We do not have to live very long to discover that life is forever passing us by. We continually obsolesce, and our ideas all go out of fashion in time. Ordinarily those passings-by—and the feelings of melancholy, frustration, and regret that typically accompany them—are matters of only personal concern. Sometimes, though, they coincide with consequential public developments and participate in social transformations that are worthy of general notice. So I take it to be with my very peripheral involvement in the civil-rights movement of the past three decades. My role in the cause was marginal, but my experience has been not unrepresentative of the uncertain and tortuous path that civil rights has traveled in recent times.

Let me begin to specify. Last spring I resigned as chairman of the Indiana Advisory Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. I did so because it seemed to me that the useful work of the commission had come to an end. That in turn was the case in large part because the relentless charges of bad faith against the commission on the part of the civil-rights establishment had wrecked the commission’s credibility. I did not credit those charges—in fact, I resented them deeply—but I recognized their effect.

The grounds for estrangement between the commission and its critics were many, but at their heart lay fundamentally different conceptions not merely of where civil-rights policies ought to go but of how they should be defined in the first place. The traditional conceptions of civil rights to which the commission and its supporters clung had over time been not so much amended by their opponents as stood on their head. Across the resulting definitional chasm there was little to do but hurl mutual accusations of sabotage and betrayal. In the commission’s work and beyond, civil conversation about civil rights had become virtually impossible.

I see no early or easy way out of the impasse we have got ourselves into. But it may be of some value to attempt to trace, by way of reflections on personal experience, how we reached our present unpromising position.

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II

On August 28, 1963, I found myself—rather to my own surprise—participating with almost 200,000 other Americans in the March on Washington for civil rights. It was the proudest single moment in the entire civil-rights crusade and one of the great moral occasions of American history. I will always feel honored to have been part of it.

Yet I wound up there only as the result of a last-minute change of mind in which momentary enthusiasm triumphed over sober judgment. Active involvement in the civil-rights movement did not come naturally to me. Certainly little in my background prepared me for it.

My parents, both born shortly after the turn of the century, grew up in circumstances as isolated from civil rights—or any other concern of mainstream American society—as could possibly be imagined. Their German Lutheran families had both emigrated to America in the 1840’s but had settled in rural communities in the Saginaw Valley area of Michigan so homogeneous and so cut off from the larger American context as to constitute a cultural universe virtually impervious to external influences. One measure of their isolation is that as late as the 1950’s, over a century after the German settlers had first arrived, children born in the Frankenmuth area still learned German at least as soon as they learned English and spoke their English with distinct German accents. There were of course no blacks anywhere around; indeed, anyone not a German Lutheran was an exotic.

It was not until my parents moved to Detroit in the mid-1930’s (where I was born shortly afterward) that they encountered blacks regularly or in numbers. Even then, those encounters occurred at a considerable distance. None of the various working-class or lower-middle-class neighborhoods we lived in on Detroit’s east side was integrated; they were ethnically diverse, but they were not racially mixed. We always got out before the blacks moved in, although the margin was sometimes close.

My parents’ knowledge of life in black Detroit came essentially from reading, rumor, and personal observation at the periphery. By report they learned—or thought they learned—of high crime rates, chronic drunkenness, loose sexual habits, weak family structures, and disinclination to steady employment. The little they had of personal experience of the black community did not cause them to question the received wisdom. In those neighborhoods we occupied near or at the edge of the racial dividing line, it was for them—and for me—an observable fact that as the blacks edged closer, conditions deteriorated: the stores became bleaker and dirtier, the streets were more littered and less safe, schools declined in quality and standards of behavior, houses and lawns displayed evidence of neglect. At one time we lived near a low-income housing project. It had always been a grim and unattractive place, but as its racial composition shifted gradually from white to black, it became what it had not been before: a thoroughly filthy, depressing, and dangerous slum.

