Johnson’s speech was bold and unprecedented, and he immediately faced an angry reaction from conservatives, who felt that Johnson had gone too far—anger that held the first inklings of the political mayhem that was to follow.87 Yet Johnson’s own words reflected an uneasy clash between two theories of black poverty, and Johnson seemed torn between the two, veering first one way and then another. Although he explicitly linked present poverty to past injustice, he also seemed to be saying that poverty was a result of a moral failing and that it was the responsibility of the black community to straighten up and deal with it. He claimed that it was a black “cultural tradition” and “the breakdown of the Negro family structure” that were causing poverty and that blacks would have to “rely mostly upon his own efforts” to escape poverty. The speech thus held the seeds of a new dogma about black poverty. In fact, the principal author of the cultural theory of poverty, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, was also the principal author of Johnson’s speech. In the end, Johnson exhorted his audience to change their own circumstances stating that “nothing is more freighted with meaning for our own destiny than the revolution of the Negro American.” Indeed, a revolution was happening, but not the one Johnson was hoping for.
What started in Watts in 1965 had spread like wildfire across the country, as urban ghettos in the north and west exploded into over 150 full-scale riots over four years. Johnson was initially bewildered, “How is it possible after all we’ve accomplished? How could it be? Is the world topsy-turvy?" Then he surmised that the problem was “We’re not getting our story over." Johnson expressed sympathy for the protesters. “He’s still nowhere. He knows it. And that’s why he’s out on the streets. Hell, I’d be there too."88 But by 1967, Johnson began to change his tune of sympathy for protesters to a forceful denunciation of the violence. “We will not tolerate lawlessness. We will not endure violence."89 Between 1967 and 1968, 70,000 federal troops were called out to suppress the urban black revolution, which had resulted in forty-six deaths, 2,600 serious injuries, and $100 million in property loss, all leading to 22,000 arrests.90
As the government bureaucracy tried to make sense of the surge of violence, they turned to Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action (referred to as the Moynihan Report), distributed among policy circles in Washington as an explanation for the uprisings.91 The report revealed that the wealth and employment gap between black and white families had been widening instead of closing, a phenomenon referred to as “Moynihan’s scissors." Moynihan acknowledged that American racism was the original sin responsible for the gap in economic opportunity.92 Having diagnosed the problem as being rooted in historic harm, he proposed that the way to fix it was to address black culture, which he called a “tangle of pathology." Specifically, the Moynihan Report blamed the prevalence of single mothers for “the deterioration of the Negro family," which was “the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate, or anti-social behavior that . . . serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and deprivation."93
The logical policy outcome was that any other intervention was futile; “the cycle can be broken only if these [cultural] distortions are set right." This was the idea that determined public policy going forward. Moynihan concluded the report bluntly by stating, “how this group of Americans chooses to run its affairs, take advantage of its opportunities, or fail to do so, is none of the nation’s business."94 The Moynihan Report, or the ways in which it has been interpreted and misinterpreted, formed the narrative of black poverty. The breakdown of the black family has been the lens through which many policymakers and Americans have viewed black poverty.
Decades later, in 2014, a congressional budget report on poverty listed as the number one cause of poverty, “The Family," and cited Moynihan’s report as primary evidence. The second cause was “work participation," followed by “lack of education," and the fourth cause of poverty, ironically, was the programs of the War on Poverty itself.95
The tide had turned for white moderates and conservatives, who demanded a retreat from any more legislation, programs, or aid. In fact, some said civil rights legislation was only making the situation worse. Protesters were pushing too hard, too fast, and being ungrateful and disruptive.96 Some argued that civil rights reforms were being “repaid with crime-ridden slums and black discontent." The Wall Street Journal editorialized that the more civil rights laws were passed, the more violence ensued.97
If there was no way to fix poverty, the best that could be done was to contain it. Quickly, the War on Poverty morphed into the War on Crime.98 So fast was the transformation that the tools, bureaucracies, and funds allocated to the poverty war were instead used by police stations across the country to fight crime. Police departments began to fill the spaces meant for the War on Poverty. It was police who delivered food and toys to needy black families. Law enforcement would be the front line of the War on Poverty, and would thereby increase its presence in and surveillance of the black communities. This criminalization of black life would increase over the next several decades, but its seeds and structure were planted during the Johnson administration.99 The War on Crime would take a heavy toll on the black population, leading to the mass incarceration of black men and the further devastation of the black ghetto, and it began ironically as a response to the violent protests of an already desperate and impoverished community.
Once Jim Crow was destroyed and equality before the law established, a new strand of colorblind racism emerged. As Ibram Kendi explained, there have always been “two historical forces at work: a dual and dueling history of racial progress and the simultaneous progression of racism."100 “Law and order" became the language of the former white supremacists, who were now engaged on the front lines of the War on Crime.101 George Wallace, Strom Thurmond, and the last defenders of Jim Crow, once defeated, shifted their rhetoric to push for stronger criminal enforcement.102 But it wasn’t just the southern segregationists. Ronald Reagan’s gubernatorial campaign ran ads with footage of riots and a warning that “Every day the jungle draws a little closer.”103 This new story of the ghetto focused on the violence, erasing the poverty beneath.
