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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Nick Kotz's new book about the civil right years argues convincingly that the true hero of the American left is LBJ.
Feb 2, 2005 | Toward the end of Nick Kotz's "Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America" comes a startling bit of information about the disastrous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. "Barely noticed during violent clashes between police and antiwar demonstrators," Kotz writes, "the proud integrated delegation from the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was seated in place of the Mississippi regulars. Fannie Lou Hamer, now an official delegate at last, received a standing ovation from the convention as she took her seat."
That such an event could happen merely four years after the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, N.J., where the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party was denied recognition in favor of the Mississippi delegates who were chosen via a system that prevented blacks from voting, is a mark of how far and how fast the civil rights movement had come. That it could be so little noticed is a measure of how quickly the movement was being eclipsed by Vietnam.
Fannie Lou Hamer -- who had led the charge for the MFDP in 1964, testifying before the credentials committee about the violence faced by blacks who tried to register to vote, and then dismissing the compromise the party offered the MFDP with "We didn't come all this way for no two seats" -- was a living presence at a convention that, for all the turmoil both inside and outside the hall, was haunted by ghosts. Absent was Lyndon Baines Johnson, who in 1964 had found Hamer's televised testimony so damning of the Southern Democrats he needed to gain the party's nomination that he convened a press conference to knock her off the air. Five months earlier, depressed by the growing reaction against the Vietnam War, convinced the war was unwinnable but unable and unwilling to extricate himself from it, Johnson announced his decision not to seek reelection. A few days after that, Martin Luther King Jr., who believed that LBJ's removal would pave the way for the end of American involvement in Vietnam, was shot to death in Memphis, Tenn. Two months later, the candidate whom many, including King, expected to bring the troops home, Robert F. Kennedy, was murdered in Los Angeles.
And yet the heartbreaking trajectory that Kotz details in his rich and necessary book suggests that even if King and Kennedy had lived, even if Johnson had been the Democratic candidate in 1968, the civil rights movement still would have frayed irreparably.
"Judgment Days: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Martin Luther King Jr., and the Laws That Changed America"
By Nick Kotz
Houghton Mifflin
522 pages
Nonfiction
The hope and fervor and uplift that accompanied the end of legal segregation in the South began to dim when it became clear that segregation's demise had barely begun to address the resentment that centuries of oppression had left behind, or the poverty suffered by blacks throughout the country. Hard on the heels of the 1965 Voting Rights Act came the Watts riots, an event that shocked both LBJ and King because it expressed that for many black Americans, the new laws had changed nothing. The Poor People's Campaign, a six-week protest held in the early spring of 1968 in Washington to highlight poverty, had fizzled, failing to equal the impact of the 1963 March on Washington or 1964's Freedom Summer or the campaigns in Birmingham and Selma, Ala. And the emergence of Black Power proponents (typified by Stokely Carmichael, then head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) changed the tone and inclusiveness of the movement.
By 1968, civil rights had ceded to Vietnam as the most urgent issue in American political life. King had recognized earlier than most the link between civil rights and Vietnam. Despite Johnson's insistence that America could have both guns and butter, King knew that the Congress could not fund both the antipoverty and education programs of LBJ's Great Society and a war. And the disproportionate numbers of blacks and poor who were drafted was as insidious a practice of institutionalized racism as any that had been defeated by legislation.
The connection between civil rights and Vietnam was denied by those who criticized King for speaking out against the war, many of them his past supporters. A New York Times editorial called the two issues "distinct and separate," while the Washington Post referred to the linkage as "sheer inventions of unsupported fantasy." King was right to see the moral and economic consistency in working to end poverty and opposing Vietnam. But his critics in the civil rights movement -- among them Whitney Young of the Urban League, and the NAACP board of directors who unanimously voted to condemn King -- were not wrong to believe that focusing on Vietnam would inevitably mean taking America's attention off civil rights. That shift of focus coincided with an unspoken sense of weariness on the part of whites who, though only some said so out loud, wondered, after the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act and Johnson's War on Poverty, "What more do blacks want?"
It was a question that could be an expression of outright racism; of naiveti about how much it would take to better the lot of black Americans; of a patronizing expectation that blacks should be grateful for the recognition of rights that never should have been denied, and resentment that their fawning gratitude never came. It was a question that even Lyndon Johnson asked. Johnson acknowledged the destructive legacy of racism, as in a speech articulating the basis for affirmative action (though it was not called that yet) in which he said, "You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, 'you are free to compete with all the others,' and still justly believe that you have been completely fair." But, a man of enormous and fragile ego, he still felt personally betrayed by the Watts riots. "After all we've accomplished," he asked. "How could it be?"
