by Joy-Ann Reid
“Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go 10,000 miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on Brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?” he told a Louisville reporter on May 4, as he and Dr. King, with whom he had quietly nurtured a growing friendship, came together to march for open housing. Ali was even blunter with Gil Noble, host of Like It Is, a popular public affairs show devoted to African American themes. “My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America. And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. . . . Shoot them for what? . . . How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”
Ali’s broadsides against the war shocked the country to an even greater degree than King’s. But other nationally prominent black athletes came to his defense. Former football great Jim Brown, recently retired, and whose business interests included a piece of Ali’s boxing contract, organized a June 4 meeting in Cleveland, Ohio, in which a group of black basketball and football greats—Brown, Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), Boston Celtics star Bill Russell, who’d suffered his share of racial indignities as an NBA star, and NFL standouts Jim Shorter, Willie Davis, John Wooten, Bobby Mitchell, Sid Williams, Curtis McClinton, and Walter Beach, along with Ohio state representative and soon-to-be Cleveland mayor Carl Stokes—quizzed Ali extensively on his reasons for refusing the draft. After the two-hour session the group, some of whom had served in the military themselves, held a dramatic press conference in which they publicly backed the Champ.
Weeks later, an all-white jury convicted Ali of draft evasion, and the judge sentenced him to five years in prison, plus a ten-thousand-dollar fine. Banned from boxing for three years but free on bail, he embarked on a series of paid college speaking engagements, debating and expounding on his war stance. King vigorously supported Ali, praising his stand from the pulpit of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, and urging other draft-eligible young men to follow his lead. But the revered athletes Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson opposed him, with Robinson accusing Ali of “harming the morale of a lot of young Negro soldiers over in Vietnam,” and calling it a “tragedy” that in his words, “Cassius has made millions of dollars off of the American public, and now he’s not willing to show his appreciation to a country that is giving him, in my view, a fantastic opportunity . . . [it] hurts a great number of people.”
Robinson held a special place of respect in black and white households, as the athlete who integrated Major League Baseball in 1947, the first black man inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. He’d been a guest on the platform at the March on Washington and until a very public falling-out with its leadership in 1967, a board member of the NAACP. Robinson had achieved a level of transracial notoriety reserved for a handful of black Americans, even starring in a 1950 movie about his life, opposite actress Ruby Dee. But Robinson was also a military veteran, having served in a segregated army unit in 1942 and exiting three years later as a second lieutenant after being acquitted in a general court-martial for refusing to sit at the back of an army bus in Fort Hood, Texas. Since 1957 he’d been a vice president of Chock Full O’Nuts, the New York–based coffee company, and was among a group of promising African Americans recruited by corporations who were aggressively looking to showcase “Negro” talent in diversity roles, including the Coca-Cola Company and even Woolworth’s, whose lunch counters had become almost synonymous with southern segregation.
Robinson was a fervent patriot who in 1963 clashed, in a series of fierce public letters, with Malcolm X, whom he denounced as “racist” and who in turn derided Robinson’s “White Boss” in Major League Baseball and beyond, the boss who “sent you to Washington to assure all the worried white folks that Negroes were still thankful to the Great White Father for bringing us to America, that Negroes were grateful to America (despite our not being treated as full citizens), and that Negroes would still lay down our lives to defend this white country (though this same white government wasn’t ready nor willing to defend Negroes).”
In May 1967, one month after King participated in an antiwar march in New York City that drew Dr. Benjamin Spock, actor Harry Belafonte, and Stokely Carmichael (the former SNCC leader who coined the term “Black Power”), and weeks after King’s praise of Ali from the pulpit, Robinson published an emotional “open letter” to King in Harlem’s Amsterdam News, asking whether it was “fair” of his friend “to place all the burden of the blame on America and none on the Communist forces we’re fighting?”—saying he believed the president was making valiant efforts to achieve peace, and adding: “I am confused, Martin. I am confused because I respect you deeply. But I also love this imperfect country.”
Robinson, Ali, and King reflected the growing dichotomy between what was viewed as the “bourgeois” goals of the integrationist civil rights movement proper, like university admissions and jobs in Woolworth’s management, and the urgent aims of a younger column of black activists like Carmichael: namely, addressing the economic inequities of class and racial prejudice that locked black Americans in urban ghettos, with few job prospects and often tense or even violent interactions with police, compounded by the invisible chains dragging spiraling numbers of already hopeless young men to Vietnam, often by way of all-white draft boards. (It was a convergence that would manifest itself a year later in Mexico City in the 1968 Summer Olympic Games, when a pair of track and field athletes, bronze medalist John Carlos and gold medalist Tommie Smith, raised their black-gloved fists in the universally understood gesture of Black Power.) King himself had begun to gravitate toward those causes, to the dismay of old friends like Robinson.
