By MIKE JAMES - The Independent
ASHLAND — A state celebration of 50 years of human rights activism began Saturday in Ashland with the acknowledgment that the job is not done yet.
While African-Americans “don’t have to go in the back door of a restaurant” any longer, there are systemic forms of discrimination still to be addressed, said John J. Johnson, the executive director of the Kentucky Commission on Human Rights.
The struggle continues to fight discrimination against women, the disabled, and HIV-positive people, Johnson said at a dinner sponsored by the Ashland Human Rights Commission.
The dinner kicked off a yearlong statewide observance of the state commission’s 50th anniversary, which is March 18.
Johnson emphasized that the generation that fought the civil rights battles in the 1950s and 1960s had won important protections for human rights, but cautioned activists not to become complacent. “We rest on the shoulders of others and must have strong shoulders” for those who follow, he said. “Much has changed, but much remains the same.”
He several times invoked the iconic civil rights figure Martin Luther King Jr., who he said would still be working to widen rights protections if he were alive today.
Rights advocates need to concern themselves with changing the conditions that create inequality, he said.
Johnson’s leadership career started when he became the youngest president ever of a Kentucky chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He is a veteran of the 1960s War on Poverty programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
Associate director of Louisville’s human relations commission in the 1970s, he directed that city’s Community Action Agency before joining the staff of the national NAACP.
Also at the dinner, Ashland Human Rights Commission chairwoman Carol Jackson presented former chairman and former mayor David Welch an award for his long commitment to the movement.
Welch started working with the state commission in 1951; that lasted for 26 years. He worked to establish the city’s commission during his tenure as mayor.
Welch remembered that as a priority. “One of the things I knew I was going to have when I left office was a human rights commission,” he said.
Accompanying anniversary events across the state will be a traveling listening tour that will provide an avenue for voicing thoughts about human rights. Those attending will be able to talk to commission representatives about the complaint process and about employment, public accommodation and housing issues.
