By 1968, the angry little man from Alabama wanted to be president himself. Neither his own Democrats nor the opposition Republicans would have him. So he struck out on his own as the standard-bearer of the American Independent Party, which amounted to George Wallace and those who thought like him. In the tormented, fractured America of 1968, there were millions. Enough to elect Wallace? Probably not—even Wallace understood that.4 But there were enough to get attention, maybe even force the 1968 election into the House of Representatives. The peace marchers and the civil rights activists had their day and their say. Wallace and his ilk demanded to be heard, too.
By Wallace’s calculations, made with the care of an experienced B-29 flight engineer juggling fuel rates, his crooked road to the White House ran through the Corn Belt, notably Nebraska. Most of America saw that prairie state as farmland, Alabama with less cotton, more corn, and a folksy twang rather than a mellifluous drawl. But George Wallace saw Nebraska, Omaha especially, as the place he intended to make a point. Like the cagey old lawyer he was, he chose his venue with care. Wallace wasn’t coming back to see Lincoln, where he met his bomber crew, or Offutt Air Force Base, where his former commander Curtis LeMay once ran the show in the house that SAC built. No, Wallace went to Omaha for one reason. He knew that North Omaha was a very restive African American neighborhood. And he aimed to do what he did best—stir the pot.
THERE WERE BLACK PEOPLE in Nebraska. They had been there from the beginning, with the first free African American arriving in Omaha in 1854, the year the city was incorporated. In 1968, African Americans amounted to a true minority, about 39,000, a bare 2.7 percent of the 1.4 million Nebraskans. Two-thirds of those black Nebraskans lived in Omaha, about 9 percent of the city’s populace. Almost all of them resided in North Omaha.5 It was de facto segregation, never done by law, but by practice. Officially Jim Crow never made it to the free soil of Nebraska. But Mr. Crow was alive and well in Omaha.
To hear the white citizens talk, African Americans lived in North Omaha because they just did. Why, some of white people’s best friends were black. They came to visit all the time. Sure they did. They just happened to bring along mops and brooms and lawnmowers. But as for working with black people, going to church with black families, socializing with black folks, well, that pretty much happened… never. The city’s cemetery was integrated, which boded well for the next life.6 There was that.
In this life, before the 1960s, Omaha had endured one particularly vicious race riot. An enraged white mob attacked the Douglas County courthouse and lynched an African American man accused of rape. Somebody—rioters, police, soldiers—killed two white miscreants. Seven police officers suffered wounds. An unknown number of white and black people went to local hospitals for injuries. Black homes and businesses had been burnt.7 After 1919, African Americans stayed in North Omaha: separate, but as in the southern states, hardly equal.
The realtors steered black families to North Omaha. Schools, churches, and businesses developed accordingly. African Americans in 1950s Omaha might aspire to a brand of genteel poverty, as long as they knew “their place.” Americans celebrated jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong and baseball greats like Jackie Robinson. But look at pictures of American police officers, judges, astronauts, college alumni, or business executives from the era. Every face is white. A century after the violent emancipation of the American Civil War, that didn’t cut it anymore.
One son of Omaha, Malcolm Little, took the name Malcolm X. He advocated violence to secure civil rights for African Americans, separate and truly equal by revolution.8 Although he moderated his views prior to his assassination in 1965, a figure like Malcolm X terrified men like George Wallace. What if black Americans didn’t know their place? What if they decided they wanted white America’s share, and decided to go after it lock, stock, and barrel?
Fortunately for the people of Nebraska and America, black and white, the influence of firebrands like Malcolm X remained marginal. The civil rights movement took its lead, instead, from Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., a Baptist minister dedicated to advancing the cause of African Americans within the law when he could, by agitation when he must, but consistently by nonviolent means. King brought his soaring rhetoric to the Salem Baptist Church in North Omaha in 1958.9 Like that other Baptist named John, King prepared the way for big things to come.
A brutal, bloody 1965 riot in the Watts district of Los Angeles marked a new wave of racial unrest in America. Chicago and Cleveland burned in the hot summer of 1966, with a hundred more cities to follow the next year.10 Omaha did not escape.
