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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
A guide to the civil-rights movement online
From 1967, Calvin Trillin on race and a mayoral campaign in Cleveland
The recent fall of a Senate majority leader for the crime of praising a centenarian colleague who had once been a leader of the segregationist movement made for an excellent demonstration of the marvellous, and misleading, clarity of historical retrospection. Everybody now knows, it seems, that the civil-rights movement was a good thing, and that its opponents were so patently wrong that, unless they are elaborately penitent, they can have no place in our public life. (At the same time, it would have been fine for Trent Lott to send off Strom Thurmond--whom everybody in Washington had long been treating as a lovable huggy-bear--with an encomium to his wonderfulness, as long as it didn't specifically mention the main cause with which he was associated.)
The rules of acceptable political behavior were not at all so clear at the time. In the South, when civil rights was still an open question only a brave few Democrats supported it, and one is hard pressed to think of any Republicans who did. In 1964, the Republican Presidential nominee, Barry Goldwater, ran as an opponent of mandatory school desegregation and of the landmark Civil Rights Act, which Congress had just passed. George H. W. Bush, campaigning for the Senate that year, came out against the Civil Rights Act. Ronald Reagan, then a popular conservative speaker preparing to run for governor of California, strongly opposed it. During the Lott affair, the commentator Charles Krauthammer, in a dump-Lott column in the Washington Post, wrote that neoconservatives like him "oppose affirmative action on grounds of colorblindness and in defense of the original vision of the civil rights movement: judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin." As Krauthammer surely knows from firsthand experience, movements and their visions always look a lot simpler from the outside and after the fact. If the civil-rights movement were suddenly to reappear as it really was, political officeholders would no more be unanimously for it than they were at the time.
The event that Krauthammer was obliquely referring to by bringing up the content of character and the color of skin was the March on Washington in August, 1963, where Martin Luther King, Jr., made his magnificent "I have a dream" speech, from which that line comes. The march was originally planned by the movement's radical wing, which was going to end the day by having the marchers move, en masse and unlawfully, into the hallways of the Capitol. A series of compromises brought the movement's moderate wing (the N.A.A.C.P., the Urban League, and the United Automobile Workers, as well as King himself) on board. Still, the chief organizer was the former Communist and still socialist Bayard Rustin, who titled the event the "March for Jobs and Freedom"--and what he meant by "jobs and freedom" was a degree of state intervention in the economy that nobody would dare propose today. The long list of those who appeared onstage at the march included Bob Dylan, Walter Reuther, Roy Wilkins, Josephine Baker, Odetta, Marlon Brando, A. Philip Randolph, and Charlton Heston. By the time King spoke, much of the crowd had drifted away. The big behind-the-scenes drama centered on John Lewis, who was then the head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and is now a veteran congressman from Georgia. Lewis had drafted a speech that said, "We will march through the South, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. . . . We shall pursue our own scorched-earth policy." Washington's Catholic archbishop refused to give the invocation unless Lewis toned it down, and finally, under heavy pressure from the organizers, he did. So even the era's most celebrated moment was not nearly as consensual as everybody now remembers.
The Library of America's new, two-volume anthology "Reporting Civil Rights: American Journalism 1941-1973" ($80) is a useful corrective to the way memory has domesticated the movement. As one reads through a hundred...
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