Patriot's History: Civil Rights, LBJ, Antipoverty (Chaps 18-19)
Blowin' in the Wind, Peter Paul and MaryNow We Are Free, Enya
We Shall Overcome, Pete Seeger
Rock of Ages, Highland Baptist Church Choir
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Summary The fifties civil rights successes used free enterprise: strategic boycotts got the businessmen to realize that blacks had influence. But radicals turned violent, and LBJ responded with a bigger government. Chapter 'Invisible,' the black, said Ellison. The KKK had dropped in ranks, but Plessy versus Ferguson held sway in racist Southern Jim Crow laws. Up North were hypocrites who segregated church and schools while being advocates for civil rights. As Eisenhower quietly deferred the issue, Mr. Brown brought suit -- the Highest Court assured his daughter's right to ANY school, and now the "separate but equal" farce was done. Or was it? In a desperate response, the "Southern Manifesto" tried to reinstate the status quo. At Little Rock, the troops arrived to segregate at Central High, and Ike sent other troops to integrate (how futile to allow big government to legislate morality!). Then Rosa Parks refused to give her seat away, and Martin Luther King resisted with discreet, nonviolent techniques: a boycott in Montgomery wreaked havoc on the busline (showing how effectively free enterprise, not force, can set things right). And King appealed to human goodness, righteous indignation: never yield from moral goals, America will navigate the heights. In '57 came the starting legal blow for Civil Rights. ~ Despite the best intentions in the civil rights enactment, there was little change, as Southern whites resisted. So the battle carried on. When four young men requested service at a Woolworth's store in 1960, novel ways to demonstrate began: the sound of "freedom rides" would resonate throughout the nation, and the "sit-in" interfered with business. Once again a market force appeared to work. But racists still refused to let it be, and many martyrs gave their lives in '63: black leader Medgar Evers; then the Baptist Church of Birmingham was bombed, four children killed. The search for cowardly attackers more than often failed. In Birmingham, when demonstrators were assailed by cops and dogs and clubs and gas, the Reverend King used eloquence and television news to bring the message to the nation from his prison cell, to show the truth about brutality, to tell about his 'dream.' With strains of "We Shall Overcome" on Selma streets, some blacks, refusing to succumb to pacifism -- Malcolm X and radical Black Muslims -- scoffed at King and turned to physical displays of violence. In '65, in Watts (L.A.) Black Panther riots offered caveats for more to come. The second Act for Civil Rights was more accepted by the public, greater heights of Constitutional protections were achieved. But once again came tragedy. A nation grieved for Martin Luther King, as thoughts of Kennedy returned. The sixties also carved a legacy of massive spending on an anti-poverty campaign - pretentiously the "Great Society" - that took a struggling class and built dependency on government. With Lyndon Johnson's victory in '64 (free-market anti-communist Goldwater looking like a bombing jingoist in dirty ads), the road was clear for LBJ, with little business common sense, to throw away our public funds on "Health and Welfare," Vista, "Aid to Families with Dependent Children" -- a charade of social "progress" that for married folks would pave a path more broken than the era of the slave. |