Saving the Nation in the Age of Black Insurgency

In the months since I was invited to participate in this roundtable, Donald Trump’s election has sharpened the parallels between today’s racial politics and those of the late 1960s. During the 2016 campaign, Trump capitalized on being the “law-and-order candidate,” repeating the pledge of white conservatives like Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan who called for an iron-fisted police and legal response to deal with the black insurgency of the late 1960s. Trump’s renewal of this slogan in his campaign, along with his invocation of “carnage” to describe inner-city America, speaks to the fact that five decades later—and at the end of the groundbreaking term of a twice-elected black president—the ghetto conditions and state violence that prompted Black Power and black rioting still persisted, and black protest was in flower again, especially against the police and prison systems.¹

In the context of Trump’s ruthless promises and actions to exclude and criminalize nonwhite Americans, it is tempting to look to the reform efforts of 1960s elite white liberals like Lyndon Johnson or Robert Kennedy with nostalgic longing. Their velvet-gloved efforts, which seemed to meet the demands of black activists partway, might now seem like the antithesis of Trumpism—shining examples, at least by comparison, of good governance and social inclusion. However, we need to remember that both white-liberal reform efforts and conservative crackdown in the 1960s originated in an enduring white-elite conception of African Americans not as citizens but rather as an alien group that had to be constrained to save the nation. This core belief helps explain why, despite the successes of the black freedom struggle, including Obama’s presidency, black America in 2017 looks a lot like it did in 1967.

African Americans’ very presence, let alone their fight against their position as an enslaved and then exploited racial caste, has given the lie to foundational national values of liberty and equality throughout American history. While the nation and its elites have most often thrived despite and because of this contradiction, at key points—like the American Revolution, the Civil War, and their aftermaths, as well as the civil rights/Black Power era—the conflict it created over the future of African American citizenship became existential for both.

The predominant white response to these crises was violent crackdown akin to “law and order,” but conflict-averse elite liberals found an alternate solution. They focused on a strategy they hoped would save the nation by ending racial confrontation and upholding the notion of equality through the removal or separation of black people from the mainstream of American society. These reformers would literally eliminate what would become known as the “Negro problem.” The justification for this strategy was a developmentalist ideology that adherents framed as benevolent, and which they funded through major philanthropic initiatives. This rationale claimed that the only way African Americans could become full citizens would be for them to establish a society of their own, one separate from white America. In fact, the white philanthropic fantasy of “separate so that they may become equal” stretches back to the early republic and the decades that followed, when many powerful white Americans, Presidents Madison and Lincoln among them, worked through the American Colonization Society in a largely futile effort to remove blacks from American soil for what Madison hoped would be “a rapid erasure of the blot from our Republican character.”² A century later, in the context of emancipation, Gilded Age philanthropists underwrote the industrial educational project through a similar developmentalist ethos in order to keep African Americans in the rural South, sharecropping and out of politics, thus cementing Northern elites’ contribution and commitment to Jim Crow.³

Although these episodes are well known to historians, when I began a book project about the liberal establishment’s response to Black Power, I was surprised to discover this separatist aspiration still present in the 1960s, a period in which I had been taught that liberals were integrationists. Instead, my case study of the Ford Foundation—at the time the world’s...