October–November 1966
THE fall political campaigns showcased an unstable clash of moods over Vietnam and civil rights. Ray Bliss, the Republican national chairman, said his candidates would stress race issues because polls showed that 58 percent of party supporters made urban disorder a top priority. The next day, October 4, Republican mayor Theodore McKeldin publicly begged the tavern keepers of Baltimore to serve Negro customers during the baseball World Series against the Los Angeles Dodgers, calling their stubborn resistance “a distasteful irony” given that the local Orioles probably owed their first championship berth to the newly arrived black star, Frank Robinson. A few days later in Alabama, four members of the Diocesan Council of Catholic Women were turned away from formal tea at the governor’s mansion, igniting controversies about who had known the guest list would be integrated. At a rare White House press conference, describing his plans to tour Asia before November, President Johnson tried gamely to smile when asked about Senator Strom Thurmond’s bellicose charge that “we could win the war in Vietnam in 90 days if we wanted to.” He said he always welcomed the views of senators.
The President scheduled the trip abroad in part to escape frustration. Many Democratic candidates already considered him an albatross rather than an asset for the off-year elections, in spite of his historic record. “FDR passed five major bills the first one hundred days,” Johnson fumed to his aides. “We passed two hundred in the past two years. It is unbelievable.” War measures gave him political boosts that seemed to wear off more quickly as the public impression of Vietnam changed from pesky to serious. Nicholas Katzenbach had just left the Justice Department for voluntary reassignment to the surpassing foreign challenge, and Johnson sent the new undersecretary of state ahead with McNamara to evaluate the course yet again. The President, meanwhile, tried to curb a growing testiness. His recent complaints to Jewish War Veterans, wondering mordantly why rabbis were so prominent in Vietnam dissent, caused speculation about a conditional link between American military commitments to South Vietnam and Israel. Anxiety over global strong-arming led to summit meetings and more headlines—“Goldberg Mollifies Jews on President”—but some rabbis felt compelled to deny suggestions of a security deal that stifled conscience. “If Abraham had no hesitation about challenging the judgment of God over Sodom and Gomorrah, lest it should sweep away the innocent with the guilty,” said Abraham Heschel, “should not an American have the right to challenge the judgment of our President when horrified by the war in Vietnam?”
King did not speak out directly, though he had collaborated with Heschel for nearly a year in an ecumenical group of antiwar clergy. His pressures during the fall campaigns mirrored Johnson’s. He received invitations to visit Israel and Jordan, each beckoning with a polar view of the conflicted Holy Land, and pragmatists within the national civil rights movement pushed him to accommodate Johnson toward a broad political realignment, looking beyond Vietnam. Bayard Rustin first sought approval for a public letter he drafted in King’s name to the Negro youth of America, gently rebuking black power: “I implore all of you to remember that Molotov cocktails, and looting, and hatred, cannot, and will not, solve the problems we really care about.” King’s most trusted labor supporters joined a conference call to obtain his signature. “Tell them that they can’t solve problems with rocks,” suggested Ralph Helstein of the meatpackers union, “any more than nations can solve them with bombs.” When King resisted, saying any letter should address all practitioners of violence, not just black ones, Rustin drafted instead a newspaper advertisement. To accommodate King, he addressed a general audience with a text that affirmed “racial justice by democratic process” and condemned only “strategies of violence, reprisal or vigilantism.”
Still, King resisted entreaties to sponsor the advertisement jointly with traditional allies led by Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph. On October 10, two days before he had Rustin and other advisers debate the question in Atlanta, a front-page leak to the New York Times underscored his worries: “Dr. King Weighing Plan to Repudiate ‘Black Power’ Bloc.” Tricks of racial perception gnarled a complex decision. King applauded the efforts of Rustin’s broad coalition to gain a favorable reception for a ten-year national freedom budget, treating seriously the White House position that America could afford “guns and butter” to fight poverty as well as the Vietnamese, but he sensed a hidden bargain to blame the black fringes for shortcomings on both fronts. This made bad politics for an exposed racial minority, and he bridled at an implicit endorsement for the wars as a package. On nonviolent principle, King fought the impulse to repudiate. Like fear, that impulse slid toward enemy-thinking, hierarchy, and pride—the chief barriers to interracial democracy.
So King refused to join the advertisement, “Crisis and Commitment,” which appeared in the October 14 New York Times along with a news story about its provenance: “7 Negro Leaders Issue a Statement of Principles Repudiating ‘Black Power’ Concepts.” Instead, he held a press conference in Atlanta to outline his ideas for the future, including generous praise for the freedom budget. He carefully reprised his written critiques of black power as an invitation to a mutual standoff. Black people were overwhelmingly victims even in their own riots, King wrote for the current issue of Ebony magazine, pointing out that Charles Whitman alone, “the young demented white student at the University of Texas…killed more people in one day than all the Negroes have killed in all the riots in all the cities since the Harlem riots of 1964. This must raise a serious question about the violent intent of the Negro.” Militant talk defined make-believe battle lines for the negative instrument of force, King maintained, adding, “Violence as a strategy for social change in America is nonexistent.” By contrast, no one had ever been killed in a nonviolent demonstration, and when Negroes marched in a well-defined democratic movement, “so did the nation.”
Reporters in Atlanta passed over all arguments consigned to Ebony, asking why King withheld his name from the ad. They pressed him to specify an objection to the joint statement, which did not explicitly mention black power. King emphasized choices of tone and tactics, but finally conceded that he could have supported the overall message. From this alone jumped news. Many stories took their cue from the Times headline: “King Endorses Racial Statement / Backs Negro Repudiation of Black Power Concept,” and King biographer David Garrow later judged the incidental consent “a serious misstep.” It threw away the hard calculations based on experience “at tiptoe stance,” raising new controversy over King’s change of mind. Wiretapped phone lines buzzed with recrimination. Rustin called Stanley Levison on October 15 to say King had brought trouble on himself by not signing the ad in the first place. Levison called a nonplussed Andrew Young, who said, “Bayard did this to us.” King told Levison apologetically that he had been backed into tacit support for the ad because Rustin had forecast disaster if he attacked it. Even more than feared, the substance of King’s position was subordinate to appetites for projected remorse over black power, which in turn delivered to the White House the useful image of a self-tamed ally. “What bothers me is that when I make these tactical errors,” said King, “it’s usually when I’m trying to deal with Bayard.”
