The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  His popularity dropped until in March 1968 Gallup’s figures indicated that only 36 percent of the country approved of his conduct of the Presidency. Like Richard Nixon five years later, Johnson responded by withdrawing into a self-imposed isolation. During his campaign against Goldwater three years earlier he had alarmed the Secret Service by his way of wading joyously into seas of humanity. Now his public appearances were confined to reliable audiences—meetings of business executives or service families on military bases, where he could trust his listeners to be respectful. The White House became embattled. Getting past the gates became much more difficult; credentials had to be just so, and dispatch cases were rigorously searched. The President’s staff urged him to get out among the people. Even if crowds were hostile the nation would sympathize and admire his courage. Anything would be an improvement on this seclusion. The Secret Service objected. Given the country’s ugly mood, they felt that appearances before unscreened groups would be risky, and this time Johnson obeyed them.

  More and more he kept watch on his staff and cabinet, alert for further defections. Those who wanted to stay, or who needed his approval for advancement now and his endorsement for future positions, felt they had to display excessive zeal and unquestioning devotion to him. Hubert Humphrey became a superhawk. Larry O’Brien drafted the dead in support of the war, telling an audience in Lexington, Virginia, that if General George C. Marshall were alive he would “no doubt” back Johnson’s Vietnam policy in every particular. Nick Katzenbach, appointed attorney general, held in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on August 17, 1967, that Congress had authorized the President “to use the armed forces of the United States in whatever way necessary” when it passed the Tonkin Gulf resolution three years earlier, and that this was indeed sufficient warrant for any military commitment the President might make in Indochina, including the bombing of targets close to the Chinese border. This exchange followed:

  SENATOR FULBRIGHT: You think it is outmoded to declare war?

  MR. KATZENBACH: In this kind of context I think the expression of declaring a war is one that has become outmoded in the international arena.

  It was enough, Katzenbach said, that the Senate had approved of American participation in regional defense treaties, in this case SEATO. He intimated that a President could do whatever he liked with U.S. military power without consulting Congress. At that point a member of the committee rose and strode angrily out of the room muttering, “There is only one thing to do—take it to the country.” The senator was Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota.

  ***

  It was in May 1967, the third and ugliest year of black violence, that Stokely Carmichael resigned as chairman of the misnamed Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and flew off to tour Cuba and North Vietnam. “You’ll be happy to have me back,” he said, referring to his successor, H. Rap Brown, as “a bad man.” The rise of Brown was a triumph for militants bent on the rejection of integration and the alienation of white liberals. “If you give me a gun I might just shoot Lady Bird,” he said on July 26, and he told Detroit blacks, “The honky is your enemy.”

  Whites were barred from a national conference on black power in Newark the weekend of July 20–23. The delegates took their theme from Malcolm X: “The day of nonviolent resistance is over.” Among the measures they endorsed were resolutions calling for the formation of a “black militia,” for “a national dialogue on the desirability of partitioning the United States into two separate nations, one white and one black,” and for recognition of “the right of black people to revolt when they deem it necessary and in their interests.” Integration was dead, the nearly one thousand delegates declared; absolute segregation of the races was the new goal.

  The August 14 issue of Brown’s SNCC Newsletter denounced Zionism, attacked American Jews, and accused Israel of crushing Arabs “through terror, force, and massacre.” That drove from SNCC membership such liberals as Harry Golden and Theodore Bikel and drew the fire of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith. The militants were undaunted. To be sure white sympathizers got the message that they were unwelcome, CORE dropped “multiracial” from the constitutional description of its membership. Speaking for CORE, Floyd McKissick issued a Black Manifesto declaring that sit-ins, boycotts, and peaceful demonstrations belonged to the past. “The tactics and philosophy of the civil rights era can take us no further along the road to total equality,” he said. “New methods must be found; a new era must begin.” The long, hot summers of rioting, he suggested, might be remembered in the future as “the beginning of the black revolution.”

