Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr. - Hardcover

Chappell, David L.

 
9781400065462: Waking from the Dream: The Struggle for Civil Rights in the Shadow of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 1400065461 ISBN 13: 9781400065462
Verlag: Random House USA Inc, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

The author of A Stone of Hope, called “one of the three or four most important books on the civil rights movement” by The Atlantic Monthly, turns his attention to the years after Martin Luther King’s assassination—and provides a sweeping history of the struggle to keep the civil rights movement alive and to realize King’s vision of an equal society.

In this arresting and groundbreaking account, David L. Chappell reveals that, far from coming to an abrupt end with King’s murder, the civil rights movement entered a new phase. It both grew and splintered. These were years when decisive, historic victories were no longer within reach—the movement’s achievements were instead hard-won, and their meanings unsettled. From the fight to pass the Fair Housing Act in 1968, to debates over unity and leadership at the National Black Political Conventions, to the campaign for full-employment legislation, to the surprising enactment of the Martin Luther King holiday, to Jesse Jackson’s quixotic presidential campaigns, veterans of the movement struggled to rally around common goals.

Waking from the Dream documents this struggle, including moments when the movement seemed on the verge of dissolution, and the monumental efforts of its members to persevere. For this watershed study of a much-neglected period, Chappell spent ten years sifting through a voluminous public record: congressional hearings and government documents; the archives of pro– and anti–civil rights activists, oral and written remembrances of King’s successors and rivals, documentary film footage, and long-forgotten coverage of events from African American newspapers and journals.

The result is a story rich with period detail, as Chappell chronicles the difficulties the movement encountered while working to build coalitions, pass legislation, and mobilize citizens in the absence of King’s galvanizing leadership. Could the civil rights coalition stay together as its focus shifted from public protests to congressional politics? Did the movement need a single, charismatic leader to succeed King, and who would that be? As the movement’s leaders pushed forward, they continually looked back, struggling to define King’s legacy and harness his symbolic power.

Waking from the Dream is a revealing and resonant look at civil rights after King as well as King’s place in American memory. It illuminates a time, explores a cause, and explains how a movement labored to overcome the loss of its leader.

Advance praise for Waking from the Dream

“A vitally needed appraisal of how the civil rights movement re-created itself in surprisingly effective ways after Dr. King’s death . . . No one is better qualified than David Chappell to examine these largely unexplored developments and to make sense of the ironies, tragedies, and triumphs. This is a brilliant, absorbing work that compels us to rethink our conceptions and judgments about the civil rights movement.”—Stewart Burns, author of We Will Stand Here Till We Die

“Waking from the Dream skillfully traces Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy during the two decades following his assassination. The previously untold story of continuing struggle and posthumous inspiration that dominates this compelling and groundbreaking book will forever change the way civil rights historians view this era.”—Raymond Arsenault, author of Freedom Riders

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

David L. Chappell is Rothbaum Professor of Modern American History at the University of Oklahoma. He is author of Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement and A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow.

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Chapter One

King’s Last Victory

The Civil Rights Act of 1968

Exactly one week after Martin Luther King’s murder, President Lyndon Johnson signed the third great civil rights act of the twentieth century, the last of what historians call the civil rights era. Supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, also known as the Fair Housing Act, said that they wished to pay homage to King and to show restive ghetto-dwellers that hope was not lost. Since his strategic shift to northern cities in 1965–66, King had been losing hope of achieving victory with the housing bill. But the bill’s prospects changed when King died. The resulting act was not just a symbolic purge of emotion, or a mere show of respect. It was a substantive answer to some of King’s most radical demands and his last real victory.

The Civil Rights Act of 1968 has been almost completely forgotten—unlike the previous two major civil rights acts, of 1964 and 1965, which people reflexively attribute to King and the movement he led. Yet many in the black freedom movement saw housing as the final frontier. School desegregation had aimed to undo the effects of residential segregation, but white flight from desegregated schools had in fact intensified residential segregation, in a vicious circle that threatened to restore and fortify Jim Crow. Housing was a tough nut to crack, because it was largely a private market of individual transactions.1

Before King died, the housing act’s supporters, including King, had doubted that any serious civil rights legislation could pass, given the widespread white reaction to the long hot summers of rioting, in 1965, 1966, and 1967. The Johnson administration had conceived the new bill in 1965, to complete the restoration of civil rights in the president’s Great Society program. President Johnson announced a major campaign to pass the bill in April 1966, with King and other civil rights leaders at his side at the White House.2 As the 1964 act guaranteed equal employment and equal access to hotels, cafés, theaters, parks, pools, rinks, and the like, and the 1965 act guaranteed equal access to the ballot, the final act would guarantee equal access to the market for private homes—including the financing that most Americans needed in order to be in that market. If it ever passed, that is.