MCNAMARA AND Katzenbach wrote reports in a windowless KC-135 transport on the day-long fight from Vietnam, while Bill Moyers and Harry McPherson returned from a parallel scouting tour of Asian capitals. After only thirty-six hours home, their combined missions melded into a gigantic presidential entourage that recrossed the Pacific Ocean for state visits to seven nations. “I know that I can wave no wand,” President Johnson declared at his send-off on Monday, October 17. Behind measured confidence and displays of pomp, he sagged under troubled assessments. McNamara was “a little less pessimistic militarily than the previous year, because the huge buildup was inflicting casualties at the annual rate of sixty thousand dead, blunting the earlier projections of imminent defeat. On the other hand, he “saw no reasonable way to bring the war to an end soon,” because the Vietnamese Communists had adapted through 1966 to a war of attrition, with morale intact and infiltration up threefold in spite of 84,000 U.S. bombing sorties. McNamara also wrote Johnson that “the important war,” for political allegiance, “has if anything gone backward.”
That failure was the topic Johnson assigned to Katzenbach, whose inspections in the Vietnamese countryside compelled a rare top secret memo of lyrical focus on “the unceasing, backbreaking toil of the peasant population…it is not so much water that their rice grows in; it is sweat.” He described for the President a political chasm between the rice paddies and American officials who discussed pacification “in a strange language of abbreviation and acronym. For example: ‘If we can get MACV, USAID and JUSPAO to prod the GVN, then maybe ARVN—working with the PF, RF, PFF, CIDG and the PAT cadres—can get RD off the ground.’” Back in Washington, Katzenbach formed a high-level “non-group” to brainstorm outside bureaucratic channels about connecting policy more effectively with the neglected outlook of ordinary Vietnamese. There was a surreal quality to the exercise, echoing the best experts. Bernard Fall, the French military historian who respected Ho Chi Minh’s cause but patrolled with U.S. soldiers, said the growing deployment of 325,000 American troops already formed a distinct culture. They made Vietnam the first war zone of cheap transistor radios, blaring escapist pop songs with lyrics like “What a day for a daydream,” and invented a “Batman” vocabulary of minimalist slang, as in “Charlie zapped a slick,” meaning South Vietnamese Communists destroyed an unarmed transport helicopter.
Shock pierced the civil rights community before Air Force One reached the first stop in Honolulu. That same Monday, a custodian found Rev. Robert Spike bludgeoned to death in a guestroom of the new Christian Center at Ohio State University, where he had preached the night before. Three Protestant denominations issued tributes while detectives swarmed, and the family received telegrams of condolence from dignitaries including King, Vice President Humphrey, and Stokely Carmichael (“Our heartfelt sympathy in your loss which is a loss for all of us”). News stories reviewed the breadth of Spike’s influence: praise from Bob Moses for marshaling the unlikely church support essential to Mississippi Freedom Summer, honor from President Johnson with a seat next to Lady Bird for the “We Shall Overcome” address to Congress, and a recent appointment to the National Council on the Humanities. Edwin “Bill” Berry of the Chicago Urban League called Spike “one of the best thinkers who ever lived.” With no reported progress in the criminal investigation, Spike’s peers mobilized from his former office at the New York headquarters of the National Council of Churches on Riverside Drive. NCC officials prepared to hire private detectives and offer a reward.
Secret fears and hatreds abruptly stifled grief. Jack Pratt, the general counsel hired by Spike in 1963 for the NCC’s Commission on Religion and Race, warned that public resolution was “the last thing” his colleagues should seek. He disclosed from a trip to Ohio that the body had been clad only in a raincoat, with homosexual literature nearby. To NCC General Secretary Edwin Espy, among others who knew Spike as a starched theologian with a picturebook family, these alien clues suggested an unspeakable plot to smear the victim, until Pratt made clear that any trial would unearth a forbidden world along with a few witting clergy who had shared, restrained, or protected Spike’s furtive liaisons with men. Hushed National Council of Churches representatives miserably tested clues on his family. “This staggers my mother,” recalled Paul Spike, then a student at Columbia University. “In fact, it comes close to shattering her.” Mother and son fought an undertow of memories that seemed freighted with alibi or glancing confession, and would cling to disbelief when unnerved church officials shut down inquiry for damage control by triage. The family half-mourned a national church so terrified of truth.
Willful avoidance sealed Spike in mystery, opening doors to conspiracy theories. (Andrew Young always feared his friend had been killed for agitation against the Vietnam War; others suspected the shadowy FBI, working perhaps even with Spike’s internecine rivals in the civil rights field.) Publicly, the murder case shriveled to a news squib that an itinerant man in custody probably would not be tried because prosecutors considered him insane. Newspapers still shunned this form of scandal because they could not bear to print the necessary words. A harbinger series in the Atlanta Constitution had just noted the appearance of startling picket signs outside the United Nations—“U.S. Claims No Second Class Citizens / What About Homosexuals?”—but profiled skulking, Jekyll-and-Hyde creatures of severely retarded emotions, who “would cut off their left arms to be cured.” Within decades, human energies founded on the civil rights movement would obliterate much of this lethal stigma and lift nearly all the closeted silence. The transformation, which lay just beyond the imagination of visionaries like Robert Spike, would be a swift one for history but too late for him.
