Fracture Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Philomena

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1

  1964

  2

  All in the Family

  3

  The Third Way

  4

  The “First Black President”

  5

  Kanye

  6

  Hope and Change

  7

  Father’s Day

  8

  Post-Racial

  9

  Backlash

  10

  Victory

  11

  Fracture

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  IF YOU WERE A BLACK KID GROWING UP IN THE UNITED STATES in the 1970s and ’80s—and you lived in a house like the one I grew up in, where we read the newspaper every morning, watched the evening news and Nightline, and rarely missed the Sunday talk shows—you knew that when you were old enough to vote, you would be a Democrat. The Democrats were “our party.” The Republicans were “their party.”

  Sure, occasionally you heard about black Republicans here and there. But they were the exception: the stuffy business types with the perfectly symmetrical corporate Afros; the old southerners who liked to go on and on about the party of Abraham Lincoln; or Republican “wannabes,” like my Congolese father, who didn’t live in the United States and so only knew the political parties as an abstraction. For most black Americans, being political meant being a Democrat. Or in my Guyanese-immigrant, single mother’s parlance, this was the party of Shirley Chisholm and Jack Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and civil rights, “Run Jesse Run” and “Where’s the beef?”—the hilarious Wendy’s TV-commercial slogan appropriated by doomed presidential candidate Walter Mondale. (My mother didn’t care that he had no chance of beating Ronald Reagan. She loved that line.) The message that We Are Democrats was all but piped into my ideological DNA.

  When Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980, my sister and I burst out crying. She was in seventh grade and I was in sixth. (We didn’t bother crying over Mondale; it was clear early on that his cause was lost.) The first vote I cast in a presidential primary was for Jesse Jackson, and my first vote for a presidential candidate was for Michael Dukakis. My sister canvassed for Gary Hart after school. I started working in the TV news business in 1998 and briefly left it in 2004 to work for the election of a Democratic president. I did so again in 2008. But the party that seemed almost organically to be my natural political home wasn’t always so.

  THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY’S TRANSFORMATION—FROM REPRESENTING the antebellum South, known for its “massive resistance” to integration and literal terrorism against black citizens; to the party that represented the vast majority of black Americans, whether descended from the enslaved or newly minted as U.S. citizens; and ultimately to the party that produced the nation’s first black president—was one of the most dramatic turnabouts in American political history. It came through the crucible of a white, southern president, Lyndon Johnson, whose civil rights triumphs were quickly overwhelmed by a war that split him from the very coalition that had brought about such veritable miracles of civil rights and civic justice.

  And it came at a cost.

  After Johnson—and the tumult of the 1968 election, which saw the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., and ultimately the election of Richard Nixon—the Democratic Party spent decades wrangling with his legacy, often disowning it, as the party struggled to regain favor with increasingly resentful white voters up north, and to stem the flight of white voters down south, as it continued to pursue the elusive White House.

  As Republicans essentially took over as the party of southern conservatives, Democrats struggled to reconcile their newly robust multiracial character with the changing politics of the country. From Richard Nixon to Ronald Reagan, Republican presidential candidates nurtured and profited from the white working class’s growing sense of grievance over those Johnson-era programs that attempted to add economic stability to the cadre of basic rights secured for African Americans (and poor whites). For Democrats, race would be both an elevator under their feet, growing their voter rolls particularly in the southern states and putting presidential elections within closer reach, and an anchor around their necks, shrinking their popularity with white working-class voters for a generation.

  By the time Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought for the Democratic nomination in 2008, the party had largely ceded the southern states to the Republicans, even though the Democrats had sent two more white southerners to the White House after LBJ: Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. Clinton in particular struggled both during and after his presidency to reconcile the thorny issues of race and politics in American life. In 1992, he faced down Jesse Jackson, who in a scant twenty years had gone from bête noire of the Martin Luther King Jr. coterie to the preeminent force in black political life, and Clinton deftly emerged from his various showdowns, with Jackson and other black leaders who spoke out about Clinton’s dramatic policy shifts to the right, to claim the symbolic mantle of “first black president.”

  But the Democratic Party in its present form—racially mixed in the north and west and nearly all black “down south”—wasn’t completed before the ascent of the real first black president. Barack Obama’s elevation to the White House in January 2009 was the symbolic coup de grâce that finally brought about that transformation. And President Obama’s brief forays into the cultural thicket of race—speaking out on the shooting deaths of two young black men, Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, and on the police’s treatment of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates—set off ideological grenades that by 2014 had tested his own party’s tolerance for a “national conversation on race” and for a president who by his very being couldn’t help but avoid the subject. The racial polarization of the Obama era helped push the Democratic Party into becoming precisely what conservatives in 1964 had wryly predicted it would: a party of ethnic minorities and liberal, northern whites, with almost no white presence south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

  This book traces the Democratic Party’s turbulent racial history, and the rocky road Democratic candidates and elected presidents have trod on their way to reconciling their party and their country’s racist past with its increasingly diverse future. In many ways, the Democrats’ evolution mirrors America’s. Its internal struggle to balance the needs and aspirations of a multiracial citizenry offers a microcosm of the national imperative to do the same. With increased diversity, our national will to confront both the past and present conditions of a shrinking white majority and an ascending multiracial minority is increasingly being tested, over issues of immigration, voting rights, gay rights, policing, and more.

