Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (96 page)

LBJ also kept up pressure for his open housing bill. In April 1968 Congress turned around and approved it. The measure was ambitious, banning discriminatory practices affecting 80 percent of housing in the nation. Congress acted, however, only because it was frightened by rioting following the assassination at the time of Martin Luther King. The law generally required complainants to bear the burden of proof and provided for only weak enforcement. Given the widespread refusal of whites to live near blacks, the open housing act, a landmark piece of civil rights legislation on paper, did virtually nothing in practice to promote residential desegregation in the cities.
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The 1968 Congress also revealed its continuing fear and anger about urban unrest, which had mushroomed since 1965. The open housing law contained tough provisions against people who crossed state lines with intent to incite riots: penalties of up to five years in jail and fines of $10,000. Two months later Congress approved an Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act that called for the spending of slightly over $100 million to upgrade law enforcement. Lawmakers also included in the bill provisions that authorized local and state as well as federal law enforcement officials to engage in wiretapping and bugging in a number of situations. For a while the President considered vetoing the measure, which took aim at the
Miranda
and other Supreme Court decisions. But the bill was highly popular not only on the Hill but also, it seemed, among constituents. Government, people were saying, must get "tough" on crime. In the end Johnson unhappily signed the bill, the last and in many ways the most conservative piece of domestic legislation of his presidency.
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Johnson's difficulties with Capitol Hill, striking though they were in contrast to his successes in 1964 and 1965, were nothing new in modern United States political history. All his liberal predecessors, including FDR, had lost battles to pressure groups and to the conservative coalition in Congress. Newly troubling to reformers, however, was the rise of well-articulated doubts about the capacity of government to remedy social problems. These doubts seemed especially strong among a number of once liberal intellectuals and policy-makers who subjected Great Society programs—aid to education, Medicare and Medicaid, above all the war on poverty—to close examination after 1965. Some of these people wrote for
Commentary
, a magazine edited by Norman Podhoretz, who turned from left-of-center in the early 1960s to conservative after 1968. Others published in a new journal,
The Public Interest
, that first appeared in 1965. It attracted some of the nation's best-known intellectuals in the social sciences, including Daniel Moynihan, the sociologists Nathan Glazer, James Wilson, and Daniel Bell, and the political philosopher Irving Kristol.
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Some of these writers refused to be typed as "conservative." Bell described himself as a socialist in economics, a liberal in politics, and a conservative only in culture. He thought of himself as a "skeptical Whig," someone who believed in progress but doubted that government could do much to enhance it. But many of the others, notably Kristol and Edward Banfield, a student of urban problems, emerged as leaders of a "neo-conservative" intellectual surge in the United States. Along with libertarians such as Milton Friedman, an especially influential economist, they pointed with alarm at the dramatic increase in the number of government programs, bureaucracies, and employees that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations had created. Government, they said, was swelling to elephantine proportions. In so doing it was greatly stimulating popular expectations. Yet the gulf between expectation and accomplishment had widened, thereby inciting dangerously high levels of frustration and polarization. Meanwhile, the number of federal regulations had multiplied seemingly beyond belief, threatening to immobilize American institutions in a tangle of red tape.
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Intellectuals, of course, have ordinarily had little impact on the course of public policy in the United States. That was true in the mid- and late 1960s as well. Few Americans—or members of Congress—read
The Public Interest
. Still, the rapid rise of the "neo-cons" to intellectual respectability was revealing. And their complaints, especially about the "dead hand of bureaucracy," epitomized a new mood of doubt. After all, the government had obviously oversold its expertise. The war on poverty was at best a skirmish. Worse, the "best and brightest" of liberals had blundered badly in Vietnam. For these reasons conservatives successfully took the offensive in public debate. Liberals, so confident and optimistic just a few years earlier, seemed tired and unsure of themselves. This sudden and largely unexpected development was one of the most lasting legacies of the mid-1960s.
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A
S THE BATTLES
over open housing legislation in Congress revealed, racial conflict continued to be the most divisive issue in American politics and society between 1966 and 1968. During these years "black power" replaced interracialism as a guiding principle in the civil rights movement, agitation for racial justice and "rights" mounted in the North, and race riots shattered the cities. Even more than usual, these were turbulent years in postwar race relations.

There was a good deal of irony surrounding this turbulence. Black people in the United States had never gained so much as they had between 1963 and 1966. The civil rights acts had succeeded, at last, in providing for legal equality. Litigation, plus the threat of losing federal aid to education, began to force school districts (save in the Deep South) to admit blacks to white schools: in 1964 only 2 percent of southern blacks attended biracial schools, a percentage that rose to 32 by 1968.
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Robert Weaver, the first black person to hold a Cabinet position—in newly created HUD (Housing and Urban Development, 1965)—led administration attempts to improve housing opportunities for blacks and the poor. Blacks also made unprecedented use of their political potential. In 1967 voters in Gary elected Richard Hatcher, a black man, as their mayor. Voters in Cleveland chose Carl Stokes, another black. These were the first African-Americans to become big-city mayors in American history. In June of the same year Thurgood Marshall became the first Negro to be confirmed as a justice of the Supreme Court. Blacks even fared better economically, thanks mainly to the overall increase in prosperity (not to the Great Society). Commentators observed happily that a significant black middle class was coming into being. In fact, the United States was on its way to becoming perhaps the least racist white-majority society in the world.
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Polls indicated, moreover, that most blacks were optimistic about their personal futures, as well as positive about the virtues of desegregation. Only a minority seemed attracted to radical causes. Millions, indeed, remained deeply attached to their churches, whose memberships far outnumbered those of civil rights organizations. Many of these churches were led by conservatives. Only a very small number of African-Americans, as before, joined or openly identified with the Nation of Islam or other militantly black organizations. Martin Luther King, who struggled non-violently for open housing laws in Chicago and other American cities during these years, remained by far the most admired black leader in the country.

