Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (80 page)

It seemed in early 1964 that Goldwater would fail in this effort. Polls suggested that he had relatively little appeal, even among Republicans. Pundits observed correctly that he was too far to the right to capture moderate voters. But Wallace's successes in the primaries exposed the rage of many Americans against liberal policies and gave heart to right-wing elements in the GOP. Goldwater's major contender for the nomination, moreover, had political liabilities of his own. This was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York, a liberal who commanded virtually no support in the conservative wing of the party. Two years earlier, when he had seemed assured of the 1964 nomination, Rockefeller had left his wife of many years and married a much younger woman. This action badly blighted his chances in 1964.

When Goldwater narrowly beat Rockefeller in a head-to-head California primary in June, it was clear that the nomination was his. A month later, in mid-July, he got the nod in a raucous GOP convention in San Francisco that exposed the bitter feelings rending the party. Goldwater delegates booed so loudly when Rockefeller arose to speak that he could not be heard. Goldwater was so angry at the rejection he received from moderates and liberals that he named Congressman William Miller of New York as his running mate. Miller was almost totally unknown but was nearly as reactionary as Goldwater himself. Goldwater closed by defending far-right organizations such as the John Birch Society in his acceptance speech. "Let me remind you," taunting his opponents, "that extremism in defense of liberty is no vice . . . and that moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue."
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Goldwater's nomination, liberals exulted, was the best thing that could have happened to the Democratic party. His zealous supporters, however, were happy and hopeful. Southern conservatives figured that he might beat Johnson in the region, and they prevailed on Wallace to withdraw. Wallace did so, leaving the GOP with a good chance—for the first time since the Reconstruction era—of scoring major triumphs in Dixie. Political observers braced for a campaign centered on the politics of region and race.

O
NCE THE
R
EPUBLICANS
had nominated Goldwater and Miller, Johnson and his advisers concentrated on pulling all but the Right into a big and joyous coalition that would bring him overwhelming victory. He orchestrated a Democratic convention in Atlantic City in late August that played as he directed, including the selection of Humphrey as his running mate. Before it was over, however, racial confrontations revealed fissures in American society that, while ultimately harmless to LBJ in 1964, widened later to rend his party and transform the nature of American politics.

Some of these fissures were already exposing the rise of fiercely anti-white activists associated with the Nation of Islam. The Black Muslims, as they were called, had been formed in the 1930s. Spurning Christianity as the religion of the slaveowner, they also rejected racial integration and called for black people to separate and build up their own communities. Members were to improve themselves by renouncing drink, drugs, tobacco, gambling, cursing, and sex outside of marriage. Men were to wear white shirts and suits, women long dresses, head-coverings, and no makeup. Deeply alienated from whites, the Muslims had no use for the interracial civil rights movement or for "corrupt" and "evil" white society. They were racists themselves, perceiving whites as "devils" who had been bleached in the years following creation and foreseeing a day of judgment when Allah would defeat the whites and vindicate the blacks through racial separation. Their ideas drew on versions of apocalyptic holiness religion popular among blacks as well as on historically durable traditions of black nationalism.
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While the Muslims enjoyed growing popularity, mainly among the most deprived people in ghetto areas of large northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York, they gained relatively few full converts. Estimates are that there were between 5,000 and 15,000 active Muslims in the early 1960s, 50,000 believers, and a considerably larger group of sympathizers.
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When Malcolm X, one of the most popular Muslim leaders, dismissed Kennedy's assassination as a case of the "chickens come home to roost," he aroused bitter emotions. Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam, berated Malcolm for his impolitic remarks, thereby sharpening a split that had already widened between the two men. In March 1964 Malcolm X broke away from the Nation to head his own group, the Organization of Afro-American Unity.

The rise of Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little; the X was a marker for the African family name that had been lost under slavery) in the remaining eleven months of his life was impressive.
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During this time he took two trips to Africa, exploring further the teachings of Islam. He gradually dropped the most extreme forms of anti-white racism held by the Black Muslims, gravitating instead (or so it seemed) toward a more secular, quasi-socialistic platform that foresaw some accommodation with poor and working-class whites. At the same time he remained a black nationalist, and he insisted that blacks must help themselves, using violence if provoked, if they hoped to survive the evils of white civilization. "There can be no revolution without bloodshed," he proclaimed.
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He dismissed civil rights leaders as lackeys of the white Establishment: King was a "traitor," a "chump," and a "fool." (King retorted that Malcolm was a "hot-headed radical with a dangerous emotional appeal.") Malcolm was extraordinarily self-possessed, articulate, quick-witted, and often funny. He spoke boldly and with a controlled but obviously passionate anger. In the process he attracted growing attention and support from urban blacks in 1964.

What Malcolm X might have been able do had he lived—enemies from the Nation of Islam assassinated him in New York in February 1965—cannot be said.
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Most politically engaged black Americans at that time remained committed to the teachings of King or to the leaders of other civil rights organizations. These leaders regarded Malcolm X as a wild and impractical opportunist anxious for personal glory. Would he have dared to speak so boldly if he had to live and work in the South, where activists were literally risking their lives? What, they asked, had he actually accomplished, except to stir up resentments in the cities and thereby to blight the vision of interracial progress? "What did he ever do?" Thurgood Marshall asked years later. "Name one concrete thing he ever did."
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Other critics wondered how black people, a mostly poor and relatively powerless 11 percent of the population, could hope to advance in American life if they rejected white people and white institutions.
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These were good questions, and they indicate that Malcolm X was far from the inspirational figure in 1964 that he later became, in martyrdom, for large numbers of blacks in the United States. Still, Malcolm had begun to instill pride in increasing numbers of African-Americans, some of whom were angrily verging on rebellion. On July 18, 1964, a riot erupted in Harlem. Lasting a week, it featured fights between blacks and police, as well as burning and looting and attacking of whites. When it quieted down, another riot broke out upstate in Rochester. King, Randolph, Wilkins, and other black leaders called for peace, but in August riots stunned Paterson and Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Compared to other urban riots in American history—and to riots later in the decade—these were relatively minor disturbances, and they stopped in September. But they exposed the coming of "the fire next time" that Baldwin had prophesied in 1963. It seemed that Johnson's civil rights legislation, primarily addressing the legal rights of blacks in the South, did little or nothing to placate the rage of blacks in the ghettos.

