During my first year of doctoral
study in history, one of my assignments was to read a month’s worth of
newspaper coverage from any year in history. As a student of postwar America, I
picked the stretch of time (really two months) between the assassinations of
Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, in the spring of 1968.
It was
indeed a tumultuous year. At the end of February, the Kerner Commission issued
its report on the riots that had rocked American cities in the summer of 1967.
Its most famous line, that America was becoming “two societies, one black, one
white—separate and unequal,” offered little hope that things would get better. The
Democrats were split by the war in Vietnam. In late March, Lyndon Johnson
announced he would not run for reelection. Less than a week later, Rev. King
was murdered in Memphis, sparking mourning marches that transmogrified into
arson-fueled riots as terrible as those the Kerner Commission documented.
Robert Kennedy, running for president on an anti-poverty message and invocation
of his slain brother’s legacy, was killed just after winning the California
primary election. At the Democrats’ convention in late August, political
shenanigans reigned inside Chicago’s International Amphitheater while members
of the Chicago Police Department beat up protestors on television images that “the
whole world [wa]s watching.” The United States seemed fully destabilized.
With
increasing frequency in the past week, I have heard comparisons between the
summer of 2016 and the summer of 1968. Two primary factors seem to be driving
that comparison: the political stalemate over the deaths of black and brown
civilians from guns wielded by police and the mass shooter in Orlando, and the unprecedented
presidential campaigns, especially that of Donald Trump. Additionally, the
combination of Trump’s mercurial politics and the unfilled Supreme Court seat
of Justice Antonin Scalia quietly hint that a constitutional crisis might unfold
sometime between August and January, 2017. Finally, the backdrops of the Syrian
civil war, multi-national terrorism credited to ISIS, and the echoes of Brexit across
the Atlantic keep Americans unsettled about the virtues of entanglements abroad.
While some cultural sea changes—most notably the national institutionalization of
gay marriage—have occurred with fewer ripples than might have been expected,
2016 is also a strange and uncertain time.
But the
comparison between 1968 and 2016 goes only so far. Forty-eight years on, while
they invoke similar feelings of public and personal anxiety, some significant
differences reign.
In 1968,
African American public protest took on broad range of issues. Despite the
legal gains of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
the dismantling of segregation promised by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education rulings a decade
earlier was incomplete. African Americans remained locked out of many
employment and housing markets and even nominal school desegregation was bitterly
contested. In 2016, the Black Lives Matter movement targets one issue: the
deaths of blacks at the hands of police, asking only “Stop
killing us.”
In the
1960s, black public protest took two forms beyond the court system:
demonstrations and civil disturbances. The frequency with which protest marches
occurred simultaneously with riots confused white observers, who had trouble
discerning the differences and roundly condemned public activism as unseemly.
Catholic nuns and priests who marched for civil rights received angry letters condemning
their political expressions as inappropriate. President Johnson, presented with a
proposal for “Demonstration Cities,” insisted that it be renamed “Model Cities.”
Riots were such common occurrences in the “long, hot summers” of the mid-1960s
that both civil rights and government organizations developed plans for how to
respond to them. In 2016, marches protest police shootings of black civilians have
been tense but largely peaceful—until the murders of police officers in Dallas
by a rogue shooter who was not part of the demonstration. Because of the easy availability of weapons, an angry person who agrees with protesters’ critiques
but disagrees with their tactics does not need a mob to wreak havoc.
That same
easy availability of semiautomatic weapons—put to traumatic use in recent years
in public places including malls, schools and universities, workplaces, grocery
stores, houses of worship, military bases, community centers, and an Orlando
nightclub—has put all Americans on guard in a way that they were not in 1968. Although
there were from time to time mass murders in the American past—including those
committed by the 1966 sniper on the University of Texas campus—the term “going postal”
did not signal a cultural phenomenon until the 1990s. Although homicides by gun
have actually decreased markedly since the peak period of the 1970s to the
1990s, adults understand that they are implicitly taking a risk when they go
out in public. Nonetheless, the New York
Times pointed out recently, the
vast majority of mass shootings take place in the country’s poorest
neighborhoods.
Even
segregation is different in 2016 than it was in 1968. In the 1960s, protest of
residential segregation focused on black access to white neighborhoods. Racial steering
by real estate dealers, blockbusting, and the dual housing market meant that
few white Americans lived near African Americans. Although racial
discrimination and exploitative real estate practices still exist in the US, blacks
did get legal and financial access to formerly all-white neighborhoods. Many
American public schools are somewhat integrated. What hypersegregation means in
the 21st century is that many African Americans do not have white
neighbors or classmates.
It was only in 1967 that the
Supreme Court’s Loving v. Virginia
decision invalidated state laws that prohibited interracial marriage. In the twenty-first
century, although it is not necessarily evident to African Americans who still live
in all-black neighborhoods, many more white Americans have deep personal connections
to people of color. This week, responding to police shootings, two of my
Facebook friends shared a meme reading “I can’t keep calm, I have a black son.”
One is a white woman married to a black man; another is herself a biracial
mother. The dangers felt by blacks who are stopped by police might well be
resonating in your mostly-white family.
In short,
in 2016 we are not as separate as we were in 1968. But we surely still are unequal.
2016 is 1968’s grandchild, softer in some ways but harder in others.