  Some honkies seemed to take an almost masochistic pleasure in their mortification. Perhaps the most vivid example was the National Conference for New Politics (NCNP), held in Chicago over Labor Day weekend in 1967. The conference was attended by three thousand delegates representing over two hundred groups with varied goals, among them an end to the Vietnam War, better treatment of the poor, and equity for black Americans. The number of votes represented by each delegate was determined by the number of active members in his organization back home. Women Strike for Peace, for example, had 1,000 votes; the Camden Citizens for Peace in Vietnam 31 votes. Negro groups had 5,000 votes. They wanted more. “Black people can’t be a plank in someone else’s platform,” said McKissick. “They must be the platform itself.” Forming a Black Caucus, the Negro delegates issued an ultimatum of thirteen points. Among them were a demand for 50 percent black representation on all committees, censure of the “imperial Zionist war,” and approval of all measures passed by the Newark conference. They demanded that all this be accepted without change by 1 P.M. that Saturday. An editor of Ramparts suggested a modification of the language but withdrew it when a member of the Black Caucus shouted at him, “What right has a white man got amending the black man’s resolution?”

  After an elderly white woman explained that this was merely a test of the NCNP’s “social barometer,” the thirteen-point program was accepted by a three-to-one vote. The delegates then gave themselves a standing ovation. Then they received a jolt. The Black Caucus was still dissatisfied. The caucus groups wanted not the 5,000 votes they had been allocated but 28,498 votes—absolute control of the convention. Negro speakers explained from the podium that it was all a matter of trust; whites had to prove that they trusted blacks by adopting the proposal. “An extraordinary development took place,” one of the white delegates said afterward. “The walls of the Palmer House began to drip with guilt.” Adoption passed, two to one. Thereafter the fate of each resolution before the convention was determined by a young Negro in the front row of the Black Caucus holding a large pink card that represented 28,498 votes. In fact, not much was accomplished. A sizable number of whites had come hoping to nominate a presidential ticket, Martin Luther King for President and Dr. Spock for Vice President. It died stillborn: the Black Caucus regarded Dr. King as a black honky, and Dr. Spock, in his old-fashioned way, still used the word Negro.

  Despite Brown-McKissick rhetoric, the flow of blacks into the middle class was increasing. Census figures would later show that the number of Negro families with annual incomes over $10,000 increased from 11 to 28 percent during the 1960s. The way was opening up spectacularly for talented blacks. In 1965 Benjamin O. Davis Jr. became a lieutenant general in the Air Force. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Robert C. Weaver, U.S. Senator Edward W. Brooke, Bishop Robert Perry of the Catholic Church, and Judge Constance Baker Motley of the federal bench all reached their eminent offices in 1966. A survey by two private organizations revealed that 1,469 Negroes held public office. Thurgood Marshall was appointed to the Supreme Court in 1967; Air Force Major Robert H. Lawrence became the first Negro astronaut on June 30 (he was killed in December when his plane crashed on a training flight); Elizabeth D. Koontz was elected president of the National Education Association; Dean Rusk’s daughter married a black, Guy Gibson Smith; Cleveland and Gary acquired Negro mayors, and Walter E. Washington was
named commissioner of the District of Columbia. The very excesses of the black militants seemed to ease the way for some Negro moderates; James Meredith repeated his Mississippi march in 1967, and the only whites to interrupt him asked for his autograph or snapped his picture.

  But backlash continued to deliver stinging blows elsewhere. In Boston Louise Day Hicks, a forty-four-year-old grandmother, became a popular figure, and later a congresswoman, on the strength of her stand against remedies for racial imbalance in schools. A black youth was murdered in Detroit’s Algiers Motel while under police interrogation; the officer who shot him pleaded self-defense and was acquitted by an all-white jury, showing that such cases were not confined to the Deep South. Adam Clayton Powell was denied his seat in Congress. There was no doubt about his misconduct, but Thomas Dodd, it was noted, was merely censured by the Senate. Father James E. Groppi failed in his campaign for “open” (integrated) housing in Milwaukee. Lester Maddox was sworn in as governor of Georgia, and the winner of Mississippi’s gubernatorial race was another racist, John Bell Williams.

