The rising power of black politics was displayed in all its diversity at the National Black Political Convention, held in Gary, Indiana, in March 1972. Over four thousand delegates from forty-seven states responded to the formal call to the convention, which set the stakes for black America in the bleakest terms: “Our cities are crime-haunted dying grounds. Huge sectors of our youth—and countless others—face permanent unemployment. Those of us who work find our paychecks able to purchase less and less. Neither the courts nor the prisons contribute anything resembling justice or reformation. The schools are unable—or unwilling—to educate our children for the real world of our struggles.” Despite the dire tones of the call, the convention itself signaled empowerment for its ideologically diverse set of participants, who ranged from Marxists to members of the Nixon administration. Gary’s own African American mayor Richard Hatcher set the mood with his keynote address. “As we look out over this vast and expectant assemblage,” he enthused, “we can imagine how Moses and the People of Israel thrilled when they witnessed the parting of the Red Sea!” Others were equally excited. Jesse Jackson, a former King associate who left SCLC to found his own group, People United to Save Humanity (PUSH), applauded Hatcher and echoed his optimism in a speech whose rallying cry insisted it was finally “Nation Time!” Blending the traditions of civil rights integrationism and black separatism—even in his physical appearance, sporting a gigantic Afro and a medallion with Martin Luther King’s image—Jackson offered an optimistic path forward.11
That path lay in politics. Participants left the convention with a bold blueprint for activism in hand, a program for social, economic, and institutional change grandly titled the National Black Political Agenda. But as a series of compromises, it ultimately satisfied no one completely and was even rejected outright by key organizations like the NAACP. Still, if the Gary Convention failed to secure a unified agenda for all African Americans, it confirmed a general course. “Political action,” Hatcher insisted in his keynote, “is an essential part of our ultimate liberation.” The potentials drawn from political engagement seemed to be increasing with every passing moment. The year of the convention, black politicians won elections to be mayors of cities like Cincinnati and Tallahassee; the next year, African Americans took over city halls in Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles, and Raleigh. Throughout this era, the total number of black elected officials in the nation rose at an impressive rate—from 193 in 1965, to 764 in 1970, all the way to 1,909 in 1980, a tenfold increase in a decade and a half.12
In obvious ways, the rise in black political representation was a result of the success of the civil rights movement, particularly the substantial changes wrought by the Voting Rights Act. But black political power also stemmed in no small part from an unintended consequence of the civil rights era. Even as the movement toppled many of the structures of state-sanctioned segregation and some of the nation’s institutional discrimination, other forms of racial separatism persisted and, in many ways, actually intensified. For when courts ordered American cities and towns to tear down formal systems of segregation, large numbers of white citizens simply refused to take part. Rather than share desegregated urban public spaces such as public parks and pools, public transportation or public schools with racial minorities, such whites retreated from them entirely, opting for private versions instead: country clubs and private pools, private forms of transportation, and, most notably, a new crop of private, all-white schools that were commonly known in the South as “segregation academies.” Meanwhile, as the sociologists Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton chronicled in the aptly named American Apartheid, residential segregation in most major cities actually intensified over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. “Desegregation,” the 1970s soon made clear, did not mean the same thing as “integration.” 13
This growing racial polarization mapped itself with increasing clarity on the larger landscape of America. Responding to desegregation as well as the deindustrialization and decay of older downtowns, more and more white residents fled from cities entirely, opting for lily-white suburbs instead. The phenomenon of “white flight” happened across the nation, with central cities in US metropolitan areas experiencing an almost 10 percent drop in their white populations over the course of the 1960s. In the North, however, the pattern was even more pronounced, with rates nearly twice the national average. Detroit, for instance, lost 350,000 whites over the decade. The inner cities that had been left behind, marked by what demographers awkwardly termed “minority-majority” populations, then selected black officials to represent them in city hall and Congress. In such ways, the successful integration of African Americans into the political system partly stemmed from the failures of integration in society at large.14
Cultural Nationalism
White withdrawal wasn’t the only reason the promises of integration were unfulfilled. Increasingly, African Americans and other racial minorities expressed growing reservations about a process of integration that seemed to unfold solely on terms established by whites. A notable element of black nationalism was an insistence that African Americans should not adopt the icons or ideals of a “WASP” (White, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant) mainstream culture but instead reaffirm heroes and histories of their own. As Malcolm X put it, just as a tree severed from its roots soon died, “a people without history or cultural roots also becomes a dead people.” 15