RICHARD NIXON captured the central glare of public attention by predicting for Republicans “the greatest political comeback of any political party in this century.” On the October 23 broadcast of Meet the Press, he sparred with correspondents about which party was “playing the backlash issue,” pointing to Lester Maddox and George Wallace as proof that Democrats would remain “the party of racism in the South.” (“I don’t know one Republican candidate who is riding the backlash,” he claimed.) Asserting that neither party in the South actually favored integration, Nixon pointed to Republican unity on Vietnam as the pivotal divide. The election of forty or more new Republicans to the House “will serve notice to the enemy in Vietnam,” he declared, “that the United States is not going to do what the French did ten years ago: cut and run.” Nixon branded Lyndon Johnson the first American President who had failed to unite his own party behind a war. “The division in the United States on Vietnam is primarily within the Democratic Party,” he told viewers.
A new liability of war dissent ripened that same week when the FBI arrested Ken Kesey, author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Sometimes a Great Notion, shortly after he announced his intention to defy drug charges “as a fugitive and as salt in J. Edgar Hoover’s wounds.” Kesey had outraged some young protesters, and captivated others, by telling antiwar rallies that it was foolish to oppose Vietnam with the politicians’ tools of ballyhoo and speeches—“that’s what they do”—breaking instead into a harmonica rendition of “Home on the Range.” With his cult following of Merry Pranksters, Kesey expressed disdain for the trapdoor psychology of war debate by beatific withdrawal and absurd theatrics. Shortly before the October arrest, he appeared at a flamboyant “Love Festival” to disregard the effective date of a new California statute that outlawed the psychedelic drug LSD. After making bail, he renewed a sporadic cross-country association with renegade Harvard professor Timothy Leary, who in September had proclaimed himself founder of a religion based on spiritual discovery through the use of LSD, marijuana, and peyote, with the signature mantra, “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” In New York, loosely affiliated groups brought a Yellow Submarine prop to a demonstration before the November elections. Others scheduled a “Human Be-In” for January in San Francisco, featuring the new rock groups Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane, where the former teach-in activist Jerry Rubin promoted countercultural politics “in the Marxist tradition of Groucho, Chico, Harpo, and Karl.”
The hippie phenomenon, modifying the “hip” beatnik rebellion of the 1950s, caught on more slowly than black power in the press. Among politicians, Ronald Reagan recognized it early in the development of counterpoint for his California gubernatorial campaign, which one opposing consultant already called “a major cultural-political watershed.” Reagan framed his call to old-fashioned morality against a blended specter of Watts and Berkeley. He proposed to bypass court review of Proposition 14 with legislation to repeal the state’s fair housing law outright, and narrated television ads over ominous film of riots: “Every day the jungle draws a little closer…. Our city streets are jungle paths after dark.” Denouncing Berkeley for “orgies so vile I cannot describe them,” he promised to recruit ex-CIA Director John McCone for a repeat of his Watts commission assignment, this time targeting the incumbent governor and university chancellor for what Reagan termed their “appeasement of campus malcontents and filthy speech advocates.” To take the edge off his attacks, Reagan quipped that a male hippie “dresses like Tarzan, has hair like Jane, and smells like Cheetah.” Ten days before the election, he released a telegram to Stokely Carmichael suggesting firmly that he cancel all speech dates in California, and challenged Governor Pat Brown to send one like it. Much to the satisfaction of the Reagan campaign, the ploy heightened news coverage of Carmichael’s October 29 address exhorting Berkeley students to say “hell, no” to the Vietnam draft.
Lyndon Johnson landed triumphant on November 2 after seventeen days and 31,500 miles abroad, the longest presidential trip in history, laden with gifts, including two white kangaroos from Australia. At the palace in Thailand, he had drawn his bath from a silver spigot in the shape of a water buffalo, and his unscheduled detour to South Vietnam’s Cam Ranh Bay on October 26 made him the first Commander-in-Chief to salute U.S. troops in an active war zone since FDR at Casablanca in 1943. The pageantry of resolve at Asian war councils spiked his favorable rating on Vietnam to 63 percent, provoking Richard Nixon to attack a long-haul strategy he said “resigns” America to war that “could last five years and cost more casualties than Korea.” Nixon proposed vigorous bipartisan action to win the war by 1968, and the President responded with unusual public venom. (Nixon’s barbs cut close to the grim secret forecasts that he and Johnson would fulfill nearly in lockstep despite all their enmity.) At a homecoming press conference, Johnson denounced the “chronic campaigner” whose habit was “to find fault with his country and his government” every other October. He said Nixon “never did really recognize and realize what was going on when he had an official position in the government,” and icily reminded reporters that President Eisenhower once asked them for a week to think of any contribution from his two-term Vice President.
Johnson canceled plans to barnstorm for Democrats. Disappointing polls showed that a commander’s glow from overseas could not swing local races, and that ineffective appeals for Pat Brown among many doomed candidates more likely would injure his own standing. He went home to Texas instead. On Monday, November 7, beneath attention fixed on the last campaign rallies nationwide, Johnson visited the Welhausen School at Cotulla. “I was the song leader,” he told a group of parents in the room where he once taught jumbled classes. “You would not believe that, but I tried to be, anyway.” He said the school had not changed much since 1928, and that nearly three-quarters of Mexican-American students still left school before the eighth grade. “Right here I had my first lessons in poverty,” he recalled. Those vivid memories still shaped all he sought to accomplish in politics, declared Johnson, “for the conscience of America has slept long enough while the children of Mexican-Americans have been taught that the end of life is a beet row, a spinach field, or a cotton patch.”
WITH SIDNEY Logan, the freedom organization candidate for sheriff, John Hulett walked into the Lowndes County courthouse early on November 7 to obtain from Probate Judge Harrell Hammonds a certified copy of the final voter list guaranteed to a new sponsoring group that appeared on the official ballot by meticulous observance of state law. There were 5,806 names in all. “We have enough registered people in Lowndes County to win,” Logan told reporters. Hulett expressed caution, knowing his first-time voters must perform under the harsh scrutiny of election authorities whose presence they were conditioned to avoid. “We have never tried to get out the vote,” he admitted, “so we don’t know exactly what we can do.” Later that morning, as never in living memory, officially designated black and white poll watchers mingled at the courthouse to hear the mandatory explanation of rules. When reporters asked what role Stokely Carmichael would play, Hulett tactfully replied that Carmichael no longer lived in Lowndes County and that SNCC workers deferred to local citizens. “The help they have given us is in courage,” said John Hinson, county school board candidate, “letting you know you are an American.”
