Blacks & Jews, pt. 3 - Sidebar Discussion

This is a sidebar discussion to supplement my current series on the history of relations between Jewish- and African-Americans in the 20th century. It dawned on me that I needed to lay a little groundwork before we got to the chaos I’m going to describe in the next (and hopefully final) installment of this essay series. The title of this series is Blacks and Jews, so obviously I’ve been treading on dangerous ground since I wrote the first sentence, but I’ve tried in good faith to tell the truth, and where I voice my own opinions and perhaps veered occasionally into polemic, I’ve done so in good faith as well. Of course, the comments section and my inbox is always open, so if you have a disagreement, question, or comment, don’t be shy about sharing them. Thanks for reading.

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We live in the waning days of the Baby Boomer. That generation was larger than any other in American history, and the wealthiest. Their control over America’s most powerful institutions has been more or less uninterrupted since the early ‘90s. They’ve used that control to turn their own generation’s origin story (The Sixties) into a new ur-myth for the whole country - successfully replacing 1776, 1865, and 1945, with the desecrated monuments and fallen statues to prove it. There is almost no corner of American culture, including ostensibly conservative ones, where people still consider George Washington to be a more sacred figure than Martin Luther King, Jr. (if you don’t believe me, go deface a monument to each of them and wait to see which one calls down the wrath of God, or the Department of Justice, on your head). The history of the 1960s has been supplanted by the myth of The Sixties, and like all myths this one has holes in it.

One of the biggest misconceptions about the era mistakes the end for the beginning. The Sixties, to most people, runs roughly through the Summer of Love (1967) to Woodstock (or maybe Altamont, 1969), but the truth is that the great movements of the decade had by then run their course and had their effects. The black rights movement reached its zenith in 1964-65 - years before anyone had ever heard of a Black Panther - with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act. The Summer of Love did not represent the birth pangs of the hippie movement, but its death rattle. What most people think of as The Sixties marked the moment when opposition to the various revolutions crossed a critical threshold, and the counterculture became a mainstream consumer phenomenon (which is to say that it ceased to be a counterculture in all but name).

Defining the exact moment when an era begins or ends is always somewhat arbitrary, but we can point to major turning points and vibe shifts with a little more precision. One of these moments came in the summer of 1965. People often point to the murder of JFK (1963) as the beginning of The Sixties, and fair enough, but glance at Washington, DC, to take one example of the national mood, and you’d find politicians still speaking of the future as a 1950s Space Age utopia. In his book, Nixonland, author Richard Perlstein describes the buzz and optimism that defined the early administration of LBJ:

“I’m sick of all the people who talk about the things we can’t do,” Lyndon Johnson told an aide in one of his patented exhortations. “Hell, we’re the richest country in the world, the most powerful, we can do it all.” The Great Society was the name Johnson gave his ambition. “It rests on abundance and liberty for all,” he said in a May 22 speech. “A society of success without squalor, beauty without barrenness, works of genius without the wretchedness of poverty.” The rhetoric was incredible. Still more incredible, it seemed reasonable…

Lyndon Johnson successfully framed his reformist agenda as something that was not ideological at all. Conservative, even. Simply a pragmatic response to pressing national problems, swept forward on ineluctable tides of material progress… “I doubt there have ever been so many people seeing things alike on decision day,” Lyndon Johnson said of his victory on November 5th. “These are the most hopeful times since Christ was born in Bethlehem,” he said while lighting the White House Christmas tree. And in his January 4, 1965 State of the Union Address, he said, “We have achieved a unity of interest among our people that is unmatched in the history of freedom.” He continued: “I propose that we begin a massive attack on crippling and killing diseases. I propose that we launch a national effort to make the American city a better, and more stimulating place to live. I propose that we increase the beauty of America and end the poisoning of our rivers and the air that we breathe. I propose that we eliminate every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote. I propose that we honor and support the achievements of thought and the creations of art.”...

“Heart disease, cancer, and stroke can be conquered, not in a millennium, not in a century, but in the next few onrushing decades.” The down payment on the revolution was medical insurance for the elderly, funded out of Social Security contributions, another stalled New Deal era initiative steered by Johnson past its permanent obstacle, the American Medical Association... 

And then there was civil rights. The genesis of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 echoed the genesis of the Civil Rights Act of 1964… Following the march by Martin Luther King, freshly minted Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, President Johnson prepared to give the greatest speech of his career… Yet no one was prepared for the moral force of the speech Lyndon Johnson gave to Congress and the nation on March 15. He wrote it himself, and delivered it over the objections of temporizing aides. “It is wrong, deadly wrong, to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of states’ rights or national rights, there is only the struggle for human rights. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it is not just Negroes, really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.” Then stunningly he raised his arms in the air and invoked the slogan of a movement that was not too long ago perceived as the preeminent irritant to America’s national unity: “And we shall overcome.” There followed the silence of a reaction too stunned for mere applause. Martin Luther King cried. Senators cried. The next Selma procession on March 21st was celebratory, thousands of singing marchers, ranks of glamorous celebrities in the fore, marching all the way through to Montgomery…

“Should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue,” Lyndon Johnson had proclaimed, “then we will have failed as a people, and as a nation.” He signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 on August 6th, under the Capitol Dome. He intoned about the slaves who “came in darkness and they came in chains. Today we strike away the last major shackle of those fierce and ancient bonds.” People cried. The Negroes’ cause was America’s cause. Who could argue with that?

Those of you who have listened to God’s Socialist know what comes next. Less than one week after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act, the worst urban violence since the draft riots of the Civil War exploded in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles. Unlike the riots of the 1860s, however, this revolution would be televised. Reporters couldn’t go deep into the warzone without being attacked, but a helicopter streamed live footage of mass violence into homes across the United States for the next five days and nights. Aerial shots showed crowds of black people setting buildings on fire and dancing around them, then attacking and chasing away firefighters who tried to put out the flames. Rioters gave interviews promising that the violence would soon spread into the suburbs, into the neighborhoods and into the homes of white people. More than once viewers saw a TV news helicopter forced to flee the scene because it was taking small arms fire from the ground. There had been racial violence before this in the ‘60s, but nobody was prepared for the scale and aggression of Watts. The televised scenes seemed to portray a mindlessness and nihilism unfamiliar to people for whom Rosa Parks and MLK had defined the racial question in America.