teenagers turned King’s largest dream into a fiasco from which SCLC never
recovered.
After Martin Luther King’s death, the civil rights movement dissipated fur-
ther. Many were the causes of its decline. The movement had achieved its
primary goals of ending legal segregation and disfranchisement, resulting in
confusion over future goals and methods. King’s murder robbed the move-
ment of its most effective voice. The movement preceded King and would
have been successful without him, but his charisma and courage appeared
indispensable. Several civil rights groups became impotent by embracing
black nationalism and characterizing Jewish allies as ghetto bloodsuckers.
The NAACP and Urban League lost membership as their legal and educa-
tional initiatives produced few striking results. The movement’s bêtes noires–
James Eastland, George Wallace, and Strom Thurmond – either repented of
their racism, grudgingly accepted the new reality, or died, removing conveni-
ent targets. Most disturbing, the urban riots of the 1960s convinced many
whites that blacks were an ungrateful people to be feared rather than helped
further.
With the Democrats saddled with race riots and the Vietnam war, Richard
Nixon became president in 1968 in part by promising to restore ‘law and
order,’ a code phrase to end racial unrest. Although the Nixon administration
increased subsidies for minority businesses, threatened to cut off federal
funding of segregated public schools, proposed a guaranteed annual income
for all Americans, and devised the Philadelphia Plan that required unions
with federal contracts to set targets and timetables for hiring minorities, these
initiatives encountered stiff conservative headwind and were quickly jetti-
soned. Nixon’s top domestic adviser Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a prime mover
of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, convinced the new president that racial
demands should be treated with ‘benign neglect.’
Despite the growing conservatism in Washington, some civil rights gains
were made. The Voting Rights Act was renewed. The US Supreme Court tired
of southern subterfuges that kept public schools segregated. In Alexander
v. Holmes(1969), the Court ordered Mississippi’s schools to desegregate
‘now.’ In Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenberg Board of Education(1971), the
Court authorized citywide busingto achieve racially integrated schools
in Charlotte, North Carolina. Attorney Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty
Law Center bankrupted Klan groups through lawsuits. The murderers of
Medgar Evers, the four black girls in Birmingham, Vernon Dahmer, and Ben
Chester White were brought to justice recently. In a symbolic gesture, the
state of Mississippi voted in 1995 to ratify the 13th Amendment abolishing
slavery. That same year, the Southern Baptist Convention apologized for
defending slavery and resisting racial justice. In 2003, the Georgia state
legislature finally removed the Confederate symbol from its flag, Ole Miss134 THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT
Busing: An unpopular
judicial remedy that trans-
ported black and white
children to achieve school
desegregation.