revolutionary type of its kind. The constitution of Vietnam starts with quotations from American Declaration of Independence and American constitution. Our constitution of India also is partly indebted to American constitution. The American political culture centres on a set of core ideals and principles-Liberty, Equality, Self-government, Individualism, Diversity and Unity- that serves as the people’s common bond.

The struggle of Africa- Americans for civil rights is the longest and bitterest in American history since the independence. Their struggle truly became a political movement with the triumphant march on Washington D.C for jobs and freedom on August 2, 1963, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., which attracted 250,000 demonstrators, one of the largest gatherings in the history of the national capital. I have a dream, Dr. King told the gathering “that one day the nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

Martin Luther was greatly influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the method he adopted for civil-rights movements was non-violence and direct actions like voter registration, civil- resistance, dis-obedience and community education.

A year later, after a prolonged fight in congress that included every legislative obstacle that racial conservatives could muster, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was enacted by president Lyndon Johnson, followed by Voting Rights Act, INA Act,1965; Fair Housing Act,1968 ERA Act for women in 1972.

Sadly, although many Acts and Laws were enacted in the middle of the past century to fulfil the American dream of enacting equality, it remains elusive to many people of America. African- Americans are still being discriminated in all the ways Two experiments conducted a few years ago could be referred here.

The producers of ABC Television’s ‘Prime Time Live’ programmes put hidden cameras on two young men, equally well dressed and sent them on different routes to do the same thing- search for an apartment, shop for a car look at albums in a record store. One was greeted with smiles and was invited to buy, sometimes at favourable price. The other man was treated with suspicion, was made to wait unnecessarily and sometimes asked to pay more. Why the difference? The explanation was simple-the first one was White and second was Black.

The Urban Institute of America had conducted a similar experiment. Two specially trained college students, one White and one Black, who were almost the same in all respects-education, speech pattern, work experience, physical builds-except for their race. They responded individually to nearly 500 classified job advertisements in Chicago and Washington D.C. The black applicant got fewer interviews, had shorter interviews and were given fewer job offers than the White applicant.

These two experiments suggest why some Americans are still struggling for equal rights. All Americans are equal in rights in theory, but in practice they are not equal today nor have they ever been. As President Lyndon Johnson explained in an address at Howard University during the height of Civil Rights Movement—‘you do not take a person who for years has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and say – you are free to compete with all the others and still justly believe that you have been fair. ‘

Actually it is the mindset of many of the white Americans in general with an excess in the southern states that cannot still accept in their conscious or subconscious mind the equality with those people who were once their forefather’s slaves. The ideal of Equality requires a higher and elevated mindset which is not in a majority, unfortunately, in America. Though there are already well drawn Laws and Acts to end discriminations among people, the ideal of equality was never fully endorsed or is not being applied truthfully by different agencies of the government or establishments.

The most recent incident of police brutality and discrimination against the Black took place in Baltimore, the gateway to the capital of America. On April 19, 2015, some police officers, all whites, arrested a black youth Freddie Gray for just catching the eye of a lieutenant and running away. He was mercilessly beaten and tortured as a result of which he died in the hospital on April 28, 2015. Black men and women, specially youths gathered there to register their protest against it. At the beginning it was peaceful. A large police force was deployed there and their high handedness angered some school and college students who adhered to some violent acts countered equally, if not more, by the police.

Soon the peaceful protest turned into a riot as mayor Rowling Blake declared a state of emergency in Baltimore city .But the protest was not limited to Baltimore city only, it spread to other cities of USA. On April 29, solidarity protests were demonstrated in cities like New York, Denver, Annobor, Albuquerque, Boston, Cincinnati, Minneapolis, Oakland, Philadelphia, Seattle, Washington D.C.

The protests were originally covered on social media with the hashtag# Baltimore Riots. However by the evening of April 28.the more popular hashtag online to cover the protest became # Baltimore Uprising. On social media and elsewhere mayor Rowling Blake and president Barack Obama were criticized for calling the protestors –Thugs on April 28.

The protests and violent exhalations by Baltimore black youths and others are the results of a long pattern of police abuse, harassment and violence towards the city’s Afro-American community in the context of systematic class inequality, custodial citizenship and mass incarceration.

The cause of black urban unrest in the USA are not ‘unknown unknowns’, rather they were described in compelling details by the 1968 ‘Kerner Commission’ which was tusked by President Lyndon Johnson-with determining the causes of urban riots since 1960 s.

A leading expert Louis Hyman observed, “The Baltimore riots were not hooliganism. They were the protest against the depredations of the ghetto economy. It is an expression of anger against another aspect of a system that has exploited the black community in subtler, more insidious but similarly tragic ways. As Baltimoreans in the 60s and now protested against the excesses of the police, it is no surprise that those protests expanded to include the other aspects of ghetto life, where economic repressions and humiliation, like harassment by police are part of everyday experience.”

The economic angle of deprivation can be gauged by recent Census Bureau data shows that White Americans have 22 times more wealth than Blacks. In 2010, the median household net worth for whites was about $ 11000 compared to $500 for blacks. Despite the rise of Barack Obama many Afro- Americans still feel like second class citizens. That Obama became the first ever Black president of the USA is an exception-not the rule. Despite Obama, the alienation of African-Americans continues. (IPA Service)