The First and Second Reconstructions: Civil Rights in America

Introduction: The South, National Power, and the Road to Civil Rights

One of the most dramatic consequences of the Civil War and Reconstruction was that the South was effectively driven from national power for roughly six decades. Southerners no longer claimed the presidency, wielded much power on the Supreme Court, or made their influence strongly felt in Congress. Beginning in the 1930s, however, the South was able to flex more and more political muscle, and by the 1970s some began to think that American politics and political culture were becoming "southernized." How did this happen, and what difference did it make to the development of the South and the United States?

Under segregation, most blacks in the U.S. still lived in the South and were employed as sharecroppers, laborers, and domestic servants, but the system of segregation and discrimination was also found everywhere in other sections of the country. Virtually nothing was done for civil rights during the Progressive Era or the New Deal. No Democratic president seriously challenged the Southern wing of the party before Harry Truman, and because of his limited support for civil rights and desegregation of the military, the Dixiecrats split with the Democratic Party in 1948. It was a harbinger of the future, and explained why John F. Kennedy was so slow and hesitant to side with the civil rights movement before 1963. In Congress, a coalition of Southern Democrats and Republicans was able to block any meaningful action on civil rights before 1964.

Even when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which outlawed segregated schools, the South resisted attempts to integrate its dual school systems for twenty years. Indeed, all members of Congress from that section signed a Southern Manifesto vowing to resist all attempts at desegregation. In short, there had simply been no real chance for a Second Reconstruction in America before the mass protests for civil rights that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s, and even their limited successes produced a major conservative backlash, led first and foremost by Alabama governor George Wallace. His split with the Democratic Party in the 1960s was a sign that many conservative Southern whites were moving into the Republican Party for the first time in history.

Thanks to the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr. and the passage of the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, blacks and other minority groups made more progress in the U.S. in a decade than ever before in history. In 1964, after a decade of massive resistance by whites in the South, only 2% of blacks in the South and Border States attended integrated schools, but 25% did by 1967 (Gold 114). Segregated buses, restrooms, train cars, theaters, waiting rooms, and restaurants all disappeared after 1964, while it also became illegal to fire women for being pregnant or having small children. These are among the most important legacies of the Civil Rights Act. Politically, however, it was disastrous for the Democratic Party, which was not able to elect a non-Southern president again until 2008. Indeed, Barack Obama was the first Northern Democrat to carry any state in the South since 1968. Lyndon Johnson was perfectly correct when he told his press secretary Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republicans for a long time to come," but nevertheless it was the right thing to do (Gold 115).

The Southern Strategy and George Wallace's Defense of Segregation

In contrast to King's many references to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, Alabama governor George Wallace reminded his audience that the framers of those documents — Thomas Jefferson and James Madison — were slaveholders. Wallace would later run for president in 1964, 1968, and 1972 on a platform opposing civil rights and generally appealing to whites disaffected by protests, demonstrations, the antiwar movement, and other cultural, racial, and religious issues. Ever since 1964, the Republicans have used a Southern Strategy to appeal to these disaffected white voters, which has allowed them to control the White House for most of the time since 1968 and enact some highly regressive social and economic policies.

Wallace certainly had a very specific view of the Framers of the Constitution, and was correct in stating that they had not intended to grant equal citizenship and voting rights to blacks, even though they had "played a most magnificent part in erecting this great divinely inspired system of freedom" (Wallace 1963). He offered himself as an example of "courageous leadership to millions of people throughout this nation who look to the South for their hope in this fight to win and preserve our freedoms and liberties. So help me God" (Wallace 1963). He even argued that the 14th Amendment, which granted equal citizenship to all persons, was illegal and had been imposed on the South after the Civil War — a view identical to that of the KKK during the First Reconstruction.

After thanking his supporters, Wallace praised Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, and reminded his listeners that the first Confederate president had taken the oath of office in the very same spot, in "this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland" (Wallace 1963). He then delivered the only line for which this speech is remembered today, proclaiming: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . And I say . . . segregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever" (Wallace 1963). If King's signature line will always be "I have a dream," then Wallace's will be this rousing defense of segregation. Wallace also denounced federal judges who ordered the integration of public schools for trampling on the rights of white citizens.

Wallace maintained that liberals on the Supreme Court had been Communist-inspired when they outlawed school segregation in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) and when they banned prayer in the public schools in Engel v. Vitale (1962). All of this became standard rhetoric on the New Right in America for decades after this speech, in both its secular and evangelical Protestant forms. Wallace's references to God and the Bible were always made in the context of liberal attacks on white Southerners, just as he insisted that any federal efforts to support civil and voting rights for blacks were really examples of reverse racism against whites. For this reason, he had "placed this sign, 'In God We Trust,' upon our State Capitol on this Inauguration Day as physical evidence of determination to renew the faith of our fathers and to practice the free heritage they bequeathed to us" (Wallace 1963). God also intended the races to live separate lives, as the Founders had intended, but now "communist philosophers" were attempting to destroy the free society based on those sacred principles (Wallace 1963).