On July 4, 1966, temperatures reached 103°. That evening, a thousand-plus young men gathered at North Twenty-fourth and Lake Streets in North Omaha. When about a hundred Omaha Police Department officers showed up to disperse the crowd, trouble erupted. Rowdies trashed two police cruisers, then went on a rampage up and down the streets. Men tossed Molotov cocktails into vacant buildings and looted storefronts. Damage cost owners millions of dollars. Governor Frank Morrison rolled in six companies of the Nebraska National Guard. When he later visited shot-up North Omaha, he called it “unfit for human habitation.”11 Morrison blamed the violence on unremediated poverty.
Omaha mayor Axel Vergman “Al” Sorenson disagreed. He attributed the entire situation to outside agitators, notably the Black Panthers, a violent nationalist organization in the tradition of Malcolm X at his most radical. It’s unclear how big a part, if any, the Panthers played in the riot. But by August, Black Panthers guarded some key buildings in North Omaha.12 That got attention in Washington.
To those concerned with American national security, Omaha wasn’t just a city in Nebraska. The Strategic Air Command’s headquarters at Offutt Air Force Base controlled the bulk of the country’s nuclear deterrent force. A riot in Cleveland was a problem for the state of Ohio. A riot in Omaha threatened America’s ability to keep the Soviet Union at bay. So the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) paid very close attention to matters in Omaha.
Long-time FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, an institution unto himself in Washington, made his reputation busting gangsters in the 1930s, Nazi saboteurs in the 1940s, and Soviet spies in the 1950s. That last bunch remained only too active, and in Hoover’s view, the red tentacles extended into the anti-war movement, such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), and to disaffected African Americans like the Black Panthers. It only made sense, at least to Hoover. If the Moscow leadership wanted an uprising, an American equivalent of the Bolshevik revolution, why not allocate some expertise and money to the disaffected? The Soviet Union’s active KGB foreign intelligence officers, joined by the GRU’s military intelligence operatives, did just enough to convince Hoover he had it right.13 That attribution of some kind of master plot gave comfort to Hoover and those of similar mind, but it didn’t match reality. In truth, Soviet intelligence people dealing with the various disparate American underground groups, including the SDS and Black Panthers, resembled ants atop a log rushing down whitewater rapids. The ants thought they were steering. Evidently, so did the FBI.
A far better understanding of the real problem behind the racial tension roiling Omaha could be found in a fifty-eight-minute documentary entitled A Time for Burning. Director William C. Jersey of San Francisco chronicled the efforts of the white Augustana Lutheran Church to reach out to embittered, embattled African Americans in North Omaha. In a telling comment, one minister quoted a parishioner: “This one lady said to me, ‘pastor,’ she said, ‘I want them to have everything I have, I want God to bless them as much as he blesses me, but,’ she says, ‘pastor, I just can’t be in the same room with them, it just bothers me.’”14
That’s why George Wallace came to Omaha in 1968.
WALLACE ARRIVED IN Omaha on Sunday, March 3, 1968. About fifteen hundred supporters met him at the airport. In a follow-on press conference, Wallace stated that riots reflected the work of “militants, activists, communists, and revolutionaries” and that in his judgment “le
aders and sympathizers of militant civil rights organizations are communists.”15 Expecting trouble, Mayor Al Sorenson assigned four uniformed police officers to Wallace, who also brought his own security team. The police added both uniformed and off-duty officers to the rally set for Monday night at the Omaha Civic Auditorium.
When it came time for the gathering, the house was rocking. A thousand Wallace supporters occupied folding chairs on the auditorium’s main floor. Thousands more filled the balcony. Into this scene marched fifty young protestors, most of them black men, carrying anti-Wallace signs. The Wallace people let in the demonstrators and ensured they found a place in front. The Alabama governor relished the upcoming confrontation. Wallace delayed his speech for an hour as the crowd shouted at the interlopers. The protestors held their positions but did not reply. That seemed to upset many of the Wallace faithful. The rain of insults continued, more and more vicious, and full of vile epithets heard today only in certain unsavory rap songs. It was like letting a pressure cooker build up steam. Both sides knew it, too.
