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July 22 - July 30, 2020
the new President indeed played skillfully upon national mourning to enact the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. Then Johnson had turned suddenly coy and insecure. Having consciously alienated the century-old segregationist base of his Democratic Party, he refused to see King, pretended he had nothing to do with his own nominating convention, and lashed out privately at both King’s Negroes and white Southerners.
Clark asserted that King came to Selma “to satisfy his revenge against me and also to make his personal bank account larger” by stirring trouble over a voting issue that was phony because “nigras are registered pretty much as they desire to.”
No one, including President Johnson, foresaw America’s first loss of a war, any more than the day’s tear gas victims pictured Selma as the last great thrust of a movement built on patriotic idealism. It was a turning point. The tide of confidence in equal citizenship had swelled over decades to confront segregation as well as the Nazis, and would roll forward still, but an opposing tide of resentment and disbelief rose to challenge the overall direction of American politics, contesting the language of freedom.
“If a man is 36 years old, as I happen to be,” he said, “and some great truth stands before the door of his life…and he refuses to stand up because he wants to live a little longer and he’s afraid that his home will get bombed or he’s afraid that he will lose his job, he’s afraid that he will get shot or beaten down by State Troopers, he may go on and live until he’s 80, but he’s just as dead at 36 as he would be at 80. And the state of breathing in his life is merely the announcement of an earlier death of the spirit.”
the heavy pressure from the lobbying clergy to dispatch U.S. soldiers to Alabama. “They all say, ‘we want troops,’” Johnson told McNamara. But troops, he said, really meant sending “some young boy who’s just been drafted or joined in,” and who lacked the ability to handle prosecutions or complex racial entanglements.
Wallace defined the problem as malcontent demonstrators trained in Moscow or New York. “You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” he said. “You can never satisfy them. First it’s a front seat on the bus. Next it’s a takeover of parks. Then it’s public schools. Then it’s voting rights. Then it’s jobs. Then it’s distribution of wealth without work.”
“What do you want left when you die?” Johnson intoned. “Do you want a great big marble monument that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Built,’ or do you want a little piece of scrawny pine board that reads, ‘George Wallace—He Hated’?”
“Your policy is all stick and no carrot, Mr. President,” said Lippmann. “You’re bombing them without offering any incentive for them to stop fighting.” Johnson replied genuinely that he loathed the war and would do almost anything to escape it, but said the Vietnamese Communists were offering him no carrots either, short of a reciprocal invitation to leave.
To lift up a vision of justice “one day,” when “our nation will realize its true heroes,” King drew upon memories etched in his speeches since the Montgomery bus boycott. He pictured first among future honorees the “old, oppressed, battered Negro women,” symbolized by the steadfast walker Mother Pollard, “who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness, ‘My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.’”
He quoted Thomas Jefferson’s premonition on blinkered democracy and slavery: “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”
Rustin told the SCLC board. “No social movement has ever been successful in this country which did not involve as an ally the hard-core white middle classes.”
While Johnson hoped that North Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh would choose economic rewards over military punishment, he admitted to himself that he would never negotiate if the positions were reversed.
Moderate segregationists would tolerate racially mixed classes in planned stages, he told President Johnson in May, but they could not survive politically if they must integrate the teachers, too. “You know and I know that I couldn’t do that with a shotgun,” he groaned.
“the North Vietnamese just said, ‘fuck you,’ that’s exactly what they said,” to overtures for talks. “And I don’t blame them!” Johnson exclaimed. “I defeated Goldwater by fifteen million [votes]. Now why would I want to give Goldwater half my cabinet? They’re winning—why would they want to talk?”
Malcolm scorched the promise of American democracy. “I am not interested in becoming American,” he said, “because America is not interested in me.” Above any political ideology, he clung to the belief that only one force could dissolve racial hatred at the root—purified, nonsectarian Islam—but the Autobiography minimized this notion because ghostwriter Alex Haley and the Grove Press editors knew it would leave Americans cold.
King declared a collective purpose “to make it clear that we love America…so much that we are going to stand up with all of our might to remind her when she is wrong. We are not newcomers here. We do not have to give our credentials of loyalty. For you see, we worked here and labored for two centuries without wages.”
