by The Century for Young People: 1961-1999: Changing America
“Black power” was the motto for activists who wanted to see more dramatic change in American society. To many, “black power” could only mean a black revolution intended to destroy the white establishment. With riots erupting in Los Angeles, Chicago, San Diego, Philadelphia, and other cities across the country, it looked as though the violent racial confrontation Americans had long feared might finally come. When Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965, his followers picked up his banner and carried it onward.
Kwame Turé, whose original name was Stokely Carmichael, was born in 1941. His experience demonstrated why Malcolm X found so many willing listeners.
I was with the first group to take trains from New Orleans as part of the Freedom Rides in 1961. It was a rough ride, because we were confronted by segregationists breaking train windows at every single stop until we got to Jackson, Mississippi, where the police arrested us for refusing to leave the white waiting room. We were sent to Hinds County Jail, and then, just to increase the pressure on us, a group of us were transferred to the Parchman Penitentiary on death row. The police were beating us and torturing us every night. I respected Martin Luther King for sticking to the nonviolence under all conditions, and I believed in it as long as it was effective, but if it wasn’t working, then I decided that I would be throwing blows. By the time I walked out of Parchman Penitentiary, I was prepared to carry a gun in my work.
When I was growing up in Harlem, Malcolm X was there all the time, so I knew all about him and the Nation of Islam. Malcolm X presented a clearer, more direct political analysis, stripped of sentimentality, that saw the reality of the enemy we were fighting. Since Malcolm X aimed his message directly at African Americans, he could touch us more deeply, while Martin Luther King’s message also had to speak to white society. King would say, “What we need is morality,” while Malcolm would say, “What we need is power.” To Malcolm, nonviolence just meant that you’re giving your cheek left and right to a man who has no conscience. He thought we needed an eye for an eye.
Malcolm X’s assassination had a profound effect on us. After his assassination in 1965, those of us who really understood him made a conscious decision to pick up Malcolm’s points and to build on them. We wanted to keep his philosophy alive. We decided to go into Lowndes County, Alabama, to use the vote as a means to organize the people. There was not one single black registered to vote there in 1965, yet 80 percent of the population in the county was black.
For three months before the arrival of election day, white terrorists sent out word that if any Africans went to vote, they’d be left there for dead. In order to encourage Africans to get out and vote, we let them know that young brothers and sisters were coming, armed, from the big cities to help out. I remember the Justice Department sent somebody to see me who said, “You know, your people are bringing in guns. What are you gonna do?” I said, “We’re gonna vote.” He said, “The whites are very upset about this.” We had already decided that we would not fire the first shot, so I said, “You tell them they’ve got the first shot, but we’re voting.” When election day came, the people turned out to vote and not one shot was fired. For the first time, black citizens of Lowndes County felt they had exercised their political rights. They began to understand the power of politics.
Like much of America, Robert Kennedy, the former attorney general and now a U.S. senator, was changing his views on many different issues: the ongoing war in Vietnam, civil rights, the growing unrest among the country’s young people. More and more people looked to him to challenge President Johnson to become the Democratic candidate in the 1968 presidential election. Many people were dissatisfied with the way Johnson had led the country since JFK’s death. Eugene McCarthy, a senator from Minnesota who was against the war, was running for the Democratic Party’s nomination, and in March of 1968 Bobby Kennedy also entered the race. Johnson, with so much of his own party against him, decided not to run again. Excitement was high; many Americans thought their troubles might be over if they could get another Kennedy into the White House.
But in 1968 it sometimes seemed as if every hope was destined to end in tragedy. In April Martin Luther King Jr. appeared in Memphis, Tennessee, in support of striking sanitation workers. There, on April 4, America’s greatest prophet of nonviolence was shot and killed. When the news broke, violence erupted all over the country, with riots, arson, and gunfire. Though the deep anguish at King’s death was heartfelt, the violence that followed was a sad tribute to a man who had dedicated his life to peaceful change.
Robert Kennedy was boarding a plane for a campaign stop in Indianapolis when he heard that King had been shot. He was scheduled to speak at a rally in Indianapolis’s black ghetto, but when he arrived the chief of police told Kennedy the city could not guarantee his safety. Kennedy ignored the warning and went anyway. The crowd waiting for him did not know King had been killed. They gasped when Kennedy told them. Then he appealed to their best instincts. “You can be filled with bitterness, with hatred and a desire for revenge,” he said. “We can move in that direction as a country…. Or we can make an effort, as Martin Luther King did …to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed …with an effort to understand, with compassion and love.” While the rest of the country burned, there were no riots in Indianapolis. There people took their grief home quietly. Two months later Bobby Kennedy, too, became the victim of an assassin’s bullet.
