Similarly, in 1966 a Harris poll asked whether Martin Luther King, specifically, was “helping or hurting the Negro cause of civil rights.” Only 36 percent said helping while 50 percent said hurting. It wasn’t just King. It was the whole movement. On the eve of the passage of the Voting Rights Act in the summer of 1965, a Harris survey asked whether demonstrations by African Americans had helped or hurt the group’s cause. Given that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had passed the year before and voting rights were on the cusp of passage, it is hard to imagine how a person could say the
...more
