African Americans weren’t the only ones who took a hit. The states of the Deep South, which fought Brown tooth and nail, today all fall in the bottom quartile of state rankings for educational attainment, per capita income, and quality of health.139 Prince Edward County, in particular, bears the scars of a place that saw fit to fight the Civil War right into the middle of the twentieth century. Certainly it is no accident that, in 2013, despite a knowledge-based, technology-driven global economy, the number one occupation in the county seat of Farmville was “cook and food preparation worker.” Nor is it any accident that in 2013, while 9.9 percent of white households in the county made less than ten thousand dollars in annual income, fully 32.9 percent of black households fell below that threshold.140 The insistence on destroying Brown, and thus the viability of America’s schools and the quality of education children receive regardless of where they live, has resulted in “the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession” for wide swaths of the American public.141
Four
Rolling Back Civil Rights
The Civil Rights Movement was so much more than Rosa Parks refusing to give up her bus seat in Montgomery, Alabama, or Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall before 250,000 people. The movement was a series of hard-fought, locally organized campaigns, supported at times by national organizations such as King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), shining the klieg lights of the press on gross inequities in employment, accommodations, and the right to vote. Adopting the strategy of nonviolence, African Americans skillfully used the media to expose the horrors of Jim Crow to the world—from snarling dogs lunging at unarmed demonstrators in Birmingham, to schoolteachers yanked onto the concrete for trying to register to vote in Selma, to four little girls in Birmingham dynamited in church right after a Sunday-school lesson on “A Love That Forgives.”1
This was a battle, as the SCLC noted, “to redeem the soul of America.”2 It was obvious that a series of congressionally neutered Civil Rights Acts, one in 1957 and another in 1960, was so ineffectual that the conditions of mass disfranchisement and overt discrimination remained virtually untouched. African Americans and their white allies would, therefore, put their bodies on the line to shake the American public and the U.S. government out of a fog of moral and legal lethargy. Thus, a triple murder of civil rights workers in Mississippi led eventually to the Civil Rights Act in 1964, and the killings in Selma and the horrific spectacle of Bloody Sunday—where nonviolent protesters were tear-gassed, whipped, and trampled by horse-bound troopers—resulted in the Voting Rights Act (VRA) in 1965.
The impact of this civil rights struggle had been slow but significant. Inequality had begun to lessen. Incomes had started to rise. Job and educational opportunities had expanded.3 And just as with Reconstruction, the Great Migration, and the Brown decision, this latest round of African American advances set the gears of white opposition in motion. Once again, the United States moved from the threshold of democracy to the betrayal of it, within two decades having locked up a greater percentage of its black males than did apartheid South Africa.4 Given the power of this iconic movement, the descent into “the new Jim Crow” should have been virtually impossible. But by the 1968 presidential election, white opposition had once more coalesced into an effective force. And in the years that followed, its response was carefully implemented.
Both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, with the support of the Burger and Rehnquist Supreme Courts, executed two significant tasks to crush the promise embedded in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. The first was to redefine what the movement was really “about,” with centuries of oppression and brutality suddenly reduced to the harmless symbolism of a bus seat and a water fountain. Thus, when the COLORED ONLY signs went down, inequality had supposedly disappeared.5 By 1965, Richard Nixon asserted, “almost every legislative roadblock to equality of opportunity for education, jobs, and voting had been removed.”6 Also magically removed, by this interpretation, were up to twenty-four trillion dollars in multigenerational devastation that African Americans had suffered in lost wages, stolen land, educational impoverishment, and housing inequalities. All of that vanished, as if it had never happened.7 Or, as Patrick Buchanan, adviser to Richard Nixon and presidential candidate himself would explain decades later: “America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.”8 Similarly, chattel slavery, which built the United States’ inordinate wealth, molted into an institution in which few if any whites had ever benefited because their “families never owned slaves.”9 Once the need for the Civil Rights Movement was minimized and history rewritten, initiatives like President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and affirmative action, which were developed to ameliorate hundreds of years of violent and corrosive repression, were easily characterized as reverse discrimination against hardworking whites and a “government handout that lazy black people ‘choose’ to take rather than work.”10
The second key maneuver, which flowed naturally from the first, was to redefine racism itself. Confronted with civil rights headlines depicting unflattering portrayals of KKK rallies and jackbooted sheriffs, white authority transformed those damning images of white supremacy into the sole definition of racism. This simple but wickedly brilliant conceptual and linguistic shift served multiple purposes. First and foremost, it was conscience soothing. The whittling down of racism to sheet-wearing goons allowed a cloud of racial innocence to cover many whites who, although “resentful of black progress” and determined to ensure that racial inequality remained untouched, could see and project themselves as the “kind of upstanding white citizen[s]” who were “positively outraged at the tactics of the Ku Klux Klan.”11 The focus on the Klan also helped to designate racism as an individual aberration rather than something systemic, institutional, and pervasive.12 Moreover, isolating racism to only its most virulent and visible form allowed respectable politicians and judges to push for policies that ostensibly met the standard of America’s new civil rights norms while at the same time crafting the implementation of policies to undermine and destabilize these norms, all too often leaving black communities ravaged.
