American Empire

by Joshua Freeman

  CHAPTER 10

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  Sixties to Seventies, Dreams to Nightmares

  During the first years of Richard Nixon’s presidency, liberal legislation continued to be passed and state function expanded. But by the early 1970s, the tide began to turn, as Nixon and his allies constructed a new, antiliberal coalition. Even then, democratization advanced. As African Americans kept pushing for economic and social equality and more political power, other groups, often using the black freedom movement as a template, mobilized to overcome discrimination and improve their lives, defining themselves by ethnicity, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, or other characteristics. Animating them all was an expanding notion of rights and strongly felt group identification, as the politics of identity came to overlie political organization based on class, party, region, and ideology. With the seemingly endless war in Vietnam amplifying political and social discord, the rhetoric coming from ruling circles and dissenting movements became extreme. In one of the most tumultuous periods in the nation’s history, the democratic revolution exploded into new arenas of life even as it approached its limits.

  The Continuing Battle for Racial Equality

  In the late 1960s, many southern facilities and institutions, and some in the North, remained racially segregated, or nearly so. In his inaugural address, Richard Nixon declared, “The laws have caught up with our conscience. What remains is to give life to the law.” It often took militant local action to do that.

  In the towns, small cities, and rural areas of the South, conflicts could be fierce. In Oxford, North Carolina, segregation and a caste system of racial power remained largely intact until 1970. Then the acquittal of a white store owner charged with murdering a young black man set off a wave of street violence by black teenagers, the carefully planned burning down of white-owned tobacco warehouses by a group of black Vietnam veterans, and a black boycott of white businesses. With the cost of segregation skyrocketing, white business leaders finally agreed to desegregate the local movie theater, hire black workers for downtown sales jobs, and increase the number of African American police officers.

  Elite groups sometimes held out longer. At Harvard University, the Porcellian Club, the most aristocratic of the undergraduate “final clubs,” did not admit an African American member until 1983. At the University of Texas, in 1984 only a single black student belonged to the fraternities affiliated with the Interfraternity Council, and some sororities moved off campus to avoid having to sign an antidiscrimination pledge.

  Schools remained a key battleground. After a decade of doing little to enforce Brown, in the mid-1960s the federal courts began to more aggressively press for school desegregation. In 1968 the Supreme Court declared that segregated school systems had a duty to eliminate racial discrimination “root and branch,” not merely to end the use of government power to enforce racial separation. Three years later, it allowed courts to require mandatory busing to integrate school systems that once had been segregated by law, leading to the imposition of busing plans in more than a hundred southern school districts. In 1973 the Court extended the requirement for active desegregation efforts to school systems that never had de jure segregation. In practice, that meant urban school districts in the North, which by then often were more segregated than those in the South.

  As a candidate and as president, Richard Nixon vocally opposed federal intervention to end de facto school segregation, especially mandatory busing. In practice, though, his Justice Department made extensive use of litigation to force school districts to desegregate. During the 1972–73 school year, fewer than 10 percent of black students in the South attended all-black schools, as school desegregation proceeded at a much faster pace than it had during the Johnson administration.

  Violent southern resistance to school desegregation had largely abated by the late 1960s. When bureaucratic and legal efforts to block desegregation failed (often after delaying it for years), many southern parents simply pulled their children out of newly integrated schools. Some moved to white suburbs where few if any black children attended local schools. Others enrolled their children in all-white private schools, including so-called Christian academies, which proliferated with the legal assault on school segregation. The white academies benefited from tax exemptions and in over a half a dozen states from direct government subsidies, until the courts declared public funding unconstitutional. Although private southern schools created or expanded to evade desegregation generally provided inferior education to that found in the public schools, their estimated enrollment burgeoned from twenty-five thousand in 1966 to 535,000 in 1972.

  The Supreme Court push for equality of schooling reached its limits in the early 1970s, as Nixon moved the Court in a conservative direction and desegregation threatened to impinge on the white northern middle class. (Nixon appointed four justices during his first term, including Warren E. Burger, who replaced the retiring Earl Warren as chief justice in 1969.) In 1973, in a case challenging the greater funds given to schools in white parts of San Antonio than to those in heavily Mexican American areas, the Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment did not require equivalent funding for school systems with differing racial compositions. The next year, in Milliken v. Bradley, it ruled that courts could not force suburban school districts to merge with urban ones to facilitate integration. This gave constitutional sanction to the segregation of schools that resulted from segregated suburbanization, a process that had been greatly abetted by government policy.

  The difficulty of trying to desegregate schools without addressing regional residential segregation became obvious in Boston, where an unusually large proportion of the middle and upper classes lived outside the city proper in almost exclusively white suburbs. In 1974 federal district judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr., in reaction to prolonged resistance by the Boston School Committee to ending school segregation, ordered a large-scale program of busing of white and black students into each other’s neighborhoods. Whites, particularly from working-class areas like South Boston and Charlestown, fiercely resisted the effort. They boycotted schools, held raucous rallies, and assaulted black students. Many directed their anger as much at the judge, who lived in a white suburb, as at African Americans, perceiving a class bias in an integration plan that left the suburbs almost untouched.

  As in the South, many northern white parents pulled their children out of public schools to avoid integration or mandatory busing. Some moved to the suburbs, while others sent children to Catholic schools. Boston public schools went from being 60 percent white in 1973 to 35 percent in 1980.

  Many black students and their parents cared as much about the content of their education as where it took place. When Anita Lafrance Allen, class of 1970, entered the recently integrated Baker High School in Columbus, Georgia, she found that “a white southern Protestant Christian ethos permeated the place,” with no nonwhite teachers, staff, cheerleaders, or homecoming queens. “In my classes we did not read a single book, essay or poem written by a person who was not a white American or European.” A desire for more African American teachers, principals, and course content animated a push in many cities—most explosively in New York—by black activists and parents for greater control over local schools, as they recognized the diminishing prospects for meaningful integration.

  A parallel process took place on college campuses, where African American students pushed for the admission of more nonwhites and the creation of black studies programs. During the 1968–69 school year, students at San Francisco State College struck for four months seeking the establishment of black and ethnic studies programs and open admissions for students of color. At the City University of New York, a wave of sometimes violent demonstrations and counterdemonstrations led to the adoption of an open enrollment policy that guaranteed every local high school graduate a place in the city’s free higher education system. At Cornell University, black students occupying a building captured
national attention by arming themselves with rifles.

  Though administrators and public officials often resisted particular protests and demands, the broad goals of black parents and students gradually were realized. At every level of schooling, curricula began paying greater attention to the experiences of African Americans and other minority groups. Black studies became established as an academic discipline. Leading colleges began admitting more nonwhite students.

  In the struggle for control of schools, black nationalists played an important role, as they increasingly set the tone of African American activism. Though nationalist ideas had deep historic roots, they achieved new prominence in the late 1960s. The Nation of Islam continued to have a substantial membership, while new nationalist groups, like the US Organization and the Black Panther Party in California and the Committee for a Unified NewArk in New Jersey, attracted many followers. Often lumped together under the label “Black Power,” these groups, though differing in their programs and beliefs, commonly had all-black memberships; rejected deference to white authority; asserted the right to armed self-defense; stressed black pride, unity, and internationalism; had acute understandings of the daily problems of ghetto life; and appealed in particular to urban youth, who were in many cases drawn by the discipline and purposefulness they provided.

  The radicalism and armed militancy of Black Power groups provoked government repression, often illegal and sometimes murderous. In 1967 the FBI extended its secret COINTELPRO to black nationalist groups in an effort to disrupt and “neutralize” them. Local police forces repeatedly raided the offices of the Black Panther Party, which had expanded across the country, resulting in fierce exchanges of gunfire. In Chicago, the police assassinated the local leader of the Panthers while he lay asleep. Government attacks, infiltration, and internal feuding contributed to the short life span of many Black Power groups. Among poor young blacks, drugs and violence took a growing toll, contributing to depoliticization.

  Though organizationally weak, the Black Power movement left its cultural and political mark. In spite of its often hyperbolic rhetoric, it had some of its greatest success through mainstream electoral politics. Changing urban demographics, combined with the political mobilization of African Americans, allowed black politicians to win election as mayors of many of the nation’s major cities, starting in 1967 with Carl Stokes in Cleveland and Richard Hatcher in Gary and continuing with Kenneth Gibson in Newark (1970), Coleman Young in Detroit and Tom Bradley in Los Angeles (1973), Walter Washington in Washington, D.C., and Maynard Jackson in Atlanta (1974). Their success came as part of a nationwide increase in black officeholding, including in the South.

  Many of the new African American officeholders, especially in the North, had not participated in the civil rights movement but came out of urban machine politics. Nonetheless, their success often rested on ties they developed to Black Power groups and the climate of assertion of the right to self-determination in black communities. In Newark, the poet and black nationalist Amiri Baraka played a key role in Gibson’s election to city hall and the ouster of a corrupt white Democratic machine. Baraka helped organize a series of national black conventions that brought together civil rights activists, nationalists, and elected officials around a shared rhetoric of Black Power and pan-Africanism. In Oakland, the Black Panthers helped to orchestrate the election of the city’s first black mayor. But as African Americans began winning positions of official power, the grassroots organizations and radical leaders who had helped them succeed became sublimated to the new regimes they constructed, which often had strong ties to local, mostly white business leaders as well. With patronage, contracts, federal grants, and political favors to distribute, African American officials adopted traditional modes of political operation, giving African Americans a greater share of power without any fundamental transformation of social structures or modes of governance.

