Freedom's Pragmatist: Lyndon Johnson and Civil Rights

6. The Limits of Liberalism: The White House, 1965–1968

211 6 The Limits of Liberalism The White House, 1965–1968 The real issue that we confront in America is not a sectional but a national problem. . . . There is a pressing need for a liberalism in the North that is truly liberal, that firmly believes in integration in its own community as well as in the deep South. Martin Luther King Jr. As Thomas Sugrue has recently reminded us, although most histories of the black freedom struggle have focused on the South, the problem of racial discrimination and racial injustice was a national rather than sectional one, something that Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr. stressed within their lifetimes. The recent focus on the “forgotten struggle for civil rights in the North” has also added weight to the literature that has challenged the conventional time frame of civil rights histories that begin with the 1954 Brown decision and end with the passage of the Voting Rights Act by highlighting the thousands of people active in the freedom struggle in earlier and later decades in the South and elsewhere. Recent works have argued that a “long civil rights movement ” can be traced back to the 1930s and extends into the 1970s and beyond , especially in terms of the battles against discrimination in housing and the workplace. Ultimately, these works challenge and complicate the southern-focused, nonviolent, and integrationist civil rights story by shedding light on the range of ideologies and methodologies employed by activists regardless of region. 212 · Freedom’s Pragmatist Certainly Johnson’s civil rights story does not end in August 1965, yet relatively little has been written on his policies and actions in the last three years of his administration, largely because the Voting Rights Act is viewed not only as the pinnacle of the “classical” civil rights movement but also as the zenith of LBJ’s presidential achievements. It was not the end of Johnson’s civil rights journey, even if it was a tense and trying road he traveled in the latter years of his presidency as he struggled to come to terms with continuing tensions in the South and a less familiar kind of grassroots activism springing up in the urban areas of the nation. His commitment to the cause stayed intact even as his ability to make tangible progress grew weaker. In the period after August 1965, and as the Vietnam War escalated, the fragile civil rights coalition between racial liberals and civil rights activists began to fracture. Many of those fighting for racial equality became increasingly frustrated with the limits of American liberalism as the Johnson administration’s integrationist and so-called color-blind approach began to be questioned. At the same time, President Johnson faced a growing racial backlash from whites outside the South. In July 1966, Johnson read Gallup Polls that showed that 44 percent of white people living outside the South thought the administration was pushing integration “too fast.” This was a noticeable deterioration from the position the previous August, when 36 percent felt that way. And although the percentage of white parents in the South objecting to sending their children to a school where more than half were “colored” had fallen to 64 percent, from a 1963 figure of 78 percent, in the North the trend was running in the opposite direction , with 53 percent objecting in 1963 but rising to 60 percent in 1966. Northern working-class whites began to openly challenge affirmative action and integrationist policies. Johnson now watched, and at times dithered, as the nation witnessed increasingly militant protests and race riots. For much of his political career, Johnson had argued that “race” was a national issue; he was now faced with this as a stark reality. LBJ did not have an instinctive sense of how to deal with the problems of the inner cities. His focus, and the nation’s, had been on southern racial problems; northern ones had been largely overlooked. When he reflected back on this period in his memoirs, Johnson acknowledged that “change, real change, was on the horizon—close enough to ignite hope but far enough away to increase frustration.” He was later able to understand that “the long history of Negro-white relations had entered a new and more bewildering stage. New problems of racial The Limits of Liberalism: The White House, 1965–1968 · 213 discrimination came to the forefront: the problems of poverty, slums, inadequate schooling...