Martin Luther King left this earth at a moment of gloom, at least about the short term. "I feel this summer will not only be as bad but worse than last time," he said, four days before his death, in a sermon at Washington's National Cathedral. He was referring to the urban riots of the previous summer. And then came the days of chaos that followed his assassination....
It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on "big government," the defense of states' rights, and the scorn for "liberal judicial activism," "liberal do-gooders," "liberal elitists," "liberal guilt" and "liberal permissiveness" were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.
When Liberalism's Moment Ended
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Friday, April 4, 2008; A23
Forty years ago, American liberalism suffered a blow from which it has still not recovered. On April 4, 1968, a relatively brief but extraordinary moment of progressive reform ended, and a long period of conservative ascendancy began.
The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the ensuing riots that engulfed the nation's capital and big cities across the country signaled the collapse of liberal hopes in a smoky haze of self-doubt and despair. Conservatives, on the run for much of the decade, found a broad new audience for their warnings against the disorders and disruptions bred by reform.
A shrewd politician named Richard Nixon sensed the direction of the political winds. When President Johnson's commission on urban unrest released its report in early 1968 and blamed the previous year's rioting on "white racism," Nixon would have none of it. The commission, he said, "blames everybody for the riots except the perpetrators of the riots." He urged "retaliation."
Nixon knew that his call for law and order was drawing working-class whites away from their alliance with the New Deal and the Great Society. "I have found great audience response to this theme in all parts of the country," Nixon wrote to former president Dwight D. Eisenhower.
It is easy to forget that the core themes of contemporary conservatism were born in response to the events of 1968. The attacks on "big government," the defense of states' rights, and the scorn for "liberal judicial activism," "liberal do-gooders," "liberal elitists," "liberal guilt" and "liberal permissiveness" were rooted in the reaction that gathered force as liberal optimism receded.
From the death of John F. Kennedy in November 1963 until the congressional elections of November 1966, liberals were triumphant, and what they did changed the world. Civil rights and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, clean air and clean water legislation, Head Start, the Job Corps and federal aid to schools had their roots in the liberal wave that began to ebb when Lyndon Johnson's Democrats suffered broad losses in the 1966 voting. The decline that 1966 signaled was sealed after April 4, 1968.
Delicious
Digg
Reddit
Newsvine
Furl
Google
Yahoo
I was 9 when King was
I was 9 when King was assassinated. I remember that I was the one who broke the news to my mother when she got home from work. I remember her saying “Oh no!” three times, came and looked at the television and then went and stayed on the phone all night. My dad didn’t come home that night. Both were heavily involved with the NAACP.
All I could understand about Nixon from what I heard from adults was that he wasn’t my friend. I couldn’t figure out why, if he was the president.
A few years later, when I understood what Malcolm X and the panthers were all about, I not only hated him, I hated America. I thought when everyone finished reading George Jackson the country would be overthrown, but lofty idealism for a 15 year old.
H.Rap Brown, Stokley Carmichael, Huey, Elaine, The Symbionese Liberation Army, etc. for all of their good intentions, are all foot notes today at best.
THAT revolution has STILL not been televised.
But when all was said and done, I found that King, that last person I wanted to study and understand, was the one person who made the most sense in his approach.
I think if you were 21, your spirit would have been crushed, not much unlike a lot of people of that time.
If you’ve read 40 million dollar slaves, it’s stunning to hear first hand accounts of a dream dying after King’s death.
Not much really happened after that, no new leader came along to galvanize the masses. Jesse Jackson tried.
I think you’re lucky you weren’t.
Tumultuous Times
I began attending high school the same week that the bomb was detonated in the church in Birmingham killing those four black girls. That same week several hundred black students including me walked out of school during the lunch period and took buses downtown to participate in a protest march.
Two months later, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. I was in P.E. class when our teacher, Ed Rueda, told us that the president had been shot. By the time I got dressed and walked into my civics class I knew that Kennedy was dead because the teacher, Nicholas Fesunoff, had a radio on and I could hear Hail to the Chief playing. Mr. Fesunoff, who won't let me call him "Mister" anymore, and I are still in touch and occasionally exchange emails. Kennedy's murder still bothers us all these years later.
A few years later Malcolm X was murdered and it was not done by the police agencies of the state. (Louis Farrakhan was and is a fraud in my book.)
When Dr. King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated I felt as if something had become unmoored in this country. In the intervening years my feelings have not changed. That was a sad and brokenhearted time.
I was 20
I was in college in the Boston area. James Brown was giving a concert there that night. It was hastily arranged to broadcast it on tv, and the mayor (Kevin White - and he was) came out on stage and embraced Brown. It worked - people watched the show instead of rioting.
JFK had been killed 5 years earlier, and RFK was shot two months after MLK.
And then Nixon won the 1968 election with his "secret plan" to bring peace to Vietnam. It turned out the plan was "bomb Cambodia."
And now, here we are. General Betray-us is being treated as a hero by Congress even as I type.
May the Creative Forces of the Universe have mercy on our souls, if any.