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· 1 · INTRODUCTION THE PARADOX OF SUCCESS Civil Rights and the Presidency in a New Era Kenneth Osgood and Derrick E. White A year before an assassin’s bullet claimed his life in April 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. published his last and most prophetic book: Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? King had just suffered a major defeat in Chicago, where intense northern racism and big-city machine politics thwarted a campaign against housing discrimination. The setback left King wondering about the path forward. Retreating to a small house in Jamaica, with no phone, he put the finishing touches on a manuscript that would receive mixed reviews at the time but would appear ever more prescient with the passage of time. As King wrote, the future of the American civil rights movement looked uncertain indeed. Civil rights activists had just scored their greatest legislative triumphs with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the culmination of decades of legal and grassroots challenges to the oppressive system of legal segregation in the United States. But the very success of the movement raised a deceptively simple question: What now? The answer to that question shattered the civil rights consensus. To some—including many white allies of African American civil rights activists —the answer was: Not much. Segregation had ended and it was time to move on. To others, however, it was time for more militant agitation . Years of patient nonviolent protest had yielded too little, too slowly in the areas of economic justice and structural racism. As white liberals abandoned the civil rights movement, black-power activism, urban rebellions , and rioting shattered for good the civil rights coalition King had helped construct over the preceding decade. So when King posited the 2 · Kenneth Osgood and Derrick E. White question “Chaos or Community?,” many reviewers at the time perceived the book as an assault on the separatism and militancy of black power.1 It was, but it also was much more. King argued that the civil rights movement had moved into a “new phase.” The fight for racial equality had just begun. The fracturing of the movement and the long-awaited death of Jim Crow were causes for sober reflection and renewed activism, not complacency. It was past time to address the wide-ranging repercussions of centuries of slavery and segregation. “A society that has done something special against the Negro for hundreds of years must now do something special for him,” King wrote. As he well knew, for African Americans the legacy of this discrimination meant inequality at all levels: grinding poverty, substandard education, limited access to jobs, dilapidated housing, a discriminatory criminal justice system, and a disproportionate share of front-line service in the rapidly escalating Vietnam War. King thus argued that the difficult campaign in Selma, Alabama, which had paved the way for the landmark Voting Rights Act, did not mark the end of the civil rights movement but the opening of a new front focused on “the realization of equality.” This would be in many ways a more difficult and divisive battle for economic equality, and King now spoke bitterly about the white allies who “had quietly disappeared.” He saw a movement betrayed. “The Negroes of America had taken the President, the press and the pulpit at their word when they spoke in broad terms of freedom and justice,” King complained, but “the word was broken, and the free-running expectations of the Negro crashed into the stone walls of white resistance.”2 That resistance came from surprising quarters: not just from traditional opponents of racial equality but also from white liberals who had once joined forces with King to oppose racial injustice. The march on Selma now looked like the apex of black and white unity. A core ideological disagreement divided black activists on the one hand from many former white allies and conservative opponents on the other. “Negroes have proceeded from a premise that equality means what it says,” King wrote, “but most whites in America in 1967, including many persons of good will, proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement .” Behind these differing definitions of equality stood, according to King, a “fantasy of self-deception and comfortable vanity” that relied on the belief that “American society is essentially hospitable to fair play and to steady growth toward a middle-class Utopia embodying [3.128.199.88] Project MUSE (2024-04-24...

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