Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  But without such outsize figures as Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, and Lyndon Johnson, the party seemed moribund and adrift. Johnson had pushed the party further than it had ever gone on civil rights and as a result alienated the southern Democrats. Even in his overwhelming victory in 1964, he had failed to carry the band of southern states that stretched east from Louisiana to North Carolina, all of which, with the exception of Mississippi, Kennedy had carried in 1960, with LBJ on the ticket. Humphrey, though he lost by fewer than 1 million votes, had failed to carry much at all.

  And though Strom Thurmond’s exit from the party didn’t immediately begin an avalanche, it signaled a shift that would soon inspire a rising class of southern Democratic politicians, including future United States senators Trent Lott of Mississippi, Jesse Helms of North Carolina, Phil Gramm of Texas, Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, and Richard Shelby of Alabama, along with eventual national political figures like Elizabeth Dole, Condoleezza Rice, Alabama chief justice Roy Moore, and future Texas governor Rick Perry, to exit the party and join the formidable political architecture of an increasingly solid Republican South.

  By 1972, the Democrats had a choice: They could become the party of racial advancement and social change and risk alienating white southern voters and northern blue collar voters, too; or they could gently push aside their liberal and African American factions and subordinate their pressing demands to increase the party’s chances on election day. The Vietnam War had taken that choice away from Johnson and shelved his opportunity to make manifest his and his party’s legacy to the growing number of Americans who, while reaping the rewards of Medicare and food stamps, federal housing assistance and guaranteed college loans, increasingly resented those very programs. And Republicans were, with increasing success, portraying those programs as giveaways to a lawless “entitlement class” consisting mainly of minorities and “illegal immigrants” who refused to support themselves with work, and whose liberal benefactors were bent on using federal welfare programs as both a cradle and a cudgel, to infantilize the poor and punish white, traditional middle-class Americans for the sins of the country’s past.

  Lyndon Johnson had been a towering force who successfully pressed Congress to make good on the promises of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and sold the War on Poverty as being just as much about saving Appalachia as it was reviving the inner cities. But without his voice, and that of Martin Luther King Jr.—the embodiment of the civil rights movement—there were few left to articulate the case for progressive change. Johnson had left no strong successor. The media had rushed to crown a young King associate, Rev. Jesse Jackson, but he lacked the trust of the broad civil rights leadership, who saw him as too eager to capitalize on King’s memory.

  And Ted Kennedy, the articulate young senator on whom the mantle of national leadership seemed destined to fall, had been involved in a scandal in 1969 in which a young woman, Mary Jo Kopechne, died in a car he was driving after it went off a bridge and sank to the bottom of a deep tidal pool on Chappaquiddick Island, in his home state of Massachusetts. Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident.

  These were chaotic times for the Democratic Party, and that was reflected in the culture around it. The number-one television program in the country was All in the Family, which debuted in January 1971 and would be a runaway hit for five years. Carroll O’Connor played the Queens native, sardonically racist Archie Bunker. With his earnest wife, Edith, and their liberal daughter and son-in-law, Archie struggles to adjust to an increasingly multicultural world.

  The Bunkers were more than a sitcom family. They embodied white America’s quiet anxieties about race, integration and neighborhood change, gender, sex, and the war. For the Democratic Party, Archie represented the Americans they were losing, and not just in the South, but also in the Rust Belt and the Northeast, who like their southern counterparts, resented the federal housing mandates and busing to end school segregation in the suburbs of cities like Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York.

  Black leaders, meanwhile, viewed the 1972 presidential election as a golden opportunity to organize, and to address their lack of broad political power despite African Americans’ determination to register and vote and despite the tremendous sacrifices and martyrdom of civil rights workers and leaders, black and white, up to and including King.