  But these developments were overshadowed by that summer’s havoc in the metropolitan ghettos, bringing to a climax the Negro revolt which had begun two years earlier in Watts. In its fury and the desolation it left behind it was like a war, and indeed there were those who believed that it was a mirror image of the Vietnam violence which could be seen on the television screens in every living room now during the dinner hour. “The government is contradictory,” said John Lewis, Carmichael’s predecessor as chairman of SNCC, “telling oppressed black men not to be violent in the streets while it carries out the terrible slaughter in Vietnam and finances it with money it should be spending to get things right at home.”

  That year the first torches were lit on April 8. Nashville police ejected a Negro from a restaurant at Fisk University that evening. Two days of chaos followed, and during the next month Cleveland, Washington, Louisville, Montgomery, and Omaha exploded. May arrived, and June, and Molotov cocktails, looters’ clubs, and snipers’ rifles appeared with increasing frequency. Major cities hit were New York, Minneapolis, Tampa, Atlanta, Birmingham, Cincinnati, San Francisco, Buffalo, Dayton and Wichita. Then came the first weekend in July and the first real ghetto catastrophe of 1967.

  It began according to the now established ritual, with policemen. Late that Friday afternoon squad cars were summoned to the Grove Hall welfare office in Roxbury, a black district in southeast Boston. An organization of women on relief was demonstrating against welfare policy. They wanted more money, and they wanted to be treated with greater civility. It was past closing time, but the women wouldn’t leave, and they had locked arms at the doors to prevent the employees from leaving. The cops entered through the windows. A crowd of Negroes gathered. Bottles and stones were thrown. More police arrived with helmets and riot sticks. They charged the mob, as it now was, in a flying wedge. That broke it up, which turned out to be a mistake. Forming small bands, the Negroes roamed Roxbury smashing glass, looting, putting buildings to the torch, and clouting whites. Before dawn a thousand policemen were battling a thousand blacks, and by Sunday evening, when the riot was spent, seventy people had been injured and fifteen blocks of Blue Hill Avenue, a main artery between downtown Boston and the suburbs, were a vast junkyard.

  The week after Roxbury was peaceful but tense; nothing in the past two summers encouraged complacency. Urbanists were watching Newark, New Jersey, with particular vigilance. Even in peaceful times Newark would have been considered volatile. In seeking Model Cities grants its administration had frankly described it as “a basic training camp for the poor.” Crowded and shimmy, its very air was polluted with offensive odors from its many factories. Newark had the country’s highest rate of venereal disease, the most crime, and the greatest percentage of condemned housing. Over the past century it had been successively inhabited by Protestants, Irish, Italians, and Jews, and by this time it was second only to Washington as a major city with a black majority. In 1960 Newark’s population had been 62 percent white. Now it was 52 percent black and 10 percent Puerto Rican. Most of the 208,000 blacks lived in the shabby Central Ward. The unemployment figure there was twice the national figure, and the black rate of joblessness was twice the city’s. In Washington the people at the new Department of Housing and Urban Development whose job it was to watch such things had long been worried about Newark. They thought the city awaited only a police incident to erupt. It came on Wednesday, July 12.

  At 9:45 P.M. a black cab driver, arrested for a traffic violation, was brought into the 4th Precinct station in the Central Ward. He argued heatedly with two police officers and exchanged blows with them. Word spread outside that the cabby had been beaten to death. The customary spectators gathered, but nothing much happened there; after they had left officers reported downtown that they had been nothing more than “a bunch of roving kids” anyway. At dusk the next day another crowd assembled, carrying signs but apparently in good humor. Then the first bottle was thrown, and the first brick. The policemen broke up the throng with nightsticks. In twos and threes the Negroes disbanded—and began looting stores. By 11 P.M. plundering was proceeding on a massive scale, snipers were firing from roofs, and fires were blazing high. Newark’s 1,400 police couldn’t handle it. By daybreak, when 2,600 National Guardsmen and 300 state police arrived, the sun shone down on what Governor Richard J. Hughes called “a city in open rebellion.” Almost half of Newark’s twenty-four square miles was in the hands of the rioters, and order was not restored until Monday, July 17. By then twenty-seven were dead. The loss was put at ten million dollars. It was the worst disorder since Watts.

