Feeling Riots

2020 ◽  
pp. 75-100
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Liberalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
Urban Rebellion ◽  
Black Equality

This chapter reflects upon the multiple interpretations of major urban rebellions in the United States between 1964-1969 to understand how descriptions of the major race riots, especially the metaphor of the powderkeg, created and reflected racialized political feelings where hopelessness replaced hope as the emotional framework for racial liberalism and as the possibility of integration ebbed. The assassinations of John Kennedy and, later, Malcolm X, along with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 evacuated black hope from political liberalism and replaced it with different political emotions, including rage, frustration, and fear. Blacks feared white terrorism and whites feared blacks. This impasse augmented the hopelessness and anger that undergirded riots. It prompted the passage of the 1967 DC Crime Bill and helped undermine the 1968 Civil Rights Bill as protest was elided with crime in news accounts and in public policy, effectively mystifying the context and content of urban rebellion. As the War on Poverty transformed into the War on Crime, feelings became a major rhetorical vector of policy discussions about urban rebellion. Law and order rhetoric reasserted white statism as the only permissible loyalty and effectively harnessed white anxiety and anger towards ending any possibility of black equality through the law.

scholarly journals THE REPUBLICAN PARTY AND THE LONG, HOT SUMMER OF 1967 IN THE UNITED STATES

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (4) ◽  
pp. 1089-1111
Author(s):  
MARK McLAY
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The United States ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Federal Spending ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
The 1960S

AbstractDuring the summer of 1967, the United States experienced a series of race riots across the nation's cities as largely black neighbourhoods rebelled against the conditions in which they were living. The crisis reached its apogee in July when the worst riots since the American Civil War struck Detroit. In this atmosphere, legislators were faced with a stark choice of punishing rioters with stricter crime measures or alleviating living conditions with substantial federal spending. Despite being a minority in Congress, elected Republicans found themselves holding the balance of power in choosing whether the federal government would enforce law and order or pursue social justice for ghetto residents. While those Republicans who pursued ‘order’ have been given prominence in historiographical narratives, such politicians only represent one side of the Republican response. Indeed, moderate and progressive Republicans rallied to save Democratic President Lyndon B. Johnson's War on Poverty and a host of urban spending initiatives that had appeared politically doomed. These actions reveal that scholars have overestimated Republican conservatism during the 1960s. Nonetheless, the rioting left a long-term legacy that enabled ‘order’ eventually to triumph over ‘justice’ in the following five decades.

The Obama Coalition

2020 ◽  
pp. 143-164
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Discourse ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Black President ◽  
Over Time

While the tensions between white hope and black despair were a dynamic that characterized politics in the Long Sixties, their structure is recursive. That is, the (positive and negative racial) feelings that undergird racial liberalism did not stop emerging and receding after law and order campaigns destroyed civil rights and Black Power organizing in the mid-70s. Nowhere is this clearer than in the entrance and disappearance of the so-called “Obama coalition” in 2008 to elect Barack Obama as the first biracial/black president in U.S. history. In considering how hope continues to be inextricably linked to rage, contempt, and despair, this brief conclusion considers hope as an ironic discourse of liberalism, particularly as it is racialized. The birth of Afro- pessimism as a coterminous discourse with what we now call the “post-racial” Obama coalition is important because it demonstrates how black feelings in the Long Sixties continue to shape national political discourse, demonstrating how affective politics are iterative as well as how they change over time.