Carmichael was finishing his third day in jail. Keeping to Selma, he had refrained from public statements about the Lowndes County election, observing a SNCC policy designed to avoid the extra tension of his black power notoriety, but Mayor Joe Smitherman ordered him arrested with Stuart House and Thomas Taylor, who had been urging people to vote from a sound truck. (“I saw some Negroes aroused,” a Selma police officer testified, “who wouldn’t usually get aroused on Saturday.”) Only by frantic exertion did Carmichael make bail in time to reach the final mass meeting Monday night near Hayneville, where 650 people packed Mt. Moriah Baptist Church. Divided by residence into the eight voting precincts, they questioned lawyer Morton Stavis about election law—disputed ballots, counting procedure, how to challenge a “graveyard” voter—and watched SNCC’s Courtland Cox demonstrate how to use a voting machine. They had posted highway signs with their emblem and safety instructions—“PULL THE LEVER for the BLACK PANTHER and go on HOME!”—but stalwarts who learned what pressures awaited poll watchers at the white-owned ballot sites decided to linger after they voted to show support, keeping the legally required distance of thirty feet.
Carmichael’s entrance in the midst of preparations electrified the church. “We have worked so hard for this moment,” he said, reviewing the twenty months since people had been afraid even to mention the voting rights movement in nearby Selma. His speech ranged from naked sentiment—“It is the will, the courage, and the love in our hearts”—to rhythmic thunder: “We will pull that lever to stop the beating of Negroes by whites! We will pull that lever for all the black people who have been killed! We are going to resurrect them tomorrow! We will pull that lever so that our children will never go through what we have gone through…. We are pulling the lever so people can live in some fine brick homes! We are going to say good-bye to shacks! Dirt roads! Poor schools!” After swaying choruses of “We Shall Overcome,” Hulett dismissed the crowd with pleas to come early and look nice, as Carmichael hugged people at the door.
On election day in Lowndes, cool and sunny, clumps of voters held up pieces of white paper to beckon the few roving poll drivers who circled rural highways. They ate premade sandwiches dispensed outside the Benton precinct, where large morning numbers allowed fellowship to the point of comforting banter. They held steady in Hayneville, where Tom Coleman and other Klansmen stalked alongside evenly divided lines. For poll watcher Eddie Mae Hulett, wife of the movement leader, the first worrisome sign at Benton was a truckload of sharecroppers who refused to look at her when she asked if they needed help, going meekly into the voting booth with a white official suggested by their plantation owner. The Justice Department observer found no basis to intervene. Driver Andrew Jones, after a long day under siege in Fort Deposit, saw the lights go out suddenly at the City Hall polling station. He told voices accosting him in the dark that he was waiting to take the poll watchers home, then grabbed a striking hand and hung on until something hard from behind “cracked the hide on my head.” Jones fell under blows as two of his daughters jumped from the station wagon and ran screaming for help. They managed to get him into Selma’s Good Samaritan Hospital by way of the Lowndes freedom headquarters at Mt. Gillard Baptist Church, where the bloody sight of him superseded a climactic election night. Carmichael and John Hulett activated their emergency vow that attackers would get only “the first shot” for free, and armed black posses scrambled across the county like Minute Men, fanning out to ward off follow-up attacks. SNCC’s Jennifer Lawson wielded the Jackson family rifle to protect the Lowndes County Freedom House near White Hall. In a yard near Fort Deposit, guarding Andrew Jones’s wife and nine children, Scott B. Smith wore military fatigues and brandished his shotgun until dawn.
All seven nominees from the freedom organization lost fairly close races, and the three who worked for white employers also lost their jobs. Fort Deposit poll watcher Clara McMeans promptly got fired from a maid’s livelihood because the boss said her activity “was reflecting on him and his friends.” The Andrew Jones family was evicted before he was released from the hospital. Since encountering Carmichael in Montgomery on the last day of the Selma march, Jones had become Fort Deposit’s first registered black citizen, watched the first local demonstrators go to jail on a garbage truck with Jonathan Daniels, and forfeited both paying jobs as a lumber worker and janitor for the Alabama power company. Now he remained in Fort Deposit to build a home on land donated by a movement farmer, with grit that inspired outsiders who witnessed the 1966 election. Months later, volunteer Mark Comfort would lead a truck convoy back from California with food and supplies for evictees still holding out in the tent city. “Even though we lost, the people have strong confidence,” John Hulett said on the day after the vote. Alice Moore took a politic line about her defeat for tax assessor, saying she always expected to lose by a few hundred intimidated no-shows and plantation voters but had not wanted to discourage anyone by letting on. Charles Smith, president of the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights, noted philosophically that half the county’s eligible black voters still had not registered. “I think the cat did well for the first time out,” he announced.
Democratic principle inched forward in Lowndes County. A movement that had shaped national commitments from Alabama and Mississippi returned there to begin everyday politics based on a common right to vote. The fledgling local group, having attracted more than twice the required 20 percent of total election turnout, gained official recognition under Alabama law as the Lowndes County Freedom Party. “We have a party now,” declared Stokely Carmichael. “Black people aren’t discouraged. We’re on the move.” He said so from Boston, however, and the party to acquire fame with him was about guns instead of the vote or Alabama, where he now planned for SNCC to maintain no more than a token presence.* A phenomenon took root from reports that went home to Oakland, California, with Mark Comfort—of armed defenders springing up election night in the dark countryside to win “The Battle of Fort Deposit” without firing a shot, preserved in a trophy photograph of one rifled warrior next to the highway signboard image of a black panther.
