The Music Has Gone Out of the Movement by David C. Carter

Author:David C. Carter [Carter, David C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781469606576
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 2012-09-01T00:00:00+00:00

LION IN THE STREETS. A 1967 Herblock Cartoon, copyright by The Herb Block Foundation.

clearly intended to raise the alarm, but his statement, like that of most contemporaries, conflated many cities into one predictive model. Both black and white observers usually viewed the nation’s cities through similarly undifferentiated lenses—as the ghetto, just as many in and beyond Washington’s Beltway had approached the Moynihan Report as though it were diagnosing all the ills of the black family, unitary in its pathology.93

All the visitors urged Johnson to “stay the course”—evoking Cronin’s allusion to Alice in Wonderland—but Markman’s report called on the president to consider broadening antipoverty efforts, as well as the overall federal commitment to the cities, with the long view in mind. But with warmer weather just around the corner, many expressed their concern that, in the interim, summer youth employment programs, recreation leagues, human relations committees, and antipoverty agencies were far from adequate as “riot insurance.”

Both administration insiders and scathing public critics of the White House occasionally applied this cynical catchphrase to these programs.94 The “scouting reports” agreed that the scale of federal assistance was too small and local government initiative too often lacking. Events seemed to be bearing out the grim prediction made a full year before by Johnson’s high-profile director of CRS. Roger Wilkins had weighed the commitment of federal resources against the dimensions of the urban crisis and starkly determined: “We don’t have the horses.”95

Did the ghetto visits represent a genuine attempt on the part of the White House to recognize and respond to shifts in African American leadership? Lyndon Johnson had a long-standing pattern of meeting with a select group of civil rights leaders—typically the Big Six, although this 1960s version of a Rooseveltian Black Cabinet had shrunk steadily in and after 1965, with the attrition of CORE and SNCC in 1966 and increasing mutual estrangement between King and the White House. Conferring with this tiny group of African American civil rights leaders to craft national civil rights policy shaped the president’s understanding of who “mattered” among blacks in the cities.

In all but a handful of cases, black women fell outside the White House’s narrowly defined parameters of leadership, as did most working-class African Americans. Women often predominated in civil rights movements at the grass roots, but they seldom appeared on Johnson’s radar screen until they became visible in a way the president deemed to be both familiar and politically “legitimate.” Just as he welcomed the opportunity to engage black male politicians, like Cleveland’s victorious mayoral candidate, Carl Stokes, he was perfectly at ease dealing with Barbara Jordan, victorious in her bid to gain a seat in the Texas statehouse. Johnson was also comfortable with women who had large middle-class constituencies, like Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women.

But he had next to no patience for women who refused to play by the ground rules of political participation he expected others to observe, and for that reason he never forgave Mississippi’s Fannie Lou Hamer for her fly-in-the-ointment disruption of “his” Democratic National Convention in 1964.

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