Malcolm’s black nationalism required black control of the economic infrastructure of the ghetto. In a defining speech called “The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm asked, “Why should white people be running the banks of our community?" Echoing Carter Woodson, he explained that blacks needed to be “re-educated" with regard to economics. “Our people have to be made to see that any time you take your dollar out of your community and spend it in a community where you don’t live, the community where you live will get poorer and poorer, and the community where you spend your money will get richer and richer."126 The ghettos existed, he explained, because blacks did not know how to control their money. Every dollar spent at a white-owned institution was a dollar lost to the ghetto. Malcolm wanted blacks to own stores, banks, and industry within the ghetto so they wouldn’t have to “picket and boycott and beg some cracker downtown for a job in his business."127 His economic plan was strikingly similar to King’s, but Malcolm’s rhetoric was more inflammatory and was sometimes laced with a threat of violence.
If James Baldwin had warned of the “fire next time" and Malcolm alluded to the bullet, it was Huey Newton who picked up the gun and loaded it. Newton created the Black Panthers to organize the ghetto as King had organized the South. The Panthers were where many of the principals in King’s coalition went after his death, but the Panther leadership was more eclectic, with several leaders embedded in criminal networks.128 The Panthers’ mission was to coordinate random violence into a coherent movement, or more accurately, a revolution. The point of the Panthers’ revolution was to overcome poverty and oppression through violent resistance. The movement has had no rival in American history. It did not recognize
U.S. sovereignty over the black nation and intended to ultimately fight it.129
Newton published the Black Panthers’ “Ten Point Program,” which underscored the disillusionment with the earlier civil rights movement. “We have listened to the riot producing words ‘these things take time’ for 400 years.” The Panthers, claiming to speak for the entire black community, made a list of what black people wanted and what black people believed. The list of wants could be summarized in the tenth, all-encompassing point: “we want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace.” As to beliefs, they believed in a right to self-defense, self-determination, fair trials, and a reversal of centuries of racist policies. Most provocatively, they declared that “whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundations on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem more likely to effect their safety and happiness.” The Panthers’ mission, in sum, was “to throw off” any despotic regime, which in this particular case was the United States government.130
Everything had changed in just the few short years spanning 1965 to 1968. When reflecting on the civil rights movement, most Americans focus on the Montgomery bus boycott, King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, Rosa Parks, and Brown vs. Board of Education. But all these events happened before 1965.
By 1969, the leaders of the movement, Malcolm X, King, John F. Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy, had all been killed, and Johnson was out of office. The consensus of the black community toward the civil rights movement, if there was one, was that it had failed, or at least that it was incomplete. Black leaders knew that the progressive momentum had halted. Yes, the “whites only” signs were now gone and employers could no longer legally discriminate based on race, but many still suffered from unemployment, dilapidated housing, and intractable poverty.
The civil rights movement held America to its democratic promise and undoubtedly opened opportunities for the black community, but these initial successes produced significant obstacles to future progress. The initial face of the movement cemented the country’s focus on legal and political rights rather than economic equality, even though the black community and white leaders knew that the former would be meaningless without the latter. The rhetoric of color-blind equality entrapped reformers who could not and did not conceive of reforms that included recompense for past wrong. Moreover, many white Americans saw legislative and Supreme Court victories as a fait accompli and excused policymakers from pressing for more meaningful and necessary reforms. And finally, the uprisings, which sprang from a mix of hope and despair, created a public and policy backlash that spawned a new system of control through the criminal justice system. The war against poverty was subsumed by the new war against crime before the former had ever been fully waged.
Most of the civil rights reforms were embattled or weakened within a few years. And some of the demands were skirted altogether. The historic 1963 March on Washington was officially called the March for Jobs and Freedom. Though Johnson worked on freedom, the jobs were not forthcoming. And the next group of black power activists no longer wanted jobs. They demanded land.
The Decoy of Black Capitalism
As the radical black movement gained momentum, it was met with a strong white backlash, which President Nixon rode into office. Faced with a political quagmire, the politically savvy Nixon was able to neutralize black resistance without sacrificing the Republican coalition built on the “southern strategy."1 Not only did Nixon find his way through the race minefield; he forged a path that many politicians after him would follow. The strategy included opposing all forms of legal race discrimination while rejecting any government effort at integration. The black militants would be met with “law and order," and antipoverty efforts were curtailed on the grounds that they were costly and created dependence on the state.2
Most importantly, in a nimble political move that has gone largely unnoticed, Nixon co-opted the black power movement’s rhetoric of economic self-determination to push for a segregated black economy, thereby justifying his neglect of other proposals for meaningful reform. Capitalism, specifically “black capitalism," became yet another rhetorical weapon used to rationalize economic inequality.
