The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties

by Christopher Caldwell

For all their pious sentiments about desegregating the South, whites opposed every single activist step that might have brought desegregation about, and every single activist who was working to do so. In 1961, they thought, by a margin of 57 to 28 percent, that the black students staging sit-ins at North Carolina lunch counters and the “Freedom Riders” occupying segregated buses between Washington, D.C., and New Orleans “hurt” rather than “helped” the cause of civil rights. In 1964, on the eve of the Civil Rights Act, only 16 percent of Americans said that mass demonstrations had helped the cause of racial equality—versus 74 percent who said they had hurt it. Sixty percent even disapproved of the March on Washington, at least in the days leading up to it, while only 23 percent approved.