Black enlistees accounted for one in five combat deaths between 1961 and 1966—a quarter of the dead in 1965—despite making up less than 10 percent of the U.S. Army ranks and 13 percent of the American population. Moreover, few black citizens were able to take advantage of the draft exemptions offered to collegians, and increasing numbers were subject to relaxed draft standards that essentially punished black men already barred from decent educations by easing their path to Vietnam. And so African Americans were increasingly siding with the antiwar movement. The furious attacks on Ali in particular, from the sports media and the mainstream press, made him the leading voice of black dissent on the war, praised as a “rugged individualist” in the pages of the Amsterdam News, where black New Yorkers interviewed by the paper’s reporters in the spring of 1968 said they’d oppose Ali when white celebrities marched off to Vietnam.
For the first time since becoming president, Lyndon Johnson faced the possibility of a broad backlash against his leadership, from the very community he’d thought would be exceptionally and eternally loyal.
As the 1968 election approached, Johnson faced challengers for his party’s nomination, in particular an antiwar candidate, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota, who shocked the sitting president by winning 42 percent of the vote in the March 12 New Hampshire primary. (Hillary Rodham, then a junior at Wellesley, had resigned from the Young Republicans and was driving to New Hampshire on weekends to stuff envelopes for the McCarthy campaign.)
And when Robert Kennedy, his late brother’s attorney general and by this time a senator from New York, saw how well McCarthy was doing, he too entered the race, ensuring that Johnson continued to face the seemingly ever-present ghosts of Camelot.
Robert Kennedy appealed to young, liberal, white voters who were passionately against the Vietnam War. Unlike McCarthy, he also had a natural appeal to black voters as the man who had carried out his brother’s aims with regard to civil rights at the Justice Department, and who together with Jack Kennedy had telephoned Coretta Scott King when her husband languished in a Birmingham jail. The number of black voters had swollen to more than 3 million across the South—topping a hundr
ed thousand even in Mississippi—triple the total eight years before.
On March 31, Johnson announced he would not seek reelection, saying he was withdrawing his name in the interests of national unity. It was a stunning development for a president so recently at the height of his power.
On April 4, the Senate was debating the Civil Rights Act of 1968. It was the last in the trio of bills Johnson planned as the crowning achievements of his presidency. Commonly known as the Fair Housing Act, the bill sought to end discrimination in the sale, rental, and financing of housing. King had marched in Chicago the previous summer for open housing, even moving part-time into a housing development in a run-down section on the city’s West Side to dramatize the “Daley brand” of segregation plaguing northern cities, which since 1950 were home to accelerating millions of migrating black families.
White Americans up north, along with the northern media, had no trouble shaking their heads at the retrograde southern policeman or the cartoonish segregationist, but it wasn’t so easy to recognize discrimination in their own backyards. Passing open housing laws was, in fundamental ways, a longer reach even than voting rights.
In the Senate, Ed Brooke, the body’s lone black member and a studiously temperate, liberal Republican, rose to tell of his own experience, coming home from fighting in World War II, only to be turned away from the homes of his choice because he was black. Brooke had introduced the Fair Housing Amendments in February, alongside Minnesota’s Walter Mondale, and he’d sat on a federal commission, the Kerner Commission, which proclaimed housing segregation as among the causes of the urban unrest that had overtaken the country for four years of long, hot summers. Everett Dirksen, whose negotiating skills had been so crucial to passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, beat back yet another filibuster by southern Democrats, and the bill was passed.
By 6:05 that evening, Martin Luther King Jr. lay bleeding on the balcony outside room 306 at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.
King’s murder sparked riots in more than a hundred cities, including Chicago, where nine black men died during two nights of mayhem, and where ten days after the unrest on the city’s West Side, Mayor Richard J. Daley infamously told reporters he’d issued orders to his police superintendent, “to shoot to kill any arsonist or anyone with a Molotov cocktail in his hand in Chicago because they’re potential murderers, and to issue a police order to shoot to maim or cripple any arsonists and looters—arsonists to kill and looters to maim and detain.”
Among the few major cities spared the chaos was Boston, where Hillary Rodham was among the thousands who gathered in peaceful protest downtown, and where James Brown forged ahead with a planned concert at the Boston Garden. In a deal between the singer’s team and city officials, the concert was broadcast live on the local public television station, WGBH, keeping many young Bostonians at home.
In New York City, Robert Kennedy spoke in mourning for the slain civil rights leader. But just two months later, just after midnight on June 5, Kennedy—by then the likely Democratic nominee—would also be felled by an assassin’s bullet, as he campaigned in California.
The scenes of urban rioting on the nightly television news broadcasts and on newspaper front pages stoked resentment among white working-class residents in northern and Rust Belt cities who were already rebelling against Johnson’s Great Society. For white families, keeping their suburbs white meant they had to fight federally mandated housing laws, busing that sought to forcibly integrate suburban schools, and increasingly, Johnson’s Democratic Party.
Republican nominee Richard Nixon and his team were more than willing to use it all. His campaign commercials featured jarring images from Vietnam that pointed to Johnson’s mistakes at war and Nixon’s vow to bring the conflict to “an honorable end.” The ads were tagged with the ominous caption: “This time, vote, like your whole world depended on it.”
The Nixon campaign also focused on a white southern backlash against the civil rights legislation passed in 1964 and 1965, and in a precursor to the “southern strategy” Nixon would deploy four years later, flipped the Party of Lincoln, all but banished from the southern states after Reconstruction, on its head.
“Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?” explained Kevin Phillips, a young lawyer who would put his operating principles for the Nixon campaign on paper in a 1969 book called The Emerging Republican Majority. “Put those together with the Farm Belt and the Rocky Mountains, and we don’t need the big cities. We don’t even want them. Sure, Hubert [Humphrey] will carry Riverside Drive in November. La-de-dah. What will he do in Oklahoma?”
Phillips foresaw a day when, in the words of Warren Weaver Jr., in a September 1969 review of Phillips’s book for the New York Times, the Democratic Party “will consist largely of treacherous Yankees who forsook the Republican Party over the past 30 years, Negroes, Jews, some stubborn Scandinavians and the liberal establishment,” broadly defined as a “privileged elite, blind to the needs and interests of the large national majority.”
In late August, the Democrats opened their convention in Chicago amid antiwar demonstrations outside the convention hall and Mayor Daley’s brutal deployment of the police to put them down by any available means.
Johnson and Daley doubted that McCarthy stood a chance against Nixon’s “law and order” message. Daley hoped to see Ted Kennedy, the last surviving brother of the late president, be the nominee, but instead Johnson conspired with Democratic bosses to unseat McCarthy, using the party’s arcane nominating rules to install Humphrey, his beleaguered vice president and former senator from Minnesota. McCarthy’s backers, including those who had supported Robert Kennedy, could only watch in despair as Johnson and Humphrey did to the antiwar liberals what they had done to the Mississippi Freedom Democrats in 1964.
As the nomination was announced, antiwar protests outside grew into full-blown riots in the “Battle of Michigan Avenue” between stink-bomb-throwing protesters and tear-gas-firing police, who arrested nearly six hundred people including liberal activist Abbie Hoffman and Black Panthers cofounder Bobby Seale. Inside the hall liberal delegates marched around singing “We Shall Overcome,” the civil rights anthem Johnson had borrowed in announcing the Voting Rights Act before a joint session of Congress in 1965, as Martin Luther King Jr. watched the president’s speech on television, from the living room of Dr. Sullivan and Richie Jean Jackson’s home in Selma, Alabama, and silently wept.
Johnson, in his final act as the leader of his party, planted the seeds of its further fragmentation by consenting to a demand by Senator George McGovern, leader of the liberal wing, for a commission that would change the way the party’s nominee was chosen in future conventions. The new rules would make every primary and caucus binding, limiting the votes of party insiders and thus their power to impose a nominee. The commission challenged the makeup of convention delegates, requiring that the percentage of female, minority, and young delegates mirror the proportions of those groups in the states.
The changes set the stage for a more inclusive party, where outsider candidates would have a fighting chance; McGovern himself would be the first beneficiary in 1972. But they would also force the party into a bitter inner conflict, between the emerging constituencies empowered by this new paradigm and the increasingly alienated Democratic Center-Right.
Nixon won the general election narrowly, by just over 812,000 out of 76 million votes, but in an electoral rout, 301 to 191, with George Wallace winning 10 million votes and five southern states: Arkansas, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, and his home state of Alabama, on a third-party ticket. On election night, with the vote counting in Illinois dragging on for more than fifteen hours, Wallace’s forty-six electoral votes even briefly threatened to throw the contest to the House of Representatives.
Nixon had performed poorly in big cities like New York, Philadelphia, and Detroit, with their large black populations. But he’d swept the Midwest, the Rust Belt, and much
of the “Sun Belt,” which his operatives prized, including Florida and his home state of California. In a poignant turnabout for the candidate who’d narrowly lost the White House in 1960 to the superior Daley machine, Nixon’s final margin of victory came just after midnight when he won Illinois.
Humphrey, for his part, had managed to turn out what the Washington Post called the “Roosevelt Coalition: organized labor, Negroes, Mexican-Americans and Jews.” But that collection, Phillips’s politically incorrect amalgam of “treacherous Yankees, Negroes,” and liberals, wasn’t enough to put a Democrat back in the White House.
Going forward, Democratic leaders would wonder whether their party had fundamentally erred by allowing itself to become too liberal on issues of law and order, too tentative in matters of war, and too beholden to those who were determined to push the country to its ideological limits on questions of race. Those questions would become the defining inner struggle for modern Democrats.
CHAPTER 2
All in the Family
Archie Bunker: Now, no prejudice intended, but, you know, I always check with the Bible on these here things. I think that, I mean if God had meant for us to be together, he’d-a put us together. But look what he done. He put you over in Africa, and put the rest of us in all the white countries.
Sammy Davis Jr.: Well, he must’ve told ’em where we were because somebody came and got us.
—All in the Family, “Sammy’s Visit,” 1972
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY THAT EMERGED FROM THE 1968 election was fundamentally different from the one that entered the civil rights battles of 1963 and 1964. Since the time of FDR, the party had balanced the power of its southern wing against the pragmatism of northern elites who, while occasionally pricking the Dixiecrats on civil rights, more often tried to accommodate them in order to maintain the party’s near-constant congressional majority.