Johnson may have been the master of the Senate, but Nixon was the master of political sleight of hand. Not only would the promise of black capitalism curb the stronger demands of black separatists; it would appeal to white voters across the political spectrum, especially because the very loosely conceived plan was open to multiple interpretations. To blacks, it was a grant of power. Nixon said, “people in the ghetto have to have more than an equal chance. They should be given a dividend."3 To suburban whites, it would cure violence. After the riots in Chicago in 1968, he reasoned, “People who own their own homes don’t burn their neighborhoods."4 To middle-class voters who held to the American values of community and upward mobility, any program using the words “capitalism," “entrepreneurship," and “self-help" struck a chord. To fiscal hawks, it would cost nothing. Upon accepting the Republican presidential nomination, Nixon declared at the August 1968 convention, “Instead of govern
ment jobs, and government housing, and government welfare, let government use its tax and credit policies to enlist in this battle the greatest engine of progress ever developed in the history of man— American private enterprise." To the business community, it was to be market-driven: “we can get a bigger social return on a given level of investment and get some of the jobs done through the market system."5
Nixon’s was not the first administration to promote minority banks and businesses, but unlike his predecessor, this was Nixon’s chief focus.6 Black business would not only lead to black prosperity, it would also lead to integration by “build[ing] bridges to human dignity across that gulf that separates black Ameri ca from white America."7 The fine print was that the bridge-building would be the sole responsibility of the black community. It placed the “black problem" in the hands of black entrepreneurs to fix with a little federal aid.
Black capitalism was disguised as a program catering to the black community’s own demands, but what black leaders had been asking for was control of the infr
astructure and institutions of local power in order to grow capital. Roy Innis, an initial proponent of black capitalism, had conceived of a “transfer of institutions within the black community to the management and control of the people themselves." He said that “Nixon should support the concept of community control of schools, welfare, sanitation, fire, police, hospitals, and all other institutions operating in the so-called ‘ghettos.’ "8 But Nixon never intended to give blacks control of their community institutions, but rather, ownership of the problem of poverty. Black capitalism delegated the responsibility to solve the racial wealth gap to the black community without the help of the white political establishment who had always held power and the purse strings, and who continued to do so.
Nixon was a pragmatist and an astute politician, so his actions were geared toward leveraging the most votes with the fewest possible actions. The biggest appeal of black capitalism was that it cost very little—financially and especially politically. Nixon had already calculated that he had “nothing to gain" by cooperating with black civil rights leaders, and he had made clear during his first State of the Union Address that he was through meeting the demands of black activists: “it is time for those who make massive demands on society to make minimal demands on themselves.”9 Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who was head of Nixon’s urban affairs office, proposed that “the time may have come when the issue of race could benefit from a period of ‘benign neglect.’ ”10 Nixon put it bluntly when he promised southern Republicans that he would retreat on civil rights and “lay off pro-Negro crap” if elected president.11
Not only would he not push forward, but he would claw back some of the progress already made. Nixon diluted the Voting Rights Act and refused to spend money on many of Johnson’s Great Society programs. The NAACP said of the Nixon administration that it was “the first time since 1920 that the national administration has made it a matter of calculated policy to work against the needs and aspirations of the largest minority of its citizens.”12 Black capitalism allowed Nixon to accomplish a great deal with very little: he neutralized black militants, gained business support, lost none of his political base, and spent virtually nothing.
In order to understand this tactical political diversion, it is important to understand the context surrounding the decision and the other paths not taken. Particularly relevant are failed integration efforts and demands by black leaders for reparation—both of which were being actively pursued in 1968. By 1970, the administration had scuttled each of these plans without fanfare.