By 1968, President Johnson was mired between black-led violence in the ghetto and a growing conservative backlash. According to a White House advisor, what could he do but “set up a commission and say a prayer.” The Kerner Commission, which relied on hundreds of researchers who collected testimonies and statistics, was the first thorough governmental exploration of black economic disparity. The first draft of the report was titled The Harvest of American Racism, and it was a forceful denunciation of the failure of Great Society programs, which the report dismissed as “tokenism that did not tamper enough with the ‘white power structure’ to have an impact.” The administration was so angry about the first draft that it fired all 120 social scientists who had worked on it. The final report was less damaging to Johnson’s reputation, though no less blunt.104
The final report determined that the riots stemmed from poverty, racism, inequality, and other social ills, but that the underlying cause was segregation. “Segregation and poverty have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans,” the report said. “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.”105 The report was an unapologetic excoriation of white society, which the commission deemed guilty not just of racism, but of apathy toward black poverty.
This report drew a clear line from past discrimination to present poverty and violence, without a detour through cultural inferiority. It also dispensed with the color-blind language of equal opportunity, but insisted that only race-based economic policy could repair the damage created by racism.
The commission ultimately warned, “Our Nation is moving toward two societies, o
ne black, one white—separate and unequal.” The report offered three future scenarios: The first was maintaining the status quo, which the commission warned would have “ominous consequences” and would lead to more violence, retaliation, and eventually a garrison state. The second path was to promote separatism, or the “enrichment" of segregated ghettos, but this path would also result in a “permanently divided country" in which equality would not be achievable. According to the commission, the only way to end the divide was to push for complete integration. Only full integration would produce a “single society, in which every citizen will be free to live and work according to his capabilities and desires, not his color." This would require a large-scale federal involvement, much like the New Deal. As it turned out, Americans would pick a watered-down version of the second option and the commission’s dire predictions of intractable inequality would come to pass.
The Kerner Report was the closest the United States ever came to a public admission of wrongdoing or “truth and reconciliation." Ultimately, the report was more truth than reconciliation. Johnson all but ignored its findings and later explained that it was a matter of funding. “That was the problem—money. At the moment I received the report I was having one of the toughest fights of my life, trying to persuade Congress to pass the 10 percent tax surcharge without imposing deep cuts in our most critical Great Society programs. I will never understand how the commission expected me to get this same Congress to turn 180 degrees overnight and appropriate an additional $30 billion for the same programs that it was demanding I cut by $6 billion. This would have required a miracle."106
By 1968, Johnson was an unpopular president deeply enmeshed in a failing war. The report came out on February 29, 1968. On March 31, Johnson stunned the nation by revealing that he would not seek reelection. Republicans made significant gains in the 1968 election, which was widely seen as a renunciation of Johnson, his Great Society, and the civil rights movement. Johnson, looking back on the loss, lamented, “I don’t think I lost that election. I think the Negroes lost it."107 Even though Johnson was involved in the country’s most unpopular war, the administration believed that the nastiest public backlash they faced was on the race issue.108
Toward the end of his life, King also came to the realization that achieving racial equality would require radical measures of integration and poverty alleviation that the government would not pursue. What is often left out of the popular narrative of Dr. King’s movement is his bout of clinical depression as the nation seemed to be backtracking after unleashing so much hope with the groundbreaking
Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts. Though he had earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his optimism and unflagging commitment to nonviolence, King’s most forthright admonitions were ignored by the public. Militant black groups denigrated his nonviolence as weak, and President Johnson sidelined him after his vocal antiwar pronouncements. A 1967 Gallup poll revealed that for the first time in a decade, King was not on the list of the ten most admired Americans.
Perhaps this fall from grace was because King’s demands and rhetoric became much more damning as he began connecting America’s racism, militarism, and economic exploitation.109 King came to believe that to address poverty, “a major structural reform of the American economy was needed."110 Despite years of violence, “not a single basic cause of riots has been corrected," lamented King. King began calling for a “Poor People’s Movement" to address not just black, but also white poverty. King called his last planned project before his death “the most important meeting [the SCLC] ever convened." The plan was to conduct another march on Washington, DC, in the spring of 1968 to address economic inequality.