  Only a handful of African Americans had been elected to Congress in the twentieth century, beginning with Oscar De Priest of Chicago in 1928. They had hailed from northern urban districts that were overwhelmingly black. And unlike their post-Reconstruction predecessors, they were overwhelmingly Democrats, with notable exceptions like Edward Brooke. The lawmakers, including Brooke, Adam Clayton Powell of New York, and Augustus Freeman Hawkins of California, both elected in 1963, endured a segregated Capitol and a House of Representatives in which their party remained divided between southerners hostile to African American interests and northerners with other fish to fry, leaving the handful of black House members with little legislative influence.

  The Voting Rights Act had led many of the young ground troops of the civil rights movement to run for state and federal office. In January 1969, newly elected black congressmen including William Clay of Missouri, Louis Stokes of Ohio, and Shirley Chisholm of Brooklyn, the first black woman elected to the House, formed a Democratic Select Committee, chaired by Michigan congressman Charles Diggs, which two years later would be formalized as the Congressional Black Caucus, with thirteen founding members. Among them were Chisholm, Clay, Ronald Dellums of California, John Conyers of Michigan, and Charles Rangel, who entered the House that session having defeated the flamboyant but famously (and fiscally) troubled Powell by two hundred votes in the Democratic primary in Harlem.

  Both inside and outside Washington, black leaders were seeking ways to consolidate and build meaningful political power, and to create a coherent national agenda for black America.

  In March 1972, some eight thousand delegates, including the Black Caucus members, descended on Westside High School in Gary, Indiana, for the National Black Political Convention. The conclave, a culmination of a year of meetings in cities like New York and Chicago, was presided over by the newly elected mayor, Richard Hatcher, a leading civil rights figure and one of the first black mayors of a major American city, along with Carl Stokes of Cleveland. The three-day event attracted the widows of King and Malcolm X; poet and author Amiri Baraka, who was a co-organizer; John Johnson, publisher of Ebony and Jet magazines; and rising civil rights leaders including Rev. Jesse Jackson, now head of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Operation Breadbasket in Chicago. Included on the eclectic program were Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale, Nation of Islam cleric Louis Farrakhan, Texas state senator Barbara Jordan, former SNCC national communications director Julian Bond, Motown singer Kim Weston, and actor Richard Roundtree.

  Organizers had hoped to craft a unified political strategy heading into the November elections, and the convention produced an ambitious platform that called for a network of national community health centers, a guaranteed minimum wage, the outlawing of capital punishment, and the establishment of a “system of national health insurance.”

  The “Gary Declaration” offered a stark assessment of black America in the post-Johnson era. Its central tension: whether to continue to work within the existing political system, or to walk away from politics and into the arms of black nationalism.

  “We come to Gary in an hour of great crisis and tremendous promise for Black America,” the declaration read, bleakly reporting that “[e]conomic, cultural, and spiritual depression stalk Black America, and the price for survival often appears to be more than we are able to pay. On every side, in every area of our lives, the American institutions in which we have placed our trust are unable to cope with the crises they have created by their single-minded dedication to profits for some and white supremacy above all.”

  The organizers in Gary were call
ing for nothing less than “radical political change.” And they declared emphatically that when it came to politics, “[b]oth parties have betrayed us whenever their interests conflicted with ours (which was most of the time), and whenever our forces were unorganized and dependent, quiescent and compliant.”

  But the reality was that black power had indeed become both concentrated and dependent on the Democrats, who dominated both the South, where most African Americans continued to reside, and the major urban centers in the Rust Belt and the Northeast, where those drawn north by the Great Migration had settled. Black Republicans had been especially marginalized by Goldwater’s candidacy, which rendered the Grand Old Party culturally unacceptable to a growing number of black voters. Despite the rank racism of the southern Democratic Party, blacks increasingly saw the party as the surest route to political participation. Black Republicans, who withdrew from the scene in Goldwater’s wake, reemerged to support Richard Nixon in 1972, but Goldwater’s lingering shadow made it all but impossible for black Republicans to make their case to the general body of black Americans. For better or worse, black Americans were casting their lot with the Democrats.