All this produced in my parents a kind of benign racism. They never—anyway not in the presence of their children—used the word “nigger,” and their comments on black people were neither frequent nor emotional, but it was always clear that their attitude toward blacks in general was one of distaste and disapproval. They did not all that often think of blacks, but when they did they did not think well of them. With their unsophisticated social views and their limited experience of life, they each took the world beyond family and church (which constituted the true centers of their existence) as it appeared on the surface. People, singly or collectively, were what they made of themselves. If blacks in general seemed to live in ways that by the only standards my parents knew were immoral or irresponsible, then they deserved to be judged accordingly. Those judgments might be tempered by Christian charity or compassion, but they were in themselves entirely unproblematic.

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So I grew up. Yet I was never, at least not on race relations, my parents’ child. Not that I was particularly rebellious in general. My mother was apolitical (she never knew whether to vote for the Democrats and war or the Republicans and economic depression) and my father was a Taft Republican; my declaration of political independence extended no farther than a preference for the Eisenhower/Rockefeller wing of Republicanism. But on civil rights I was an unabashed liberal. From the beginning, I needed neither sociological instruction nor moral persuasion: I knew that it was wrong to discriminate against people on the basis of race and that much of the pathology of black life resulted from barriers to equal opportunity thrown up by white prejudice. Cut off by temperament and Lutheran principles from political zealotry, I could nonetheless approach the civil-rights question with an unaccustomed attitude of moral certitude.

I was not alone in this, of course. Those who charge the generation that came of age in the 50’s with an absence of moral passion have things right for the most part. We were typically gradualists, incrementalists, pragmatists; irony and ambiguity dominated our political imaginations. But civil rights was different. We weren’t yet ready to take the issue to the streets (we were appalled by the very idea of conducting politics in the streets), but on this matter irony and ambiguity evaporated. On civil rights we knew, and we cared. (The only other issue on which we approached passionate consensus was the proposition that Joe McCarthy was a moral and intellectual disgrace.)

It appalled me that the church to which my family belonged—a magnificent neo-gothic cathedral located near downtown Detroit in a decayed nonresidential neighborhood—remained an all-white bastion in an area whose few immediate residents and whose contiguous populations were predominantly black. It was bad enough that the congregation—all of whose members lived some distance away—made no effort to draw in black members; it was intolerable that on those infrequent occasions when black people appeared at worship services, they were politely but pointedly informed of the location of the city’s black Lutheran churches. My father and I argued about all this endlessly, and I determined that once independent of my family I would have no part in such arrangements.

Given my attitudes on civil rights, it was ironic (and embarrassing) that my personal relations with blacks were as awkward as they were. To begin with, I did not know any blacks well. The schools I attended normally enrolled at least a small number of them, and I had occasionally played with or against blacks in baseball or basketball leagues, but none had become close friends. Despite my desires to the contrary, I remained acutely aware of skin color, and on the few occasions when I found myself in a predominantly black gathering, I felt distinctly uncomfortable. Blacks in groups—male blacks at least—frightened me. (Once, when I was thirteen, I took the wrong streetcar on Gratiot Avenue and wound up deep in a black neighborhood; it was broad daylight and no one challenged me as I walked, as swiftly as I could, back to “safety,” but I was terrified the entire time.)

Still, when I headed off to college in 1956, I had a genuine if not truly intense commitment to civil rights, and the next four years at Valparaiso University confirmed and deepened that commitment. The liberal professors who instructed me in my academic concentrations in American history and politics provided historical and intellectual evidence to support my predispositions on the issue. All my close friends, whether or not they were political, held sympathetic views on race relations. I became an enthusiastic supporter of the Lutheran Human Relations Association of America, a pioneer Christian civil-rights organization then located on the Valparaiso campus.