When Wallace came out, the crowd responded with an enthusiastic wave of applause. The governor raised his arms for quiet, then began his address. Down to his front, the fifty objectors waved their signs, but Wallace kept right on going. His American Independent Party needed 750 signatures to get on the Nebraska ballot for president. It looked like Wallace would get them.
He got more than he bargained for. Ignored and frustrated, their chants unheeded, some of the protestors tore up their signs and began throwing the pieces, to include the wooden sticks, at the podium. That did it.
On the dais, Wallace stopped speaking. He covered his face. His guards stepped up to shield him. Young African American reporter David Rice, representing the rather sketchy underground publications Asterisk and Buffalo Chip, tried to quell the rain of debris. For his troubles, he earned a faceful of mace from an undercover police officer. Other police began to usher the protestors out of the hall. Enraged Wallace enthusiasts swung their metal folding chairs, whacking the greatly outnumbered young men as the police tried to get them outside.16
Within an hour, North Omaha rose up. Looting became widespread, with a dozen plate-glass storefronts shattered and ten shops aflame. Two city buses had windows knocked out. The night rang with gunfire, sirens, and tinkling glass. Caught by surprise, the Omaha Police Department scrambled to get officers into the neighborhood.
Inside one darkened pawnshop, off-duty police officer James Frank Abbott confronted Howard L. “Butch” Stevenson, age sixteen. Stevenson appeared suddenly, hopping in through a smashed front window. Abbott hollered, “Hold it.” Stevenson kept right on going. The officer pumped out one 12-gauge shotgun shell at point-blank range. Hot pellets punched fatal holes in young Stevenson’s torso. The looter was unarmed.17
Stevenson’s death kept the kettle bubbling the next day. Students at Horace Mann Junior High (95 percent African American) smashed windows and set fire to shrubbery and grass as police stood by. At Central High School, police officers broke up a demonstration, arresting several students, including star basketball player Dwaine Dillard. On March 9, Central had to play short-handed for the state championship in a final game moved at the last minute to more tranquil Lincoln. Central lost, another casualty of the unrest.18
This time, the National Guard never left their armories. The fires burned out. The police tallied one dead, thirteen injured (two of them Wallace backers), and nine arrests.19 For his part, George Wallace got his signatures and his media exposure and scuttled off.
The FBI Omaha Field Office dutifully reported its version of the unrest.20 That unhappy summary went directly to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Already wrestling with the quagmire in Vietnam, LBJ faced the front end of yet another long, hot summer on top of the urban horrors of 1965, 1966, and 1967. Wallace reminded him of the political threat from the reactionary right. Others in his own Democratic Party outflanked him to his left. Johnson lamented: “I sometimes felt that I was living in a continuous nightmare.”21 He was. And so were the rest of those he routinely addressed as his fellow Americans.
LYNDON JOHNSON RESPECTED the experts. He didn’t always listen to them, but he had long ago determined that the most difficult policy decisions worked best when underwritten by the opinion of a blue-ribbon panel. Even as LBJ’s hand-picked wise men contemplated the way ahead in Vietnam, the bad news from Omaha had the president reaching back to the last set of recommendations he’d gotten from a previous line-up of great American minds. The findings landed on Johnson’s desk on February 29, 1968, a few days before Omaha blew up again.
The president had been expecting it, and knew the report would not be good. In the summer of 1967, as Detroit and Newark smoldered, LBJ tapped Governor Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois to form the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. In World War II, Kerner proved himself as a major in the 34th Field Artillery Battalion under the command of then-Lieutenant Colonel William C. Westmoreland. Now he stepped forward to try to figure out why America’s cities burned every summer. Ten other prominent Americans joined the effort. The Kerner Commission represented a nice balance of America’s sensible center, balancing white and black members, Democrats and Republicans, labor and industry, and city, state, and federal levels. The fringe nuts, the George Wallace people and the ghetto rabble-rousers, did not receive invitations.
