King: A Life

by Jonathan Eig

It had been nearly ten years since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In those ten years, The New York Times observed, “the stereotype of the apathetic, satisfied Negro” had been obliterated; the federal government had joined the fight against racial segregation; and people of all races and political views had come to agree that race would be “the great domestic issue facing this country” for years to come. After a decade, however, only 1 percent of white children in the South went to school with Negro children. Negro men were still twice as likely as white men to be unemployed, and the median income for Negro families remained stuck at about half that of white families. Many schools in the North had grown more segregated as white families over the course of the decade migrated from cities to suburbs, in part to escape the growing urban Negro population. In New York City, a majority of white people surveyed by The New York Times said the civil rights movement had gone too far. The white people surveyed “spoke of Negroes’ receiving ‘everything on a silver platter’ and of ‘reverse discrimination’ against whites,” the Times reported. More than half of those surveyed said the movement was going “too fast,” and nearly half said picketing hurt the Negro cause more than it helped. The Times referred to the phenomenon as a “white backlash,” a new term for the newspaper in 1964.