The Penguin History of the World

The first and most successful phase of the campaign for equal status for the black was a struggle for ‘civil rights’, of which the most important were the unhindered exercise of the franchise (always formally, though not actually, available in some southern states) and for equality of treatment in other ways, such as access to public facilities and schooling. The success stemmed from decisions of the Supreme Court in 1954 and 1955. The process thus began not with legislation, but with judicial interpretation. These important first decisions declared that the segregation of different races within the public school system was unconstitutional and that where it existed it should be brought to an end within a reasonable time. This challenged the social system in many southern states, but by 1963 there were some black and white children attending public schools together in every state of the Union, even if others stayed in all-black or all-white schools.

Legislation was not really important until after 1961. After the inauguration of a successful campaign of ‘sit-ins’ by black leaders (which itself achieved many important local victories), Kennedy initiated a programme going beyond the securing of voting rights to attack segregation and inequality of many kinds. It was to be continued by his successor. Poverty, poor housing and bad schools in run-down urban areas were symptoms of deep dislocations inside American society. And inequalities were made more irksome by the increasing affluence in which they were set. The Kennedy administration appealed to Americans to see their removal as one of the challenges of a ‘New Frontier’.

Even greater emphasis was given to legislation to remove them by Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded to the presidency when Kennedy was murdered in November 1963. Unhappily, the deepest roots of the American black problem appeared to lie beyond the reach of laws in what came to be called the ‘ghetto’ areas of great American cities. Again, a long perspective is helpful. In 1965 (a hundred years after emancipation from slavery became law throughout the whole United States) a ferocious outbreak of rioting in a black district of Los Angeles was estimated to have involved at its height as many as 75,000 people. Other troubles followed in other cities, although not on the same scale. Twenty-five years later, all that had happened in Watts (where the Los Angeles outbreak took place) was that conditions had further deteriorated. The problem of America’s blacks was (it was usually agreed) one of economic opportunity, but none the easier to solve for that. It not only remained unsolved but also appeared to be running away from solution. The poisons it secreted burst forth in crime, a major collapse in health standards and family cohesion in some black communities, and in ungovernable and virtually unpoliceable inner-city areas. In the culture and politics of white America they seemed at times to have produced a near-neurotic obsession with colour and racial issues.

His own poor southern background had made President Johnson a convinced and convincing exponent of the ‘Great Society’ in which he discerned America’s future, and perhaps this might have held promise for the handling of the black economic problem had he survived. Potentially one of America’s great reforming presidents, Johnson nevertheless experienced tragic failure, for all his aspirations, experience and skill. His constructive and reforming work was soon forgotten (and, it must be said, set aside) when his presidency came to be overshadowed by an Asian war disastrous enough before it ended to be called by some ‘America’s Sicilian Expedition’.