The objective was to contain and neutralize the victories of the Civil Rights Movement by painting a picture of a “colorblind,” equal opportunity society whose doors were now wide open, if only African Americans would take initiative and walk on through.13 Ronald Reagan breezily shared anecdotes about how Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society handed over hard-earned taxpayer dollars to a “slum dweller” to live in posh government-subsidized housing and provided food stamps for one “strapping young buck” to buy steak, while another used the change he received from purchasing an orange to pay for a bottle of vodka. He ridiculed Medicaid recipients as “a faceless mass, waiting for handouts.” The imagery was, by design, galling, and although the stories were far from the truth, they succeeded in tapping into a river of widespread resentment.14 Second- and third-generation Polish Americans, Italian Americans, and other white ethnics seethed that, whereas their own immigrant fathers and grandfathers had had to work their way out of the ghetto, blacks were getting a government-sponsored free ride to the good life on the backs of honest, hardworking white Americans.15 Some Northern whites began to complain that civil rights apparently only applied to African Americans. One U.S. senator, who asked to remain anonymous, confided, “I’m getting mail from white people saying ‘Wait a minute, we’ve got some rights too.’ ”16
During his 1968 presidential bid, Alabama governor George Wallace understood this resentment. He had experienced a startling epiphany just a few years earlier after trying to block the enrollment of an African American student in the state’s flagship university at Tuscaloosa. For that act of defiance,
the governor received more than one hundred thousand congratulatory telegrams, half of which came from north of the Mason Dixon Line. Right then he had a revelation: “They all hate black people, all of them. They’re all afraid, all of them. Great God! That’s it! They’re all Southern! The whole United States is Southern!”17 But even then, he recognized, it couldn’t be business as usual. The Civil Rights Movement meant that “the days of respectable racism were over.”18 And so in his bid for the presidency, Wallace mastered the use of race-neutral language to explain what was at stake for disgruntled working-class whites, particularly those whose neighborhoods butted right up against black enclaves. To the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, who came to his campaign rallies in Detroit, Boston, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and San Diego, he played on the ever-present fear that blacks were breaking out of crime-filled ghettos and moving “into our streets, our schools, our neighborhoods,” signaling in unmistakable but still-unspoken code that “a nigger’s trying to get your job, trying to move into your neighborhood.”19 For working-class whites whose hold on some semblance of the American dream was becoming increasingly tenuous as the economy buckled under pressure from financing both the Great Society and the Vietnam War (on a tax cut), this was naturally upsetting.20 Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.21 Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted. By 1966, 85 percent of whites were certain that “the pace of civil rights progress was too fast.”22
Despite Wallace’s premise that “Negroes never had it so good,” by the mid-1960s African Americans’ median family income was only 55 percent that of whites, while the black unemployment rate was nearly twice as high.23 By 1965, just 27 percent of African American adults had completed four years of high school; whereas more than half of whites twenty-five years and over had achieved that basic threshold of education.24
African Americans simply refused to accept those disparities as natural. Refused to concede that a reality of just a quarter of black adults holding a high school diploma was as good as it was ever going to get. Refused to believe that double-digit unemployment rates were just fine for people who actually wanted to work. Refused to tolerate a practice where their labor was worth only 55 percent of that of whites doing the same job. Instead, blacks insisted that inequality was the result of a series of public policies that must be changed. Therefore, they continued to file a series of lawsuits to equalize education.25 They used the courts to pry open closed labor unions.26 They elected black political leadership in numbers that hadn’t been seen since Reconstruction.27
Their resolve to dismantle racial inequality led one white woman in Dayton, Ohio, to assert, “Oh, they are so forward. If you give them your finger, they’ll take your hand.” The growing consensus was that blacks wanted too much too fast.28 White angst rose further with the more overtly militant shift in the Civil Rights Movement. More than a decade of being beaten, jailed, and sometimes killed while using methods of nonviolent protest had begun to wear thin, especially on the youth involved in the demonstrations. Nor had the initial Southern focus of the movement addressed the discrimination that millions of African Americans faced in the urban North, Midwest, and West. Thus, nonviolence gave way to an ethos of self-defense, best articulated by the Black Panther Party, a group founded in 1966 which openly brandished guns and challenged the police. The goal of integration, so fundamental to the SCLC and the NAACP, was now forced to openly compete with the more sharply articulated demands of Black Nationalism and Black Power. Soon, in response to police brutality, rioting consumed wide swaths of Newark, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Cleveland, and this served only to intensify the white backlash that had begun with the second wave of the Great Migration during World War II, while also providing whites exasperated by what they perceived as threats to the status quo with the cover of “reasonableness” and “moderation.”29
