by Norman Lowe
Many of his measures became law, partly because after the 1964 elections the Democrats had a huge majority in Congress, and partly because Johnson was more skilful and persuasive in handling Congress than Kennedy had been.
The Economic Opportunity Act (1964) provided a number of schemes under which young people from poor homes could receive job training and higher education.
Other measures were the provision of federal money for special education schemes in slum areas, including help in paying for books and transport; financial aid for clearing slums and rebuilding city areas; and the Appalachian Regional Development Act (1965), which created new jobs in one of the poorest regions.
Full voting and civil rights were extended to all Americans, regardless of their colour (see the next section).
Perhaps his most important innovation was the Social Security Amendment Act (1965), also known as Medicare: this was a partial national health scheme, though it applied only to people over 65.
This is an impressive list, and yet the overall results were not as successful as Johnson would have hoped, for a number of reasons. His major problem from early 1965 was that he was faced by the escalating war in Vietnam (see Section 8.3). Johnson’s great dilemma was how to fund both the war in Vietnam and the war on poverty. It has been suggested that the entire Great Society programme was under-financed because of the enormous expenditure on the war in Vietnam. The Republicans criticized Johnson for wanting to spend money on the poor instead of concentrating on Vietnam; they were supporters of the strong American tradition of self-help: it was up to the poor to help themselves and wrong to use taxpayers’ money on schemes which, it was thought, would only make the poor more lazy. Thus many state governments failed to take advantage of federal offers of help. And the unfortunate president, trying to fight both wars at the same time, ended up losing in Vietnam, winning only a limited victory in the war against poverty, and damaging the US economy as well.
In the mid-1960s violence increased and seemed to be getting out of hand: there were riots in black ghettos, where the sense of injustice was strongest; there were student riots in the universities in protest against the Vietnam War. There were a number of political assassinations – President Kennedy in 1963, Martin Luther King and Senator Robert Kennedy in 1968. Between 1960 and 1967 the number of violent crimes rose by 90 per cent. Johnson could only hope that his ‘war on poverty’ would gradually remove the causes of discontent; beyond that he had no answer to the problem. The general discontent and especially the student protests about Vietnam (‘LBJ, LBJ, how many kids have you burnt today?’) caused Johnson not to stand for re-election in November 1968, and it helps to explain why the Republicans won, on a platform of restoring law and order.
(e) Nixon (1969–74)
Unemployment was soon rising again, with over 4 million out of work in 1971; their plight was worsened by rapidly rising prices. The Republicans were anxious to cut public expenditure; Nixon reduced spending on Johnson’s poverty programme, and introduced a wages and prices freeze. However, social security benefits were increased, Medicare was extended to disabled people under 65, and a Council for Urban Affairs was set up to try to deal with the problems of slums and ghettos. Violence was less of a problem under Nixon, partly because protesters could now see the approaching end of America’s controversial involvement in Vietnam, and because students were allowed some say in running their colleges and universities.
During the last quarter of the twentieth century, in spite of some economic success under Reagan, the underlying problem of poverty and deprivation was still there. In the world’s richest country there was a permanent underclass of unemployed, poor and deprived people, the inner cities needed revitalizing, and yet federal spending on welfare, although it increased after 1981, remained well below the level of government welfare funding in western European states like Germany, France and Britain (see Section 23.5(c) for later developments).
23.2 RACIAL PROBLEMS AND THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
(a) The government’s attitude changes
As we saw earlier (Section 22.5), African Americans were still being treated as second-class citizens right up to the Second World War. Even when American troops were travelling aboard the Queen Mary to fight in Europe, blacks and whites were segregated – blacks had to travel in the depths of the ship near the engine room, well away from the fresh air. However, the attitude of the nation’s leaders was changing. In 1946 President Truman appointed a committee to investigate civil rights. It recommended that Congress should pass laws to stop racial discrimination in jobs and to allow blacks to vote. What caused this change of heart? The committee itself gave several reasons:
Some politicians were worried by their consciences; they felt that it was not morally right to treat fellow human beings in such an unfair way.
Excluding black people from top jobs was a waste of talent and expertise.
It was important to do something to calm the black population, who were becoming more outspoken in their demands for civil rights.
The USA could hardly claim to be a genuinely democratic country and leader of the ‘free world’ when 10 per cent of its population were denied voting and other rights. This gave the USSR a chance to condemn the USA as ‘a consistent oppressor of underprivileged peoples’. The American government wanted that excuse removed.
Nationalism was growing rapidly in Asia and Africa. Non-whites in India and Indonesia were on the point of gaining independence. These new states might turn against the USA and towards communism if American whites continued their unfair treatment of blacks.
Over the next few years, during the Eisenhower presidency, the government and the Supreme Court introduced new laws to bring about racial equality.