Notions to adapt the striking ballot symbol had circulated in the wake of Carmichael’s speeches since May. J. Edgar Hoover secretly alerted FBI offices to talk of forming a New York black panthers outfit among activists with a “propensity toward violence” and no “actual connection” to the “legitimate political party” in Alabama, but Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale quickly preempted all contenders. Beginning that fall from Oakland, their Black Panther Party for Self-Defense flashed lightning with military poses of black separatist rebellion from the heart of big cities. The sensation all but expunged real antecedents that were sound and contrary in every respect—ballot struggles by patriot sharecroppers, quilting women, and priestly martyrs—just as fascination with black power eclipsed Stokely Carmichael’s six prior years in the nonviolent movement.
“A POST-ELECTION silence settled today on the LBJ ranch,” reported the New York Times on November 10. In seclusion, the President groaned, “I don’t think I lost that election. I think the Negroes lost it.” He emerged for a press conference several days later to address the dismal 1966 tally of net loss to Republicans: forty-seven House members, three senators, eight governors, and 677 seats in state legislatures. Johnson first took ten questions about war matters, especially U.S. nuclear missile capabilities versus the China and Soviet Union, then put the best face he could on the results. He said Democrats still controlled both chambers of Congress—the House by 248–187, the Senate by 64–36—with roughly the same margin he enjoyed before the 1964 landslide. Asked directly about the influence of “white backlash,” the President dodged. “I just don’t have the answer to it,” he replied. “I don’t know.” He said the abnormally large shift could be traced to three popular Republican governors in big states: George Romney of Michigan, James Rhodes of Ohio, and Ronald Reagan of California. Privately, however, Johnson saw an adverse trend instead of a fluke. He predicted that most of the new Republicans in Congress would vote with the Southern Democrats while seeking colleagues to replace them. This was the backlash he feared. “It’ll move beyond George Wallace and become respectable,” he told Bill Moyers.
Wallace, for his part, bristled at suggestions that Ronald Reagan surpassed him overnight in presidential stature. “He used to be a liberal,” Wallace warned reporters at a victory celebration. “Now he’s a conservative, and he might change back again.” Wallace claimed to have orchestrated the nation’s most impressive win against the Republican trend despite the handicap of a stand-in novice candidate, his wife, Lurleen, who won 63 percent of the Alabama vote but sat quietly through a press conference devoted mostly to his larger ambitions for 1968. The outgoing governor indignantly rejected any backlash label—“I never made a statement in my political career that reflects on a man’s race”—and presented himself as a crusader for constitutional states’ rights. Wallace said, “My only interest is the restoration of local government.”
In California, Governor-elect Reagan deflected instant clamor that he was destined for the White House, calling it “very flattering that anyone would even suggest such a thing.” His contest drew a record 79 percent of registered Californians to the polls, and he won by 993,739 votes out of 6.5 million, carrying all but three of fifty-eight counties. Reagan acknowledged a groundswell. “It seems to be all over the country,” he said. “The people seem to have shown that maybe we have moved too fast.” He discounted white backlash as a benefit to him or other Republicans, emphasizing his personal abhorrence of bigotry and contrasting the new Negro Republican senator Edward Brooke of Massachusetts with segregationist Democrats Lester Maddox and George Wallace. “For me,” said Reagan, “the vote reflects the great concern of the people with the size and cost of government.” His dubious but genial disclaimer of racial politics in California was more attractive than the bitter view of his vanquished opponent, who grumbled that Reagan won a 57 percent landslide with only 5 percent of the black vote and a quarter of Hispanics. “Whether we like it or not,” said the two-term incumbent Pat Brown, “the people want separation of the races.”
Political analysts found backlash effects central to the success of Republican challenger Charles Percy over three-term Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, who maintained his “unequivocal stand in favor of open-occupancy legislation.” All the muscle of Democratic precinct captains barely carried the city of Chicago itself for Douglas, and Republican Sheriff Richard Ogilvie, who had been so visible against the fair housing marches into his suburbs, wrested from the Daley machine 18,000 patronage jobs under partisan control of the Cook County Board. This political feat established Ogilvie to become the next governor of Illinois, and Mayor Daley, according to biographers Adam Cohen and Elizabeth Taylor, perceived a grave threat to his own reelection in April of 1967. He criticized Martin Luther King early in November as a troublemaker bent on creating backlash votes for Republicans. One day after the election, Daley had his chief negotiator deny any binding responsibility under the Open Housing Summit Agreement of August 26. “There were only certain suggestions put down and goals to be sought,” Thomas Keane told the Chicago City Council. An uproar ensued. “Any attempt to destroy that hope is an act of cruelty,” said King, but the mayor moved decisively to shore up the white ethnic wards, relegating integration to a charitable zone at the margin of politics. His press secretary later confided that Daley’s “idea of affirmative action was nine Irishmen and a Swede.”
PRESIDENT JOHNSON underwent surgery after the election to remove a throat polyp and repair the scar from his gall bladder operation, while submitting also to political pain he could defer no longer. Announcements dribbled out that the ceiling for the ongoing Vietnam buildup would rise from 400,000 to 470,000 troops, and Defense Secretary McNamara, who had lopped 50,000 soldiers from the request by the Joint Chiefs, presented the figure as a “leveling off” in future military effort. Still, journalists anticipated a bloody future from combat deployments in 1967 that projected roughly twice the average for 1966, when 30,000 Americans were wounded and 5,000 of the 6,644 cumulative U.S. fatalities occurred. To pay unbudgeted war expenses being filched from other Pentagon accounts, McNamara soon asked Congress for a supplemental appropriation of $12.4 billion, which more than doubled the admitted Vietnam estimate and pushed annual costs toward 20 percent of the overall national budget. Such sums threatened to deform the tiny South Vietnamese economy, whose prices had jumped 125 percent to absorb the flood of American war dollars. (“Runaway inflation can undo what our military operations can accomplish,” McNamara secretly observed.) To curb inflationary pressures from the Vietnam deficit at home, the President unhappily asked for an income tax surcharge.