Like Wallace, Richard Nixon tapped into this general resentment. The “Southern Strategy,” as his campaign handlers called it, was designed to pull into the GOP not only white Democratic voters from below the Mason-Dixon Line but also those aggrieved whites who lived in northern working-class neighborhoods. Using strategic dog-whistle appeals—crime, welfare, neighborhood schools—to trigger Pavlovian anti-black responses, Nixon succeeded in defining and maligning the Democrats as the party of African Americans, without once having to actually say the words. That would be the “elephant in the room.”30 In fact, as H. R. Haldeman, one of the Republican candidate’s most trusted aides, later recalled, “He [Nixon] emphasized that 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 not appearing to.”31
Nixon, therefore, framed America’s issues as “excesses caused by … bleeding heart liberalism.” The Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he asserted, had removed the legal barriers to equality; they had also, he continued, raised unrealistic expectations in the black community. When equality didn’t immediately emerge, he explained, lawlessness and rioting soon followed. On the presidential campaign trail, Nixon’s basic mantra was that “it was both wrong and dangerous to make promises that cannot be fulfilled, or to raise hopes that come to nothing.” The point, therefore, was to puncture blacks’ expectations.32
That downward thrust would come through the iron fist of law and order.33 Crime and blackness soon became synonymous in a carefully constructed way that played to the barely subliminal fears of darkened, frightening images flashing across the television screen.34 One of Nixon’s campaign ads, for example, carefully avoided using pictures of African Americans while at the same time showing cities burning, grainy images of protesters out in the streets, blood flowing, chaos shaking the very foundation of society, and then silence, as the screen faded to black, emblazoned with white lettering: THIS TIME VOTE LIKE YOUR WHOLE WORLD DEPENDED ON IT: NIXON.35 The point, longtime aide John Ehrlichman explained, was to present a position on crime, education, or public housing in such a way that a voter could “avoid admitting to himself that he was attracted by a racist appeal.”36 Nixon, after screening the ad, enthusiastically told his staff that the commercial “hits it right on the nose … It’s all about law and order and the damn Negro–Puerto Rican groups out there.”37 Yet, in the ad he didn’t have to say so explicitly. It was clear who was the threat, just as it was clear whose world depended on Nixon for salvation.38
In the 1968 election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Nixon, in addition to playing on the growing disenchantment with the Vietnam War, won by making the unworthiness of blacks the subtext for his campaign. Following his inauguration, the president targeted “two of the civil rights movement’s greatest victories, Brown and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.”39 This was more than a cynical political ploy to curry favor with a particular constituency.40 The Civil Rights Movement had raised the ante, because now, as in the years of Reconstruction, there appeared to be a strong Constitutional basis, in the newly invigorated Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, for African Americans’ claim to citizenship rights.
Given the landmines in the new post-civil-rights political terrain, outright opposition to the new statutes would have backfired. Thus, Nixon’s strategy—one that would play out well into the twenty-first century—was to “weaken the enforcement of civil rights laws.”41 The Voting Rights Act in particular was the bête noire of the Republican Party’s new Southern wing, empowering African Americans as it did through the ballot box. The VRA, which was able to muster only enough votes for initial passage by carrying the unprecedented provision requiring renewal within five years, was set for what its opponents hoped would be its death knell in 1970.
As the renewal hearings started, the Republican co-chair of the House Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch of Ohio, a fiscal conservative and civil rights advocate, explained that he had hoped the basic foundation of democracy, the vote, would n
ow be accepted and honored. But “resistance to the program has been more subtle and more effective than I thought possible,” he said. “A whole arsenal of racist weapons has been perfected.” Instead of outright denial of access to the ballot, the South had begun to use dilution of black electoral strength through rigging precinct boundaries and requiring at-large elections. Mississippi, for example had passed a series of laws that turned the elected position of school superintendent into a political appointee and changed the selection of county supervisor from district-based to at-large elections. And Virginia, which prior to the VRA had assigned election officials to help the illiterate vote, in 1966 mandated that ballots had to be handwritten. The states argued that Section 5 of the VRA, which requires that the U.S. Department of Justice or the district court in Washington preapprove changes to election requirements, pertained only to mechanisms that directly affected access to the ballot box, such as the poll tax. In Allen v. State Board of Elections (1969), Chief Justice Earl Warren stopped Mississippi and Virginia in their tracks as he laid out that the VRA was “aimed at the subtle, as well as the obvious, state regulations which have the effect of denying citizens their right to vote because of their race.” Representative McCulloch, therefore, noted, in his support for renewal of the act that it was painfully obvious that “350 years of oppression cannot be eradicated in 5 years.”42
White Rage Page 11