Fracture

Barack Obama, the Clintons, and the Racial Divide

Joy-Ann Reid

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780062305251
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062305275
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Barack Obama's speech on the Edmund Pettus Bridge to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the Selma to Montgomery marches should have represented the culmination of Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream of racial unity. Yet, in Fracture, MSNBC national correspondent Joy-Ann Reid shows that, despite the progress we have made, we are still a nation divided—as seen recently in headline-making tragedies such as the killing of Trayvon Martin and the uprisings in Ferguson and Baltimore.

With President Obama's election, Americans expected an open dialogue about race but instead discovered the irony of an African American president who seemed hamstrung when addressing racial matters, leaving many of his supporters disillusioned and his political enemies sharpening their knives. To understand why that is so, Reid examines the complicated relationship between Barack Obama and Bill and Hillary Clinton, and how their varied approaches to the race issue parallel the challenges facing the Democratic party itself: the disparate parts of its base and the whirl of shifting allegiances among its power players—and how this shapes the party and its hopes of retaining the White House.

Fracture traces the party's makeup and character regarding race from the civil rights days to the Obama presidency. Filled with key political players such as Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, John Lewis, and Al Sharpton, it provides historical context while addressing questions arising as we head into the next national election: Will Hillary Clinton's campaign represent an embrace of Obama's legacy or a repudiation of it? How is Hillary Clinton's stand on race both similar to and different from Obama's, or from her husband's? How do minorities view Mrs. Clinton, and will they line up in huge numbers to support her—and what will happen if they don't?

Veteran reporter Joy-Ann Reid investigates these questions and more, offering breaking news, fresh insight, and experienced insider analysis, mixed with fascinating behind-the-scenes drama, to illuminate three of the most important figures in modern political history, and how race can affect the crucial 2016 election and the future of America itself.

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 “Voice 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.

News of the men’s disappearance, their faces peering out from an FBI flyer urging public help, quickly became a national and an international sensation, increasing the urgency for their representatives in Washington to act, because now white lives were also on the line.

When the Civil Rights Act went back to the House for final passage on July 2, it received overwhelming affirmation again: 289 to 126. The bill had split the Democratic Party straight down the Mason-Dixon Line, with the all-Democratic caucuses of Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana, Arkansas, and North and South Carolina voting unanimously against it, while the tiny, all-Democratic delegations in Oregon, Rhode Island, Delaware, Hawaii, and Idaho were solid “ayes.”

Senator Hubert Humphrey hailed the act as “the greatest piece of social legislation of our generation.” President Johnson signed it into law hours after final passage, two days before Independence Day. But southern Democrats were crying “tyranny” and condemning the forces they blamed for it: the clergy, the media, and even labor unions, long a core component of the Democratic election apparatus.

Though he had taken a first, historic step toward history, and toward finishing what Kennedy, prodded by a broad and insistent civil rights movement, had started, Johnson could see the dam of political realignment massing inside his party’s southern stronghold. The alienation of the South from the labor movement, and the sense of siege across the former Confederate states, particularly regarding the press, would be lasting.

One month after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, on August 4, the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were found. They had been shot, beaten, and buried in an earthen dam in Philadelphia, Mississippi.

A month after that, on September 16, Strom Thurmond quit the Democratic Party for good, pledging his support, his South Carolina political machine, and his counsel to Goldwater. Thurmond accused his former party of “leading the evolution of our nation into a socialist dictatorship”; Democrats, he said, had “forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses, and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors.”

“The Democratic Party has encouraged lawlessness, civil unrest, and mob actions,” Thurmond ranted. “The Democratic Party . . . has sent our youth into combat in Vietnam, refusing to call it war. The Democratic Party now worships at the throne of power and materialism.”

Thurmond was the first of the “Dixiecrats” to go. He wouldn’t be the last. And his view of his former party would come to be the dominant view of a majority of white southern voters.

