Jim Crow, really?

NEWARK — The Rev. Al Sharpton was aboard a flight halfway from Miami to LaGuardia Airport when the turbulence set in.

“They said, ‘stay in your seat,'” Sharpton recalled Sunday during a stirring address to a packed prayer rally at the Metropolitan Baptist Church in Newark.

The turbulence lasted 23 minutes. The jet eventually leveled off. But nobody disembarked. That’s because the journey was not over, he said.

The civil rights movement is no different, he said. Nearly 50 years after the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech, the journey has not ended, Sharpton said.

“Just because we got through the turbulence of the ’60s doesn’t mean we got there,” he said, later adding: “We still got a ways to go. And in the last 60 days, we were given a reminder that we still have to fight — because if we go to sleep, there are those that never intended for us to get this far, that would turn back on everything that was achieved.” […]

And they pointed to President Obama, who’s election inspired talk of a post-racial society. But some of his detractors, Sharpton said, proved America isn’t there yet, with calls for his birth certificate.

Sharpton said a new generation developed ways to suppress the vote and deny justice, and it was also up to a new generation of civil rights leaders to stop them.

“James Crow Jr. Esquire, son of Jim Crow. We’re going to Washington to say, ‘you may be Jim Crow’s son, but we Doctor King’s and Fannie Lou Hamer’s children,” he said, also billing the march like this: “We’re not going to Washington to remember the dream, we’re going to finish achieving the dream.”