  If the modern Republican Party represents the part of America that in fundamental ways is pulling backward toward a distant and irretrievable past, the current iteration of the Democratic Party represents the possibilities and challenges of a multiracial future. It doesn’t always get the alchemy right, and if it ultimately fails, party loyalties and demographic compositions could one day be scrambled again. But for the time being, and for the foreseeable future, particularly for African Americans, the Democrats are the only ball game, and with pressing issues of economic, health, and educational disparities, and with voting rights hanging in the balance, failure is not an option.

  As Barack Obama prepares to end his presidency after two terms, the Democratic Party is poised to turn once again to the Clintons, with Hillary Clinton—the former Young Republican and onetime First Lady who remade he
rself into a United States senator and Obama’s secretary of state—poised to inherit the mantle of leadership, and with it the job of managing and shaping the party’s demographic future.

  I wrote this book because if the Democrats can’t get it right—and they haven’t yet—it’s hard to see how the country can.

  CHAPTER 1

  1964

  Negroes are continuously making progress here in this country. The progress in many areas is not as fast as it should be but they are making progress and we will continue to make progress. There is prejudice now, there’s no reason that in the near and the foreseeable future that a Negro could also be president of the United States.

  —Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy in a Voice of America broadcast, May 23, 1961

  “THEY KEEP SAYING I HAVE ALL THIS TROUBLE IN THE NEGRO community, and I’ve never heard a Negro say that,” Lyndon Johnson told Whitney Young, head of the National Urban League, during a brief telephone conversation on January 6, 1964.

  The country was still reeling from the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, who had been cut down in LBJ’s Texas just two months earlier. Racial strife rippled across the South, where black and white college students in carefully pressed and starched shirts and horn-rimmed glasses sat down at Woolworth’s lunch counters; weathered women and men with sun-drawn faces lined up to register to vote; and young pastors and children with old souls met the whip and the hose and the stone wall of white resistance and hardened fealty to segregation.

  In two days Johnson would be giving his first State of the Union address, and he was making a flurry of phone calls to gain support for a host of items. He was worrying over everything from a budget bill he was sending to the House to the elections later that year, when he would have to stand for president in his own right.

  Johnson also had to deal with his fellow southerners in Congress who had signed the so-called Southern Manifesto, which was conceived in 1956 by Richard Russell of Georgia and Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, and which pledged to resist the desegregation of southern schools by “all lawful means.” It had been signed by nineteen southern Democrats—all but the Tennessee delegation of Albert Gore Sr. and Estes Kefauver—and seventy-seven members of the House of Representatives. Johnson thought these lawmakers were being bullheaded in the face of history’s headwinds. He had watched as his predecessors Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy were drawn reluctantly into defending civic justice for black Americans, but he saw in this issue a legacy he could build for himself.

  The hardscrabble Texan had an uneasy relationship with the specter of the fallen president, in whose shadow he’d labored since 1960. And he was incensed that even as he contemplated a pair of recess appointments that would place two black men, Spottswood Robinson III and Aloysius Leon Higginbotham Jr., on the federal bench, Jet magazine was questioning his commitment to the cause.

  Jet, the weekly bible of black news since its founding in Chicago in 1951, was where African Americans saw the gruesome pictures from the open casket containing the remains of lynched fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 and learned that a disturbed black woman named Izola Ware stabbed Martin Luther King Jr. with a letter opener in a Harlem department store in 1958. Now Jet readers were learning that Johnson had not been photographed with any black leaders since assuming the presidency.

  “I want to appoint these judges,” Johnson growled through the Oval Office telephone to Young. “[But] I don’t want to do it unless the whole Negro community knows that I’m doing it and the Democrats are doing it, and this damned Jet and the rest of ’em quit cutting us up and saying that I hate the ‘Nigroes.’ ”

  Young, along with other civil rights and labor leaders, including Roy Wilkins, the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.; James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality; and A. Philip Randolph, had spent three years lobbying, cajoling, and negotiating with the Kennedy administration for a civil rights bill that would put teeth into the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, and bring the South into full compliance with federal law and civilized modernity. Before that, in 1957, they’d pushed President Dwight Eisenhower to sign a civil rights bill—the first since Reconstruction—to bring federal power to bear to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South, and which established a civil rights commission and a civil rights division at the Department of Justice.