OUTSIDE THE SOUTH, NATIONAL DEMOCRATS, INCLUDING THE president, quickly began to view the newly liberated and growing black vote as their reward for a job well done on the Civil Rights Act. Johnson believed he’d earned the loyalty of the civil rights establishment and the black body politic, a belief that would be severely tested as the country became increasingly involved in Vietnam. Just one month after he signed the landmark civil rights bill, activists from Mississippi disrupted the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey, with round-the-clock protests on the boardwalk. At the convention, activist Fannie Lou Hamer gave dramatic testimony, broadcast by the three televisions networks, about the brutality she and other would-be registrants endured inside a Mississippi jail. Johnson wanted Hamer off TV, fearing that the spectacle had the potential to cast him and his Democratic Party as villains in yet another racial conflagration.

African Americans had always seen their relationship with the two political parties as a means to an end. Constant agitation and pushing presidents from both parties were simply part of the process, and King had long warned the movement about becoming entangled in partisan affairs, telling a February 11, 1958, gathering at Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina: “I’m not inextricably bound to either party. I’m not concerned about telling you what party to vote for. But what I’m saying is this: that we must gain the ballot and use it wisely.”

After Abraham Lincoln, black voters, when they could access the ballot box, had been strongly Republican, and after Franklin Roosevelt, increasingly Democratic.

Even in 1936, when black voters lent 71 percent of their ballots to reelect Roosevelt, only 44 percent of African Americans identified themselves as Democrats, though by this time fewer than 40 percent continued to call themselves Republicans. When Roosevelt was elected to a fourth term in 1944, black party identification had fallen by 4 points, and FDR’s share of the black electorate was down to 68 percent, with 21 percent calling themselves independents.

While the party often failed to address segregation, and in some cases, like housing, served to entrench it, the New Deal had been the first tranche of federal policy since Reconstruction to lift large swaths of African Americans out of despair. And with FDR’s vice president, Harry Truman, up for election in 1948, facing Republican Thomas Dewey and “Dixiecrat” Strom Thurmond, who was running on a segregation line, black voters clung to the Democrats all the more, boosting their party identification by 16 points, and the share of their votes to 77 percent.

Theodore White, in a much-circulated column in Collier’s magazine in August 1956, titled “The Negro Voter: Can He Elect a President?” wrote: “By 1948, when Truman squeezed out his hair’s-breadth win over Dewey, carrying Illinois by 33,612 votes, California by 17,865 votes, Ohio by 7,107 votes, no practicing politician could ignore the fact that the Negro vote in these states was one of the vital margins by which the Presidency of the United States had been won.”

Democrats held their overwhelming share of the black vote in 1952, as Adlai Stevenson, the liberal Illinois governor, received 76 percent as he faced war hero Dwight D. Eisenhower in the general election. But when Eisenhower faced Stevenson again four years later, two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark school desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Stevenson’s share of the black vote dropped to 61 percent, Eisenhower’s climbed from 24 to 39 percent, and just 56 percent of black Americans called themselves Democrats.

Eisenhower’s reluctance to openly confront southern segregationists, his lack of public support for the Brown decision, and his reticence in using federal power to further the cause of civil rights may have encouraged southern resistance, and white citizens’ councils sprang up across the southern states to resist the Supreme Court’s desegregation ruling. But southern vehemence helped to doom the Democratic ticket with black voters. The Southern Manifesto debuted in the thick of the reelection campaign in March 1956, and among the signers was Stevenson’s 1952 running mate, segregationist Alabama senator John Sparkman. And though Stevenson was now running with moderate Estes Kefauver, Stevenson’s studious, “cautious disagreement” with the declaration of resistance worked to his disfavor as the news spread in black newspapers.

Stevenson, though mellifluous on the stump, was notoriously bland on civil rights, and at pains not to alienate his party’s southern wing, whose consent had delivered him the nomination, including over Texas senator Lyndon Johnson. And Eisenhower, despite his silence on even the Emmett Till lynching, was a man with a growing record...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• 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
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher