Fracture

by Joy-Ann Reid

  News of the men’s disappearance, their faces peering out from an FBI flyer urging public help, quickly became a national and an international sensation, increasing the urgency for their representatives in Washington to act, because now white lives were also on the line.

  When the Civil Rights Act went back to the House for final passage on July 2, it received overwhelming affirmation again: 289 to 126. The bill had split the Democratic Party straight down the Mason-Dixon Line, with the all-Democratic caucuses of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and North and South Carolina voting unanimously against it, while the tiny, all-Democratic delegations in Oregon, Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, and Idaho were solid “ayes.”

  Senator Hubert Humphrey hailed the act as “the greatest piece of social legislation of our generation.” President Johnson signed it into law hours after final passage, two days before Independence Day. But southern Democrats were crying “tyranny” and condemning the forces they blamed for it: the clergy, the media, and even labor unions, long a core component of the Democratic election apparatus.

  Though he had taken a first, historic step toward history, and toward finishing what Kennedy, prodded by a broad and insistent civil rights movement, had started, Johnson could see the dam of political realignment massing inside his party’s southern stronghold. The alienation of the South from the labor movement, and the sense of siege across the former Confederate states, particularly regarding the press, would be lasting.

  One month after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, on August 4, the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found. They had been shot, beaten, and buried in an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

  A month after that, on September 16, Strom Thurmond quit the Democratic Party for good, pledging his support, his South Carolina political machine, and his counsel to Goldwater. Thurmond accused his former party of “leading the evolution of our nation into a socialist dictatorship”; Democrats, he said, had “forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses, and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors.”

  “The Democratic Party has encouraged lawlessness, civil unrest, and mob actions,” Thurmond ranted. “The Democratic Party . . . has sent our youth into combat in Vietnam, refusing to call it war. The Democratic Party now worships at the throne of power and materialism.”

  Thurmond was the first of the “Dixiecrats” to go. He wouldn’t be the last. And his view of his former party would come to be the dominant view of a majority of white southern voters.

  OUTSIDE THE SOUTH, NATIONAL DEMOCRATS, INCLUDING THE president, quickly began to view the newly liberated and growing black vote as their reward for a job well done on the Civil Rights Act. Johnson believed he’d earned the loyalty of the civil rights establishment and the black body politic, a belief that would be severely tested as the country became increasingly involved in Vietnam. Just one month after he signed the landmark civil rights bill, activists from Mississippi disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with round-the-clock protests on the boardwalk. At the convention, activist Fannie Lou Hamer gave dramatic testimony, broadcast by the three televisions networks, about the brutality she and other would-be registrants endured inside a Mississippi jail. Johnson wanted Hamer off TV, fearing that the spectacle had the potential to cast him and his Democratic Party as villains in yet another racial conflagration.

  African Americans had always seen their relationship with the two political parties as a means to an end. Constant agitation and pushing presidents from both parties were simply part of the process, and King had long warned the movement about becoming entangled in partisan affairs, telling a February 11, 1958, gathering at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina: “I’m not inextricably bound to either party. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this: that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely.”

  After Abraham Lincoln, black voters, when they could access the ballot box, had been strongly Republican, and after Franklin Roosevelt, increasingly Democratic.

  Even in 1936, when black voters lent 71 percent of their ballots to reelect Roosevelt, only 44 percent of African Americans identified themselves as Democrats, though by this time fewer than 40 percent continued to call themselves Republicans. When Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944, black party identification had fallen by 4 points, and FDR’s share of the black electorate was down to 68 percent, with 21 percent calling themselves independents.

  While the party often failed to address segregation, and in some cases, like housing, served to entrench it, the New Deal had been the first tranche of federal policy since Reconstruction to lift large swaths of African Americans out of despair. And with FDR’s vice president, Harry Truman, up for election in 1948, facing Republican Thomas Dewey and “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond, who was running on a segregation line, black voters clung to the Democrats all the more, boosting their party identification by 16 points, and the share of their votes to 77 percent.

  Theodore White, in a much-circulated column in Collier’s magazine in August 1956, titled “The Negro Voter: Can He Elect a President?” wrote: “By 1948, when Truman squeezed out his hair’s-breadth win over Dewey, carrying Illinois by 33,612 votes, California by 17,865 votes, Ohio by 7,107 votes, no practicing politician could ignore the fact that the Negro vote in these states was one of the vital margins by which the Presidency of the United States had been won.”

  Democrats held their overwhelming share of the black vote in 1952, as Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Illinois governor, received 76 percent as he faced war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower in the general election. But when Eisenhower faced Stevenson again four years later, two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Stevenson’s share of the black vote dropped to 61 percent, Eisenhower’s climbed from 24 to 39 percent, and just 56 percent of black Americans called themselves Democrats.

  Eisenhower’s reluctance to openly confront southern segregationists, his lack of public support for the Brown decision, and his reticence in using federal power to further the cause of civil rights may have encouraged southern resistance, and white citizens’ councils sprang up across the southern states to resist the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling. But southern vehemence helped to doom the Democratic ticket with black voters. The Southern Manifesto debuted in the thick of the reelection campaign in March 1956, and among the signers was Stevenson’s 1952 running mate, segregationist Alabama senator John Sparkman. And though Stevenson was now running with moderate Estes Kefauver, Stevenson’s studious, “cautious disagreement” with the declaration of resistance worked to his disfavor as the news spread in black newspapers.

  Stevenson, though mellifluous on the stump, was notoriously bland on civil rights, and at pains not to alienate his party’s southern wing, whose consent had delivered him the nomination, including over Texas senator Lyndon Johnson. And Eisenhower, despite his silence on even the Emmett Till lynching, was a man with a growing record: on desegregating military bases and the District of Columbia, on increased federal hiring of black Americans, and on judicial appointments, where he put pro-desegregation moderates on the bench. Even Adam Clayton Powell Jr., the flamboyant Harlem congressman and the country’s most visible black political leader, with a celebrity status in black households that was akin to a Hollywood star, took pains to point to Eisenhower as a man he could work with. Powell skipped the 1956 Democratic convention and even endorsed the president’s reelection in October, forming “Independent Democrats for Eisenhower” (and earning the kind of scorn from the Democratic establishment the Dixiecrat apostates rarely faced).

  By November 1956, Eisenhower, the Texas-born but Kansas-raised military man, and his Californian running mate, Richard Nixon, seemed like a good deal for many black voters compared to a middling Democrat and a southerner.

 
; It wasn’t until 1964, with Johnson facing Goldwater, the outspoken foe of the Civil Rights Act, that the Democratic Party claimed the near-total support of black voters at 94 percent, with 82 percent of African Americans identifying as Democrats, a height from which they would barely look back.

  Goldwater’s victory over New York governor and billionaire Nelson Rockefeller for the Republican nomination ensured overwhelming black adherence to the Democratic ticket. And Goldwater’s candidacy horrified prominent black Republicans, like groundbreaking baseball star (and Rockefeller supporter) Jackie Robinson, and Edward Brooke, then Massachusetts’s pioneering black attorney general, who refused to give Goldwater his endorsement, later saying “you can’t say the Negro left the Republican Party; the Negro feels he was evicted from the Republican Party.”

  National Review publisher William Rusher predicted the rise of the New Right the previous December, telling the Harvard Young Republican Club two days after Pearl Harbor Day that given Rockefeller’s liberalism and Johnson’s likely “swing over, rather sharply to the left” in a bid to “comfort and mollify” his party’s liberals after Kennedy’s assassination, “the hard-core South” was “once again up for grabs.”

  Indeed it was.

  Goldwater also appealed to young conservatives outside the South, who were drawn to his message of individualism, and his challenge of the staid, hierarchical system of the Grand Old Party with its patrician northern and western elites. These young conservatives included Hillary Rodham, who, as the drama over the civil rights bill played out in Washington in the summer of 1964, canvassed her neighborhood in the Chicago suburbs for the Goldwater campaign.

  The promising high school student came from a family of rock-ribbed conservatives. Her father, Hugh Rodham, a western Pennsylvania native who owned a drapery business, raised Hillary and her two younger brothers on his strict Republican views. Hillary devoured Goldwater’s book Conscience of a Conservative at the suggestion of a ninth-grade teacher. She was a member of the Young Republican National Federation, which since the Hoover administration had operated chapters nationwide, focused on nurturing conservatives under the age of forty. Four years earlier, Hillary had canvassed the South Side of Chicago for Richard Nixon in his razor-thin losing effort against Jack Kennedy.

  But this “Goldwater girl” from Illinois, still a year off from her first term at Wellesley College, was also just the kind of rising white idealist that Democrats would build their future on, and whom they would doggedly pursue long after they’d lost white southerners and stopped worrying about the “black vote.”

  Hillary’s worldview was being shaped by the convulsions of the 1960s—and by an April 1962 trip with her youth minister, Don Jones, who took a group from her conservative congregation at Park Ridge Methodist Church, to hear Martin Luther King Jr. deliver a speech titled “Remaining Awake Through a Revolution” at the Chicago Sunday Evening Club. Clinton would later write in her memoir that the speech “challenged [the] indifference” of her generation of young, white Americans, which in some ways was insulated from the trench warfare being fought by young men and women not much older than them, in states like Alabama and Mississippi, where the simple act of registering to vote invited sometimes violent resistance and the threat of economic disenfranchisement, ostracism, or even death.