  “[The] strategy is as simple as it is profound,” journalist Theodore H. White wrote in 1956. “It is to alter totally the patterns of Southern custom and life. ‘It does no good,’ the leaders of the NAACP say almost to a man, ‘to send a rescue party South or mourn a colored man murdered in Mississippi. But if the federal government guarantees the Negro the right to vote down South, everything changes. No outsider can do anything about a Negro-hating sheriff in Tallahatchie County, but if Negroes vote they can change the sheriff. Arguing about segregation up North does little good—but if Negroes sit on school boards down South, they can act for themselves.’ ”

  That fight had been long, arduous, and bloody. By 1964 just 4 in 10 African American adults in the South were registered to vote, and the situation was far worse in Alabama, where just 23 percent were registered, and in Mississippi, where the figure was only 6 percent. But with scathing front-page newspaper stories landing on the doorsteps of white American households up north, King’s visible public image, and the nightly television broadcasts focused on the American South, civil rights groups had leveraged the 1963 March on Washington, and the firebombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham two weeks afterward—following months of marches, beatings, buses set on fire, dogs and fire hoses trained on men, women, and children in the city that blacks wryly nicknamed “Bombingham”—to push the Democratic-controlled Congress to advance the Civil Rights Act of 1963.

  Johnson now carried the burden of seeing the civil rights bill through Congress while keeping his party from being torn in two. He wanted help from labor and civil rights leaders to shake loose the Republican votes the bill needed to defeat a filibuster by southern Democrats.

  “They say I’m an arm twister,” Johnson told Roy Wilkins during a January 22 call. “But I’m not a magician. . . . I can’t make a southerner change his spots any more than I can make a leopard change his spots.” Johnson’s advice to Wilkins and his fellow civil rights leaders was paradoxical for the titular head of the Democratic Party. He urged them to work Republican senator Everett Dirksen of Illinois, and even to dangle the potential for black voter support for Dirksen’s reelection, to solicit his help on the bill.

  On February 10, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 emerged from the grip of Howard W. Smith, the powerful Democratic chairman of the House Rules Committee and a hardened Virginia segregationist, and passed overwhelmingly in the full House by 290 votes to 130.

  The vote came as America’s cultural evolution was accelerating. The night before, the Beatles captivated 73 million Sunday night television viewers of The Ed Sullivan Show. Two weeks later, on February 25, a twenty-two-year-old boxer and 1960 Olympic gold medal winner from Louisville, Kentucky, named Cassius Clay beat Sonny Liston in a landmark bout in Miami Beach, at a time when neither man was permitted to try on clothes at the downtown Miami department stores, and when even Joe Louis, the retired champ, had to sleep in private homes in Miami’s downtown black district, called Overtown. In victory, Clay announced that his name was now Muhammad Ali, and he would soon test the country’s patience for a black superstar who shed Christianity for the Nation of Islam, and the dignified acceptance of secondary citizenship for an unabashed and defiant demand to speak loudly, and as an equal.

  In the Senate, the civil rights bill rested in the hands of the Democratic majority leader, Mike Mansfield of Montana, who used a procedural maneuver to bypass the Judiciary Committee, led by James Eastland, a pugnacious Mississippi Democrat known as the “Voic
e of the White South.” In 1957 Eastland had insisted in a rambling television interview with journalist Mike Wallace, just over a month before passage of the first Civil Rights Act, that 99 percent of “Nigras” in the South preferred segregation.

  “The races segregate themselves on buses,” Eastland said, adding that it had been “found, throughout the years, you have more harmony and the races can make more progress under a system of separate.”

  The bill would outlast a record fifty-four-day filibuster led by Russell, the Georgia Democrat, who declared that the southern bloc would “resist to the bitter end any measure or any movement which would have a tendency to bring about social equality and intermingling and amalgamation of the races in our states.” He was joined by Thurmond of South Carolina and Robert Byrd of West Virginia. Those two, along with a handful of Republicans including Barry Goldwater, who happened to be running for president, launched a fourteen-hour filibuster of their own. But on June 19, 1964, the bill passed in the Senate, 73 votes to 27. It was a triumph for Lyndon Johnson, whose arm-twisting proved quite potent indeed. In the end, 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans voted in favor, while 21 southern Democrats and 6 Republicans voted “nay.”

  Two days after the Senate vote, on Father’s Day, three civil rights workers—James Chaney, twenty-one, a local black man, and two young Jewish men from New York City, Michael “Mickey” Schwerner, twenty-four, and Andrew Goodman, twenty—disappeared in the heart of Neshoba County, deep in the Mississippi Delta, The three men had been part of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s “Mississippi summer project,” which would later be dubbed “Freedom Summer,” an attempt to send an integrated northern army of volunteers to strengthen the resolve of terrorized black would-be voters.