1968 - Mark Kurlansky [27]
Originally, as most southerners sensed correctly, the civil rights movement fit comfortably into the prejudice most of the rest of the country felt toward the South. The movement seemed heroic when heading south and taking on drawling Neanderthals with names like Bull Connor. But in 1965, Martin Luther King began to champion the issue of “open housing” in northern cities. To most of white America, this was something different. They were not just trying to go to school and ride buses in Alabama, they were trying to move into our neighborhoods.
King and other leaders had also started devoting an increasing amount of time to opposing the war in Vietnam. By 1967, when King became an outspoken Vietnam War critic, he was the last major civil rights figure to do so. Most of the Congress of Racial Equality, CORE, and SNCC had turned antiwar in 1965 and 1966. Many of King’s advisers in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference were reluctant to attack the government in time of war. In 1967 the Mobe and its leader David Dellinger, a World War II draft resister, made an all-out effort to bring King into the antiwar movement. Dellinger had also had advisers telling him that the antiwar movement was getting too involved with black leaders and it was alienating potential supporters of the antiwar cause. Many whites saw the involvement of black leaders as stepping outside the legitimate turf of a civil rights leader. Never mind the fact that only 11 percent of the population was black while 23 percent of the combat soldiers in Vietnam were. Blacks were now trying to dictate foreign policy. Heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, perhaps the one black figure who was even better than King at using the media, had refused the draft, saying, “I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.” He was convicted of draft evasion, and a week after Johnson’s State of the Union speech, Ali’s appeal was rejected.
Ali had changed his name from Cassius Clay, which he said was a “slave name,” when he became a Black Muslim, in 1963. The Black Muslims, Black Power, and especially the increasingly visible Black Panthers, who advocated violence, robberies, and shoot-outs with the police, were frightening to white people. The flames in black ghettos the summer before had for many been the final blow. King said that Black Power advocates such as Stokely Carmichael provided white people with the excuse they needed. “Stokely is not the problem,” King said. “The problem is white people and their attitude.”
For the ruling Democrats, the response to urban violence was a growing threat. An aide to Vice President Hubert Humphrey told Time magazine, “Another summer of riots could really sink us next fall.” King opposed Johnson and had no loyalty to the Democrats, but he had more far-reaching fears of this so-called backlash. “We cannot stand two more summers like last summer without leading inevitably to a right-wing takeover and a fascist state,” King said.
On January 12, President Johnson gave his State of the Union address. Never before in history had the annual address received so much television coverage. Not only did all three networks and the new National Educational Television station, the forerunner of PBS, carry the speech, but all four set aside time after the address to have guests come on and discuss what had just been heard. CBS canceled Green Acres, He and She, and The Jonathan Winters Show for its unprecedented two and one half hours of coverage. NBC sacrificed a Kraft Music Hall special starring Alan King and Run for Your Life to give two hours of coverage. ABC postponed its drama Laura developed by Truman Capote as a star vehicle for Jackie Kennedy’s sister, Lee Bouvier Radziwell. For the analysis that preempted Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor, CBS had Senate minority leader Everett Dirksen. But the most extensive analysis was by NET, which had started the new trend by devoting more than three hours to the 1967