This kid getting the snot beaten out of him really doesn’t rank with the great civil rights cases of the 1960s — and yet, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson were delighted to declare the cause of the “Jena 6″ the dawn of the “21st century civil rights movement.”

Talk about back to the future.

The real reason Sharpton and Jackson are so happy is because, to them, every public policy issue that concerns race is a nail — and they’ve been using the same old hammer for decades. When someone who’s black takes a different approach, they feel threatened.

To cheer for another century of 1960s-style civil rights protests is to rally for pessimism and failure. What we should cheer for is the day when such race-based protests will seem as alien to us as slavery, public lynchings and other sad relics of our past.

No — we’re not there yet. But we’ve gone about as far as we can go with polarizing leaders like Sharpton and Jackson at the helm.

(Snopes tries to separate fact from fiction on the incident.)