White Ethnic New York by Joshua M. Zeitz

Author:Joshua M. Zeitz [Zeitz, Joshua M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, 20th Century, Social Science, Ethnic Studies, General, Political Science, Political Ideologies, Conservatism & Liberalism
ISBN: 9780807872802
Google: gjybSZTCfpcC
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-09-01T15:57:15+00:00

6 Race

In December 1966 the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal announced that white “backlash” had come to Brooklyn. Only a month before, New York City voters had approved a binding referendum that eliminated the Civilian Complaint Review Board, a commission established by Mayor John Lindsay to hear official charges of police misconduct. In no borough were the results more lopsided than in Brooklyn, where working-class citizens plainly rejected the board.

“It would be wrong to dismiss the vote on November 8th... as a local aberration in a city characterized by George Wallace as home of the ‘Communist-Socialist-Beatnik Conspiracy,’” explained writer James J. Graham. “The size of the anti-Board tally, especially among normally liberal Jewish voters, and on an issue much less sensitive than open housing, for instance, dramatically demonstrated that whites in big cities are ready to call a halt to Negro advances too close to home.” The editorial page of the Nation agreed, informing its readers that, “like Proteus, the white backlash has many shapes. One is the measure on the New York City ballot giving the voters the opportunity to abolish the Civilian Review Board.” Obliterating the board signaled nothing less than “a rebuke to civil rights groups and a setback for the whole civil rights movement.”1

New York City’s review board controversy came three years after President Kennedy began receiving scattered reports from Democratic Party operatives of a certain “back-lash” brewing in northern cities against his proposed civil rights initiative. (This was probably when the term first entered America’s political lexicon.) National opinion surveys in mid-1963 revealed that 41 percent of all voters felt the president was moving “too fast” on integration; 42 percent opposed Kennedy’s legislative package, the substance of which President Lyndon Johnson ultimately signed into law a year later as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Six months before Kennedy’s assassination, White House insiders believed that the administration’s new push for civil rights had cost the Democratic Party 4.5 million white voters. These estimates led even the president to worry: “This issue could cost me the election,” he told civil rights leaders.2

Three years later, in the wake of a curiously strong showing by Alabama governor George Wallace in several northern presidential primaries, liberals began to worry that working-class racism might rend the fabric of the celebrated New Deal coalition. The same day that New Yorkers went to the polls to defeat the Civilian Review Board, a former B-grade actor named Ronald Reagan trounced incumbent governor Edmund “Pat” Brown in California’s gubernatorial election. Brown’s defeat owed largely to the defection of conservative Democrats allied with Los Angeles’s law-and-order mayor, Sam Yorty. Frightened by the Watts riot of 1965 and embittered by Brown’s support of open housing policies, these voters turned to Reagan, whose campaign appealed subtly but unquestionably to their racial fears.

Thus it seemed to the Nation that events on each coast were of a piece. A week before the election, its editorial page worried that “even a symbolic victory for the backlash in cosmopolitan New York City

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