A home of one’s own had become the new version of the American dream when post–World War II subsidies and loan guarantees put a freestanding, single-family house within reach for an expanding middle class. Housing had been a basic civil right since the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which declared that former slaves had the same right as everybody else “to inherit, purchase, lease, sell, hold, and convey real and personal property.” The right to housing then expanded, haltingly, in roughly the manner that the elective franchise had previously expanded. Thousands had gained access to housing in Supreme Court decisions, in acts of Congress in 1934, 1938, 1944, and 1949, as well as in minor appropriations for housing and urban development, and in much state legislation. The new bill aimed to complete the picture by banning the discrimination that previous policies had left untouched: in most of the private market.3

Moderates like Republican representative Charles Matthias of Maryland watered down the first version of the bill in 1966. Matthias’s amendment, reducing the act’s coverage to large-scale apartments and transactions of the biggest real estate firms—only about 40 percent of the nation’s yearly housing trade, rather than the 100 percent the administration seemed to envision—had weakened the administration’s bill so much that King said it was no longer worth passing. Its passage would only spawn false hopes and ultimately increase urban despair and violence.4 The amended bill passed the House in 1966. But even that weak version was too strong for the Senate, whose axis of rural northern Republicans and southern Democrats choked it off with a filibuster.5

Though it was an omnibus bill, which also sought to integrate federal and state juries and to protect civil rights workers from vigilante attacks, most of the controversy focused on its housing provisions. From Reconstruction on, segregationists held private space to be politically inviolable. This was a central tenet of their ideology. They might concede formal equality in law courts and as an abstract principle or a distant goal. But southern Democrats could rally angry masses to resist encroachments on schools, churches, small businesses—and in the twentieth century, increasingly, urban residential neighborhoods. The tactic often worked by insinuating a motive of sexual predation whenever black citizens violated white southerners’ notion of their proper “place.” By emphasizing respectable principles of private property, segregationists could also appeal across sectional and party lines. The modern “conservative” ideology of pro-big-business Republicans in the North and West similarly targeted a national government, hell-bent on elbowing its way into “private” businesses. Such a government might soon encroach on other “property,” such as residences. A man’s home is his castle, was an ancient common-law principle.

Early in the next session in 1967, President Johnson urged Congress to try again to complete the civil rights revolution, urging action on his comprehensive bill to end discrimination in housing. Prospects for passage of the great new act remained dim, however.6

Nobody was gloomier about the reintroduced housing bill’s prospects, or more ardent about the need to pass it, than King. Against strong resistance within King’s organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), and outside it, King was already organizing the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC). King’s ambition was to organize the nation’s poor, of all races, to demand action from the federal government, to alleviate their misery and give them hope of a decent life and truly equal opportunity for their children. In addition to testing the patience of that government at a moment when voter sentiment appeared to range from indifferent to fed-up with protests and social problems, the venture took King far from the self-restrained and largely middle-class adult culture of the black churches that had nurtured and disciplined his successful ventures in his southern homeland. King was proposing now to stage massive demonstrations in Washington, D.C., on April 22, 1968, with a broad agenda that named open housing—including nondiscriminatory financing—as one of its most urgent demands. Open housing was the goal that had recently been within Congress’s reach. King sometimes made it clear, as he usually had in the past, that he would accept a partial victory, to end the disruption of commerce in return for achievement of some of his goals. But King threatened that if Congress did not act upon the movement’s demands in the spring, there would be massive demonstrations at the major party conventions that summer.7

King clearly feared that the days of civil rights success were numbered. Internal squabbles and increasingly wily resistance had hobbled the movement since the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and civil rights leaders could not agree on what their next goal should be. Racial discrimination could not compete with the war in Vietnam as a provocation for mass protests. For King that meant he should rally whatever he could salvage of his movement. His well-connected middle-class allies were growing ever fainter at heart. The time had come to muster the forces who had the least to lose and most to gain, those who had been left out of the progress so...

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Verlag
Random House USA Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2014
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1400065461
ISBN 13 
9781400065462
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
249
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