There was, it is true, a somewhat artificial cast to the support of civil rights there. The town was lily white, the campus not much different. Our liberalism was sometimes more earnest than serious. There was, for example, the case of Clarence. Clarence was one of the handful of blacks in my class. Proud, sensitive, somewhat aloof, he was not an easy man to know. Most of us respected Clarence but did not know quite what to make of him; in Willy Loman’s terms, he was liked but not well-liked. Yet when he ran for vice president of the student council, he won by what must have been the largest margin in the school’s history. The size of the victory was embarrassing, not least to Clarence himself. We had all voted for him because we did not know how not to.

But by the fall of 1960, when I began graduate work in American Studies at Yale, the civil-rights movement was about to move beyond pious rhetoric and earnest gestures. In the next few years, the movement exploded across the South: sit-ins, freedom rides, voter-education drives, integration of schools and universities, massive protests aimed at breaking the back of the whole structure of segregation. In the beginning, the protests were overwhelmingly black and Southern, but before long Northern whites became substantially involved.

Everything the protesters wanted, I wanted. With them, I initially found the Kennedy administration insufficiently activist in its support of their efforts, and I was heartened when, under black and liberal pressure, Kennedy finally sent to Congress in June 1963 the measure that eventually became the comprehensive Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Yet when the first calls went out for a massive March on Washington in support of the movement in general and the congressional bill in particular, I hesitated. I did not like the proposed march’s air of emotionalism and hint of intimidation. Black Southerners had no choice but to engage in massive public protest since they were effectively excluded from participation in the political process. That was not the case at the national level. Legislative politics, I thought, should be a matter of careful reflection and rational debate, and the politics of mass demonstration seemed to me a threat to both. In the Congress of the United States, after all, we were not dealing with a gang of redneck reactionaries. I wanted Congress to pass the civil-rights bill because it was the right and prudent thing to do, not because it felt stampeded. Large public demonstrations seemed to me in general an invitation to demagoguery and irrationalism, a populist vote of no confidence in the orderly processes of representative government that maintain political civility and decency. (I have never changed my mind on these matters; the March on Washington was my first and last involvement in mass protest.)

Then, too, there was a growing mood of moral superiority attendant on the movement with which I felt uncomfortable and which I suspected the march would intensify. I knew that racism and segregation were morally wrong and I had great respect for the moral serenity with which Southern blacks and whites confronted their neighbors over their region’s burden of guilt and failure in matters of racial justice. But the attitude of utter contempt and hatred for white Southerners with which so many Northern white activists expressed their commitment to the cause seemed to me lacking in both historical comprehension and moral discernment. Martin Luther King’s appeals to Southern blacks to love their oppressors occasionally struck me as demanding more of human nature than could reasonably be expected under the circumstances, but they displayed a degree of compassion and understanding for the white South that relatively few Northern activists had the patience or the moral imagination to comprehend.

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But for all my reservations, when the time for the march came, I went. The cause was so obviously right, the need so urgent, the mood so overwhelmingly one not of threat but of expression of concern, that my hesitations came to appear to my own mind as excessively fastidious. At the last moment, I knew I had to go.

And so I found myself, having made no advance plans, grabbing a seat on one of the last special buses leaving New Haven for Washington. The bus had been chartered by the local black Catholic parish, and I was the only white on board. I was immediately made to feel at home, however, by a kindly matriarch who beckoned me to sit next to her and who introduced me all around. Her only moment of reservation toward me came when, in reply to the question, “You a Catholic boy?” I replied, “No, ma’am, I’m a Lutheran.” That took her aback, but she quickly recovered: this clearly was to be a day that transcended even divisions between papists and Protestants.

As many observers have remarked, the march resembled nothing so much as a massive church picnic (except that most church picnics are not as well integrated). Unlike so many of the marches on so many of the issues that were to follow, there was no spirit of bitterness, defiance, or alienation; all was celebration and affirmation. We marched for what was self-evidently good and true, and we believed that a society basically decent and just would recognize that truth and that goodness.

