LONDON–When Martin Luther King died 30 years ago this weekend the outlook for America’s race relations looked on the surface unredeemable: a future of more urban riots, further polarisation of the races, white reaction feeding black reaction in ever ascending spirals of bitterness and hate. There seemed to be little on the horizon to give ground for hope. The south was fighting what appeared at the time to be a successful rearguard action against the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools and the 1964 Civil Rights Act that outlawed discrimination in public places. The north was becoming increasingly segregated. The electoral drift was towards the right, soon to bring to power Richard Nixon and the end to any thought of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society”. Black revolutionary militancy was becoming more bold and confident.
Yet within only three years the picture had changed dramatically. Polarisation didn’t worsen. Blacks en masse didn’t become more militant and revolutionary. The South began to change out of all recognition. Political and economic opportunities for educated blacks increased at an astonishing rate. All this happened in spite of economic recession and, supposedly, the ultra-conservative leadership of the black’s bete noire, Richard Nixon.
Why were the omens of the time wrong? I think for three reasons. First, the impact of what Martin Luther King achieved was often seriously underestimated. The last two years of his life were so overshadowed by the rise of the militant Black Power movement–in the words of one of its leaders, H. “Rap” Brown, “if the honky (the white man) wants to give me a hand he should give me some guns”–that it was easy to overlook the incredible revolution Dr King had wrought and the deep foundations he had laid. Not only had he made black America politically conscious but with the winning of the 1965 Voting Rights Act he released a tremendous political energy that transformed the south and enervated the north.
The second reason why the situation didn’t deteriorate as was widely predicted at the time is that we were taken in by the “images”– the images of Black Power in 1966, of the big city riots in 1967, of the gun-toting Black Panthers in 1968, images that were picked up by the press and magnified out of all proportion to the true feelings of most blacks.
Certainly, in the late 1960s there was a groundswell of opinion among young blacks that something more militant than King’s non-violence was necessary. But the press made it more frightening and horrific than it was. Young blacks, having found they could scare white society if nothing else, stepped up their game of “putting on whitey” and escalated the rhetoric. Now we see in retrospect that the situation was rather like that of the 1840s, when a small group of intellectuals advocated slave insurrections but stopped short of organising them.
The third reason is that by the late sixties America had become immeasurably different from the America Dr King first confronted in 1955. Then McCarthyism put even the vaguest liberals on the defensive. By the end of the sixties, after a decade and a half of the civil rights movement and five years of the anti-Vietnam War movement, America’s institutions had never been so openly questioned by such a broad spectrum of political opinion, even though the right was strong enough to win the presidential election.
Seen from today’s vantage point we can see that all these early trends have gathered impetus. Blacks, if educated, have never had it so good. Violent protest of a political nature has withered to insignificant proportions. White opinion is more accomodating. Blacks politically now pack a punch. Indeed, there would have been a black president by now if Colin Powell had been prepared to stand–and what a difference that would have made to the current sleazy, inept and unnecessarily arrogant image of America abroad that the current incumbent is responsible for.
The debit side, needless to say, remains huge–a seemingly unshifting black underclass of broken families, alienated children, random violence and a youth, totally without prospect, even in this time of low unemployment, of holding down any job other than the one proffered by the ubiquitous gang leaders who have become, for so many of them, substitute fathers.
This underclass simply has no parallel in any other industrialized country. America may statistically bring down its unemployment level to lower than Europe’s by locking up at any one time 1.5 million young black people and keeping another 8.1 million on parole, but it cannot by any stretch of the imagination solve either its residual race or omnispresent crime problems, which are so tightly interlinked, by such tricks of accounting. The job outstanding is immense. Left untended it continues to coarsen, corrode and roughen all of American society. America has still to make King’s choice between “chaos and community”.
