Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (58 page)

Malcolm returned to the States on May 21 in the middle of the longest filibuster in the Senate’s history—fifty-seven days. The
senators who drove the filibuster were trying to stop the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Behind the scenes, supporters of the act agreed on outlawing future discrimination, but disagreed on what to do about past discrimination. Antiracists requested that the act’s fair employment provisions eliminate the established seniority rights of White workers. Assimilationists balked at the idea, while segregationists tried to make the request into a wedge issue. Segregationists knew White Americans were commonly refusing to acknowledge the accumulated gains of past discrimination—and nothing signified those gains in the labor market better than seniority. But the bill’s powerful assimilationist backers were adamant that it would not affect White seniority. “We don’t think that one form of injustice can be corrected or should be corrected by creating another,” AFL-CIO lawyer Thomas E. Harris said. Equating measures that healed inequities with measures that created inequities? It was as ridiculous as equating the harmful crime with the harmful punishment.
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Harris believed that taking away Whites’ seniority “would be unjust to the white workers” who had been building seniority in their jobs for many years. However,
not
to do so would be unjust to the Negro workers who had been discriminated against for just as long. Not tackling the seniority question (and past discrimination) would be “akin to asking the Negro to enter the 100-yard dash forty yards behind the starting line,” argued the general counsel for the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Carl Rachlin. But that was what the writers of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were largely asking the Negro to do. And when the Negro lost the dashes and the racial disparities persisted, racists could blame the supposed slowness of the Negro, not the head starts of accumulated White privilege.
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And so, as much as the Civil Rights Act served to erect a dam against Jim Crow policies, it also opened the floodgates for new racist ideas to pour in, including the most racist idea to date: it was an idea that ignored the White head start, presumed that discrimination had been eliminated, presumed that equal opportunity had taken over, and figured that since Blacks were still losing the race, the racial disparities and their continued losses must be their fault. Black people must be
inferior, and equalizing policies—like eliminating or reducing White seniority, or instituting affirmative action policies—would be unjust and ineffective. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 managed to bring on racial progress and progression of racism at the same time.

The most transformative verbiage of the 1964 act was the wording that legislated against clear and obvious “intention to discriminate,” such as southern “Whites only” public policies. But what about those northern discriminators with private policies that had long kept Blacks out? What about those who were still blockbusting and segregating northern cities, and still creating, maintaining, and increasing racial inequities in wealth, housing, and education? If the northern backers of the act defined polices as racist by their public outcomes instead of their public intent, then they would be hard-pressed to maintain the myth of the antiracist North and the racist South. By not principally focusing on outcome, discriminators had to merely privatize their public policies to get around the Civil Rights Act. And that is precisely what they did.

Though the members of Congress were aware of these privatizing forces, they chose not to explicitly bar seemingly race-neutral policies that had discriminatory public outcomes through racial disparities. On the urgings of segregationists, in fact, Congress actually provided the means for the progression of racism. Section 703(h) of Title VII allowed employers “to give and to act upon the results of any professionally developed ability test.” Though eugenicists had been discounted in mainstream America, members of Congress and their constituents had thoroughly embraced their standardized mental tests as having the capacity to assess what did not exist: general intelligence. In the job industry, in education, and in many other sectors of society, officials could justify their racial disparities by pointing to test scores and claiming they were not intending to discriminate. And to racist Americans, the racial gaps in the scores—the so-called achievement gap—said something was wrong with the Black test-takers—not the tests.
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The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the first important civil rights legislation since the Civil Rights Act of 1875. It outlawed public, intentional discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or
national origin in government agencies and facilities, public accommodations, education, and employment; established a federal enforcement structure; and empowered victims of discrimination to sue and the government to withhold federal funds from violators. Hours after President Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964, he appeared before television cameras to play up the American “ideal of freedom” for cynics in Los Angeles and Lagos and Lhasa. “Today in far corners of distant continents,” he proclaimed, “the ideals of those American patriots still shape the struggles of men who hunger for freedom.”

Malcolm X had another take on the Civil Rights Act, echoing the thoughts of antiracist young minds like Angela Davis’s. If the government could not enforce the existing laws, he asked the Organization of African Unity conference in 1964, “how can anyone be so naïve as to think all the additional laws brought into being by the civil-rights bill will be enforced?”
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THE PASSAGE OF
the Civil Rights Act in 1964 hardly hurt Lyndon B. Johnson’s commanding position for reelection during that election year. Johnson did face an improbable challenge for the Democratic nomination from Alabama governor George Wallace, however. After taking a public stand for segregation the year before, Wallace had received more than 100,000 approving letters, mostly from northerners. Wallace realized, as he told NBC’s Douglas Kiker, “they all hate black people. . . . That’s it! . . . The whole United States is southern!”
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During his campaign, George Wallace sounded more like the 1964 Republican nominee than LBJ. Arizona senator Barry Goldwater’s nomination for president signified his star power over the escalating conservative movement in American politics, powered by his 1960 chart-topper,
The Conscience of a Conservative
. Inspiring millions of Democrats to turn Republican, including Hollywood movie star Ronald Reagan, Goldwater’s tract deeply massaged those Americans who had outgrown (or never needed) government assistance. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant
spiritual
being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,”
Goldwater wrote without a shred of evidence. Many proud, dignified, industrious, self-reliant members of the White middle class, who had derived their wealth from the welfare of inheritance, the New Deal, or the GI Bill, accepted Goldwater’s dictum as truth, despite the fact that parental or government assistance had not transformed them or their parents into dependent animal creatures. After looking at White mothers on welfare as “deserving” for decades, these Goldwater conservatives saw the growing number of Black mothers on welfare as “undeserving”—as dependent animal creatures.
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Barry Goldwater and his embryonic conservative movement hardly worried Johnson as he arrived on the beaches of Atlantic City for the Democratic National Convention in August 1964. But he was worried about those northern activists who had violently protested against police brutality and economic exploitation in urban summer rebellions from Harlem to Chicago. In the South, SNCC field agents had weathered Klan brutality during their “Mississippi Freedom Summer,” which brought hundreds of northern college students to teach in antiracist “Freedom Schools” and assist in organizing the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party (MFDP). The interracial MFDP came to Atlantic City and requested to be seated in place of the regular Mississippi delegation, which everyone knew had been elected through fraud and violence. The MFDP’s electrifying vice chair, Fannie Lou Hamer, riveted the nation in her live televised testimony at the convention. “If the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America? The land of the free and the home of the brave? Where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hook, because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings.”