The irony, of course, was that for militant blacks, especially the young, these improvements in race relations fell far short of what they were coming to expect. Their expectations whetted by the acquisition of political and legal rights, they demanded social and economic rights: open housing, better schools, decent jobs, everything that middle-class whites were enjoying. Social and technological change further drove these expectations. Thanks in part to the massive south-to-north migrations of blacks in the postwar era, blacks were far less isolated than they had been in the past. Having escaped the rigidities of Jim Crow in the South, they felt a liberating sense of possibility in the North. More than their elders, they could see what they were missing in life. Television especially sharpened the sting of relative deprivation. Available to virtually all people by the mid-1960s, it flashed to viewers the ever more fantastic wonders of the affluent society. The relative deprivation of blacks, moreover, was in some ways growing. While the median family income of black people was increasing more rapidly than that of whites in these years (rising slightly from 57 percent of white income in the late 1940s to 61 percent in 1970), the gap in their
absolute
earnings was widening.

Many black people had other grievances in these years. One was the war in Vietnam, which grew steadily more unpopular with African-Americans as casualties mounted in 1966. Some of the black veterans who finished their tours of duty in "Nam" returned angry at the discrimination that they had experienced in the service and determined to fight at home for justice. "I ain't coming back playing, 'Oh, Say Can You See,'" one such veteran exclaimed. "I'm whistlin' 'Sweet Georgia Brown,' and I got the band."
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Black intellectuals, too, stressed that African-Americans must take pride in themselves, their race, and their history. James Baldwin wrote bitterly of the psychological damage that afflicted blacks who internalized the inferiority, thereby hating themselves, that whites ascribed to them. The psychologist Kenneth Clark, whose research had influenced
Brown
υ.
Board of Education
, wrote an introduction in 1966 to a widely read collection of essays,
The Negro American
, in which he warned that whites could not be relied on to do much more for the cause of racial justice. "The new American Dilemma," he wrote, "is power." Blacks must take it and act for themselves. "Ideals alone . . . do not bring justice," he said. "Ideals, combined with necessity, may."
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Some radical black intellectuals began to deny that blacks and whites could ever understand each other. The playwright and essayist LeRoi Jones wrote in 1965 that whites could not appreciate black jazz music. The difference between the white listener and black listener, he said, is "the difference between a man watching someone have an orgasm and someone having an orgasm."
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In 1968 Jones changed his name to Imamu Amiri Baraka. Like others of his persuasion, he looked to Africa as a dominant and positive source of black cultural forms in the United States. An impassioned chauvinist, he also celebrated the superior capacities of African-American people.

With racial polarization developing, it required only an incident to undermine interracialism in the civil rights movement. That happened when James Meredith, the loner who had tried to integrate Ole Miss in 1962, determined in June 1966 to make a 220-mile pilgrimage from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. Black people, Meredith hoped, would be inspired and emboldened to register to vote.
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Two days into his trek, however, a white man in Hernando, Mississippi, pumped three rounds of birdshot from a 16-gauge automatic shotgun at Meredith and a handful of fellow marchers on the highway. Meredith fell bleeding to the ground and was rushed to a hospital in Memphis.

When Meredith started his march, few people had paid much attention. No civil rights organizations were involved. The shooting changed all that. Top civil rights leaders—King, Floyd McKissick, who had taken over in January from James Farmer as head of CORE, and Stokely Carmichael, who had replaced John Lewis in May as the leader of SNCC—quickly determined to resume the march. Meredith, whose injuries proved to be superficial, was a little bewildered and worried about what these leaders were proposing to do. But he gave his assent to carry on the march. Without the benefit of planning aforethought, a dramatic new protest—the first on such a scale since Selma fifteen months before—was thrown into high gear.

For the next ten days the marchers, numbering between 30 and 250, walked toward Jackson without major incident. But in Greenwood, police arrested Carmichael and two other SNCC workers on charges of violating a local ordinance against putting up tents on the grounds of a local black school. Carmichael, a West Indian who had gone to Howard University, was a proud and fiery young man. While he had deferred to the nonviolent philosophy of King, he did not believe in it, and he had already profoundly antagonized Roy Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League, who had come to Memphis to join in strategy sessions. Both leaders angrily returned to New York. Carmichael had also demanded that whites be excluded from the march, backing off only under pressure from King. When Carmichael got out of jail on bail, he seized the occasion by firing up an agitated crowd of 600 at the scene.

His speech became a milestone on the road away from interracial cooperation in the civil rights movement. "This is the twenty-seventh time I have been arrested," he announced. "I ain't going to jail no more." Carmichael then shouted five times, "We want black power!" Each time the crowd cheered more enthusiastically, and Carmichael warmed to the response. "Every courthouse in Mississippi," he shouted, "ought to be burned tomorrow to get rid of the dirt." Repeatedly he asked his listeners, "What do you want?" The crowd called back, louder each time, "Black power! Black power! BLACK POWER!"
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Carmichael's call was neither spontaneous nor new in the long history of black protest in the United States. The trend toward black direction of civil rights activities, even if it excluded whites, had been relentless since the travail of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party at the Democratic National Convention in 1964. SNCC, in choosing Carmichael over Lewis a month before, had signified its readiness for it. Willie Ricks, a SNCC advance man on the march, had tried out the phrase at rallies and urged Carmichael to use it. Even so, the response of blacks in Greenwood, many of them local people, to the slogan of "black power" was striking. Militant blacks thereafter talked about "black power" all the time, sometimes to the accompaniment of virulently anti-white rhetoric.
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