After the Dream: Black and White Southerners since 1965

1 HISTORIC PROGRESS

• 1 • HISTORIC PROGRESS Public Accommodations and Voting Rights in the Johnson Years In the Johnson years, civil rights campaigners faced many challenges. By the summer of 1965, the United States was deeply embroiled in the war in Vietnam, a conflict that drew attention and funding away from racial issues. Just a week after the Voting Rights Act was signed into law, a brutal race riot in the Watts district of Los Angeles left thirty-four people dead and caused millions of dollars in property damage. Smaller riots soon broke out in Chicago, Philadelphia, and other northern cities, and they would be repeated over the next few summers. Reacting to these televised disturbances, many whites associated blacks with uncontrolled lawlessness and unreasonable demands. In August 1966, a Newsweek poll related “the spreading white view that enough is enough for now.” Reflecting this mood, by early 1967 two congressmen, Mississippi’s William Colmer and Florida’s William C. Cramer, were leading efforts to pass an antiriot bill. By June 1967, the presidential aide Fred Panzer reported to LBJ that the races were completely polarized. “Whites are uneasy and resistant,” he noted. “Negroes are impatient.” Panzer cited a Gallup poll showing that 47 percent of southern whites feared racial violence on the streets, up from 44 percent the year before. Although most of the riots had taken place in the North, the southern figure was the highest in the country.1 The president had urged them to “close the springs of racial poison ,” but most southern whites were clearly not listening.2 Between 1964 and 1968, leading southern politicians were bombarded with letters from white constituents that called for harsh action against the rioters . Writing to Democratic senator Richard Russell in 1967, Walter Hawkins Jr. spoke for many. “In my opinion,” he declared, “these niggers riot as a cause to steal and loot. No amount of appeasement . . . will correct the situation.” “If I were to do what these negroes are doing,” added a correspondent to Senator Herman Talmadge during the New- 12 • AFTER THE DREAM ark riot of 1967, “I would be shot and killed, as I should be, as I would be no better than a mad dog. These black bastards need killing, and I don’t mean two or three, but thousands, if it takes this to save our country .” While Russell gave a cautious reply to such letters, Talmadge expressed enthusiastic agreement.3 In sharp contrast, blacks saw the violence as a reflection of economic deprivation and called for far-reaching solutions. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it, “More than half of our people are struggling on an island of poverty in the midst of this ocean of material wealth. . . . In the final analysis this is the reason for the riots and discontent across the nation.”4 In these years, other problems complicated the task of implementing the new legislation. By 1968, relations between the White House and most civil rights leaders had fallen apart. The causes of the breakdown were complex but included Johnson’s commitment to the war in Vietnam and his feeling that black leaders were not sufficiently appreciative of his landmark civil rights legislation. In addition, the successive riots reduced the possibilities for fundamental economic reforms even as they dramatized how necessary such initiatives were. In 1968, Johnson ended up shelving the recommendations of the Kerner Commission, which called for a wholesale commitment of national resources to narrow the economic gap between the races. It was too embarrassing for LBJ to admit that his Vietnam budget was more than three times greater than the amount that the commission wanted to invest in the cities. “By that time,” recalled SCLC vice president Andrew Young, “I think we had lost faith in President Johnson altogether.”5 Civil rights activists confronted other fresh difficulties. Prior to 1965, the leading organizations had worked together to overthrow legal segregation and secure black voting rights. While there had always been tensions, particularly between the hierarchical SCLC and the groupfocused Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the fight against overt segregation had created what King’s former aide Bayard Rustin called “an uncommon unity.” Once the civil rights legislation was passed, however, activists differed about the “much more difficult task” of implementing it effectively.6 Leading civil rights groups certainly experienced many problems. According to Clayborne Carson, after 1965 SNCC was “severely weakened by police repression, loss of white financial support, and internal dissension and disarray.” Many...