College and university campuses were in an uproar, and not only in the United States. Students took to the streets in Paris and London. Czechoslovakia, a Communist country, had begun some modest but daring democratic reforms, nicknamed the “Prague Spring.” But on August 20, 1968, some 650,000 Soviet troops marched into Czechoslovakia to force the country back into the Soviet camp. Mobs of Czech youths climbed onto Russian tanks and chanted, “USSR go home.” But the Prague Spring was over.
The most notable American uprising came at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Ten thousand demonstrators traveled there to make their voices heard. Twenty-three thousand police officers and National Guard forces were waiting for them. An army of students faced off against an army of police in riot gear outside the convention center. Inside, party leaders nominated Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, as the Democratic candidate for president. The demonstrators outside claimed that the party leaders had ignored them and betrayed their hopes. It felt as if a civil war between America and its own young people had begun.
Jane Adams, born in 1943, was a member of Students for a Democratic Society who was in Chicago for the convention.
I had been active in the student Left throughout the sixties, but by 1968 I was so alienated from the political system that I was not following the processes of the Democratic candidates very closely. I remember many people saw Bobby Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy as hopeful forces for change, but after Martin Luther King’s assassination, I began to feel that there was a rottenness at the core of the political system of this country.
I was a marshal out in the streets during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. My most vivid memory of the convention was at the demonstration down at the McCarthy campaign headquarters. A crowd of thousands of people gathered outside, and the police were pushing us closer and closer together. Those of us who had experience protesting kept saying, “Stand up, stand up, stand up,” because we knew the police were gonna charge and were gonna go in and slaughter them. After the police charged in, I saw this young man in a suit and tie and a woman who looked like she was a sorority girl, very well dressed, and she had blood pouring out of her hair. This young man had picked her up and was trying to push her in the door, and he was hysterical. I was so furious, because these kids were doing nothing.
When Humphrey was nominated, I was in the YMCA watching it on TV. I ran out in the streets, and armored personnel carriers with barbed wire on the front of them moved into position. The young people chanted, “The whole world is watching,” which really meant that the whole world is watching th
is massive injustice that’s going on here, the ripping off of our democracy from us.
On the night of July 20, 1969, Americans put away their anger. Along with billions of television viewers around the world, they watched as American astronaut Neil Armstrong stepped out of the lunar module and became the first man to walk on the moon.
The American space program had also been caught up in the Cold War struggle between democracy and Communism. After the Soviets had launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, beating America into space, the United States had thrown its support behind NASA, the national space agency. JFK had pledged to put a man on the moon before the 1960s were over. Now, in 1969, that promise had been fulfilled.
Among those at the crowded Apollo XI launch site was the 1920s pilot Charles Lindbergh. It had been only forty-two years since his heroic flight across the Atlantic, but the world had changed a great deal. His had been an individual achievement; he had navigated his own plane through near disaster. The Apollo program was the work of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money and more than four hundred thousand people in assembly plants and control rooms.
Still, like Lindbergh’s flight in the twenties, the mission of the three Apollo XI astronauts gave their wounded country something to be proud of, something to share. And when the nation’s weary citizens saw pictures of their planet taken from space, they were moved: It was not the troubled world they knew, but a beautiful, peaceful globe, ordered and still.
CHAPTER 2
Years of Doubt
1969–1981
In the 1970s the booming postwar economy finally went bust. There was no single event that announced this decline, nothing like the 1929 stock market crash, which announced the arrival of the Great Depression. Instead, high unemployment and rising prices crept up on Americans. The unpopular war in Vietnam and the crisis in the economy combined to spread a feeling of mistrust of the government and its leaders. There was a new awareness that the growth of industry had helped to damage the environment. People worried about pollution, overpopulation, inflation, and recession. The earth itself, and the United States along with it, now seemed fragile and the future uncertain.
Prices were going up and up, and the most painful price increase was the one at the gas pump. Oil was—and still is—the lifeblood of America. Every plane, tank, and car needs it. Every skyscraper and industrial plant runs on it. Oil is part of the fertilizer that helps farmers produce crops for the world; when used in drugs, it helps fight disease. Like no other raw material, oil created the American way of life. And it fueled the American dream machine, the automobile.
Since the 1920s the car had become a symbol of American prosperity. GM made big cars after World War II, and people bought them according to their status: the more successful you were, the bigger your car. For years America had been buying cheap oil from the petroleum-producing countries of the Middle East: Saudi Arabia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, and others. But when America supported Israel in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, the oil-producing countries punished the United States. They organized an oil embargo, cutting off America’s pipeline.
Suddenly the price of gasoline and heating oil went up. Everything in the American economy that had depended on cheap energy got more expensive. People had to turn down their thermostats, cut back on driving, make do with less. A new thrift was force-fed to the country.
Long lines formed at gas stations, whose owners were asked to sell a maximum of ten gallons per customer. Now the large cars that Americans had been driving for so long were a handicap. Still, the powerful American automakers kept right on rolling big cars down the assembly lines. People began buying smaller, more fuel-efficient foreign cars instead. The era of the gas guzzler was over.