Separate schools for blacks and whites were illegal and unconstitutional; some black people had to be included on all juries (1954).
Schools must be desegregated ‘with all deliberate speed’; this meant that black children had to attend white schools, and vice versa.
The 1957 Civil Rights Act set up a commission to investigate the denial of voting rights to black people.
The 1960 Civil Rights Act provided help for blacks to register as voters; but this was not very effective, since many were afraid to register for fear of being harassed by whites.
Unfortunately laws and regulations were not always carried out. For example, whites in some Southern states refused to carry out the school desegregation order. In September 1957, when Governor Faubus of Arkansas defied a Supreme Court order by refusing to desegregate schools, President Eisenhower sent federal troops to escort nine black children into the High School at Little Rock. They were greeted outside the school by a mob of protesters who at first refused to move. The troops had to disperse them at bayonet point; the nine students entered the school escorted by 22 armed guards, who took them home again after school. The escort continued for several months afterwards. This was a symbolic victory, but Southern whites continued to defy the law, and by 1961 only 25 per cent of schools and colleges in the South were desegregated. In 1961 the Governor of Mississippi refused the application of a black student, James Meredith, to the all-white state university; he was eventually accepted the following year.
(b) Dr Martin Luther King and the non-violent campaign for equal rights
In the mid-1950s a mass Civil Rights movement developed. This happened for a number of reasons:
By 1955 a larger proportion of black people lived in the North than was the case earlier. In 1900 almost 90 per cent of all blacks lived in the Southern states, working on the plantations. By 1955 almost 50 per cent lived in Northern industrial cities, where they became more aware of political issues. A prosperous black middle class developed which produced talented leaders.
As Asian and African states such as India and Ghana gained their independence, African Americans resented their own unfair treatment more than ever.
Black people, whose hopes had been raised by Truman’s committee, grew incre
asingly impatient at the slow pace and the small amount of change. Even the small advances they made aroused intense hostility among many Southern whites; the Ku Klux Klan revived and some Southern state governments banned the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). It was obvious that only a nationwide mass movement would have any effect.
The campaign took off in 1955 when Dr Martin Luther King (see Illus. 23.2), a Baptist minister, emerged as the outstanding leader of the non-violent Civil Rights movement. After a black woman, Rosa Parks, had been arrested for sitting in a seat reserved for whites on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, a boycott of all Montgomery buses was organized. King soon found himself the chief spokesman for the boycott; as a committed Christian, he insisted that the campaign must be peaceful:
Love must be our regulating ideal. If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, historians will have to say ‘there lived a great people – a black people – who injected new dignity into the veins of civilization’.
White segregationalists responded with violence: bombs exploded in four black churches and Martin Luther King’s house. The black people of Montgomery refused to be intimidated. The campaign continued and in November 1956 its goal was achieved: segregated seating was stopped on Montgomery buses. Soon afterwards the Supreme Court ruled that any segregation on public buses was unconstitutional. This was just a beginning: in 1957 the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was founded and King was elected as its president. Its aim was to achieve full black equality by non-violent methods. In the summer of 1957 King launched a moral reform campaign, emphasizing that if black people wished to have complete equality with whites, they must ‘seek to gain the respect of others by improving on [their] shortcomings’. In a series of sermons all over the South, he criticized what some whites called ‘bad niggers’, meaning those who were lazy, promiscuous, slovenly, drunken, ignorant and downright criminal. Only when such people had undergone ‘a process of self-purification’ to produce ‘a calm and loving dignity befitting good citizens’, could all black people become fully equal.
Illustration 23.2 Dr Martin Luther King
The campaign of sit-ins and peaceful disobedience reached a climax in 1963 when King organized successful demonstrations against segregation in Birmingham, Alabama. The police used tear gas, clubs, dogs and water-hoses against the demonstrators, and King was arrested and briefly imprisoned. Although the campaign had attracted world attention and sympathy, and some progress had been made, there was still a long way to go before black people could enjoy equal rights with whites. The Kennedy government was sympathetic to black aspirations but was desperately trying to keep the campaign peaceful, which was becoming more difficult. As Howard Zinn points out, how could you expect blacks to remain peaceful
when bombs kept exploding in churches, when new ‘civil rights’ laws did not change the root condition of black people. In the spring of 1963, the rate of unemployment for whites was 4.8 percent. For nonwhites it was 12.1 percent. According to government estimates, one-fifth of the white population was below the poverty line, and one-half of the black population was below that line. The civil rights bills emphasized voting, but voting was not a fundamental solution to racism or poverty. In Harlem, blacks who had voted for years, still lived in rat-infested slums.
A huge march on Washington was organized for August 1963, to protest at the failure to solve the problem. About a quarter of a million people, both black and white, gathered to listen to the speakers, and it was here that Martin Luther King made one of his most moving speeches. He talked about his dream of a future America in which everybody would be equal:
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character.
