He Was Our Man in Washington by Owen Symes

Author:Owen Symes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
Published: 2021-02-19T00:00:00+00:00

4.1.4 Civil Rights vs. Law and Order

The federal government responded to black agitation in several ways. Under Truman, the military was desegregated (after much internal resistance). Eisenhower tried to ignore the civil rights movement, but after Brown v. Board of Education – and the shattering of the notion that separate institutions for African Americans could be equal in quality to those of whites – he belatedly sent federal troops to defend desegregation efforts in Little Rock, Arkansas (which he did not out of solidarity with the struggle for justice, but because the governor of Arkansas refused to honor federal law – a defiance Eisenhower could not brook).32 By the early 1960s some reformist legislation had been passed, but federal law still did not do enough to protect black civil rights. The Kennedy administration talked a good talk, but did not make a priority of the black struggle; Kennedy, after all, was far more interested in foreign policy than anything on the domestic scene, having said to Nixon in 1961: “It really is true that foreign affairs is the only important issue for a President to handle, isn’t it? I mean, who gives a shit if the minimum wage is $1.15 or $1.25…?”33 After Kennedy’s assassination, president Johnson, responding to increasingly large and fervent demonstrations by millions of blacks and their white allies across the country, reversed this emphasis and pushed strongly for domestic reform. In 1964 the strongest civil rights bill since Reconstruction passed Congress, and in 1965 the Voting Rights Act passed as well. Now federal eyes were looking at the abuses of the South, federal boots were marching in defense of black rights, and progress finally seemed at hand.

Crucially, this push for political reform did not occur in a vacuum. Martin Luther King Jr.’s non-violent marches (which often devolved into violence at the hands of brutal and determined policemen) swam in contentious currents. Opposition to the Vietnam War was growing – and would hit fever pitch by the early 1970s; levels of reported crime were on the rise; the migratory waves of millions of African Americans from the South to the North and West crested; and urban uprisings (notably that of Watts, a black Los Angeles neighborhood, in 1965) shook the foundations of polite society. Many whites, therefore, saw the civil rights movement in the context of national disintegration.34 Said representative John Bell Williams: “This exodus of Negroes from the South, and their influx into the great metropolitan centers of other areas of the Nation, has been accompanied by a wave of crime…What has civil rights accomplished for these areas?…Segregation is the only answer as most Americans – not the politicians – have realized for hundreds of years.”35

FBI statistics did indeed show an increase in crime, especially as the civil rights movement gained momentum: reported street crime quadrupled and homicide rates nearly doubled.36 Three things explain this rise. (1) Reforms in how crime was reported and tabulated: for instance, the number of recorded robberies and burglaries in New

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