Accordingly, African Americans advanced a new form of cultural nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s that championed distinctive styles of black expression and celebrated accomplishments of prominent African American artists, intellectuals, and entertainers. Academics and athletes alike set models for cultural expressions of black power, as soul and funk musicians broadly popularized the theme. James Brown captured the mood in his 1968 hit, “Say It Loud: I’m Black and I’m Proud!” Television, as always, both echoed and amplified the growing trend, most noticeably with ABC’s Roots, an eight-part serialization of Alex Haley’s best-selling family history. Broadcast over eight nights in January 1977, the series attracted the single largest audience in television history, with network officials estimating that 130 million Americans watched all or part of the program. Indeed, Roots was a national phenomenon. “It’s [the] Super Bowl every night,” marveled the Associated Press. “People are bringing TV sets to work, watching in airports and bars, leaving meetings early and emptying movie theaters and restaurants to get home in time for the nightly episode.” Hundreds of colleges and high schools used the broadcast in courses to expose students to black history. These explorations of black identity and expressions of black pride, well received across the country, fueled in African American communities a growing sense of black distinctiveness and, in a political sense, black separatism.16
In a similar fashion, Mexican Americans likewise came to question the wisdom of political and cultural integration. The most visible activists of the 1960s, labor leaders Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, had succeeded in securing change through existing channels of liberal reform. Using nonviolent protests and boycott campaigns, they publicized the plight of migrant farmworkers in the Southwest and secured recognition for their union with an empowering motto of “Sí, se puede!” (“Yes, we can!”) But while their labor activism succeeded, other Mexican American leaders increasingly grew disillusioned with the limits of integrationist action. In 1966, Rodolfo “Corky” Gonzales, a former boxer and Democratic Party operative, founded the Crusade for Justice in Denver to secure better housing, improved economic conditions, and judicial reforms. Increasingly drawn to separatist politics, he embraced a dream of reclaiming the American Southwest as a distinct nation of “Aztlan.” For his part, Gonzales saw a peaceful path forward for the nationalist agenda, suggesting at one point that a United Nations plebiscite might settle the question whether la raza (the race) should formally secede from the United States. Others took more direct approaches. Reies López Tijerina, leader of the militant Alianza Federal de Mercedes (Federal Alliance of Land Grants), occupied the Ki
t Carson National Forest in New Mexico in 1966; a year later, he went to prison after a shootout with local deputies, and the Alianza withered away.17
While campaigns for a geographically distinct nation never did accomplish their goal, increasingly more Mexican Americans embraced a cultural nationalism of their own. Rejecting the in-between label of “Mexican American,” they called themselves “Chicano” instead. This new identity represented a rejection of “gringo” civilization and a reclamation of their own. “The North American culture is not worth copying,” declared Armando Rendón in his 1971 Chicano Manifesto; “it is destructive of personal dignity; it is callous, vindictive, arrogant, militaristic, self-deceiving, and greedy; . . . it is an $80 billion defense budget and $75 a month welfare; it is a cultural cesspool and a social and spiritual vacuum for the Chicano.” Historian Rodolfo Acuña, a pioneer scholar in the field of Chicano Studies, likewise declared in 1972 that the previous decade had dispelled any illusions Chicanos had about their place in American society. “Many Chicanos participated actively in the political life of the nation, during which they took a hard look at their assigned role in the United States, evaluated it, and then decided that they had had enough,” he observed, “and so they bid good-bye to America.” 18
Chicanos declared “good-bye to America” only in a cultural sense; they still sought to use the political process to protect and empower their communities. Initially, activists pinned their hopes on a distinct political party. La Raza Unida, founded in 1970, launched electoral campaigns across the Southwest but found itself unable to gain traction and folded by 1978. Returning to the Democratic Party, Chicanos found greater success, not just by working in its broader coalition but also by embracing broader identities as “Hispanic” or “Latino,” moving beyond their Mexican American roots to encompass a much wider range of peoples who spoke Spanish or descended from Latin America, respectively. In 1976, for instance, the Carter campaign highlighted Hispanic outreach while five Democratic members of the House of Representatives—three of Mexican descent and two Puerto Ricans—united to form the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Likewise, the National Council for La Raza, which began in 1968 as a nonprofit organization advocating for Mexican Americans in the Southwest, relocated to Washington, DC, in 1973 to increase its national influence and then broadened its reach to represent all Latinos. By 1978, Council president Raul Yzaguirre could claim “a national constituency-based organization with over 100 affiliated community organizations representing over a million Latinos.” At the local level, meanwhile, Latino politicians began to win races in major metropolitan areas as well: Henry Cisneros in San Antonio in 1981, Federico Peña in Denver in 1983.19
As these Americans embraced varied new identities as Chicanos, Hispanics, or Latinos, Japanese and Chinese Americans aligned in an innovative identity of their own: “Asian Americans.” Despite their different experiences as immigrant communities across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the two populations had increasingly been blurred together in the eyes of white legal and political authorities. By the 1960s, the undifferentiated “Oriental” was routinely held up by white liberal reformers as the “model minority,” a population that had experienced unquestioned racial discrimination and yet still managed to thrive economically. Though white authorities often set them apart from—and indeed against—other racial minorities, Japanese and Chinese Americans came to feel a kinship with other nonwhites. In the late 1960s and 1970s, activists embraced a new, pan-ethnic “Asian American” identity and rejected their previously privileged status as a “model minority.” In a 1969 manifesto titled “The Emergence of Yellow Power in America,” Amy Uyematsu argued that Japanese and Chinese Americans had lost “self identity” by adopting the values of the white middle class. They had been complicit in the old racial order, “allow[ing] white America to hold up the ‘successful’ Oriental image before other minority groups as the model to emulate. White America justifies the blacks’ position by showing that other non-whites—yellow people—have been able to ‘adapt’ to the system.” Asian Americans needed to reject that status, she said, and instead engage in “yellow political power.” 20
