Shocking the Conscience: A Reporter's Account of the Civil Rights Movement

21. A Familiar Face

282 21 A FAMILIAR FACE At seven-foot-two, NBA star Wilt Chamberlain towered above the heads of the thousands of mourners outside Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church for the funeral of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Even at a distance, I spotted him inching his way toward the entrance, but didn’t notice until he was almost there that following behind him was a much smaller, slim white man whose face I recognized instantly. At the door, the security guard saw only the hoop star, and yelled, “Back up folks and let Brother Wilt in,” opening the way for Chamberlain but momentarily blocking the path of his white companion, Richard Milhous Nixon. Almost a year later, on January 20, 1969, Nixon was sworn in as thirtyseventh president of the United States, having won the election without support of a majority of white and black voters. (He had only a plurality of the popular vote, with third party candidate George Wallace taking more than 13 percent of the ballots from him and Democratic candidate, Vice President Hubert Humphrey.) As for blacks, less than one in ten backed the GOP nominee . I wrote in Ebony that outside of the familiar breed of segregationists and white supremacists, few men in American public life had incurred the wrath of blacks as Nixon had, which largely explained their cool reaction to the former vice president as he’d made his way into the church through a crowd that warmly welcomed other VIPs such as Governor Nelson Rockefeller, Senators Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, and Vice President Humphrey.1 Blacks were not about to forgive or forget how Nixon had coldly ignored their communities in his unsuccessful presidential bid in 1960 against a man who started out as an underdog, Senator John F. Kennedy. In that election, the black vote was the difference between victory and defeat. In 1968, blacks’ ninety-percent anti-Nixon vote didn’t matter. As incoming president, Nixon faced his biggest challenge in winning the confidence of the country’s 25 million blacks. In his speeches, he mentioned a goal of “reconciliation of the races,” but the real issue was whether Nixon could achieve his own reconciliation with blacks. I didn’t see that as A Familiar Face 283 an impossible thing to do. While there was definitely something uncomfortable about his social interactions with blacks during the Eisenhower administration , he had also compiled a pretty good official record. In addition to that, he was on good terms with many prominent Negroes, both leaders and followers, and had helped to bring down segregation barriers in the nation’s capital. There was no question, however, that his “liberalism” had snapped sharply in 1960 when he sought the presidency, and “wrote off” the black vote to get it. Opening his campaign in 1968, Nixon went out of his way to woo black support but found little interest, with most black Republicans urging New York’s Nelson Rockefeller to enter the race. At the nominating convention in Miami Beach, Nixon turned to South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond for advice, and wound up with Maryland governor Spiro Agnew, like Nixon, a liberal-turned-conservative, as his running mate. This time, however, he did not run a lily-white campaign, hiring black Republicans to begin a selfhelp dialogue in black communities. But since all those in campaign strategy positions were white, he had to start from scratch once in office to fulfill a campaign pledge to name blacks to key positions in government. There were so few black Republicans, a Nixon aide cracked, “we’ve got more available jobs than we’ve got blacks to fill them.” Vice President Hubert Humphrey was the black favorite in 1968, but it wasn’t enough to save him from the backlash against Johnson’s Vietnam policy. (Courtesy of author.) A Familiar Face 284 OneofNixon’sfirstblackhireswasbusinessmanRobertJ.(“Bob”)Brown, of High Point, North Carolina, a former Democrat, whom he appointed to the White House staff as a special assistant to the president. Brown was founder and CEO of B&C Associates, the oldest black-owned and operated management consulting, market research, and public relations firm in the country. Another appointee was renegade Republican Arthur Fletcher, son of a buffalo (black cavalry) soldier and a Comanche woman. Fletcher was a giant of a man who made a lasting mark as assistant secretary of labor...