Racial confrontation in the South more directly threatened the President's hopes for a serene and successful campaign in 1964. Mississippi, as so often in the history of the civil rights movement, proved the major arena of conflict. There CORE, SCLC, NAACP, and SNCC had earlier formed a Council of Federated Organizations (COFO) aimed at mobilizing black people, especially to gain the right to vote. Robert Moses, still risking his life in the state, served as program director for the effort, which had intensified in 1963. Aiding him at that time was a cohort of eighty-odd white students, most of them from Yale and Stanford. They had been recruited by Allard Lowenstein, a thirty-three-year-old white activist from New York who was deeply engaged in the movement. In October 1963 they endorsed NAACP activist Aaron Henry and Tougaloo College chaplain Ed King, a white man, as nominees for governor and lieutenant governor on a Freedom party slate.
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Moses and others, heartened by these efforts, then began planning what became known as Freedom Summer in Mississippi, a campaign in 1964 to register blacks as voters and to establish "Freedom Schools" for black children.
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Seeking volunteers, they finally accepted more than 900, mainly white college students who could take at least part of a summer off. Most of them underwent a week or two of training before going to Mississippi in late June. As they prepared to go they were warned by veterans of the movement that the Johnson administration opposed the venture and would offer them no federal protection. LBJ feared violence that in turn would damage Democratic party unity in the coming campaign. As the volunteers arrived in the Magnolia State, they faced enormous danger without hope of backing from the government.

What many had feared soon happened. On June 21 two white activists, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, and one black activist, James Chaney, disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi. When their bodies were finally found buried in an earthen dam in early August, it was revealed that Schwerner and Goodman had been shot through the head once each with .38 caliber bullets. Chaney had been shot three times.
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Evidence implicated Neshoba County deputy sheriff Cecil Price, who had apprehended the three young men and turned them over to a Klan-dominated mob that killed them gangland style. Three years later an all-white jury convicted Price and six others, including local Klan leader Sam Bowers, of "violating the civil rights" of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.
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The terror in Mississippi frightened the volunteers and outraged people throughout the world. COFO leaders were angry, too—in part at themselves for lapses in their own precautionary procedures, and in much larger part at the Johnson administration for having failed to provide protection. The FBI, indeed, did not arrive on the scene until twenty hours after the three men vanished and did not take charge of the search for three days. Later in the summer, Hoover, responding to criticism, increased his forces in the state, and one of his informants made possible the discovery of the bodies and the subsequent prosecution of the killers. COFO leaders and volunteers, however, remained furious at the administration.

Violence and bloodshed further stained the efforts of that fateful summer. Between June and the end of August foes of COFO burned or bombed thirty-five homes, churches, and other buildings in Mississippi. Thirty-five volunteers were shot at (three were hit), eighty were beaten, and three more were killed. White authorities made more than 1,000 arrests of COFO workers and their allies. As Cleveland Sellers, a leader of COFO, recalled, "It was the longest nightmare I have ever had, those three months."
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Much of the work that summer took place in the Freedom Schools, which engaged thousands of poor, mostly rural black children and their parents in an experiment that promised much for their lives. But the most highly publicized activity was to secure equal rights for black people in state and national politics, and COFO mounted a major effort to enlarge the rolls of their Mississippi Freedom Democratic party (MFDP). Pursuing an orderly democratic process, they ultimately selected a total of thirty-four delegates and thirty-four alternates to represent the state at the Democratic National Convention in late August in Atlantic City. Four of the delegates, including Ed King, were white. Roughly three-quarters of them were small farmers.
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Thus was set in motion a highly contentious struggle between Johnson and liberal allies on the one hand and militant civil rights workers on the other. The Freedom party delegates did not intend that to be. Declaring their loyalty to the President and to the liberal ideals of the Democratic party, they expected to be well received at the Johnson-dominated convention. The rival white delegation chosen by party regulars, by contrast, denounced the civil rights act and explicitly opposed the party platform. Most of these whites were expected to support Goldwater in the fall. But Johnson, after first hoping to work out a compromise, discovered that the white Mississippians would walk out of the convention if the MFDP received any consideration whatever. Several other southern delegations threatened to join them. If that happened, Johnson faced serious electoral consequences in Dixie.

Johnson, orchestrating every detail of his nomination, had foreseen controversy and had planted FBI informants to secure intelligence about the upstarts soon to arrive at the convention.
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He also leaned on the convention's credentials committee, which considered the rival claims, so as to ensure that it would not vote to bring the inflammatory issue before the convention floor. Still, he hoped that pressure and persuasion would help MFDP delegates see the light. Some of the nation's best-known liberals, including Reuther and Humphrey, besieged MFDP leaders with pleas and promises. Nationally known black leaders—Rustin, King, CORE leader James Farmer—also seemed ready to accept a compromise. This would have allotted the MFDP delegates two voting seats and admitted the rest with non-voting, honorary status. Johnson further indicated, although in general terms, that convention rules would be changed so that racial discrimination would not determine the selection of delegates in 1968. The credentials committee did LBJ's bidding and recommended the deal.
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