Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated forty years ago today. At that time, John Conyers was a young congressman and lawyer from Detroit. He worked with King on civil rights struggles in the South. Conyers went on to sponsor the bill making King’s birthday a federal holiday. Today, John Conyers is chair of the House Judiciary Committee. Michigan Radio’s Jack Lessenberry spoke with him.
And then the official paused and said, “But we do spy on the people they would use to spy on us if they did spy on us.”
“And so do they.”
I don’t know why we are so fascinated with spies, except that we love secrets and gadgetry and gossip. And we are never really satisfied that we know the whole truth. We like dark and delicious conspiracies. We don’t want to get murdered in our beds, but we don’t mind being scared a little bit. For years, the perfect country for this was Deutscher Demokratische Republik, or East Germany.
They were small, paranoid, heirs to two sets of evil traditions, and far enough away that we could think of them only when we wanted to. They existed out there in a place where the skies were always slate-gray, and ominous mists surrounded the Berlin Wall.
Going through the Wall at Checkpoint Charlie was indeed an ultimate Cold War experience. Once in 1985 I did that, right behind a rather stupid woman who whirled about and took a picture of the guards. They came running after her. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I said. “Give them your camera. They are going to take your film.”
“I am not going to give it to them,” she said. I shrugged and walked away before they thought I was with her. Before I got out of earshot, they had ripped the back off of her Minolta. What I learned later, from time spent in other closed societies, was that the line wasn’t always clear between who was a spy and who wasn’t. Nor did most people fit into our neat little classification of sides.
I once knew a woman in the Philippines who was simultaneously Imelda Marcos’s press secretary and the lover of her husband’s main political rival. She also ran the local operations of a U.S. television network through her American-born husband, who was a hopeless alcoholic. She had what you might call portable loyalties.
Once I mentioned that I knew my hotel room was bugged. “Of course it is. They record everything,” she said.
“Well, who listens to all of it?” I asked. “That’s just the problem,” she said.
“There isn’t anyone to listen to all of it.”
That was, of course, before the rise of YouTube. I think it is oddly fitting that the Berlin Wall came down in the same year in which the World Wide Web was invented. Nowadays, you have to assume that everything you do and everywhere you go is being filmed by somebody, and will end up on some web site, somewhere.
We’ve gone from a world where we had to beware of spies to a world in which everyone is videotaping everyone, all the time.
Some days, it’s enough to make you want the Stasi back.
Forty years ago, the original National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders produced a six-hundred page report. That report ended up contributing a single sentence to our collective consciousness:
“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate – and unequal.”
What I suspected was the reconstituted Kerner Commission would conclude that not much has changed. I expected they would find that things are better in a few ways; and worse in others.
And in fact, you may well conclude that’s exactly the situation, if you give the condensed version of the new commission’s report a quick read. African-Americans are doing worse than whites economically. Overall racial segregation levels are still high.
Yet there have been vast changes. America today is far different from what it was in 1968. Some of that is very good. To state the most obvious, a Barack Obama would have been impossible in 1968, But then so would a Michelle Obama, a young black, female, Harvard-educated lawyer earning $342,000 a year.
Yet nobody forty years ago thought that by the next century, achieving the American dream would be far less possible for millions, both black and white. Indeed, the new report could easily say. “Our nation is moving towards two societies – one rich, one poor, separate, unequal, and with a gap steadily more impossible to bridge.” You know that yourself, if your household income is much less than the Obama’s. News that we might be in a recession came as a surprise to many people who didn’t know that we were not in one.
Sure, segregation remains a problem –especially in schools. But the bigger problem is that thanks to a series of deliberate government policies, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten an increasingly shorter end of the stick. We are a far richer nation now.
But the child poverty rate has increased. We have the most rapid growth in wage inequality in the industrial world. Corporations once felt they ought to share their profits with their workers. That’s usually no longer the case. The average CEO earned forty times as much as the average worker back in 1968. Today, it is 360 times as much.