Johnson prepared to strike a tone of gallant realism in his 1967 State of the Union address. Vowing to “stand firm” in Vietnam, he quoted Thomas Jefferson’s “melancholy law of human societies to be compelled sometimes to choose a great evil in order to ward off a greater.” He reintroduced the failed omnibus civil rights bill of 1966, and promised to “intensify our efforts” in the War on Poverty. Anticipating a political crossfire, Johnson ordered archivists to retrieve every word the late President Kennedy said about helping the poor, and his economists compiled impressive statistics showing that 8.4 million new jobs since 1960 had reduced the poverty rate from 22 to 17 percent of the population. Still, Johnson’s own anti-poverty director denounced pressures to keep the third Office of Economic Opportunity budget stalled at roughly $1.5 billion, dwarfed by—and sacrificed to—the escalating price for Vietnam. “The poor will feel that democracy is only for the rich,” Sargent Shriver told reporters. Rustin’s freedom budget, launched to headlines on October 26, fell dormant with its plan to rescue the remaining 34 million poor Americans, of whom three in four were white, and Martin Luther King discreetly complained to the White House staff of domestic “retreat.” At the same time, countervailing forces sought to eliminate the anti-poverty campaign entirely. “Our work was just beginning,” Johnson recalled balefully in his memoir, “but there were some who felt that even this beginning was too much.” Elements of reaction in both political parties worried Johnson more than his liberal critics. They pressed for all-out war in Vietnam and attacked the anti-poverty agency as a utopian dream tinged with black power subversion.
A political strategist admonished President Johnson that “the best minds are now in this game” against him, determined to exploit his association “with eliminating ghettos and generally pouring vast sums into the renovation of the poor and the Negro. The average American is tired of it.” A White House counselor advised less bluntly that government leaders were wearing down under conflict between Vietnam and the Great Society. “You have a tired cabinet,” wrote Harry McPherson. “They are good men, but they are beyond asking the hard questions now.” Johnson privately confronted Democratic governors who blamed the midterm losses on poor communication, especially his cornpone television persona and the vexing school desegregation guidelines. “I think it is unfair to take your leader and publicly say that it is his image that has caused all the problems,” he asserted in full pique, and the governors returned equally wounded complaints. “All of us want to help you,” insisted John Connally of Texas. “All of us want to look forward to 1968. We are all now on the defensive.” Seeping doubt plagued Johnson’s efforts to protect his mandate from 1964. “Now is indeed ‘The Valley of the Black Pig,’” Lady Bird Johnson told her diary, recalling an apocalyptic poem by William Butler Yeats. “A miasma of trouble hangs over everything.”
FIVE DAYS after the election, King convened the far-flung SCLC staff of seventy-five for a stabilizing retreat on the coastal island of St. Helena, South Carolina, near the town of Frogmore, where the Penn Community Center inherited the rustic grounds of an old Quaker school for freed slaves. James Lawson and Ira Sandperl conducted joint seminars on the philosophy of nonviolence. Joan Baez performed solos between rousing group songfests that relieved strife brimming from the campaigns in Grenada and Chicago. Workshops vented fatigue, doubt, and abandonment. “The only time I have ever been hit is by a staff member,” said one overwrought worker. Rival factions loyal to Bevel and Hosea Williams blamed each other for division, sabotage, unnecessary suffering, and the disillusionment of vulnerable followers. Williams fiercely resisted suggestions that he shift his operations into black Chicago for a winter registration drive to offset Mayor Daley’s push in the white wards, until a threat of open revolt silenced the commotion. “Dr. King, we love you,” Willie Bolden announced, “but I’m gonna be frank. Hosea Williams is our leader.”
Williams made choking gestures toward Bolden, knowing the loyal outburst would only feed rumors that he was plotting a “coup” against King. Williams nurtured reciprocal suspicions against Bevel and his mercurial new protégé, Jesse Jackson. The Williams camp presented themselves as workhorses in the Selma tradition against dilettante theorists who seldom went to jail and had lured King to grief in Chicago. The Bevel camp disparaged Williams as a domineering crew boss for reformed seaport gangsters, incapable of grasping a national movement or the self-sustaining potential of Operation Breadbasket, spearheaded by Jackson. King himself, when present, tolerated the clash of headstrong lieutenants as a necessary by-product of frontier hardship and conviction. He ignored the scathing duels over his leadership, and seldom restrained the combatants. (“Remember, we are a nonviolent organization,” he placidly interjected.) Only in the end, when Williams growled at his hint that temporary consolidation in Chicago might be best, did King exhibit his will. “All right, forget it,” he told Williams. “Just forget it.”
Williams stopped short to gauge the intensity of King’s remark, then folded. “Doc, you know I’ll go,” he said, and with the notable exception of Willie Bolden, most of his staff soon packed off sullenly into the Chicago winter. Privately, King rebuked Andrew Young for allowing Bevel and Jackson to combine so heavily against Williams, sapping resilience, and distress over the criticism snapped Young’s exhausted nerves. Leaving the retreat early for another assignment, he fell unconscious in the Savannah airport. One of the doctors who helped revive him sent Young straight on to Tel Aviv, reasoning that negotiations abroad would amount to prescribed rest.
Battered emotions long had been a staple of the movement, testing King far past his trained experience at funerals. On Monday evening, November 14, he suspended the turmoil at Penn Center to explore thoughts out loud. “Whether I have anything to say or not,” he said, “I want you to try desperately to listen.” He honored the assembled SCLC workers and guests. “I found myself shedding a few tears this afternoon when I listened to Lester [Hankerson] talk about what he had gone through in Mississippi,” King confessed. “And many of our staff members go through experiences not quite as bad as Lester that we often know nothing about. And I want to thank you, because you have done this out of loyalty to a cause.” He acknowledged “a great deal of confusion in the air,” and professed no certainty or answers—“I am still searching myself”—to begin what he called “my informal statement” on the past, present, and future of the movement. In its surviving rough outline, biographer David Garrow later identified the skeletal structure of King’s next and final book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
Reviewing the movement decade, King concluded that change from its great mandates for equal citizenship was broad but neither swift nor deep. “While this period represented a frontal assault on the doctrine and practice of white supremacy,” he said, “it did not defeat the monster of racism…. And we must never forget that the roots of racism are very deep in America.” King defined the obstacle on a philosophical plane, distinguishing between the “empirical” statement that black people lagged behind and a stubborn “ontological” disposition to divide races for battle. He saw both. “And the fact is that the ultimate logic of racism is genocide,” he asserted. “If you say that I am not good enough to live next door to you…because of the color of my skin or my ethnic origins, then you are saying in substance that I do not deserve to exist. And this is what we see when we see that [form of] racism still hovering over our nation.”