The group’s verdict proved stark. “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.”22 The only answer appeared to be a massive commitment of government resources to remedy the problem. Anything less than an urban Manhattan Project, an inner-city Apollo moonshot program, promised more of the same for decades.
For LBJ, it amounted to another kick in the teeth. If Tet upended the president’s war in Vietnam, the Kerner Commission’s pessimistic conclusion reflected abject failure in the war on poverty. Like the damn North Vietnamese, poverty looked to have the upper hand. And as in Vietnam, the underlying conditions played America false. Johnson’s 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act finished de jure racial segregation. The administration’s Great Society—Head Start for little children, Medicare for seniors, Medicaid for the poor, decent housing for the cities—seemingly struck at de facto racial divides. But as in Vietnam, the metrics all represented U.S. resources going in. What came out? Watts 1965. Chicago 1966. Detroit 1967. And now Omaha 1968. Laws and spending couldn’t change hearts and minds in middle America, any more than bombs and bullets could do so in Southeast Asia.
In his very public turn against the war on April 4, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. had warned that the fixation on Vietnam forestalled necessary reckoning at home.23 He spoke as America’s best self, the national superego telling us what we should be. And George Wallace surely croaked as the country’s rotten id, demanding a return to a past that never really was. In the middle stood LBJ, U.S. ego personified, a man who consistently projected strength, yet harbored an inner character fissure as big as the jagged channel of the Pedernales River near his south central Texas roots. All the bills came due that grim March of 1968.
ON MARCH 10, the New York Times exposed the military’s 206,000 troop request. The fine print mentioned ideas about ground incursions on the Ho Chi Minh Trail and the need to mobilize the national guardsmen and service reservists. Half of the requested troops would go to Vietnam, with the rest slated to meet U.S. worries about other hot spots like Korea, NATO’s central front, and the Middle East. Nobody read any of that. All they saw were those huge black screaming headlines: “Westmoreland Requests 206,000 More Men, Stirring Debate in Administration.”24 More. More. More.
On March 12, the Democrats of New Hampshire cast 42 percent of their votes for a little-known Minnesota senator named Eugene McCarthy. LBJ won—of course he did, he was the sitting president, the architect of the massive 1964 Democratic Party landslide. But this guy McCarthy, backed by hundreds of earnest door-knocking young men and women shorn of long hair and love beads, “clean fo
r Gene,” made his point. McCarthy ran explicitly as “not Johnson,” and implicitly on getting the United States out of Vietnam.25 McCarthy was his own man, a quixotic figure in every way.
Yet in the returns coming from New Hampshire, LBJ saw not the Minnesotan, but the smiling countenance of Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York. The dead JFK, and now the very live RFK, hovered just out of reach, dogging Johnson, rebuking him, mocking him. The debonair Harvards would have done it right. The Harvards would have done it better. They’d have wrapped up Vietnam, soothed the stewing black ghettos, and gotten a U.S. flag on the moon already, and likely put one on Mars to boot.
The day after New Hampshire, RFK told reporters: “I am now reassessing my position.”26 Of course he was. Johnson felt vindicated—he’d long expected Bobby Kennedy to jump into the race—but that offered nothing to help him meet the upcoming challenge to his presidency. Wallace loomed to the right, Kennedy to the left, and out on the other end, the Republicans turned to the wily Richard M. Nixon, back from the political graveyard.
The polls, notably the respected Gallup survey, also augured peril. In 1967, as MACV sought the casualty crossover point, us versus them, Americans continually backed the war about 60/40, with some erosion over the year. After Tet, war support briefly spiked as the citizens rallied around the flag. But by mid-March, that surge dissipated. About 40 percent, the doves, wanted peace. Another 60 percent, the hawks, wanted to “win,” whatever that meant. And more than 60 percent, both hawks and doves, thought LBJ had bungled the whole shebang.27 Any way you cut it, Johnson and his administration were slowly sinking.
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