When Crack Was King: A People's History of a Misunderstood Era

by Donovan X. Ramsey

Nixon is perhaps best remembered for his corruption and the Watergate scandal, but his brand as a politician was a fierce conservatism steeped in the politics of white resentment. But unlike Wallace, who advertised his white supremacist ideologies, Nixon’s approach was more insidious. The best example is his choice of Spiro Agnew, the governor of Maryland, to be his running mate in 1968. Agnew owed his national profile to the stir he caused when he publicly dismissed the findings of the Kerner Commission report. “Why don’t impoverished white Americans riot? Could it be that they know they will not meet with sympathy, that collective white lawlessness will not be tolerated?” Agnew asked in a July 1968 speech to the National Governors’ Conference. “It is not the centuries of racism and deprivation that have built to an explosive crescendo but the fact that lawbreaking has become a socially acceptable and occasionally stylish form of dissent.”