President Johnson called an emergency press conference to divert the networks away from Hamer’s transfixing testimony, and then later he offered the Freedom Party a “compromise”: two nonvoting seats accompanying the segregationist delegation. “We didn’t come all this way for no two seats!” bellowed Fannie Lou Hamer. MFDP and SNCC activists traveled home carrying a valuable lesson about power politics. Persuasion does not work. “Things could never be the same,” SNCC’s
Cleveland Sellers recalled. “Never again were we lulled into believing that our task was exposing injustices so that the ‘good’ people of America could eliminate them. . . . After Atlantic City, our struggle was not for civil rights, but for liberation.” Malcolm X’s empowerment philosophy of Black national and international unity, self-determination, self-defense, and cultural pride started to sound like music to the ears of the SNCC youths. At the end of 1964, Malcolm X returned from an extended trip to Africa to a growing band of SNCC admirers and a growing band of enemies.
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On February 21, 1965, Malcolm X was gunned down by some of those enemies at a Harlem rally. When James Baldwin heard the news in London, he was beside himself. “It is because of you,” he shouted at London reporters, “the men that created this white supremacy, that this man is dead!” From his nationally watched voting registration campaign in Selma, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr. was reflectively restrained. “While we did not always see eye to eye on methods to solve the race problem, I always had a deep affection for Malcolm and felt that he had a great ability to put his finger on the existence and root of the problem.” On February 22, 1965, the
New York Times
banner headline read: “The Apostle of Hate Is Dead.”
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Actor Ossie Davis christened Malcolm “our shining black prince” days later in his magnetic eulogy before the overflow crowd at Harlem’s Faith Temple of the Church of God in Christ. “Many will say . . . he is of hate—a fanatic, a racist,” Davis said. And the response would be, “Did you ever really listen to him? For if you did, you would know him. And if you knew him you would know why we must honor him.”
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Antiracist Americans did honor him, especially after recordings and transcripts of his speeches began to circulate, and after Grove Press published
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. Journalist Alex Haley had collaborated with Malcolm to write the autobiography, which was billed by Eliot Fremont-Smith of the
New York Times
as “a brilliant, painful, important book” upon its release in November 1965. Malcolm X’s ideological transformation—from assimilationist, to anti-White separatist, to antiracist—inspired millions. Possibly no other American autobiography opened more antiracist minds than
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
. Malcolm condemned the half-truth of racial progress, bellowing that you don’t stick a knife in a person’s back nine inches, pull it out six inches, and say you’re making progress. “The black man’s supposed to be
grateful?
Why, if the white man jerked the knife
out
, it’s still going to leave a
scar
!” He argued that White people were not born racist, but that “the American political, economic and social
atmosphere
. . . automatically nourishes a racist psychology in the white man.” He encouraged antiracist Whites who had escaped racism to fight “on the battle lines of where America’s racism really
is
—and that’s in their own home communities.” He ferociously attacked “the white man’s puppet Negro ‘leaders,’” who had exploited “their black poor brothers,” and who did not want separation or integration, but only “to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women!” But nothing was more compelling than Malcolm X’s unstinting humanism: “I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.”
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ANTIRACIST AMERICANS HAD
some reason to hope for justice when Congress took up the voting rights bill after hundreds of marchers were bludgeoned on a bridge outside of Selma on March 7, 1965. Yet even with a voting rights bill, the United States would not be finished, President Johnson had the courage to declare in his commencement address to Howard University graduates in June. “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 then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.” It was quite possibly the most antiracist avowal ever uttered from the lips of a US president. And Johnson was just getting started. “We seek not just freedom but opportunity,” he said. “We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Racial progress had come primarily for “a growing middle class minority,”
while for poor Blacks, Johnson said, “the walls are rising and the gulf is widening.”

In Johnson’s time—in the midst of civil rights legislation—racial disparities in unemployment had grown, income disparities had grown, and disparities in poverty, in infant mortality, and in urban segregation had all grown—as he pointed out at Howard University. Why had all this happened? Johnson offered two “broad basic reasons”: one antiracist (“inherited poverty” and the “devastating” legacy of discrimination), and one racist (the devastation wrought by “the breakdown of the Negro family structure”).
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