Real liberty, fraternity, and equality, according to Wallace, could only be found under a legal system that separated the races rather than requiring integration. He warned King and other blacks who "follow the false doctrine of communistic amalgamation" that whites were willing to defend the status quo at all costs (Wallace 1963). Barry Goldwater and Richard Nixon subsequently made use of the Southern Strategy to pick up the votes of disaffected Southern Democrats by appealing to these cultural and racial issues, and Republicans have continued this approach to the present. Goldwater picked up five states in the Deep South in 1964, in a year that was otherwise a landslide for the Democrats. Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan used the Southern Strategy extensively to appeal to disaffected white voters, and for this reason the Democrats almost never receive a majority of the white vote. Indeed, the Southern Strategy intensified after Barack Obama became president, even though his administration had not focused on civil rights issues to any appreciable degree.

The Legacy of the Civil Rights Acts and the Limits of the Second Reconstruction

Civil rights did not lead to the end of poverty among blacks and other minorities, although it certainly helped create a black middle class for the first time in U.S. history. King spent far more time addressing basic economic issues in his 1967 "Where Do We Go from Here?" speech, including the fact that blacks had half the income of whites and double the rate of unemployment, lived in substandard housing, and died in Vietnam at twice the rate of whites relative to their proportion of the population. Blacks attended college at only 5% the rate of whites while "75% hold menial jobs" (King 1967). In the ghettos of the North, they were "confined to a life of voicelessness and powerlessness," a condition that had not fundamentally changed since 1967 (King 1967). King called for a guaranteed annual income to raise blacks out of poverty, which would have cost about $20 billion a year at the time — far less than the $35 billion cost of "an unjust, evil war in Vietnam," which King also wanted to end (King 1967). Yet he also opposed violence and insisted that the riots in Watts in 1965 and in Detroit and Newark two years later accomplished nothing for civil rights or economic conditions. Nor did he believe that a violent revolution would ever succeed in the United States.

Blacks still live in segregated ghettos with high levels of unemployment and gang violence, while black poverty and unemployment remain at least double the levels of whites, as they always have been. Nor is there any longer a bipartisan consensus in favor of civil rights as there was in the 1960s. Instead, the Republicans became the party of the white backlash and shifted focus to "the negative side effects of affirmative action rather than about the need for positive measures to end discrimination" (Grofman 1). Violence and police brutality against blacks certainly continued — for example, the beating of Rodney King by police in Los Angeles, which led to the most violent riots since the 1960s when the officers were acquitted in 1992 (Hasday 103). Discrimination in housing also continued, and the 1968 Civil Rights Act that outlawed it has never been effectively enforced. Even its passage was simply a reluctant move by a Congress badly shaken by the nationwide rioting following the assassination of Martin Luther King that year.

Perhaps the most important contrast between Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech of 1963 and his 1967 "Where Do We Go from Here?" was that he discussed economic issues far more extensively by the end of his life. Civil rights, desegregation, and voting rights were not enough given that the majority of blacks were still in poverty, lacked adequate housing and educational opportunities, and faced high unemployment. King's message in 1967 was more radical than his speech four years before, and he was assassinated in 1968 at a time when he was organizing a Poor People's March on Washington that many whites feared would end in riots. Black poverty and social inequality remain common today, and have perhaps worsened due to economic downturns, despite the successes of the 1960s civil rights movement.

Obviously the civil rights movement did change American society to some degree — Barack Obama could never have been elected president without it. In his "A More Perfect Union" speech in 2008, Obama also discussed economic issues far more frequently than King had in 1963, although his solutions for poverty were never as bold as King's guaranteed annual income proposal. As both King and Obama discovered, demanding equal rights and individual liberties in the United States has always been easier than obtaining social and economic rights — and in the case of blacks, both types of rights have been frequently denied.

In his 2008 speech, Obama recognized that King's work had not yet been completed and that racism and segregation were still very real obstacles that blacks and other minorities faced in their daily lives. Nevertheless, he also wished to create a movement broader than issues of race, one that addressed social and economic justice for all people in the United States. Obama spoke at length about economic conditions facing working-class and middle-class whites who did not consider themselves especially privileged. They had seen their industrial jobs and pensions disappearing for decades, with wages stagnant or declining. Politicians had been manipulating their racial fears and resentments for many years, focusing them on issues like affirmative action. Blacks and other minorities were not to blame for the social and economic decline of the lower classes, but rather "a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many" (Obama 2008).

By historical standards, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and 1965 Voting Rights Act have been enormously successful, as far as they went, and were among the few federal interventions in this area that made a real difference in the lives of minorities. They guaranteed basic civil and voting rights to blacks that had been granted only temporarily in the First Reconstruction and then withdrawn. They did not end poverty, discrimination, police brutality, or racism in general, but they made it impossible for these to continue as a matter of law and public policy — which they had been prior to 1964. Were Martin Luther King still alive today, he would note the progress that has been made while still pointing out that much more needs to be done, particularly in inner-city communities, where the majority of young black males are in prison or on probation. Thanks to the conservative backlash after 1968, progress on most of these fronts has been stalled, although the election of a black president in 2008 was something that could never have happened without the civil rights movement. As King well understood, a change of laws did not automatically alter the severe social and economic injustices faced by blacks and members of other minority groups.