Using the only tool he believed to be effective, a massive nonviolent demonstration, he sought to organize a multiracial movement to stir the nation’s leaders to address poverty. He knew that white policymakers had stopped paying attention both to him and to civil rights in general, and so he sought to make an eye-catching and dramatic public spectacle.111 He called on demonstrators to come to Washington on mules and buggy trains from the rural South as well as the urban North to show vividly how little economic progress blacks had made in a generation.112 As Gerald McKnight explains, “King was proposing nothing less than a radical transformation of the Civil Rights Movement into a populist crusade calling for redistribution of economic and political power."113
While pushing for large-scale reform, King was also admonishing blacks to harness their own economic power. In his last speech, “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop," he pleaded, “we’ve got to strengthen black institutions. I call upon you to take your money out of the banks downtown and deposit your money in Tri-State Bank. We want a ‘bank-in’ movement in Memphis. Go by the savings and loan association. . . . We are telling you to follow what we [the SCLC] are doing. Put your money there. You have six or seven black insurance companies here in the city of Memphis. Take out your insurance there. We want to have an ‘insurance-in.’ ”
King advocated black banking as a key weapon in his arsenal of nonviolent resistance. He believed his most successful northern project was Operation Breadbasket, which proclaimed, “If you respect my dollar, you must respect my person.” This was an extension of the “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” Harlem boycotts. “We will no longer spend our money where we cannot get substantial jobs.”114 King describes the philosophy of Operation Breadbasket as “the belief that many retail business and consumer goods industries depleted the ghetto by selling to Negroes without returning to the community any of the profits through fair hiring practices.”115 Operation Breadbasket was not just about jobs, King insisted; it was about “the development of financial institutions which were controlled by Negroes and which were sensitive to probl ems of economic deprivation of the Negro community.” One of the operation’s projects in Chicago was to convince a large grocery store chain, HiLo, to make deposits in the two black banks in Chicago. Operation Breadbasket had “demanded” that the black community “put money in the Negro savings and loan,” and then requested that businesses with stores in the ghetto deposit funds in black-owned banks. The Poor People’s Movement and Operation Breadbasket ended abruptly when Dr. King was killed in April 1968.
After King’s assassination in 1968, the civil rights coalition he helped build began to unravel. King’s last book was appropriately titled Where Do We Go from Here? James Farmer explained that the movement was “reeling,” and the major groups “didn’t know where they were going or what to do at that point.” Without King, it seemed that there was not a single black leader that white Americans would listen to. But as it turned out, neither the White House nor the black movement was in the mood to talk anyway.
The black movement’s tone, demands, and orientation had changed. Stokely Carmichael famously initiated this shift with his pivotal 1966 speech. “Everybody owns our own neighborhoods except us,” he said. “We want Black Power.” The new leaders held that the civil rights reforms had been meaningless in the face of poverty, a position King himself would have agreed with. Carmichael was not seeking to reform the American political system, but rejected it outright because it had always exploited blacks.116 “Ultimately,” he said “the economic foundations of this country must be shaken if black people are to control their lives." In inflammatory language that made the black activist notorious, he said he wanted a black power movement “that will smash everything Western civilization has cre-ated."117 James Forman was even more blunt: “If we can’t sit at the table, let’s knock the fucking legs off!"118
This was not just a rejection of King’s nonviolence, but also of Booker T. Washington’s ideal of racial equality through hard work and thrift. In fact, Washington’s name became an insult synonymous with Uncle Tom.119 “We are told," said Carmichael, “ ‘ If you work hard, you’ll succeed’—but if that were true, black people would own this country. We are oppressed because we are black—not because we are lazy, not because we’re stupid (and got good rhythm), but because we’
re black."120 James Baldwin articulated the changing mood in The Fire Next Time: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign / No more water but fire next time." Baldwin warned of what was coming. “Crime became real, for example—for the first time—not as a possibility but as the possibility. One would never defeat one’s circumstances by working and saving one’s pennies; one would never, by working, acquire that many pennies, and, besides, the social treatment accorded even the most successful Negroes proved that one needed, in order to be free, something more than a bank account. One needed a handle, a lever, a means of inspiring fear."121
If King had been the leader of the early civil rights movement, Malcolm X, though he had been dead since 1965, became the voice and spirit of what ensued.122 Malcolm was the de facto leader of the urban ghetto, having experienced poverty, crime, unemployment, and prison himself.123 Malcolm picked up where Marcus Garvey had left off and considered himself a leader of the black masses. He was not interested in speaking to whites or even wealthy blacks, who he blamed for exploiting the poor. Like Garvey, he rejected integration, saying that the white man would never allow blacks to enter “his house" anyway.124
To Malcolm, the ghetto was a colony, and the only solution to achieve black economic prosperity was to demand control of all the levers of economic and political power within the black community. Malcolm was not asking white Americans to provide equal rights to blacks. “I don’t even consider myself an American," he said. Blacks needed to defend themselves against American exploitation because “the [U.S.] government has proven itself either unwilling or unable to defend the lives and the property of Negroes." Malcolm was uninterested in antidiscrimination laws; he wanted an uprising. Malcolm urged the black movement to reconsider their failed strategies of nonviolence. “Revolution is bloody, revolution is hostile, revolution knows no compromise, revolution overturns and destroys everything that gets in the way. . . . You don’t do any singing [in a revolution]; you’re too busy swinging. It’s based on land. A revolutionary wants land so he can set up his own nation, an independent nation." His radical call to arms terrified the public. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI spied on him for most of his life.125
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