In 1964 King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But not everything he attempted was successful. In 1966 when he led a campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, he came up against bitter white opposition and could make no progress.
King admitted that the achievements of the Civil Rights movement had not been as dramatic as he had hoped. Together with the SCLC he began the Poor People’s Campaign in 1967, which aimed to alleviate poverty among black people and other disadvantaged groups such as American Indians, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans and even poor whites. They aimed to present a bill of economic rights to Congress. King also launched himself into criticism of the Vietnam War, and this upset President Johnson, who had been sympathetic to the civil rights campaign, as well as losing him some of his support among the whites. The FBI began to harass him, but he was undeterred. Still insisting on non-violence, he decided that the way forward was to have huge demonstrations lasting over a period, and was planning what he called a Poor People’s Encampment to be set up in Washington to act as a permanent reminder to the government. However, tragically, in April 1968, King was assassinated by a white man, James Earl Ray, in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a strike of refuse workers.
Dr Martin Luther King is remembered as probably the most famous of the black civil rights leaders. He was a brilliant speaker and the fact that he emphasized non-violent protest gained him much support and respect even among whites. He played a major part in the achievement of civil and political equality for black people, although, of course, others also made valuable contributions. He was not much involved, for example, in the campaign to desegregate education. He was fortunate that the presidents he had to deal with – Kennedy (1961–3) and Johnson (1963–9) – were both sympathetic to the Civil Rights movement. Kennedy admitted in 1963 that an African American had
half as much chance of completing high school as a white, one-third as much chance of completing college, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 dollars a year, and a life expectancy which is seven years less.
Kennedy showed his good intentions by appointing the USA’s first black ambassador and by presenting a Civil Rights Bill to Congress. This was delayed at first by the conservative Congress but passed in 1964 after a debate lasting 736 hours. It was a far-reaching measure: it guaranteed the vote for blacks and made racial discrimination in public facilities (such as hotels, restaurants and shops) and in jobs illegal. Again the Act was not always carried out, especially in the South, where black people were still afraid to vote.
Johnson introduced the Voting Rights Act (1965) to try to make sure that black people exercised their right to vote. He followed it up with another Civil Rights Act (1968), which made it illegal to discriminate in selling property or letting accommodation. Again there was bitter white hostility to these reforms, and the problem was to make sure that the Acts were carried out.
(c) The Black Muslims
Although progress was being made, many African Americans were impatient with the slow pace and began to look for different approaches to the problem. Some black people converted to the Black Muslim faith – a sect known as Nation of Islam, arguing that Christianity was the religion of the racist whites. They believed that black people were the superior race, and that whites were evil. One of the movement’s best known leaders was Malcolm X (formerly Malcolm Little), whose father had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. He was a charismatic speaker and a good organizer; he dismissed the idea of racial integration and equality and claimed that the only way forward was black pride, black self-dependence and complete separation from the whites. He became extremely popular, especially among young people, and the movement grew. Its most famous convert was the world heavyweight boxing champion Cassius Clay, who changed his name to Muhammad Ali.
Malcolm X came into conflict with other Black Muslim leaders, who began to look on him as a fanatic because of his willingness to use violence. In 1964 he left the Nation of Islam and started his own organization. However, later that year his views began to change: after a pilgrimage to Mecca, he beca
me more moderate, acknowledging that not all whites were evil. In October 1964 he converted to orthodox Islam and began to preach about the possibility of peaceful black/white integration. Tragically, the hostility between Malcolm X’s movement and Nation of Islam exploded into violence, and in February 1965 he was shot dead by a group of Black Muslims in Harlem.
(d) Violent protest
More militant organizations included the Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party. The Black Power movement emerged in 1966 under the leadership of Stokeley Carmichael. He was a West Indian who had moved to the USA in 1952 and became a strong supporter of Martin Luther King. However, he was outraged by the brutal treatment suffered by civil rights campaigners at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan and other whites. The Black Power movement encouraged robust self-defence and self-determination, and 1967 saw probably the worst urban riots in American history. A total of 83 people were shot dead and hundreds were injured, the vast majority of whom were black civilians. In 1968 Carmichael began to speak out against American involvement in the Vietnam War; when he returned to the USA after a trip abroad, his passport was confiscated. He decided he could no longer live under such a repressive system; in 1969 he left the country and went to Guinea, in West Africa, where he lived until his death in 1998.
The Black Panther Party for Self-defence was founded in 1966 in Oakland, California, by Huey Newton, Leroy Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Searle. Its original aim, as its name implies, was to protect people in the black ghettos from police brutality. Eventually the party became more militant and developed into a Marxist revolutionary group; their programme included: