Victory, Phillips believed, turned on mobilizing white working people. He called them “the great, ordinary Lawrence Welkish mass of Americans from Maine to Hawaii.” They had once voted for the New Deal in order to direct their anger at economic elites. But amid this long economic boom, Phillips argued, they were now ready to target those whom they saw as cultural elites.
Who were these new elites? Northeastern liberals, the longtime enemy of George Wallace’s imagining. In a piece for Reader’s Digest drafted by his speechwriter Pat Buchanan, Nixon made his own case. “Just three years ago this nation seemed to be completing its greatest decade of racial progress,” he said. “Why is it that in a few short years a nation which enjoys the freedom and material abundance of America has become among the most lawless and violent in the history of the free peoples?”
Race riots, he argued, were “the most virulent of symptoms to date of another, and in some way graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.” Liberals had created a culture of “permissiveness toward violation of the law and public order.”17 The primary beneficiaries were the cultural elite’s pet demos: baby boomer youths and minorities.
Race, and to a lesser extent youth, provided Republicans with a shot at complete national voter realignment, an enduring red majority. “All the talk about Republicans making inroads into the Negro vote is persiflage,” Phillips would say. “From now on, Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that.”18
Only half-jokingly he told another reporter, “Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”19
Nixon believed that people did not vote their hopes, they voted their fears. They liked to be flattered into thinking they were voting their principles. If white working-class voters feared that postwar wealth was being redistributed away from them to Blacks, the Southern strategy gave them a target and a justification.
In the spring of 1968 Nixon met with Senator Strom Thurmond and won the segregationist’s support. As Thurmond assured hard-liners Nixon was really on their side, he worked on more moderate whites who found Wallace distasteful, but not his agenda. Nixon added a new line to his stump speeches. “At least half” of Wallace’s supporters were not racist, he said, “A lot of them are just terribly concerned about the problem of law and order.”20
The message to whites—which was meant, said one campaign strategist, to be stated “between the lines” and “in regional code words”—was clear as a kill.21 Like Wallace, Nixon’s agenda absolved whites of the sins of history, and restored white privilege. The difference was aspirational. By voting Nixon, they could show they were better than that old bellowing Wallace fool.
Nixon understood that in the long run he needed to change the entire civil discourse. The civil rights movement had reshaped the national conversation about race. It had begun to build a new cultural consensus that supported the exercise of federal power for racial and economic justice with a capacious morality. The Southern strategy was, by no means, a fait accompli.
In the beginning Nixon’s “silent majority” was a theory in search of evidence. The writer Barbara Ehrenreich has argued that there was little proof of a massive white rightward shift during the late sixties. Indeed the period marked a high point of cross-racial labor organizing. Whites who worked in closest contact with Blacks did not form the angry core of Phillips’s new conservatism—they were, in fact, the most disposed toward racial integration.22
But the media-awkward Nixon seemed to have his sweaty finger on the pulse of the media establishment, which had loudly discovered working-class white America. Exposed first in Michael Harrington’s The Other America, the white poor remained underrepresented through the decade. “In the sixties, it was hard to find a blue-collar worker in the media at all,” Ehrenreich wrote.23 But by 1969, the media had bought Nixon’s narrative, and an enduring blue-collar stereotype was born. She continued:
Professional authority was under attack; permissiveness seemed already to have ruined at least one generation of middle-class youth. And so, in turning to the working class, middle-class observers tended to seek legitimation for their own more conservative impulses. They did not discover the working class that was—in the late sixties and early seventies—caught up in the greatest wave of labor militancy since World War II. They discovered a working class more suited to their mood: dumb, reactionary, and bigoted.
The mood was set at the top. Nixon told his aides, “You have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while appearing not to.” Their job, he added, was to “get rid of the veil of hypocrisy and guilt and face reality.”24 Realignment depended on the right’s ability to detach questions of justice from questions of race.
When Nixon spoke of law and order, Blacks heard unmitigated support for the same police who had fire-hosed civil rights protestors and brutalized their communities, whose protection of racist elites and indifference to basic dignities had helped fueled the rage of the urban riots. “I’m all for law and order,” said one woman from the NAACP, “but he is trying to get the support of the white backlash people.”25 Nixon had a cool and ready response: “Law and order is not a code word for racism. Black Americans have just as great a stake in law and order.”26
Meaning had slipped away. Everything was encoded. One could signal racial denigration and division in the same moment he denied he was doing so. In the years to come, it would be more difficult than ever to find reconciliation and renewal, to start a real discussion about race.
On November 5, 1968, seven months after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination had set off days of despair and nights of fire in the nation’s inner cities, Wallace took the forty-six electoral votes in Goldwater territory, the heart of the Deep South. But Nixon ran the rest of the table from coast to coast.
His victory signaled that a major shift had begun. For marginalized minorities in particular, the state was shifting, as scholar Vijay Prashad would put it, from a responsive one to a repressive one. The Southern strategy would dominate national politics for the next forty years. Jericho had fallen. New walls had risen quickly.
But if Nixon was correct that his party’s dominance depended on neutralizing a Black progressive agenda, the right would still need to address the cultural shifts that had made that agenda viable. It would have to somehow undo the puissant words of King, Ellison, Baldwin, Hansberry, and Hurston, silence the uniting sounds of Berry, Cooke, James, Robinson, and Simone, eclipse the penetrating images of Lawrence, Bearden, Saar, Douglas, and Ringgold. It would need to deconstruct the emerging language, aurality, and visuality of race. During the post–civil rights era, battle lines would increasingly move from the political front to the cultural front.
WHAT REMAINED UNSEEN
As the sixties roared to a close, Black artists were debating form, content, and social responsibility with increasing urgency. But no matter their politics or their aesthetics, they all shared the condition of invisibility and they were increasingly unwilling to tolerate this condition. They would no longer be unseen. They would demand recognition.
In October 1968, the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) opened a benefit exhibition dedicated to Martin Luther King Jr.’s memory. But no Black artists had been invited. Only after community outcry were Faith Ringgold, Jacob Lawrence,27 and a handful of others asked to participate. Their paintings were hung in a room away from the main show. Days later the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a major survey exhibition on painting and sculpture of the 1930s without any Black artists included.
Frustrated, the trustees of the new Black artist–focused Studio Museum in Harlem called an emergency meeting at the offices of Artforum magazine to di
scuss what to do. The curator Henri Ghent agreed to organize for the Studio Museum a show of Black artists from the 1930s—including Henry Ossawa Tanner, Lawrence, Bearden, and Woodruff. Dramatizing the Whitney’s snub, the show would be called Invisible Americans: Black Artists of the 1930s.
But Ringgold felt they needed to go further. She argued to the meeting’s attendees, “A public demonstration at a major museum protesting the omission of Black artists is long overdue in New York City.”28 On Sunday, November 17, thirty artists marched on the Whitney Museum, beginning two years of demonstrations against three of the most important institutions in the American arts.
Farther up Museum Mile, Thomas Hoving, the young Upper East Side-born, Princeton-educated director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art had announced a blockbuster exhibition called Harlem on My Mind: The Cultural Capital of Black America, 1900–1968.29 Hoving’s chief curator, Allon Schoener, would install multimedia “information environments” featuring six hundred photographs and slides,30 films, and sound recordings immersing museum visitors in a simulacrum of Uptown. The real thing was just two miles up Madison Avenue, a world away.
Behind the scenes some Met trustees were loudly unhappy about the notion of doing a “nigger show.”31 But Hoving told a reporter, “We want to do anything we can to help whites understand more of what the black community’s about.”32 Later in his memoir, he wrote, “Through ‘Harlem,’ the museum would pay its true cultural dues. It would chronicle the creativity of the downtrodden blacks and, at the same time, encourage them to come to the museum.”
While the exhibition featured Black photographers, musicians, poets, and performers, it excluded Black visual artists. Instead the Met only allowed them a panel discussion. The politics of protest had only enabled this absurd arrangement: the artists’ art could not be seen, but the artists could be seen talking about not being seen.
With Bearden moderating, they took the Met to task, discussing Ellison’s other truism about Black invisibility: they see everything and anything but me. Jacob Lawrence said, “I don’t know of any other ethnic group that has been given so much attention but ultimately forgotten.”33
On January 16, 1969, the day that Harlem on My Mind opened to previews, the newly founded Black Emergency Cultural Coalition (BECC) began a picket in the gathering dusk at the base of the steps to the Met.34 The Met protest made the issue of Black artists’ invisibility an urgent topic among the art-world elite. The underground paper The East Village Other warned: “The art world is about to enter the stormiest period it has ever known.”35
While the BECC was forming uptown, a multiracial group of downtown conceptualists who shared an interest in radical politics—including Carl Andre; Lucy Lippard; Hans Haacke; Tom Lloyd; and Ringgold and her daughters, Barbara and Michele Wallace—began the Art Workers’ Coalition (AWC) downtown. Artists brought a wild mix of ideas to the open meetings. Some called for a copyright and royalty system that would allow artists to profit from auctions and resales of their work. One proposed that New York museum research departments be repurposed to serve the Vietcong army.
Finally the AWC chose the MOMA as its target for radical democratization. Some demands, such as support for fields like installation art or film, increased educational materials, community outreach, and free admission, would soon be accommodated. Other rejected ideas would take root later in alternative galleries like the downtown gallery Artists Space.
Still other ideas seemed too radical for the art world altogether. In April 1969, Tom Lloyd and Faith Ringgold wrote a letter signed by the United Black Artists Committee calling on the MOMA to create a Martin Luther King Jr. Wing for Black and Puerto Rican art.36 Galleries had been reserved, they noted, for “the exhibition of Dutch, Russian, Italian, Austro-Germanic, and other ethnic and national contributions.” Why not American minority artists? In advance of the Committee’s first scheduled “evaluation tour,” for which buses from Harlem would bring dozens of community members to demonstrate inside the museum, MOMA officials hurriedly installed paintings from Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series.
The proposal for the wing fizzled, but two years of protest had made an impact. The 1970 Whitney Annual included Betye Saar and Barbara Chase-Riboud, the first Black women to be shown in the museum. The Whitney announced a show entitled Contemporary Black Artists in America—although when artists learned that a white male, Robert Doty, would curate it, they protested it, too. For the 1971 season, MOMA announced shows for Richard Hunt and Romare Bearden.
But the vogue for artists of color peaked. In 1969, Benny Andrews had told New York Times reporter Grace Glueck, “We’re a trend like Pop and Op. We’re the latest movement. Of course, like the others, we may be over in a year or two.”37 He was right. “Between 1966 and 1973 there were thirty major exhibitions of African-American art,” the scholar and curator Sharon F. Patton would note. “The rest of the 1970s, however, were disappointing. There was less than enthusiastic institutional sponsorship of exhibitions, many galleries and artist groups dissolved, and artists often ‘disappeared.’”38
In this the end of the 1960s was no different than the end of the close of the Works Progress Administration, the drying-up of a fertile field. “The more hell we raised, the more some people got their work bought, got inside, got their big show,” Ringgold said. “But the history of this country, in respect to Black people, has been a series of backslidings.” How might an integrated nation be imagined if much of it remained invisible? What would it take for the unseen to be seen?
SAVING AMERICA’S SOUL
Exactly a year before his death, Martin Luther King Jr. had taken to the pulpit of the Riverside Church in Harlem to deliver what would be one of his most excoriated talks, the very opposite of his “I Have a Dream” or “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” talks, the “Beyond Vietnam” speech. King had decided to side with the antiwar movement, and in this talk, he meant to outline why he had taken such a controversial position, why he had chosen to confront “the fierce urgency of now,” why “the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church … leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.”
Many people—Black and white—had told King that fighting to end the war would hurt the cause of Black freedom. King believed that they misunderstood the nature of the cause. The struggle against segregation, the struggle to end an unjust war, and the struggle against poverty were all part of the struggle for freedom.
When President Kennedy first focused on alleviating poverty, historians Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward wrote, it was “a way to evade civil rights demands while maintaining Black support.”39 By 1967 all of the liberal commitments—to the poor, to African Americans, to people of color—seemed paper-thin. King had come to believe that liberal politicians were pitting jobs against civil rights, class against race. And the war loomed as the biggest threat to everyone’s freedom.
At Riverside Church, King noted that President Johnson’s War on Poverty had given way to the Vietnam War. He said he could not tell the young Black radicals to put down their rifles and Molotov cocktails for nonviolence if he did not oppose the violence America was inflicting on the world. More important, militarism was the “enemy of the poor.” It was a “cruel irony,” he said, that Black and white boys who would never attend the same schools together were being sent to kill and die together, absurdity taken to the level of a global tragedy.
“We watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village,” he said, “but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit.”
He reminded his audience that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference had taken “To Save the Soul of America” as its motto. And he quoted Langston Hughes:
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!
King called on the gathering to consider it the height of “compassion and nonviolence” to understand “the enemy’s point of view, to hear his questions, to know his ass
essment of ourselves.” And then he pushed them further, to reach for a deeper universalism. He asked Americans to consider the voices of a much different, more expansive silent majority than the one that Nixon claimed, one that extended to the world. Then he himself took on those voices:
I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam.
I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted.
I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam.
I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation.
These, King said, were revolutionary times. While there were immediate political stands to be made, conscientious objections to be stated, ceasefires to be declared, negotiations to be undertaken, and reparations to be made, these actions would not by themselves make a more just world. Nor would they be enough to cure the “deeper malady within the American spirit.” King had come to see “racism, materialism, and militarism” as the forces driving the nation’s march toward war. He said, “I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values.”
From the early days of his ministry at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church to the night he took the pulpit at Riverside Church, King had called for nonviolence, not as a mere strategy for civil rights reform, but as the basis for this revolution of values. Nonviolence and redemption were the animating principles of what King called “the beloved community,” his central unit of change. Undergirded by values like recognition, inclusion, and empathy, the beloved community would not seek peace through war, but peace through peace. Herein lay true freedom. Forging the beloved community was the beginning of building a new world.
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