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chapter eight Broken Bloc: “Law and Order,” the New Right, and Racial Uplift Redux, 1968–75 Despite black power’s contradictory class character, its popular association with communal insurrections was indicative of “the issue of black poverty and unemployment” that had become the central domestic crisis of the 1960s. Since 1950 a large swath of the black working class had become a “semiproletariat” barely suspended above permanent unemployment. Meanwhile, as a result of Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the size of the black middle class doubled between 1960 and 1970, and the diversity of its occupations expanded. Continuing desegregation of graduate and training schools, and new sources of federal aid for higher education, expanded its professional wing, while the implementation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act fortified the black electorate, feeding the development of new political officeholders. However, the “old” class of African American middle-class entrepreneurs had experienced decline as corporate expansion, and corporate -led urban renewal, disrupted segregation-era black business institutions . To the extent that Black Power represented a fusion of the dual Black Nationalist politics of professionals and workers, government actors and corporate capitalists responded to black urban working-class uprising, and the “skidding” of the old black middle class, by cultivating a new entrepreneurial elite. Consequently, “Black Power” received an unlikely endorsement from Richard Nixon, the Republican nominee in the 1968 presidential election, who articulated it specifically as “Black Capitalism.” During his presidency, the federal state for the first time directly supported black business , albeit on the White House’s own narrow terms. That is, the fundamental goal of set-asides, loans, and logistical support for “Black Capitalism ” was to project models of individual achievement and responsibility—and provide a social barrier to black working-class militancy . The maturation of post-1965 black elected officials, though not directly tied to this project, ultimately served a similar function.1 One result of these processes was increased class polarization among 217 African Americans. At the same historical moment that these new dynamics of class formation were magnifying the fragmentation of black political agendas, the postwar U.S. police state expanded through popular appeals to “law and order,” and a cross-class white coalition consolidated under the banner of the “New Right.” It was through a combination of government repression and co-optation, and antiurban social welfare policies that the black working-class political bloc prevailing since the Great Depression was finally eroded. The “New Right,” paradoxically, produced conditions for a new black historic bloc along dramatically altered lines.2 Interracial Incivility g The public housing rent strike settlement, and the creation of the Civic Alliance for Housing, had been possible in large measure because of St. Louis’s culture of “civility.” For many prominent white citizens, the pride they took in the city’s “good” race relations was vindicated by the pact, and more generally by the absence of major rioting. Yet local authorities responded to Black Power activists largely through coercion. The Liberators, arguably St. Louis’s most radical Black Power organization, weathered the brunt of police harassment, though their own tendencies toward “adventurism ” may have further inflamed the conflict. On September 4, 1968, Koen and four other members were arrested on peace disturbance charges following a dispute with police, who stopped them on a minor traffic violation . That evening, a group of Liberators arrived at the Lucas Avenue police station, where the five had been taken. Indicative of the growing class stratification among African Americans in St. Louis, they confronted the black station watch commander, Lieutenant Fred Grimes, who rebuffed their demands to release their comrades. In separate incidents that same evening, unidentified snipers fired shots through the front window of the station, and at Grimes’s home. Arsonists also attempted the firebombing of the real estate office of Clifton W. Gates, a black member of the Board of Police Commissioners.3 The following day, vandals ransacked the Liberators’ headquarters and set their patrol car ablaze. (A witness later claimed to have seen Lieutenant Grimes fire a shotgun blast through the Liberators’ office window.) That night, police rounded up twenty-one members of the Liberators and the Zulus for questioning. Claiming that the spate of shootings and firebombings was the result of a Liberator-Zulu feud, the president of the Board of Police Commissioners, Mayor Cervantes, and Missouri governor Warren Hearnes, endorsed a police crackdown on both groups. Similarly enraged was the staff of the Globe-Democrat, whose main news columnist, Patrick...

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