Plessy’s Long Shadow

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derrick Bell
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection ◽  
Political Equality ◽  
Race Riots ◽  
Black And White ◽  
The Law

The supreme court’s 1896 Decision in Plessy v. Ferguson served to bring the law into a dismal harmony with the nation’s view of race in life. The Court decided that segregation in public facilities through “separate but equal” accommodations for black citizens would satisfy the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment. The years since the sporadically enforced policies of Reconstruction ended in 1876 had been hard for those former slaves and their offspring whose slavery had legally ended with the passage of the Thir­teenth Amendment in 1865. To ensure their rights to due process and the equal protection of the law, the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 provided that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, . . . are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Despite legislation intended to provide enforcement of these rights, the laws were poorly enforced and most were subsequently declared unconstitutional. Corrupting law but relying on intimidation and violence, southern governments stripped blacks of political power. Given meaningful if unspoken assurances that the federal government would not protect black civil rights, conservative southerners regained power utilizing racial fear and hatred to break up competing populist groups of poor black and white farmers. In addition to the disenfranchisement of blacks, whites sought to secure their power through intensive anti-Negro propaganda campaigns championing white supremacy. Literary and scientific leaders published tracts and books intended to “prove” the inhumanity of the Negro. In this hostile climate, segregation laws that had made a brief appearance during Reconstruction were revived across the South, accompanied by waves of violence punctuated by an increase in lynchings and race riots. In an effort both to protest the indignity of segregation and challenge its validity, Homer Plessy, acting for a New Orleans civil rights group, attempted to ride in a railroad car reserved for whites. He was arrested and convicted of violating Louisiana’s 1890 segregation law. On appeal, the Supreme Court acknowledged that the Fourteenth Amendment required absolute equality of the two races before the law, adding: “but in the nature of things it could not have been intended to abolish distinctions based upon color, or to enforce social, as distinguished from political equality, or a commingling of the two races upon terms unsatisfactory to either.”

America’s Wars on Poverty and the Building of the Welfare State

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Torstensson
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Welfare State ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Weak Center ◽  
Compassionate Conservatism ◽  
The Welfare State

On January 5, 2014—the fiftieth anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson’s launch of the War on Poverty—the New York Times asked a panel of opinion leaders a simple question: “Does the U.S. Need Another War on Poverty?” While the answers varied, all the invited debaters accepted the martial premise of the question—that a war on poverty had been fought and that eliminating poverty was, without a doubt, a “fight,” or a “battle.” Yet the debate over the manner—martial or not—by which the federal government and public policy has dealt with the issue of poverty in the United States is still very much an open-ended one. The evolution and development of the postwar American welfare state is a story not only of a number of “wars,” or individual political initiatives, against poverty, but also about the growth of institutions within and outside government that seek to address, alleviate, and eliminate poverty and its concomitant social ills. It is a complex and at times messy story, interwoven with the wider historical trajectory of this period: civil rights, the rise and fall of a “Cold War consensus,” the emergence of a counterculture, the Vietnam War, the credibility gap, the rise of conservatism, the end of “welfare,” and the emergence of compassionate conservatism. Mirroring the broader organization of the American political system, with a relatively weak center of power and delegated authority and decision-making in fifty states, the welfare model has developed and grown over decades. Policies viewed in one era as unmitigated failures have instead over time evolved and become part of the fabric of the welfare state.

Beds and Biometrics

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrisia Macías-Rojas
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Prison Population ◽  
The United States ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
United States Today ◽  
Prison Overcrowding ◽  
Immigrant Detention ◽  
Post Civil Rights ◽  
The U.S

Prominent Arizona conservatives and, some would argue, liberal reformers helped spearhead law and order policies that exploded the U.S. prison population and created a crisis of prison overcrowding. This chapter argues that the scramble for prison beds was a major force behind the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), which Congress pushed as a way to purge noncitizens from jails and prisons in order to free up prison beds. CAP gave primacy to criminal enforcement targets and unleashed an onslaught of measures that restructured immigrant detention and deportation, spawned similar programs like “absconder” initiatives, “fugitive” operations, Security Communities, and immigrant prosecution programs like Operation Streamline—in other words, many of the punitive policies we associate with the criminalization of migration in the United States today. However, punitive policies are not necessarily a “backlash” against rights and protections that reformers fought for for over a century. Rather, they operate within post–civil rights “antidiscrimination” constitutional frameworks in ways that recognize rights for certain “victims,” while aggressively punishing and banishing those branded as criminal.