  The Gary Declaration asserted that the delegates had “come to Gary confronted with a choice . . . not the old convention question of which candidate shall we support; the pointless question of who is to preside over a decaying and unsalvageable system,” and posited that “the only real choice for us is . . . whether we will move to organize independently” toward “social transformation or social destruction.” However, the reality was that the choice had already been made. For the vast majority of black voters, it was the Democrats or bust.

  On the dais, Rev. Jackson gamely thundered to the delegates, “We are grown! We ain’t taking it no more! No more yes boss. No more bowing or scrapping. We are twenty-five million strong. Cut us in or cut it out. It is a new ball game!” But few in the hall believed there was a game at all. Both parties were not vying equally for the African American vote. In fact, Nixon was angling for blue-collar white Democrats, using the specter of “urban” lawlessness as a wedge.

  Before the convention in Gary, the organizers had hoped to launch an African American candidate for president, ahead of the July Democratic convention in Miami Beach. It was to be a bold stroke, just four years after King’s assassination, and they had settled on Carl Stokes. But the plan never made it to Gary, having been upended in January by Shirley Chisholm’s announcement from the pulpit of Concord Baptist Church in Brooklyn, in which she declared: “I am not the candidate of black America, although I am black and proud. . . . I am not the candidate of the women’s movement of America, although I am a woman, and am equally proud of that. I am not the candidate of any political bosses or fat cats or special interests.”

  Chisholm made it clear she saw no prospect of getting the Democratic nomination. Instead she was calling for a “bloodless revolution at the Democratic National Convention,” led by “blacks, women, young [and] Spanish-speaking peoples,” who she proposed could “get together a ticket that is reflective of all different segments that make up this great land called America.” She had been contemplating the idea since the previous July but had not discussed her intentions with her fellow Black Caucus members. In Gary, her run was greeted as an irritant and a move that undermined their daring agenda.

  The rejection disappointed Chisholm’s ardent supporters, including her New York youth organizer, a young preacher named Al Sharpton, who left the three-day conference incensed that so many leaders of the black political class were dismissing the daughter of a Guyanese burlap bag factory worker and a Barbadian seamstress, as a candidate of greater interest to women than to African Americans. For Sharpton and other Chisholm supporters, it was a sign of sexism, pure and simple, running like a rampant infection through the movement.

  In the end, for black political organizers, Gary was a thrill, albeit an empty one that put the fragmentation of the black political movement since King’s death on display. There was no overarching strategy for black political advancement, and certainly no appetite to marry it to the cause of women’s rights. For all the declaration’s fire and fury, at the Democratic convention the leaders defaulted to pragmatism and threw their support behind George McGovern, who was running on a populist liberal agenda that included a full withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam, a blanket amnesty for those who had evaded the draft, and dramatic defense cuts to fund increased spending on domestic programs.

  McGovern emerged from the Democratic convention on July 13 with 57 percent of the delegates, defeating Henry “Scoop” Jackson, the indefatigable George Wallace, and Chisholm, who placed fourth in the delegate count. But the nominating process produced a public spectacle that included failed entreaties by McGovern to Hubert Humphrey, Edmund Muskie, Walter Mondale, and McGovern’s preferred choice, Senator Ted Kennedy, to serve as his running mate, as well as clashes with the National Women’s Political Caucus, including Chisholm, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, and Betty Friedan, over the inclusion of a plank supporting a woman’s right to choose an abortion (which McGovern and his aides worked to quash) and the endorsement of an Equal Rights Amendment. Even the selection of Missouri senator Thomas Eagleton as McGovern’s running mate descended into farce, as the voting dragged on into the wee hours, producing mock ballots for CBS newsman Roger Mudd, Mao Zedong, and even one for Archie Bunker.

  The convention seemed to underscore the party’s diminished state.

