Myth America by Kevin M. Kruse

Author:Kevin M. Kruse [M. Kruse, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2023-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

14

White Backlash

Lawrence B. Glickman

On September 27, 1966, CBS Reports aired a documentary called Black Power–White Backlash. The documentary began with chants of “Black Power” followed by Mike Wallace’s somber narration: “Summer 1966 was a season of revelation for the white man in the North. For the first time, he began fully to comprehend the intensity of his feelings and his fears about the black man.” Throughout the documentary, Wallace didn’t simply foreground white fears and anxieties; he claimed that “Black power was the catalyst” of those fears, comparing white backlash to a chemical reaction. White people had become “fed up with racial turmoil,” he claimed, and, as a result, were now “countermarching, counterdemonstrating” in opposition to Black Power.1

Contrary to Wallace’s narrative, summer 1966 was far from “the first time” that white people acted on their “fears and anxieties” about the Black struggle for freedom and equality. Indeed, just a few days after the documentary was broadcast, Martin Nolan of the Boston Globe observed that the “‘white backlash’ is now 3½ years old.” And less than a month later, the syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak claimed that “the backlash is becoming a permanent feature of the political scene,” noting a lingering “bitter anti-Negro resentment.” Yet the Black Power–White Backlash documentary reversed that history. Even the ordering of the words in its title—like much journalistic and scholarly writing about opposition to the civil rights movement—implied that the “white backlash” was a response to “Black Power.” But the title got the history wrong. Whereas white backlash had been coined in 1963 to describe extant white resistance to emerging policy initiatives toward racial equality, Black Power was a brand-new phrase when the documentary aired in September 1966. The activist Stokely Carmichael, who appeared in the documentary, had brought the phrase to the public square in a speech only two months earlier.2

By the time the documentary aired, more than three years of polling data showed a trend of accelerating white backlash. Starting in May 1963, even before President John F. Kennedy promoted civil rights (his legislation having been stalled in Congress for several months), a Gallup poll asked a question every month about whether the Kennedy (and later the Lyndon B. Johnson) administration “is pushing racial integration too fast, or not fast enough.” For the next fifteen months, George Gallup reported that those who thought things were moving “too fast” grew, with the ratio of person who said “too fast” to “not fast enough” increasing every month from two-to-one to four-to-one. By October 1963, 50 percent of Americans said JFK was going “too fast.” Headlines like “Gallup: Too Fast,” and “Integration Push Too Fast in Feeling of Those Surveyed” appeared regularly.3

The reversal of agency on display in the documentary—in which civil rights extremism caused white counterreaction—was not an aberration but was actually typical of how white backlashes have long been explained and continue to be understood today. Commentators often misassign responsibility for backlashes, as Wallace did, by implying that African American activists are

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