Hoover had publicly called King “the most notorious liar in the country.”
Johnson closed with a simple three-part conclusion. He was “not happy with Vietnam.” But “we cannot run out.” Therefore, the bombing must resume.
Wallace himself already looked to the 1968 presidential race, and rumors flew of a tacit understanding with President Johnson. If Wallace quietly retired the “White Supremacy” banner, thereby making Alabama more palatable to national Democrats, Johnson might relax loyalty rules to accommodate a fellow
Rupp, the legendary “Baron of the Bluegrass,” was strong enough to resist. The Kentucky legislature had flown the capitol flag at half mast to mourn his loss to integrated City College of New York in 1950, when even the professional NBA was still segregated, and his last team would be all white when he retired in 1972 with the most career wins of any college coach.
FBI wiretaps picked up Stanley Levison’s pragmatic assessment of infighting between and within civil rights groups. He observed that King’s peers were delighted to see him “sticking his neck out” on Vietnam. “Roy [Wilkins] and Whitney [Young] have snuggled up to Johnson,” he told Clarence Jones. “Martin is now in a different relationship to the White House than he used to be. They are on the inside, and I think they love it.”
CHICAGO nationalized race, complementing the impact of Watts. Without it King would be confined to posterity more as a regional figure. The violence against Northern demonstrations cracked a beguiling, cultivated conceit that bigotry was the province of backward Southerners, treatable by enlightened but firm instruction.
“For me,” said Reagan, “the vote reflects the great concern of the people with the size and cost of government.” His dubious but genial disclaimer of racial politics in California was more attractive than the bitter view of his vanquished opponent, who grumbled that Reagan won a 57 percent landslide with only 5 percent of the black vote and a quarter of Hispanics. “Whether we like it or not,” said the two-term incumbent Pat Brown, “the people want separation of the races.”
Nicholas Lemann, a student of the black exodus from the South into Chicago, identified a larger reaction of potent, cumulative effect. “The beginning of the modern rise of conservatism coincided exactly with the country’s beginning to realize the true magnitude and consequences of the black migration,” he wrote in 1991, adding that the influential neo-conservative movement was founded then “by former liberals who lost faith in large part over the issue of race in the North; in Irving Kristol’s famous apothegm, ‘a neo-conservative is a liberal who has been mugged by reality,’ it’s not difficult
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McNamara wrote. “The picture of the world’s greatest superpower killing or seriously injuring 1,000 noncombatants a week, while trying to pound a tiny backward nation into submission on an issue whose merits are hotly disputed, is not a pretty one.”
“I’ve lost ten thousand boys out there,” Johnson kept saying. His war would become “increasingly hostage to the dead,” author Thomas Powers later observed.
“What I am trying to get you to see this morning is that a man may be self-centered in his self-denial and self-righteous in his self-sacrifice,” King declared. “His generosity may feed his ego and his piety may feed his pride. So, without love, benevolence becomes egotism and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.”
“We cannot talk of Dr. DuBois without recognizing that he was a radical all of his life,” said King. “Some people would like to ignore the fact that he was a Communist in his later years.”
For Levison, the DuBois event was emblematic of despair in progressive circles. “The people are depressed,” he said. “They feel that nobody has answers to riots in the streets. They feel frustrated about Vietnam.” Levison thought the depression was unwarranted but real, like the paradox of DuBois, who could be recognized either for a long arc of achievement or his bitter, halfhearted flight into Communist ideology.
“The American people are infected with racism—that is the peril,” King concluded. “Paradoxically, they are also infected with democratic ideals—that is the hope.”
He had never fired a Kennedy appointee, the President whispered, and had asked many like Sorensen not to leave. He regarded all he had done as a continuation of the Kennedy-Johnson program. He believed President Kennedy could look down to this day and agree Johnson had kept faith in education, poverty, and civil rights even while repaid with disaffection by Negroes and young people. “The next man who sits in this chair,” he managed to say, “will have to do better.”
The probate court in Atlanta established that King died intestate, leaving no will and a net worth less than $6,000—his estate’s largest asset being a disputed bequest of $12,351.36 from the eccentric poet and essayist Dorothy Parker.
