them from exercising their voting rights but
by a whole range of discriminatory practices.
Unemployment among black people was three
times as high as among whites; black schools were
inferior to those of whites in the more prosperous
suburbs. And they were not only black – they were
also poor. Few African Americans had overcome
their disadvantages to rise to the middle class; few
possessed the necessary education to better them-
selves. Equal opportunity, even where it existed in
federal employment, was of little use to the major-
ity of black people without an improvement in
their basic living conditions. In the slums of the big
cities black people lived in overcrowded, rat-
infested ghettos. Crime was rife, the people
demoralised. The high-minded oratory of love and
passive resistance uttered by leaders such as Martin
Luther King inspired many African Americans to
join in the stirring freedom-song ‘We shall over-
come’.
But other, more radical black leaders also won
an increasing following. They did not call for
brotherly love and integration with white society,
a sharing of Christian values and materialist aspir-
ations. The African Americans were gaining their
national freedom and their self-respect in Africa
- why not in America too? The appeal of these
black leaders was to a sense of self-identification,
‘black is beautiful’, and a rejection of white values,
among them the ‘capitalist system’ of oppression.
In the North Malcolm X was preaching a heady
mixture of protest, revolt and separate black
nationhood. ‘I see America through the eyes of
the victim. I don’t see any American dream – I
see an American nightmare’, he declared. Then
in February 1965 he was assassinated. Elijah
Muhammad led a black religious movement,
turning African Americans from mainstream
American religions to the Muslim faith, which had
won many converts in Africa. To emphasise their
separate identity his followers changed their
names; the best known was the unbeaten world
heavyweight boxing champion who adopted the
name of Muhammad Ali. There were now many
African Americans for whom passive resistance was
not enough. The Black Panthers armed them-
selves, ready to defend black people with the gun.
By the close of the 1960s, when federal laws had
brought little change in the living conditions of
the majority in the ghettos, the doctrine of separ-
ateness and violent protest – Black Power – had
won over many new adherents.
The violence that exploded in New York’s
Harlem in 1964 was spontaneous rather than
organised, but it spread through the ghettos from
coast to coast in the next few years. The presence
of white police, the symbol of white authority,
could now spark a whole area of a city into an
orgy of destruction. One of the worst city riots
erupted in the black Watts community of Los
Angeles in the summer of 1965. Indeed, summer
after summer, when the heat made the over-
crowded ghettos least bearable, violence would
break out in cities all over America. In 1967 parts
of Detroit and Newark were set alight; after the
assassination of Martin Luther King in Memphis,
Tennessee on 4 April 1968, there were riots in
hundreds of towns across America. King’s funeral
brought white and black leaders briefly together
in a show of unity and revulsion against the racist
fanaticism that endangered the lives of all promi-
nent African Americans. But fundamental obsta-
cles to racial reconciliation could not be suddenly
removed. They exist still.
Desegregation made slow progress in educa-
tion and job opportunities. With successive civil
rights measures and increasing federal enforce-
ment of these laws, spectacular progress was
made, however, in one area – black voting rights.
A cynic might observe that the African Americans
tended to vote Democrat, and it was Johnson’s
Democratic administration that had taken action.
Nonetheless, the hold of the racist white politi-
cians was broken. In 1952 only one in five of the
Southern African Americans had been able to reg-
ister for the vote; by 1968 it was three out of five,
the same proportion as white voters.
Black people began to hold important city
offices too. By 1977 seventy-six American cities
had elected black mayors. Where the majority of
African Americans failed to make substantial
inroads was in health care, housing, income and
economic power. The ghettos persisted. Almost
three decades of protest and violence have not
much changed the economic disadvantages of
the majority of black people in employment,
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