  Nixon, meanwhile, was carrying overwhelming advantages into the general election, including the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, which lowered the voting age from twenty-one to eighteen; he’d signed it in 1970, and Congress affirmed it the following year. It instantly added more than 10 million new voters heading into November, ironically giving the famously uncharismatic president, who’d lampooned himself in 1968 in a “sock it to me” cameo on Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In, a reason to tout himself to the young and hip.

  Despite revelations in October in the Washington Post about a June break-in by political “burglars” at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate hotel and office complex in Washington, D.C., Nixon was decisively reelected.

  Even the war had turned into his strength. The Weather Underground bombings, controversial testimony by former soldiers, and even officers like John Forbes Kerry, at the Fulbright hearings, the lore of “Hanoi Jane,” and images of police subduing college protesters on elite campuses like the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University—and outside the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach—made the antiwar movement as unpopular as the war itself; while the ongoing clashes between black citizens and police in major cities, and even a prison riot at Attica prison in upstate New York in 1971, played to the Nixon campaign’s “law and order” appeals. With more than 55 percent of newly eligible young voters going to the polls, Nixon won 18- to 29-year-olds by a margin of 52 percent to 46 percent.

  For African Americans, the outcome of the election was grim. Despite gains in congressional seats and in state and local offices, fewer than 50 percent of black voters had participated in the election, with the African American vote underperforming the national electorate by 11 to 14 points, depending on the measure. “The most pervasive factors affecting the black vote,” researchers at the newly formed Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies wrote, “appear to have been apathy, lack of interest in either candidate and a feeling that the result was a foregone conclusion.”

  When Johnson passed away on January 22, 1973, two days after Nixon’s second inaugural, his party was left to grapple with his dual legacy, which spanned the heights of progress on civil rights, and the depths of despair over Vietnam. The party’s leaders seemed decidedly uncertain of how to square what Johnson had given them and the country with what they’d lost.

  By forcing his party, and particularly his fellow southerners, to reckon with the country’s ongoing racial strife, Johnson had thrown open the doors to a
growing and increasingly loyal liberal and African American base. But he had also driven scores of white Democrats into the arms of the Republican Party and a growing conservative movement that was quickly organizing around opposition to all that his administration had stood for. The rapidly changing culture was a long-term boon to the party of liberal social progress, but a short-term nightmare. And the question of whether Johnson had pushed too far and too fast, and been too easily swayed by the pressure from the Left and from civil rights leaders, or whether his ambitious social project had simply been devoured by an ill-conceived war, would linger over the Democratic Party for a generation.

  JIMMY CARTER SAT IN THE GOVERNOR’S MANSION IN ATLANTA, Georgia, watching his party stray far afield of what he saw as the core values of a majority of Americans. He’d been elected governor in 1970 on a careful mix of the old and new South. He had refused to join a White Citizens’ Council as a local businessman, but he kept an eye on the rural white voters who remained uncomfortable with the galloping tide of integration. He believed he understood what ailed the national Democrats, and he sensed an opportunity.

  In March 1974, writing in The Atlantic Monthly, columnist David S. Broder diagnosed the psychic ills that were tearing the party apart. These were illustrated by the clashes between the old guard of LBJ and Mayor Daley versus the antiwar iconoclasts at the 1968 convention, and versus the “long-haired youths, blacks, Chicanos, and activist women” in 1972 who in the eyes of party regulars “had, by their action, consigned their own candidate, McGovern, to defeat.” In the end, Broder wrote, and many Democrats believed, there wasn’t enough room in the party for the old guard and the liberal irregulars.

  Carter had taken sides in that fight and came down squarely on the side of the traditionalists. But he was, in some ways, a typical southern politician. Carter was as eager as any to profit from the anger of the real-life Archie Bunkers who resented the patchwork of civil rights and housing laws, busing and affirmative action, which they saw as giving an unfair leg up to agitating minorities at their expense, but he was always cognizant of the requirement to keep the growing ranks of black voters in the Democratic fold.