King used the premise of latent combat identity to analyze the twin obsessions of the political year. He presented black power and the white backlash as independent phenomena, rejecting common theories that one justified or propped up the other. He said backlash was nothing new. It was a vocabulary of denial like the idealized Ku Klux Klan stories that had numbed and distorted the aftermath of the Civil War. He described backlash as coded resistance to structural changes beyond free access to a bus or library. Like the original segregation laws, it served notice that white men were determined to retain tangible privilege from jobs to neighborhoods. By contrast, King defined black power as a cry of pain. “It is in fact a reaction to the failure of white power to deliver the promises and to do it in a hurry,” he said. “Once we recognize this we begin to understand what is happening in this revolution.”
He explored the nature of revolution, speaking from his outline. “Now first, when you look at a revolution,” King ventured, “you must always realize that the line of progress is never a straight line.” There were inevitable counterrevolutions, splits, and convolutions “when you feel like you are going backwards,” he said. “Virtually all revolutions in the past have been based on hope and hate.” Conflict made for tumbling factions even when the revolutionaries were fellow aristocrats like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, and King admitted taking extra risks from a submerged minority base. “To fire people and motivate them, get them moving,” he said, civil rights leaders had shouted “All, Here, Now!” for democratic rights long abridged. “We knew that we morally deserved our freedom, and we should have had it now,” he declared, “but deep down within we knew it couldn’t come now.”
On top of unmet expectations, the movement carried extra burdens from a nonviolent discipline that embraced punishment without the outlet of rage. “We transform the hate element of the traditional revolution into positive nonviolent power,” King asserted, “and it was precisely this hope and nonviolent power that guided the psychological turning point through all of the victories that we achieved.” Yet these achievements were strained by the very tactics that created them. “The minute hopes were blasted,” he said, “the minute people realized that in spite of all these gains their conditions were still terrible, then violence became a part of the terminology of the movement in some segments. It is in this context that we must see what is happening now.” King called it a harsh truth that it was easier to feed the frustrations of violence with more violence than to soothe the frustrations of nonviolence with more sacrifice and hope. “Interestingly enough, in a revolution when hope diminishes,” he said, “bitter hatred develops toward the very people who build up the hope, because in building up the hope they were not able to deliver the promises.”
His meditation came to a bleak turn. King said the nonviolent movement was menaced on both flanks by the violent tones of white backlash and black power. Then, far from advising a respite to let historic adjustments settle, he pressed the full three-part credo of his Nobel Prize address: “All that I have said boils down to the conclusion that man’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty, and war.” At Penn Center, he called them “the inseparable triplets.” No longer could the movement expect to make progress on race in Grenada or Chicago while avoiding the violent propensity of “a sick nation that will brutalize unjustifiably millions of boys and girls, men and women, in Vietnam,” King told the assembly. “And the two issues cannot be separated. They are inextricably bound together.” They were chambers of collateral refuge for hostility. So was poverty. He said violence of spirit infected the economic system.
King smiled at Williams: “Now, Hosea, I want you to hear this because you are a capitalist.” Just as they must “not be intimidated” to speak out against the war in Vietnam, he said, they could not let charges of Communism silence misgivings about the capitalist distribution of wealth. “Maybe America must move toward a democratic socialism,” King bluntly suggested, and the movement must consider economic critiques by taboo thinkers such as Karl Marx. “If you read him, you can see that this man had a great passion for social justice,” he said. “You know Karl Marx was born a Jew, had a rabbinic background.” The early Marx was clearly influenced by Amos and other Hebrew prophets, King asserted, but fell prey to economic determinism that justified “cutting off individual liberties” in a proletarian dictatorship. “The great weakness of Karl Marx is right here,” he said, “that he did not recognize that the means and ends must cohere…. Now this is where I leave brother Marx and move on toward the kingdom.”
To do so, King said they must set aside the triumphant celebrations of 1965, regird themselves for protracted labor, and deepen their commitment to nonviolence. “We have a method,” he declared, “and we must develop it.” Their method may be only an experiment, but war-hungry critics must understand that violence was uncertain, too. “Violence may murder the liar,” said King, “but it doesn’t murder the lie. It doesn’t establish truth…. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate.” The reflex to violence divided mankind into warring tribes, subverting the essential promise of democracy and religion alike. “I still want SCLC to be that lamp of hope, that light in a very dark situation,” he said. “We must still believe that we are going to deal with this problem by enlisting consciences” rather than particular racial groups. “For there is no salvation through isolation.”
King closed with meditations on history. His small band of cohorts, many of them barely calmed from their internal feuds, absorbed a call to take on nothing less than the global cousins of segregation. He presented a radical leap in the language of steadfast commitment. Far from a plan, it was a raw summons to witness, and King broke off with an awkward new metaphor instead of his polished oratory. The landmarks of 1964 and 1965 had advanced “the football of civil rights” to “about the 50-yard line,” he declared. Now they faced diehard resistance in opposition territory. “As we move on, sometimes we may even fumble the ball,” said King, “but for God’s sake, recover it. And then we will move on down the field.”
