Most of the outright segregationists were Southerners. But even in the North, where there was less sympathy for strict segregation, there was palpable fear of the changes the civil rights movement was bringing. Throughout the sixties, more than 60 percent of voters agreed that “the civil rights people have been trying to push too fast.” This reaction partly reflected the way the goals of the civil rights movement widened over time. At first it was simply a matter of undoing Jim Crow—the explicit, blatant disenfranchisement and sometimes violently enforced second-class status of blacks in the South. The crudity and brutality of Jim Crow made it, in the end, a relatively easy target for reform: The nation’s sympathies were engaged by the civil rights marchers; its sense of itself was outraged by the viciousness of the resistance by Southern racists. And undoing Jim Crow required no more than declaring the formal, government-enforced institutions of Southern segregation illegal.
Once the formal institutions of Southern apartheid were gone, however, there still remained the reality of less formal but de facto discrimination and segregation—which, unlike formal segregation, existed all over the country. And as civil rights activists tried to take on this reality, the nature of the confrontation changed. In the eyes of many nonSouthern whites, it was one thing to tell school districts that they couldn’t explicitly maintain separate schools for white and black children, but it was something quite different to redraw school district boundaries and put children on buses in an attempt to end de facto segregation. Similarly, many non-Southern whites viewed laws telling state governments that they couldn’t refuse services to black people as legitimate, but viewed as illegitimate laws outlawing racial discrimination by private landlords or by homeowners selling their homes. Civil rights advocates were right to believe that de facto segregation and discrimination—which despite claims that they represented voluntary choice were often in practice supported by threats of violence—represented barriers to progress every bit as important as Jim Crow. In attempting to remedy these wrongs, however, the civil rights movement inevitably brought itself a much wider range of enemies.
Enterprising politicians took notice. Ronald Reagan, who had opposed the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Act—calling the latter “humiliating to the South”—ran for governor of California in part on a promise to repeal the state’s fair housing act. “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house,” Reagan said, “he has a right to do so.”
Above all, public perception of the civil rights movement became entangled with the rising tide of urban disorder—a linkage that served to legitimate and harden resistance to further civil rights progress.
In October 1967 Richard Nixon published a now-famous article in Reader’s Digest titled “What Has Happened to America?” The article, which was actually written by Pat Buchanan, wrapped up all the nation’s turmoil in one package: Liberal permissiveness, Nixon/Buchanan claimed, was the root of all evil.[3]
“Just three years ago,” the article began, “this nation seemed to be completing its greatest decade of racial progress.” But now the nation was “among the most lawless and violent in the history of free peoples.” Urban riots were “the most virulent symptoms to date of another, and in some ways graver, national disorder—the decline in respect for public authority and the rule of law in America.”
And it was all the fault of the liberals.
The shocking crime and disorder in American life today, flow in large measure from two fundamental changes that have occurred in the attitudes of many Americans. First, there is the permissiveness toward violation of the law and public order by those who agree with the cause in question. Second, there is the indulgence of crime because of sympathy for the past grievances of those who have become criminals. Our judges have gone too far in weakening the peace forces as against the criminal forces. Our opinion-makers have gone too far in promoting the doctrine that when a law is broken, society, not the criminal is to blame.
Nixon and Buchanan knew what they were doing. A conservative, went a line that became popular in the 1960s, is a liberal who has been mugged. These days crime has faded as a political issue: Crime rates plunged in the nineties, and they plunged most in New York City, once seen as the epitome of all that was wrong with American society. But in the sixties, “law and order” was arguably the single most effective rallying cry of conservatives.
There was a reason Americans felt that law and order were breaking down: They were. The crime rate more than tripled between 1957 and 1970. The rate of robbery, which Historical Statistics of the United States defines as “stealing or taking anything of value from the care, custody, or control of a person by force or violence or by putting in fear”—in other words, mugging—more than quadrupled.
Why did crime surge? The short answer is that we don’t really know much about what causes crime to rise or fall, as demonstrated by the inability of experts to predict major changes in crime rates. The crime surge of the sixties, which confounded the expectations of liberals who expected growing social justice to be rewarded with better behavior, came as a complete surprise. So did the plunging crime rates of the nineties, which confounded conservatives who believed that no improvement in crime would be possible without a return to traditional social values. As Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago has pointed out, in the nineties “the crime decline was so unanticipated that it was widely dismissed as temporary or illusory long after it had begun.”[4]
Perhaps the most plausible explanation for the great crime wave rests on demography. After World War II millions of blacks left the rural South for Northern cities—and along with their white fellow citizens, they also had a lot of children. As the baby boom reached adolescence, there was a large increase in the number of young males, and young urban black males in particular. It’s true that the actual increase in crime was much larger than the increase in the number of people in crime-prone demographic groups, but there may have been a “multiplier effect” because the demographic changes overwhelmed the forces of social control. The proliferation of crime-prone young males created new, dangerous norms for behavior. And the increase in the number of people likely to commit crimes wasn’t matched by any corresponding increase in the number of police officers to arrest them or jail cells to hold them. During the sixties the number of people in prison remained essentially flat even as crime soared—a sharp contrast with what happened in the nineties, when the number of people in prison continued to rise even as crime plunged.
Other factors were at work, too. One was a lack of inner-city jobs. Millions of Southern blacks had moved to Northern cities in search of manufacturing jobs—jobs that were abundant in the forties and fifties, thanks to the wartime boom and the peacetime consumer boom that followed. In the 1960s, however, those same cities began turning into an economic trap. Thanks to changing technologies of production and transportation, manufacturing began moving out of crowded urban industrial districts to sprawling plants in the suburbs; as a result jobs became scarce in the inner-city areas where blacks lived. Yet the black population remained penned in those inner cities due both to segregation and the inability to afford cars. The result was high unemployment among urban blacks even in the face of a booming economy.[5]
3.
An online version is available at http://www.wadsworth.com/history _d/templates/student_ resources/0534607411/sources /old/ch29/29.4. nixon.html.
4.
Steven Levitt, “Understanding Why Crime Fell in the 1990s,”
5.
This phenomenon was first noted by John F. Kain, “Housing Segregation, Negro Employment, and Metropolitan Decentralization.”