By every measure, income inequality is growing. Naturally, since African-Americans started off poorer, they feel this even more. Virtually all the income growth this decade has gone to the richest one-tenth of one-percent of us.
Which means the disparity is growing worse and worse. Here’s something else the original Kerner Commission said. They thought it was “time to make good the promises of democracy to all citizens.”
That meant white and black; rich and poor; Native American and Hispanic, everybody. The best way to do that is by giving people a real chance to earn a living wage. If we don’t, well, Karl Marx thought our society would eventually turn out like this. He had an interesting prediction about what would happen. You might want to look it up.
Within days, the famous “smoking gun tape“ revealed that Nixon and his top aide, H.R. Haldeman, had plotted from the start to use the CIA to try and cover-up the Watergate burglary.
That was August 5, 1974. Three days later, Nixon announced that he would resign the presidency at noon the next day.
He did not want to go. But he’d been caught dead to rights, and he knew he would speedily have been impeached and convicted.
That would have meant he would have lost his hefty presidential pension, and have been flat broke.
So he quit. There are those in the last two weeks who have looked for parallels between Richard Nixon and Kwame Kilpatrick.
That is a mistake, I think. Nixon liked the high life about as much as a turtle enjoys pole vaulting. He wasn’t interested in women.
Actually, he wasn’t much interested in people, period. He liked secrecy, plotting, and getting and keeping and manipulating power.
But despite all his terrible flaws, Richard Nixon knew the world was bigger than he was. Though he had grounds for believing the 1960 election may have been stolen, he didn’t contest it. He told friends that he thought it might have torn the country apart.
And though Richard Nixon pretty clearly engaged in obstruction of justice, nobody alleged, let alone produced evidence to prove, that he lied on the witness stand under oath.
Kwame Kilpatrick's case reminds me more of that of the man Nixon brought to dinner: Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. He was an appalling creature; self-made, churlish, and not especially bright.
For nearly five years he was a heartbeat away from the presidency. Nixon sent him to funerals and used him to viciously attack his enemies, mainly, liberals, “hippies” and the press.
Speechwriters Pat Buchanan and William Safire used to compete to see who could get Agnew to say the most bizarre phrases, like “nattering nabobs of negativism,“ or “Effete corps of impudent snobs.”
For his part, Nixon called Agnew “impeachment insurance.” Then one day, it turned out that Agnew had taken kickbacks from crooked contractors while governor and was still, incredibly, demanding and getting bags of cash as vice-president.
It was an “open and shut case,” according to the U.S. Attorney General. When the charges were announced, Spiro came out swinging. “I will not resign if indicted,“ he shouted to a crowd.
But then Agnew considered his prospects. He agreed to plead no contest to tax evasion, pay a fine, and scuttle off into the night.
The authorities knew the public interest lay in Agnew being gone just as fast as possible. Agnew’s interest was in staying out of jail.
What’s the moral of the story?
Why I am I telling you all this now? Well, as they say in fair and balanced journalism: I report, you decide.
But the youth and anti-war movements and the chaos of 1968 led to huge pressure for more democracy in picking nominees for president.
States, including Michigan, rushed to establish primaries. The very first one here, held in May, 1972, turned into an accidental disaster. It was supposed to be a contest between George McGovern, who represented the young and anti-war elements of the party, and Hubert Humphrey, who was organized labor’s candidate.
But George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, decided to run as a Democrat that year. That was a year when the controversy over school busing was the biggest issue in Michigan, and Wallace capitalized on it. Then, the day before Michigan’s primary, the governor was shot while campaigning in Maryland.
Angry voters next day turned out in droves to register their sympathy and support for George Wallace, who got more votes than all the other Democrats combined. That primary had no long-term significance. But the next two Republican primaries were among the most significant we’ve ever had. President Gerald Ford was in deep trouble in the spring of 1976. He had lost a string of primaries to Ronald Reagan. It looked like he might be the first incumbent President in modern times to ask for his party’s nomination—and fail to get it.