Time has obscured most of the memories of the occasion, but I do vividly recall—and not just because history has enshrined it—Dr. King’s magnificent “I Have a Dream” speech. There was lots of entertainment that day, and there were lots of speeches. For most of us—especially those like me located on the fringes of the crowd—attention flagged. But when King’s turn finally came, he commanded notice from the start, and he held us in the bonds of his extraordinary imagery and intensity. I remember that halfway through the speech, an elderly black man just in front of me turned and remarked to no one in particular, “Man, don’t he talk fine.” He did, and none of us there will ever forget it. As the historian Allen Matusow has said, King’s speech “elevated the march from a mere political tactic into a spiritual event.”

The march was a success in every way. It took some time for the civil-rights bill to work its way through Congress, but I remember watching on television with great pleasure—and even a small sense of participation—when Lyndon Johnson signed the bill into law in July 1964. At the time I was at a Lutheran family camp on Lake Michigan where I was delivering a series of lectures on Christians and politics. The lectures emphasized—in good Lutheran fashion—the complexities and ambiguities of applying Christian principles to political situations, but I noted that on certain issues, civil rights currently chief among them, the moral outlines of the question were clear enough, and that on such issues appeals to complexity constituted evasion of responsibility rather than recognition of reality. After 1964, however, civil-rights policy was never to appear so simple to me again.

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III

As with so much of American life at the time, civil rights after 1964 went terribly wrong. Certain achievements still lay ahead—major congressional bills in 1965 and 1968 established federal involvement in voting rights and fair housing—but the heroic age of liberal success had passed, and it was rapidly succeeded by a bewildering descent into ever more violent and bizarre forms of radical upheaval and of sadly confused and misguided responses to those upheavals. America almost came apart in the late 60’s, and the unraveling of the civil-rights movement was a central element in the process of dissolution.

I observed most of this from a distance. In the fall of 1964 I began teaching American history at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Thus cut off from direct participation, I nonetheless kept close to civil-rights developments through television (Canadians tend to watch almost as much American television as Americans do), reading, my teaching and writing interest in the subject, and, above all, very frequent visits to the U.S., especially to my family in Detroit. Through my family, I participated in the urban racial crises of those years. At times, indeed, the participation was quite direct. Even as I had been present at the civil-rights movement’s moment of glory, so I was on the scene when things hit bottom: I was in Detroit during the 1967 riot, the worst of all the racial cataclysms of the period.

The mid-60’s started out as the best of reform times. Passage of the civil-rights bills of 1964 and 1965 marked the successful completion of the movement’s drive to end the Southern segregation system in education, political participation, public accommodations, and employment. Legal rights to equal opportunity had been firmly established. Implementation of those rights was to be neither automatic nor easy, of course, but it is no exaggeration to say that a revolution in race relations had been set in motion in the American South.

And so the movement turned North. The targets there were housing, schools, and jobs, and the aims were to eliminate the de facto forms of segregation that persisted in all three and, with that, to improve the economic and social conditions of life for black citizens. As President Johnson declared in his address at Howard University in June 1965, it was time to move beyond the provision of equal opportunity for blacks and attempt to secure “equality as a fact and equality as a result.”

Prospects at first appeared propitious. The nation was prosperous, the public mood generous, and liberal expectations optimistic. But the moment of hopefulness passed quickly.

It turned out to be far more difficult for blacks to move from poverty to prosperity than it had been to advance from segregation to legal equality. Patterns of racial discrimination in the North were more deeply entrenched than many had suspected, and they had left legacies of social dislocation in the black community that made it difficult for some elements in the community to make the best of the opportunities that were open to them. Because the problems went deeper than reformers had thought, the leverage of government to effect change was considerably less than they had supposed. Equality of economic and social condition, it turned out, could not be achieved—as desegregation had been achieved—simply through organizing protests, passing laws, and enforcing court orders. It was to be at best a long-term project, and the mood of rising expectations that had swept black. America in the early 60’s had no patience for talk of the long term.