  That trajectory away from indifference and toward direct confrontation would lead Hillary Rodham, during her freshman year at Wellesley, to shock the all-white congregation at Park Ridge by bringing a black classmate to service, and it would lead her, as president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans, to support Ed Brooke’s history-making Senate campaign as a liberal Republican in 1966. But in 1964, Hillary was a Goldwater Girl.

  With Goldwater on the ballot, American voter identification with the Democratic Party peaked at 51 percent in 1964—higher even than in 1942, at the height of U.S. involvement in World War II. The party of southern segregation had become the party of American modernism, while its southern appendage clung to Goldwater, who declared that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” as he sank his party to a low ebb.

  For black voters, 1964 was a watershed. With weeks to go before the election, the NAACP announced that 5.5 million African Americans had registered to vote across thirty-four states and the nation’s capital, and that overall black voter turnout could reach 12 million—7 million more than the number thought to have voted in 1960.

  On election day, they were proven right, as 58.5 percent of eligible African Americans went to the polls—72 percent in the northern states and 44 percent in the still restrictive South—a feat that would not be repeated for forty-four years.

  The 1964 election saw the highest total voter turnout ever measured, before or since, with 69 percent of American adults pulling the lever nationwide and delivering a rebuke to Goldwater so complete that a month later, when Martin Luther King Jr. was asked if he could envision a Negro being elected president of the United States, he replied: “I have seen certain changes in the United States over the last two years that surprise me. I have seen levels of compliance with the civil rights bill, and changes that have been most surprising so on the basis of this, I think we may be able to get a Negro president in less than 40 years. I would think that this could come in 25 years or less.”

  Johnson and his party would have little time to celebrate the triumphs of the civil rights era as the president increasingly turned his attention toward the war in Vietnam.

  THE U.S. TROOP PRESENCE IN VIETNAM WOULD GROW FROM 16,000 in 1965 to more than half a million in 1968. The nightly newscasts were teeming with images of Americans fighting and dying in a far-off conflict few Americans understood, but whose grasp able-bodied men lacking means or connections could scarcely avoid. Unrest among young Americans was spreading, across cities and college campuses nationwide, in some cases provoking violent clashes with police. The January 1968 Tet Offensive, which set U.S. troops on their heels, sapped the last hope that the war could be won.

  By March, Johnson’s approval ratings had fallen from an 80 percent peak in March 1964 to just 36 percent the week after a devastating February 27 broadcast in which CBS newsman Walter Cronkite, America’s most trusted man, returned from Vietnam and all but declared the war unwinnable. After the telecast, Johnson was said to have remarked, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost America.”

  It was a swift and sudden reversal for the president who had, just a few short years before, shepherded not only the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Now those achievements, along with the extension of the Social Security Act to include Medicare and Medicaid, plus an ambitious program to end poverty among poor black and white Americans, seemed a distant memory. And the president who’d marshaled it all was now seen by his party, and his country, as a relentless man of war.

  The war also split Johnson from Martin Luther King Jr., who in April 1967 delivered a withering speech before a crowd of three thousand at New York’s Riverside Church denouncing U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the concurrent defunding of Great Society programs. King accused the war, and by extension, the Johnson administration, of “doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home.

  “It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

  Newspaper editorial pages, includi
ng the New York Times and the Washington Post, and even the NAACP, declared that King’s speech had conflated unlike crises to the detriment of the core cause of black uplift. The major civil rights organizations had an investment in Lyndon Johnson, and they feared that King was throwing it away.

  There had long been tension among black leaders over how best to interact with presidential power: whether as negotiators or agitators. King had, during the March on Washington and the Selma marches, played the role of negotiator, siding with the White House and other major civil rights groups to moderate the more radical members of the movement like John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Now he was squarely on the side of the radicals.

  King had always sparked deep divisions in public opinion; making Gallup’s list of “most admired Americans” twice, in fourth place in 1964, the year he won the Nobel Prize, and in sixth place in 1965. But his favorable ratings among the American public never exceeded 45 percent. By 1966, Americans’ disapproval was overwhelming, at 63 versus 32 percent. By 1967, Alabama segregationist George Wallace was ranked among America’s most admired men, and King, the antiwar agitator, was not. Meanwhile, King’s break with Johnson was total—he would not be asked back to the White House.

  Three weeks after King’s Riverside address, on April 28, heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali publicly refused to report for induction into the army, prompting the World Boxing Association to strip him of his title and triggering a trial, set for June 20.

  With Malcolm X gone—assassinated in February 1965 in Harlem—Ali was the most prominent Black Muslim in the country, and an idol to young African Americans for the bravado he expressed in his utter indifference to the strictures of racial comportment imposed on black men. He said his faith was the reason he refused to be drafted, but he also offered a withering critique of the war itself and the plight of African Americans at home.