As African Americans, Mexican Americans, and Asian Americans recoiled from accepting any notion of a mainstream culture, so too did significant numbers of whites themselves. During the late 1960s and 1970s, white ethnics—descendants of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century immigrants from countries like Ireland, Italy, Poland, and Greece who had arrived as outsiders to the nativist culture of America but gradually won acceptance as “white” themselves—reclaimed their own distinct identities as well. While earlier generations of immigrants had worked hard to shed their ethnic identities and adopt the civic and cultural traditions defined by a Protestant America, their heirs in the 1970s moved in the opposite direction, recovering older identities. Notably, the expressions of ethnic pride had self-conscious echoes of the cultural nationalism of racial minorities, with slogans like “Polish Power” and “Italian Pride.” Much as black nationalism was voiced in Roots, films like The Godfather (1972), The Godfather II (1974), and Rocky (1976)—which all won Oscars for Best Picture—emphasized the cultural roots and distinct communities of their white ethnic protagonists. As critics noted, however, there was an important distinction: white ethnics who made such claims could, and often did, alternate at will between an “ethnic” identity and a safer “white” one that afforded majoritarian privilege and protection. Even so, the claim to an ethnic identity, however lightly it was made, represented an important development. “The new ethnic politics is a direct challenge to the WASP conception of America,” the Slovak American intellectual Michael Novak noted in his 1972 book, The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics. “It asserts that groups can structure the rules and goals and procedures of American life. It asserts that individuals, if they do not wish to, do not have to ‘melt.’ ” 21
As the nation’s racial and ethnic minorities came to think of themselves as distinct and disparate groups, increasingly untethered to any standard “American” identity, the country found its population transformed by a major new wave of immigration. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, one of the most important changes of the Great Society era, abolished the old national-origins quota system that had severely restricted immigration into the country for four decades. The National Origins Act of 1924, passed at the peak of nativist panic in what historian John Higham called “the Tribal Twenties,” was intended as a way to reverse the rising tides of immigration in the early twentieth century.22 Horrified at new waves of Italians, Greeks, Poles, and Russian Jews, the authors of the law sought to restore the population to an “older stock.” The legislation established quotas for immigration from various nations, manipulating census data to guarantee that 85 percent of new arrivals would come from northern and western Europe. In a gratuitous insult, the act also barred entry to “all aliens ineligible for citizenship,” a clause that, in light of recent Supreme Court decisions, banned all Asians. Such measures were slightly relaxed in the ensuing decades, but restriction remained the rule for the middle swath of the twentieth century.23
The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the old system and ushered in a revolutionary new era of migration to America. While the previous law had privileged immigrants from northern and western Europe, the new structure, with its preferences for individuals who worked in white-collar jobs or who had family ties in the United States, encouraged massive migration from Latin America and Asia. Mexico remained the most significant source of the new wave of immigration from Latin America, but Hispanic nations such as the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Peru, and Ecuador witnessed a striking surge in emigration to the United States, as did, to a lesser degree, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama. The increase from Asian nations was even more pronounced; by the early 1980s, roughly half of all immigrants to the United States arrived from Asia. The new Asian immigrants came most notably from China, India, Pakistan
, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines, but also Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Indonesia, Burma, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Taiwan, Malaysia, and Bangladesh. During the 1970s, the overall US population increased by 11 percent, but the subset of the Asian American population grew 141 percent. The sheer size and internal diversity of the new waves of Asian and Latin American immigration contributed to both the growth and the breadth of larger cultural identities such as “Asian American,” “Hispanic,” and “Latino” within the United States.24
As these new immigrants took their place in a nation that was increasingly sorting itself into distinct racial and ethnic groups, they did the same. The new arrivals gravitated in significant numbers to major metropolitan areas like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Miami, Houston, San Diego, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Inside such cities, immigrants often grouped together. Where applicable, established ethnic enclaves like the Chinatowns and Little Tokyos, common in many cities, stood ready to welcome them, but in new settings these immigrants forged their own communities. Nicaraguans, Salvadorans, and Guatemalans flocked to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Dominicans migrated en masse to New York City, soon rivaling the older Puerto Rican concentration there. Cubans steadily expanded their presence in Miami. The Hmong from Laos and South Koreans set down roots in Los Angeles, as Indians and Pakistanis forged a thriving new “South Asian” or “desi” community of their own in Houston. Settling down in their own neighborhoods with their cultural ties intact, these new immigrants made worlds for themselves that resembled those already made by their fellow Americans.25
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