Not that things had not improved. During the course of the decade, in fact, black Americans made measurable advances, both absolutely and in relation to whites, in income, occupation, and education. But the rate of improvement was slower than had been promised (there was an incredible amount of overpromising in those years); worse, the advance of some in the black community to middle-class comfort set in bold relief the inability of other parts of the community to keep pace. The quarrel that ensued concerned more than statistics about progress or regression; it involved the emotionally-loaded questions of where the primary obstacles to further black progress lay and how and by whom those obstacles might best be removed.

Everyone agreed that most of the problems of black America derived, directly or indirectly, from slavery and segregation and that government had a special responsibility to do everything in its power to remove the legal and customary remnants of racial discrimination. Most conceded that black progress toward equality of condition would require more than self-help programs; at the outset, at least, there was widespread support for the myriad Great Society programs intended to lift the poor in general, and minorities in particular, above the poverty line. Disagreements arose, however, when some analysts began to suggest, however tentatively, that there now existed within the black community patterns of social pathology—family decay, welfare dependency, soaring crime rates, educational failure—that, whatever their historical origins, had taken on a life of their own independent of white prejudice and that would have to be fought and overcome by efforts within the community itself.

For black militants and their white allies, however, such forms of analysis—as in Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 paper on The Negro Family: The Case for National Action—constituted exercises in “blaming the victim” and avoiding social responsibility, even when, as in Moynihan’s case, great care was taken precisely both to avoid putting blame on blacks and to emphasize the key role of government in helping blacks help themselves. For those persuaded that the essential, even the sole, black problem was white prejudice, and that that prejudice was so pervasive and overwhelming in its social effects as to leave blacks helpless to make it in America so long as it persisted, any focus at all on the internal problems of black culture could only be seen as a diversion and an evasion, itself evidence of racist attitudes. Racism was the problem, its elimination from the white psyche the only solution. In the meantime, amelioration would only come for blacks from “massive” government programs of aid and support that might to some degree circumvent the all-devouring prejudice that doomed reliance on private initiatives, white or black, to inevitable failure.

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The more I pondered these ideas, whether as a concerned expatriate or as a professor attempting to instruct my bemused Canadian students in the folkways of American life, the less sense they made. Of course the black situation was unlike that of any other group in America, but as a historian I knew that other minority groups—Orientals and Jews, for example—had managed to make their way in the U.S. despite being targets of vicious and visceral prejudice, and that they had done so by cultivating skills and cultural strengths that allowed them to succeed in the face of discrimination from dominant groups in society. That blacks could do so as well was demonstrated by the continuing growth of the black middle class. The view that black progress was a gift solely in the hands of whites to withhold or bestow seemed to me destructive and self-defeating. The problem of the black underclass, I gradually decided, had more to do with the vicissitudes of class than of race.

It was not simply racism, for example, that caused white people to flee neighborhoods into which blacks were moving. I knew that from the experience of my sister, Kay (who died a few years ago of cancer), who was four years younger than I and intensely committed to racial justice and harmony. When she struck out on her own in her early twenties, she chose to live in racially-mixed neighborhoods. But the decay of those neighborhoods—most particularly, the threat and reality of black crime—forced her to a series of moves. She did not give up easily. The first time—in an apartment not far from downtown Detroit—she joined with an interracial group of friends to organize a crime-watch operation on the block, but it was not enough. We finally talked her into moving when, after a series of scares, she was robbed at knife-point in front of her apartment in broad daylight.

After that she found a larger apartment on the west side of town in a better, but still racially-mixed, neighborhood. (My father moved in with her after the death of my mother in 1969.) She stayed there several years, but it was a losing struggle. Each time I visited her, I could observe signs in the area of gradual deterioration—dirtier streets, shabbier stores, reduced residential maintenance—while she reluctantly recounted horror stories of neighborhood crime. What bothered her most was that she was learning to fear blacks in general, and she knew that over time all the good will and understanding in the world would not prevent that fear from turning into something worse.