  Hispanics and Native Americans Mobilize

  As the African American movement for rights, equality, cultural pride, and social betterment evolved, it became a model for an ever-growing number of other social movements. Each constituency had its own history, concerns, and political dynamics. But the influence of the black struggle could be seen on all of them. Virtually all the social movements of the late 1960s and 1970s involved not only sharpened conflict between particular communities and the larger society but also conflicts within communities about what goals to pursue and how to pursue them, conflicts between the young and old, traditionalists and modernists, militants and moderates, and separatists and assimilationists.

  Mexican Americans provide a case in point. Starting in the 1920s, a series of organizations had been founded to fight discrimination against Mexican Americans, project an image of them as patriotic white Americans, and secure them government benefits. In the mid-1960s, some Mexican American activists—in many cases impressed by the successes of the civil rights movement—began forming more militant groups. The United Farm Workers revived the once strong tradition of California agricultural unionism, representing Filipino as well as Mexican American workers. Under the charismatic leadership of César Chávez, it melded contractual unionism, Mexican American culture, Catholic ritual, and civil rights movement tactics. The strike it led of grape workers and the national boycott of grapes it organized in their support trained a whole generation of labor and political activists. A 1967 armed raid on a New Mexico courthouse, led by Reies López Tijerina, in pursuit of long-contested land claims, brought to national attention the lingering bitterness over the loss of land titles when the United States took over Mexican territory.

  Though the Mexican American mobilization began in the countryside, it soon spread to the cities where most of the four and a half million Mexican Americans lived. Newly formed groups, like the Brown Berets in Los Angeles, the Crusade for Justice in Denver, and the Mexican American Youth Organization in Texas, embraced a cultural nationalism sometimes fused with political ideas and accoutrements borrowed from Black Power groups. Many new activists adopted the term “Chicano”—a working-class self-description, which had sometimes been used pejoratively by outsiders—to describe themselves and identified themselves as brown, not white. Like many of the social movements of the time, the Chicano groups danced back and forth across the fuzzy line separating radicalism from reform, simultaneously denouncing the very nature of American society while pressing for new government programs and benefits. At colleges and universities, they fought for the introduction of Chicano studies programs and the admission of more Mexican American students. At high schools in East Los Angeles and Texas, mass walkouts of Mexican American students protested ill-treatment by authorities little interested in their problems or heritage.

  The Chicano movement broke with the strong Mexican American tradition of military service when it began organizing protests against the draft and the war in Vietnam. Rapidly gaining momentum, the Mexican American antiwar movement culminated in the Chicano Moratorium March on August 29, 1970. The twenty thousand to thirty thousand people who marched down the main boulevard of East Los Angeles constituted one of the largest gatherings of Mexican Americans in the country’s history. The day ended in violence when sheriff’s deputies tried to break up a rally and young demonstrators fought back. Three people died, including Rubén Salazar, a leading Mexican American journalist. The Chicano movement soon splintered, with some more radical activists moving away from community organizing and cultural nationalism toward one or another version of Marxism, and increasing isolation.

  On the East Coast, Puerto Rican activists followed a similar trajectory. Influenced by the student movement, the Black Panthers, and various left-wing groups, in 1969 a group of young New York Puerto Ricans, mostly born on the mainland and in some cases barely fluent in Spanish, formed the Young Lords, a radical community group, based in East Harlem. Through a series of demonstrations and building takeovers, they won a broad following in their fight for cleaner st
reets, better health care, and more government services. But the group had a short half-life, losing its community base when it plunged into independence politics in Puerto Rico and worker organizing, with minimal success.

  Other groups also developed heightened ethnic consciousness, launching militant struggles against discrimination and winning substantial political and social gains. Perhaps the most dramatic instance was the new wave of Native American activism that developed during the late 1960s, both within traditional tribal and political structures and from the American Indian Movement (AIM), a militant group formed in 1968. A series of protest actions forced the issue of Native American rights onto the national political agenda for the first time in over half a century, including an eighteen-month occupation of Alcatraz Island that began in 1969, a six-day occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1972, and finally the 1973 AIM occupation of the village of Wounded Knee, South Dakota—site of an 1890 massacre of Lakota Sioux by the U.S. Army—which resulted in a prolonged armed standoff between the demonstrators and federal forces. While Native American militants were subjected to an intense campaign of government repression, their actions led to substantial reforms in Indian policy and the revival of many tribes.

  The Women’s Movement

  The social movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s that perhaps had the greatest impact on American life was the women’s movement. It had roots in earlier periods of feminist activity, all the way back to the mid-nineteenth century. But it developed in ways deeply influenced by the postwar African American freedom struggle.