Racial Liberalism, the Moynihan Report & the Dædalus Project on “The Negro American”

Daedalus ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 140 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Geary
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
The United States ◽  
Johnson Administration ◽  
Arts And Sciences ◽  
Racial Liberalism ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Moynihan Report

In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then an official in the Johnson administration, published The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, better known as the Moynihan Report. He was influenced by his participation in two conferences organized by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in the mid-1960s, as well as two issues of its journal Dceda-lus, on the topic of “The Negro American.” Arguing that the “damaged” family structure of African Americans would impede efforts to achieve full racial equality in the United States, the Moynihan Report launched an explosive debate that helped fracture a fragile liberal consensus on civil rights. Geary examines the report alongside the Dcedalus project, establishing its roots in the racial liberalism of the mid-1960s and connecting it to efforts by liberals to address the socioeconomic dimensions of racial inequality. He considers the close relationship between scholarship and public policy that existed at the time and reflects on the ways liberal ideas about race have changed in the decades since.

Democracy's Capital

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Pearlman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Welfare States ◽  
Community Control ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Black Residents ◽  
Lyndon Johnson ◽  
War On Crime ◽  
The 1960S

From its 1790 founding until 1974, Washington, D.C.--capital of "the land of the free"--lacked democratically elected city leadership. Fed up with governance dictated by white stakeholders, federal officials, and unelected representatives, local D.C. activists catalyzed a new phase of the fight for home rule. Amid the upheavals of the 1960s, they gave expression to the frustrations of black residents and wrestled for control of their city. Bringing together histories of the carceral and welfare states, as well as the civil rights and Black Power movements, Lauren Pearlman narrates this struggle for self-determination in the nation’s capital. She captures the transition from black protest to black political power under the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations and against the backdrop of local battles over the War on Poverty and the War on Crime. Through intense clashes over funds and programming, Washington residents pushed for greater participatory democracy and community control. However, the anticrime apparatus built by the Johnson and Nixon administrations curbed efforts to achieve true home rule. As Pearlman reveals, this conflict laid the foundation for the next fifty years of D.C. governance, connecting issues of civil rights, law and order, and urban renewal.

Emigrant Psychoanalysts in the USA and the FBI Archives

2004 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-92 ◽  
Author(s):  
James E. Goggin
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Cultural Context ◽  
Due Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
External Threats ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Rich ◽  
New Nation

Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.

The 1970s

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Borstelmann
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Free Market ◽  
The United States ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Retirement Plans ◽  
Free Agency ◽  
The World ◽  
The Disabled ◽  
Oil Crisis ◽  
American Society

This book looks at an iconic decade when the cultural left and economic right came to the fore in American society and the world at large. While many have seen the 1970s as simply a period of failures epitomized by Watergate, inflation, the oil crisis, global unrest, and disillusionment with military efforts in Vietnam, this book creates a new framework for understanding the period and its legacy. It demonstrates how the 1970s increased social inclusiveness and, at the same time, encouraged commitments to the free market and wariness of government. As a result, American culture and much of the rest of the world became more—and less—equal. This book explores how the 1970s forged the contours of contemporary America. Military, political, and economic crises undercut citizens' confidence in government. Free market enthusiasm led to lower taxes, a volunteer army, individual 401(k) retirement plans, free agency in sports, deregulated airlines, and expansions in gambling and pornography. At the same time, the movement for civil rights grew, promoting changes for women, gays, immigrants, and the disabled. And developments were not limited to the United States. Many countries gave up colonial and racial hierarchies to develop a new formal commitment to human rights, while economic deregulation spread to other parts of the world, from Chile and the United Kingdom to China. Placing a tempestuous political culture within a global perspective, this book shows that the decade wrought irrevocable transformations upon American society and the broader world that continue to resonate today.

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