The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration, 1965-1968 (review)

T H E A L A B A M A R E V I E W 66 be frustrated that they must visit a website (TheAgeofLincoln.com) for Burton’s extensive footnotes. This will not likely trouble students, and The Age of Lincoln seems ideally suited for classroom use, as Burton raises many topics for discussion, writes clearly, provides a wealth of information , and includes many effective vignettes to illustrate his points. Burton’s work further demonstrates Robert Penn Warren’s observation that “in the American mind, the Civil War itself never truly ended.” By the conclusion of the book one is able to see how it was possible for a conflict of such magnitude to become “transmuted to a romantic memory ” where people participate in re-enactments or visit battlefields without ever addressing the true causes and consequences of the war (p. 369). MATTHEW NORMAN Gettysburg College The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement: Civil Rights and the Johnson Administration, 1965–1968. By David C. Carter. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xv, 359 pp. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-8078-3280-6. On August 5, 1966, one year after the enactment of the Voting Rights Act, Mary McGrory of the Washington Evening Star reported, “the music has gone out of the movement” (p. 158). As David Carter explains, McGrory and others believed that “dissension and pessimism had replaced the harmony and optimism” that had characterized the Civil Rights movement (p. xv). Even though Carter considers McGrory’s “musical epitaph simplistic and premature,” he adopts her description for the title of his book (p. xv). Rejecting a simple, straight declension narrative, Carter’s eight chapters seek to tell a more complicated, uneven story of how the music went out of the movement during the administration of Lyndon Johnson. Two crucial events—President Johnson’s address at Howard University on June 4, 1965, and the release of the Kerner Commission’s report early in 1968—provide the chronological limits of Carter’s story. In between he explains the development of turbulence, chaos, disagreement , and miscommunication in the administration, in the movement, and between them. Influenced by Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s research for the “Report on the Negro Family,” which appeared later, Johnson’s Howard University speech announced his intention to broaden the Civil Rights movement to encompass fundamental economic rights, because “freedom is not enough” (p. 4). The president stressed “not just equality as a right and J A N U A R Y 2 0 1 1 67 a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result,” and he sought to unite what had become “two nations” (pp. 4, 7). According to Carter, Johnson “reset the bar of political and economic expectations at a daunting new height” (p. 9). LBJ’s “rhetorical expansion” that appeared to combine the movement with his War on Poverty soon succumbed to “a gradual disengagement from the civil rights agenda” through “retreat, withdrawal, loss of will, and even betrayal” (p. 22). Though Carter takes a national, White House–based policy perspective , two discursive chapters focus on Mississippi (Alabama does not even appear in the index). A short history of the Child Development Group of Mississippi depicts a controversial attempt to join civil rights and economic justice. The aborted 1966 march of James Meredith, the emergence of Black Power, and the shrinking of the “middle ground” within an increasingly fractured movement threatened the Johnson administration ’s hopes (p. 131). Interspersed with the Mississippi chapters, Carter discusses the administration ’s handling in the late summer of 1965 of the Watts riots, the Moynihan Report, and the growing Vietnam War. He finds striking similarities in “theme and architecture” between Johnson’s Howard speech and the Moynihan Report and recognizes the “understandable but erroneous linkage” between the report and the Watts uprising (pp. 71, 70). With dissension created by urban riots, the war, Black Power, and Republican victories in 1966, Johnson’s civil rights consensus, according to Carter, collapsed. Johnson and his advisers struggled to formulate a coherent civil rights policy. To gather reliable information on the spreading urban disorders, the administration secretly sent trusted aides to more than...