ANDREW YOUNG returned on November 30 from his twelve-day mission to Jordan and Israel. The foreign ministries of both countries eagerly sought an ecumenical pilgrimage, he reported, and were making arrangements for King to preach to as many as five thousand travelers from a boat just offshore on the Sea of Galilee. Young hoped to create a peace headquarters at either Hadassah Hospital or the old Hebrew University, which still sat vacant in Jordanian territory, but cooperating officials were “scared to death” that hostilities would shut off desperately needed foreign revenue. The Young visit coincided with riots over Operation Shredder, a quick predawn raid on Palestinian militia near Hebron that turned into a pitched battle with the unexpected arrival of a Jordanian army patrol. The Israeli commander and fifteen Jordanian legionnaires were killed, with many soldiers wounded and more than a hundred homes destroyed. Undersecretary of State Katzenbach scolded Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban for a bungled cross-border provocation against the most moderate Arab head of state, King Hussein, who had kept his Patton tanks east of the Jordan River to assuage Israeli security concerns but now felt compelled by military leaders to move some of them toward Jerusalem.
King said regretfully that the threat of general war might force him to cancel his visit to the region in 1967. One host government or both would react viscerally to any statement approaching peace politics, and Young’s fallback idea to emphasize religious reconciliation seemed lamely unpromising. (Hardly anyone noticed King’s public appeals for the relief of Jews persecuted in the Soviet Union.) Stanley Levison thought it would take genius for any outsider to find a constructive position in the cauldron of Middle East politics. He agreed with Young that any trip should be confined to sightseeing, which would put King in the untenable position of ducking urgent problems at home to lead tourists through a war zone.
Levison fretted separately about newly transcribed copies of King’s rambling self-examination at Penn Center. King himself worried from hard experience about the passages of internal criticism, and restricted distribution to avoid another round of negative news stories “hammering at black power” on his authority. That would only discredit the civil rights movement again, he figured, advertising divisions against his purpose to shape a positive alternative and let the weaknesses of black power run their natural course. Levison, the chief SCLC fund-raiser and FBI target, highlighted reservations about the transcript’s pulpit style and its colloquial reference to the father of Communism. “Martin disagrees with Marx but calls him ‘brother Marx,’” Levison said on his wiretapped phone line. “I don’t think that would be good for the contributors.”
IN AN early appraisal of the 1966 Chicago civil rights movement. Bernard Lafayette told veterans they already had met key goals. Their campaign disproved theories that racial grievance in northern cities was “too subtle to dramatize,” he said, and refuted the widespread doubt that fragmented city people could be “mobilized for nonviolent direct action in the face of mass violence.” Scholars who specialized in Chicago history concluded accurately that the open housing settlement, though it put only a small dent in residential segregation, “was certainly far stronger than the settlements that had brought SCLC’s Birmingham and St. Augustine campaigns to a close.” The Metropolitan Chicago Leadership Council for Open Housing, created by the agreement, remained over decades a respected coalition for stable neighborhood integration, carrying two of its many lawsuits into the U.S. Supreme Court. Chicago politicians renounced local commitments, just as Birmingham leaders had reneged on promises to integrate department store bathrooms and the police force. What sharply distinguished the movements was the disparity in their wider impact. The weaknesses of the Birmingham settlement disappeared in a rippling tide that dissolved formal segregation by comprehensive national law. The Selma campaign itself never defeated or converted Sheriff Jim Clark, but the nation democratized voting rights to make segregationists such as him relics of the past. No corresponding shift enhanced the Chicago settlement in outcome or reputation, and all its shortcomings remained an eyesore.
To cushion their loss, some movement leaders adopted the conceit that they had once bowled over opposing forces by themselves. “We should have known better,” wrote Ralph Abernathy, “than to believe that we could come to Chicago and right its wrongs with the same tactics we had used in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma.” Bayard Rustin, narrowing his framework to excuse himself along with the rest of the country, turned a jaundiced eye on his bosom friend. “I knew he had to fall on his face,” said Rustin. “Daley cut Martin Luther King’s ass off.”
By the cycles of history, a period of letdown and division was perhaps inevitable to let the country absorb enormous changes mandated by the letter and spirit of equal citizenship. Cruel flukes compounded this letdown. The quest for interracial justice came of age just as the national climate turned hostile over the Vietnam War, and the movement’s most distinctive tenet—nonviolent witness for democracy—nearly vanished simultaneously from public discourse. Nonviolence became passé across the spectrum. Black people discarded it like training wheels to claim the full belligerent status of regular Americans. Even stalwart practitioners like Diane Nash yearned for something stronger, doubting its reward. White people were eager to dismiss nonviolence as a church notion misplaced in national politics. Hippies made it look selfish. Many thinkers ignored what they considered an outmoded handicap suited to a phase of the race problem. Almost no one honored or analyzed the broader legacy of nonviolent citizens, and King would grow ever more lonely in his conviction that the movement offered superior leadership discipline for the whole country. To him, the decline of nonviolence magnified compound dangers inherited from “enemy thinking”—the tendency to wall off groups of people by category. In religion, enemy psychology could invert the entire moral code to make violence a holy cause. In politics, enemy psychology could subvert the promise of democracy with a hierarchy of fear, secrecy, and arbitrary command for war.
The realignment of 1966 was at once blatant and subliminal, symbolic and momentous. Its backlash feature first appeared to be no more than a balancing correction for the near extinction since 1964 of the Goldwater Republicans, the last defenders of legal segregation outside the South, but observers in subsequent decades looked on the normally obscure midterm year as a fulcrum of more lasting change toward political dominance by the heirs of Goldwater. Political scientists Earl and Merle Black traced a “Great White Switch” in partisan voting patterns across the South. Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country’s beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote in 1991, adding that the influential neo-conservative movement was founded then “by former liberals who lost faith in large part over the issue of race in the North; in Irving Kristol’s famous apothegm, ‘a neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,’ it’s not difficult to guess what color the mugger was.” In a mirror thesis, Matthew Dallek concluded his book about the rise of Ronald Reagan with a terse review of his opponent’s “one crippling defect” in the 1966 election: “He was a liberal. And when Pat Brown went down, so did the philosophy that he had clung to throughout his adult life. It has never really recovered.”