The most crucial path not taken was on integration, and on this issue Nixon was adamant. This was truly unfortunate because a window for reform had opened in 1968, and if followed, could have potentially ended the ghetto economic trap. Johnson had tried to fight housing segregation as early as 1966, but this effort had been defeated in Congress at least partly by the forceful lobbying of bankers and realtors, who had labeled nondiscrimination laws in housing as “anti-market”—the subtext of the argument being that the market, presumably meaning white home buyers, was opposed to integration.13 The national appetite for civil rights reform had shifted so much by 1966 that White House aid Harry McPherson quipped that “it would have been hard to pass the Emancipation Proclamation in the atmosphere prevailing now.”14
Johnson was relentless, and finally found an opening. On April 11, 1968, just a week after Martin Luther King was killed, Johnson pushed for action on Article VIII of the 1968 Civil Rights Act, commonly known as the Fair Housing Act (FHA, but not to be confused with the
Federal Housing Administration). Johnson found and exploited the only window available to push through Congress the last and most crucial part of his civil rights agenda even as the shocked nation mourned the civil rights leader. Johnson was elated. “We have passed many civil rights pieces of legislation," he said when he signed the bill. “But none is more important than this." The law banned racial discrimination in housing, including steering blacks toward segregated neighborhoods, and any intimidation and coercion of black home buyers, a common tactic of northern segregationists. In order to pass the congressional gauntlet, the bill’s enforcement provisions were weak, but the law, to be administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), required government officials to do everything possible to “affirmatively further" fair housing, which was understood to mean housing integration.15
Nixon had to contend not only with this recent mandate, but also with George Romney, his HUD director. Romney took the charge to affirmatively further fair housing as seriously as any HUD director before or since. He was the perpetual thorn in Nixon’s side, and in many respects Romney was Nixon’s foil—he was a moral crusader in a highly politicized administration. Romney had refused to endorse Barry Goldwater and the GOP’s right-wing extremists in 1964, explaining that he was on a “crusade" for moderate Republican principles.16 Nixon, by contrast, had stumped for Goldwater, and his political opportunism earned him the GOP nomination in 1968. Romney denounced the southern strategy, befriended King, and urged Republicans to take up the civil rights cause. In his 1963 State of the State address as governor of Michigan, he had pronounced that the state’s “most urgent human rights problem is racial discrimination—in housing, public accommodations, education, administration of justice, and employment."17
Romney was the only member of Nixon’s cabinet interested in pushing forward on civil rights instead of pulling back. After Nixon announced his cabinet, one commentator quipped in the New York Times, “the Cabinet [is] George Romney and eleven fellows named Clyde."18 Nixon’s director of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), the agency in charge of advancing the War on Poverty (or in Nixon’s case of retreating from it) was Donald Rumsfeld. Rumsfeld began to dismantle the OEO’s mission immediately. In charge of the office dealing with urban affairs was his token “liberal," Daniel
Patrick Moynihan. The entire cabinet was white. Black commentators derisively referred to Nixon’s White House as “Uncle Strom’s Cabin."19
Though Nixon and Romney had been rivals, Nixon still appointed Romney as his HUD secretary, a decision he would soon regret. Romney was convinced that poverty led to crime, drugs, and violence, and that the principal source of poverty was segregation. Romney believed that “Force alone will not eliminate riots. . . . We must eliminate the problems from which they stem," and he rejected the idea that integration would occur naturally without state inter-vention.20 So Romney fought for integration with messianic zeal, but within a hostile administration. He was opposed by the president every step of the way.
Romney ordered HUD to reject any applications for water, sewer, or road projects from any state or municipality that fostered segregated housing. Romney did not clear his strategy with the White House, and as loud complaints rolled in about HUD grant rejections, they went directly to the president’s desk. Nixon was livid and put an end to it immediately. “I am absolutely opposed to this. Knock it in the head now."21
Romney turned his attention to an even more ambitious plan, called “open communities," which he defined as communities “in which choices are available, doors are unlocked, opportunities exist for those who have felt walled within the ghetto."22 The basic plan was to integrate a few neighborhoods by building public housing in white suburbs and by offering loans to aspiring black homeowners. In other words, he wanted to move blacks from the cities into the suburbs. He believed that the only way to fix the ghetto was to break it down.23
Romney chose a few suburbs across the country to test his open communities plan, including one in his home state. Warren, Michigan, was a white working-class suburb of Detroit and was a racial tinderbox, having broken out in rioting when a black family moved to a white neighborhood in 1967. Just three years later, Romney chose Warren as a pilot for his program in spite of, or perhaps because of, this history. Romney told the population of Warren that he was withholding $3 million in federal funds from the city until they accepted low-income housing.24 The backlash was extreme
. According to Nixon, “George Romney found out in Warren, that there’s as much racism in the North as in the South."25 In the weeks after the Warren encounter, Strom Thurmond and other southern congressmen began referring to Nixon as “Mister Integrator."26 Romney forged ahead.
Romney knew these initiatives would face political and public backlash, but he fervently believed that it was simply the right thing to do. He explained to his task force that the question for him was not “whether we should work toward open communities," but rather “how explicit we should be in announcing our goals."27 Knowing he was alone in his commitment, he decided to do it in secret. Without the president’s backing, Romney pushed an ambitious bill in Congress that would have developed open communities and restricted discriminatory zoning laws. He also drafted legislation that would have allowed the federal government to override any local zoning laws that restricted public housing. Romney’s rationale was that if the government was footing the bill on community betterment projects, the communities in question could not be permitted to actively thwart the goals of the Fair Housing Act.
When Nixon heard about Romney’s plan through an internal memo, he scrawled a three-word response to his aide John Ehrli-chman: “Stop this one." But he didn’t have to. The Republican-dominated House Banking Committee quickly shut down the bill.28 In another internal memo, Nixon explained his reasoning: “I am convinced that while legal segregation is totally wrong that forced integration of housing or education is just as wrong." And he understood what this meant. “I realize," he continued, “that this position will lead us to a situation in which blacks will continue to live for the most part in black neighborhoods and where there will be predominately black schools and predominately white schools."29
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