And the lack of jobs in the inner city, as famously argued by the sociologist William Julius Wilson, probably helped foster a destructive culture. Wilson also argued that the beginnings of desegregation perversely worsened the problem, because middle-class blacks took advantage of reduced housing discrimination to flee the ghetto, leaving behind a population segregated by class as well as race.
Whatever the reasons for rising crime in the sixties, what people saw was that law and order were breaking down. Many of them were more than willing to follow Nixon’s lead and place the blame on purported liberal permissiveness. There’s no evidence that permissiveness—as opposed to, say, lack of prison capacity or sufficient employment opportunities for blacks—was a significant factor in the crime wave. But the public, confronted by rising crime at the same time the nation was attempting to correct past injustices, was all too willing to make the connection.
And in the public mind concerns about crime were inextricably mixed with fear of large-scale urban violence.
The era of urban riots that began with the Harlem riot of 1964 lasted only four years—that is, although there would be riots after 1968, like the 1992 Los Angeles riot that followed the police beating of Rodney King, they would never feel like a national wave. In the riot years, however, it seemed as if all of urban America was going up in flames.
The causes of the rise and fall of urban riots remain as obscure as the causes of the rise and fall of crime. Many, probably most, riots began with acts of police brutality. The 1964 Harlem riot, for example, began when a police officer shot a fifteen-year-old black youth. And during the riots the police often ran amok. Still, police brutality against blacks was nothing new. So why, for four years in the 1960s, did such acts provoke large-scale riots?
Social scientists have found that riots were most likely to happen in cities outside the South that had large black populations. The absence of Southern riots presumably reflected the tight level of social control. Or to put it less euphemistically, in the South blacks were too terrorized to riot. Repression was less total in Northern cities, and the great postwar migration ensured that by the sixties many of these cities had huge black populations, including an increasing number of younger blacks who had never lived in the South. These demographic trends, which were essentially the same demographic trends that helped cause rising crime, combined with the terrible living conditions in urban ghettos, probably set the stage for violent reactions against acts of brutality that would once simply have been endured.
Did the civil rights movement have anything to do with urban riots? The 1968 report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, generally referred to as the Kerner Commission, suggested that it did. “White racism,” it declared, “is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.” While placing the ultimate blame on white racism, however, the report suggested that the proximate causes of the riots lay in the expectations created by the civil rights movement:
Frustrated hopes are the residue of the unfulfilled expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic struggle for equal rights in the South.
A climate that tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a form of protest has been created by white terrorism directed against nonviolent protest; by the open defiance of law and federal authority by state and local officials resisting desegregation; and by some protest groups engaging in civil disobedience who turn their backs on nonviolence, go beyond the constitutionally protected rights of petition and free assembly, and resort to violence to attempt to compel alteration of laws and policies with which they disagree.
The frustrations of powerlessness have led some Negroes to the conviction that there is no effective alternative to violence as a means of achieving redress of grievances, and of “moving the system.” These frustrations are reflected in alienation and hostility toward the institutions of law and government and the white society which controls them, and in the reach toward racial consciousness and solidarity reflected in the slogan “Black Power.”
A new mood has sprung up among Negroes, particularly among the young, in which self-esteem and enhanced racial pride are replacing apathy and submission to “the system.”
Lyndon Johnson was deeply dismayed by the Kerner Commission report, which he felt played right into the hands of conservatives. Blaming white racism for urban disorder, no matter how true the accusation might have been, was no way to win white votes. Suggesting that attempts to diminish the heavy hand of racism might have catalyzed violence wasn’t likely to encourage further reform so much as to empower those who didn’t want a civil rights movement in the first place. And it certainly helped Nixon.
And in the minds of white voters, crime and riots merged with another widely publicized indicator of America’s breakdown: rising welfare dependency.
After his death in 2004 Ronald Reagan was eulogized as a lovable, avuncular fellow, devoted to the cause of freedom, defined by his victory over the Soviet evil empire and, maybe, by his devotion to tax cuts. But the Ronald Reagan who became California’s governor in 1966 was something quite different: the representative of and vehicle for white voters angry at the bums on welfare. In his autobiography Reagan described the groups who urged him to run for governor of California in 1966:
People were tired of wasteful government programs and welfare chiselers; and they were angry about the constant spiral of taxes and government regulations, arrogant bureaucrats, and public officials who thought all of mankind’s problems could be solved by throwing the taxpayers’ dollars at them.[6]
The image is clear: Welfare chiselers were driving up decent peoples’ taxes. Never mind that it wasn’t true, at least not to any significant extent—that Aid to Families with Dependent Children, the program most people meant when they said “welfare,” never was a major cost of government,[7] and that cheating was never a significant problem. (In later years Reagan would refer again and again to the grossly exaggerated story of a Chicago welfare queen driving her welfare Cadillac.) The fact was that welfare rolls were indeed rising. By 1966 twice as many Americans were on welfare as there had been a decade earlier. That was just the beginning: The welfare rolls more than doubled again in the “welfare explosion” of the late 1960s and early 1970s.[8] And Reagan didn’t need to point out that a substantial fraction of those who entered the welfare rolls were black.
What caused the welfare explosion? A change in attitude, according to the mainstream media: “In Washington,” wrote Time in 1970,
they call it the “welfare syndrome.” Largely because of the work of groups like the National Welfare Rights Organization, which now has chapters in all 50 states, the poor no longer feel that any stigma is attached to applying for welfare. Tens of thousands of persons who were once too timid or too ashamed to go on the dole are now rapping on the doors of their local welfare offices and demanding the payments they consider to be their right.[9]
The author and pundit Mickey Kaus, writing thirty years later, was blunter about what really changed: “Before the ‘welfare explosion’ of the late 1960s many poor blacks were blocked or discouraged from receiving welfare.”[10]
7.
In 1970, after a decade of rapid growth, AFDC payments totaled $4.9 billion, compared with $39 billion in payments to Social Security beneficiaries. Data from the Social Security Administration, http://www.ssa.gov/policy/ docs/statcomps/supplement /2005/9g.html.
10.
Mickey Kaus, “The Ending of the Black Underclass,” Slate.com, Nov. 3, 1999. http://slate.com/id/1003938/.