In Detroit the big automakers started laying off their workers. LaNita Gaines, born in 1950, was a Chrysler employee who watched as the oil crisis began hurting people’s lives.
When I first started working at the plant, Chrysler was manufacturing these giant-sized cars. They had gigantic gas tanks and got little mileage, but they were big and comfortable. It seemed as if people were changing cars every two years, and they weren’t really going for the quality of the car; they just wanted to keep up with the latest model. I swear at one point they were moving down the assembly line so fast that we’d sometimes miss a screw.
In 1973 we began to see a downturn in the industry as a whole. We workers would read about the oil crisis in the papers, and we didn’t quite know what to make of it. All we knew is that people were waiting on seemingly endless lines to get a tank of gas, and Chrysler just kept building those huge cars. The public started paying closer attention to gas mileage and began turning to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars from abroad like the Germans’ Volkswagen Beetle and Japanese cars. We had a Chrysler Imperial at that time, and it was a real gas-guzzler. We were getting eight miles to the gallon on it, and it seemed as if you could barely get from one gas station to the other before you had to fill up again. Eventually I had to say goodbye to it because I couldn’t afford to keep gas in it.
The American companies were refusing to change to what was now going to be the new road for the auto industry. We workers just kind of looked at that and said, “Well, why don’t they change? When are they gonna get the message that we’re not in love with those big cars anymore?” We’d try to tell them that we were the ones that were buying those little cars, but the company didn’t want to listen. We were looking for companies that made smaller cars, of course, that were American-made, but if America was not making those cars, then you had to buy what you could find. We had to get to work, we had to get our families around, and with gas prices climbing much faster than our wages, we had to do something. We had to buy what was economically feasible for our families.
I worked at Chrysler until around 1974. I had bought my first home and started a family. That November they came around and told us that we were permanently laid off. I was terrified. I thought, “What does this mean? I’ve had a job for all these years, and now I’m being put in the street.” All of a sudden there was not enough money for the mortgage note and the car note. We could barely keep food on the table. I thought I could rely on unemployment for a while, but the industry had recently changed some of its policies in the cutbacks, so the sub fund, which was to help laid-off workers, was depleting quickly, and I realized there was just one step between me and the welfare line. There was a sentiment of despair everywhere. These were very shaky times, and we just didn’t know what to do.
The faltering economy led many people to feel that their leaders were failing them. This disappointment in the government had really begun with Vietnam, a war Richard Nixon inherited from Democrat Lyndon Johnson when he became president in 1969. At first many Americans were pleased when Nixon set up a policy of “Vietnamization,” which placed more of the burden of their own defense on the South Vietnamese, and started bringing American GIs home. But this good feeling did not last. In 1970 it was revealed that U.S. soldiers had massacred Vietnamese civilians at My Lai, and that same year the United States illegally invaded Cambodia. Protests against the war continued to divide the nation. In May four college students were killed by National Guard troops during an antiwar rally at Kent State University in Ohio. Rage and resentment seemed to be the only emotions Americans had in common.
The 1972 presidential campaign was under way when a seemingly minor crime took place. One night in June seven men broke into the offices of the Democratic National Committee in the Watergate office complex in Washington, D.C. The burglars were arrested. But when it was discovered that they were on the payroll of the Committee to Reelect the President, a chain of events was set in motion that would eventually create a constitutional crisis known as Watergate. Americans watched with fascination and disgust as a complicated story of intrigue and obstruction of justice reached higher and higher in the government, eventually touching the president himself.
Hugh Sloan, born in 1940, was a White House aide who became caug
ht up in the Watergate scandal.
I started working at the White House as an assistant to the president’s appointment secretary during Nixon’s first term in office. I was very young and driven, and it was exciting to see the inner workings of government. When election time neared I was put on a team to help organize the Committee to Reelect the President. Working on the campaign was even more exciting than working at the White House. We were all working for a cause and by and large we were all believers, so there was a lot of enthusiasm around the office.
One morning I was in the office and I saw G. Gordon Liddy, who was in charge of campaign security, hurrying down the hall in a state of panic. As he ran by, I heard him say something like, “My boys got caught last night. I told him I’d never use anybody from here. I made a big mistake.” I didn’t know exactly what he was talking about at first, but it got me thinking. Then I read in the papers about the Watergate break-in, and I saw that James McCord was one of the people arrested. I knew McCord; he was directly involved in the Committee to Reelect the President. The pieces fell together pretty quickly in my mind. It was obvious by the way everyone was acting around the office that the campaign was somehow involved in the break-in. The men who were arrested had a fair amount of cash on them, most of it new hundred-dollar bills. I suspected that cash might have come from money that I had given Liddy, purportedly for campaign security. All of a sudden I started wondering whether the investigators would be able to pick my fingerprints off of those bills.