  Detroit blew the following Sunday after a police raid on a Twelfth Street black nightclub which was selling liquor after 2 A.M., the legal closing time. The crowd milled around, the rumors of brutality spread—this time it was said that a boy wearing handcuffs had been kicked down a stairway—and the crowd, scattered by police, wandered away in small groups and began looting. In some ways this outburst was unusual. Unlike Newark, Detroit had not been regarded as a potential trouble spot. The mayor, elected with Negro support, had introduced measures which, together with the booming automobile business, had helped create a large black middle class. That, in fact, was part of the trouble. The rioters, who had not made it, were as resentful of middle-class Negroes as of whites. Another difference was that looting was integrated in Detroit; blacks and whites ransacked stores side by side. The extent of the arson was almost unbelievable—1,600 fire alarms in eleven days. But the most remarkable aspect of the Detroit riot was its size. Henry Ford called it “the greatest internal violence since the Civil War.” The death toll was forty-three. Over seven thousand were arrested. Eighteen blocks of Twelfth Street and three miles of Grand River Avenue were burned to the ground. Aerial photographs of the city resembled Berlin in 1945. Five thousand people were without shelter. And many were insanely jubilant. “Those buildings going up was a pretty sight,” said one of the Detroit rioters. “I sat right here and watched them go. And there wasn’t nothing them honkies could do but sweat to put it out.” He was speaking, of course, of Negro homes.

  President Johnson appointed a commission headed by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois to study outbreaks and find a way to prevent more of them. Hearings were scheduled by the Senate’s Subcommittee on Investigations and the House Committee on Un-American Activities—which was under the impression that subversives were responsible for the disorders. And still that summer’s rage in the ghettos was unspent. Altogether rioters struck 114 cities in 32 states. The complete toll would never be known, but there were at the very least 88 deaths, more than 4,000 other casualties, and 12,000 arrests. Among the grimmest upheavals were those in Wilmington, Toledo, South Bend, Grand Rapids, Pontiac, Milwaukee, New Haven, Providence, Saginaw, Flint, Portland (Oregon), and Cambridge (Maryland).

  The Cambridge uprising was of particular interest. It was one of the few episodes which justified the Un-American Activities Com
mittee’s suspicions, and it had an unforeseen impact on national politics. Backlash had been a major factor in Maryland’s 1966 gubernatorial campaign; when a racist candidate won the Democratic primary, black voters had backed the Republican nominee, Spiro T. Agnew, a moderate. Agnew’s feelings about law and order were stronger than his views on race, however, and he was outraged when Rap Brown, an outside agitator if there ever was one, told a rally of Eastern Shore Negroes that “It’s time for Cambridge to explode.” Brown called a Negro school a firetrap which “should have burned down long ago.” He urged them to “Get yourself some guns,” said that the riots were a “dress rehearsal for revolution,” and added that “Violence is as American as cherry pie.”

  Thereupon Cambridge exploded, the school was burned, and Agnew issued a warrant for Brown’s arrest on charges of inciting to riot and arson. “Such a person,” said the governor, “cannot be permitted to come into a state with the intention to destroy and then sneak away, leaving these poor people with the results of his evil scheme.” Brown was arrested in Alexandria, Virginia, two days later. Afterward he faced other charges for carrying firearms across a state line while under indictment. Meanwhile Governor Agnew’s resolute handling of the incident had attracted the attention of the Republican party’s national leadership, winning him the admiration of, among others, Richard M. Nixon.