He turned to his home state for help. Governor William Milliken was a moderate Republican to the core. He much preferred Jerry Ford, who he had known for decades, to Ronald Reagan. So he helped energize the state party to rally around Michigan’s home boy.
And indeed, Gerald Ford won decisively in another primary in which turnout was high. Though expected, the size of the margin rallied Ford loyalists across the nation and he began winning more primaries.
That summer, he barely held off a challenge at the convention, and won the nomination, only to lose to Jimmy Carter in November.
Four years later, it was George H.W. Bush’s turn. He started strong that year, with a big win in Iowa that gave him what he hoped would be momentum, or as he called it “the Big Mo.”
Alas, Bush’s Big Mo soon went nowhere. His campaign was in trouble by the time Michigan’s May 20 primary rolled around.
But thanks to Governor Milliken’s relentless campaigning, Bush won almost as great a victory over Reagan as President Ford had four years before. Both men were back in Detroit for the convention that year.
Ronald Reagan had more than enough delegates for the nomination, and was flirting with putting Gerald Ford back on the ticket as vice president. But when that fizzled, he turned to George Bush.
He did so because he thought Bush would be popular in big industrial states like Michigan, where he had done so well.
And the rest is history. Except that, four years ago, Governor Milliken said he could not support George W. Bush for reelection. For the first time in his life, he publicly endorsed a Democrat.
Just think of the irony. George W. would almost certainly never have gotten to the White House if Bill Milliken hadn’t worked so hard for his father when he had run for president a generation ago.
You really can’t make this stuff up.
White America was stunned. These were northern cities where blacks could vote, not Alabama and Mississippi.
Didn’t blacks - Negroes, as they said then - enjoy an increasing standard of living? Hadn’t Detroit’s mayor won office with overwhelming black support? Nationally, things seemed to be going better for African-Americans than at any time in history.
Lyndon Baines Johnson was the first President to publicly and fully commit himself to the civil rights cause. He had helped ram civil rights and voting rights bills through Congress. He was astonished by the riots, and wondered if it was some kind of conspiracy against him.
And so he appointed an extremely high-powered commission that July, even as the last fires were raging in Detroit. For seven months, an all-star gallery of very important people, chaired by Illinois Gov. Otto Kerner, studied and investigated the country, and held hearings.
Then, aided by a massive staff, they produced one of the most important government reports ever written. There was no conspiracy, they found. Just discontent. Much of it justified.
Looters’ first targets in those riots of the 1960s were color TVs. And the world the young African-American rioters saw there was not a world they saw any hope of sharing. That was what it was about.
That became perfectly clear to the men and women, both Republicans and Democrats, on this commission.
They began their six hundred page report this way:
“Our nation is moving toward two societies, one white, one black separate and unequal."
“This deepening racial division is not inevitable. The movement apart can be reversed,” they wrote. But if things went on as they had been, it would lead to continuing polarization, and ultimately, would threaten our democracy.
Yet when this report was finished, it was largely ignored by an increasingly paranoid President, who thought the commissioners might be out to get him. The war in Vietnam had gotten worse.
Everything else was about to get much worse, too. LBJ dropped out of the presidential race weeks later. Four days after that, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Bobby Kennedy, the only white politician black America ever fully trusted, was murdered two months later. The Democratic convention exploded in bloody rioting; Richard Nixon was elected, and the Kerner Commission report was forgotten.
Until now, that is.
Gallantly, admirably, the Eisenhower Foundation has set out to hold new hearings, to examine where we now are. To read the Kerner report today is to experience sadness over roads not taken.
Today, there are black astronauts and CEO'S and presidential candidates. But the black underclass is larger and more hopeless and poverty is more deeply rooted than in 1967.
And increasingly, according to a new study by the Pew Research Center, young blacks do less well than their parents.
They say you get few second chances in life. Maybe, just maybe, we are getting one now.
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