It unsettled her to be an object of overt hatred simply by virtue of being white. It began with dirty looks (was she imagining things, she wondered?) and proceeded to ugly words (“white bitch,” two young black men muttered at her as she passed them on the street) and finally to physical assault (a rifle pellet through the kitchen window). By then she and my father (who had been mugged while waiting for a bus) were spending much of the time shut up in their apartment, at least after dark, as in a state of siege. Reserves of good will and humor—“How do I get them to realize I’m a liberal?”—ran low. Finally she moved again, this time—even though burdened by nagging feelings of guilt—to an all-white apartment complex beyond the city limits.

Stories like my sister’s (and they could be replicated endlessly all over urban America during the 60’s and 70’s) elicited little sympathy from black radicals and their white allies. White America was finally being given some of its own back, the argument went. After all, the movement from civil rights to black nationalism, with its attendant increase in anti-white feelings, was only an understandable response to white prejudice and recalcitrance. Black power, Black Muslims, Black Panthers: they were all conditioned responses to racist stimuli, not random social occurrences. If blacks had learned to hate whites, that was simply, as it was said, the hate that hate produced.

Fair enough, at a surface level. But where, socially speaking, might one go with such an argument? What does society usefully do with a proposition that not only understands but condones racial hatred? Besides which, the argument was fundamentally misleading, at least in contemporary terms. During the mid-60’s, black and white racial attitudes passed each other going in opposite directions. Empirical measures of white attitudes showed a decline in racial prejudice, while the emergence of black nationalism, whether or not it affected general black feelings about whites, raised the idea of black rage to consciousness and, above all, gave it social legitimacy.

The effects were entirely perverse. Well-intentioned whites, willing at least in principle to live in harmony with blacks, were alienated by patterns of behavior among underprivileged blacks to which they quite properly objected but which they all too frequently attributed to racial rather than class characteristics. Blacks, already conditioned in that direction, quite understandably interpreted white reactions as racially inspired. In fact, middle-class people, of whatever race, had always tried to insulate and remove themselves from lower-class behavior, whatever its racial origins. The “racial stereotypes” that blacks assumed whites held of them had been the views that the middle class had always attributed to the lower class, and those views had in fact often been not stereotypes but more-or-less accurate generalizations. For black and white alike, the necessary project was to separate racial and class attributes, and to proceed from there.

Instead, the civil-rights establishment continued to indulge in interpretations of racial issues that studiously avoided uncomfortable realities and that provided exculpation for forms of minority behavior that were, by any rational assessment, self-defeating, socially destructive, and morally indefensible. The best of intentions led to the worst of social analysis and prescription, as became depressingly clear in the response to the black riots that began in Birmingham in 1963 and that spread across much of urban America through the rest of the decade. It would be difficult to overstate the damage done by the riots to race relations in America, and the Detroit uprising of 1967, the worst of them all, typified the general disaster.

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It began, as so many of the upheavals did, with a police incident. Early in the morning of Sunday, July 23, there was a disturbance between police and patrons of a bar in the Detroit inner city. Before long, mobs of young people began to engage in burning, looting, and random violence. The police, aware of charges that in earlier situations official “overreaction” to minor incidents had made matters worse, did not in the early stages send large numbers of officers into the area. They also got cooperation for a media blackout, on the assumption—based again on the presumed lessons of earlier outbreaks—that media attention tended to encourage further riotous behavior. But neither of these precautionary measures had the desired effect. The rioting intensified and spread, eventually encompassing fourteen square miles of black neighborhoods. In several of the earlier outbreaks, mobs had displayed some form of disciplined selectivity, leaving black-owned properties intact as they assaulted white ones. Not so in Detroit, where the violence was entirely indiscriminate: mobs burned and looted black businesses as freely as white ones and burned down black homes as well. Well-to-do blacks from outside the ghetto entered the riot areas and joined in the looting. What occurred in Detroit was not, in any immediate sense, social or political protest; it was mob nihilism.

My wife and I had come into the Detroit area on Saturday, staying with my brother in Livonia, a suburb west of the city. My sister, then living in her apartment near downtown Detroit, had stayed overnight in Livonia with us. Because of the news blackout, we heard nothing of the riot until Sunday afternoon when other members of the family came out to Livonia from Detroit and reported that as they had driven along the expressway past black neighborhoods they had seen vast clouds of smoke. Soon afterward, the media blackout was canceled, and we learned what was in process.

By Monday morning, news reports indicated that the police and the National Guard had brought things under control, and so my wife, sister, and I drove into the city, as we had previously planned, to stay at my sister’s apartment. Her apartment was located a few blocks away from the expressway that divided her racially-mixed neighborhood from the Detroit ghetto. The day was quiet, but the evening—in which the riot resumed with increased intensity—became surreal. Temperatures were high that night and the apartment had no air-conditioning, so we kept the windows open.

As we played cards at the kitchen table, we could hear the regular sound of rifle fire coming from the nearby riot area. It was as if someone had left on an old war-movie soundtrack in the background. Later that night, after midnight, we heard the rumblings of what we later learned were troop vehicles moving along the expressway. For the first time in all the terrible racial upheavals of the 60’s, things had gotten so out of hand that officials had been forced to call in federal troops. Before order was restored, there were 43 dead, 7,000 arrested, 1,300 buildings destroyed, and 2,700 businesses looted.

The experience of the riot was awful, its aftermath almost worse. Most Americans realized that such behavior, however much it might be understood, could not be tolerated. America, they knew, for all its lingering racial prejudice, was not a society so pervaded by racist assumptions that only irrational violence was open to its minorities. Many liberals, however, responded to the crisis by finding excuses for the inexcusable. They even managed to persuade themselves that the riots would have a positive net effect: white America would finally be brought to see how desperate was the black plight and thus would be moved to remedial action.

In fact, the effect of the riots was quite the reverse. A majority of white Americans had felt themselves affected by the moral appeals of Martin Luther King and had come to accept the argument that American society had for too long relegated black people to second-class citizenship and had to take positive steps to make amends. But the riots eroded much of that good will. They provided evidentiary support not for reformers but for racists, and they antagonized countless middle Americans open to the possibility of change but closed to the idea that America was so morally corrupt that it deserved to be torn apart. The riots polarized a society that had been potentially ready for significant reform.

The liberal response made things worse. The President’s National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (the Kerner Commission) reported in 1968 that the single most fundamental cause of the riots was white racism. It might have made sense to argue that white racial attitudes were most to blame, over the long run, for the disabilities of black Americans, but specifically to attribute the riots to white racism both stretched the causal link to the breaking point and, however inadvertently, demeaned black people by denying them any real role of moral agency. It was one thing to recognize the genuine frustration about real grievances that led some blacks to lash out blindly, something else to leave the impression that the black situation was so hopeless, and so utterly dependent on white behavior for any kind of modification, that such lashings-out by blacks constituted the only line of action open to them. It perpetuated the idea that black people had identity only as historical victims, people to whom things simply happened. In post-segregationist America, that was no longer a sufficient perspective.

Most white Americans rejected the image of themselves as ridden with racism and thus simply shrugged off the commission’s exercise in guilt-mongering, even as, in the light of mounting evidence of the Great Society’s inadequacies, they looked skeptically at the commission’s view that only massive government programs offered any hope for making things better for black society. In the aftermath of the riots, only a minority of Americans were interested in “blaming the victims,” but a large number of them had become persuaded that solutions to the nation’s race problems could not develop so long as blacks were encouraged to see themselves only as victims.

Over the next decade, indeed, many observers, both black and white, came to the same conclusion as they recognized the analytical and prescriptive dead end into which conventional left-wing understandings of the racial problem had led. People involved in the issue as either activists or analysts decided that civil-rights questions needed more rigorous examination and more narrow focusing.

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As I continued to teach and occasionally write on the subject, it became ever more apparent to me that attempts to reduce racial dilemmas to a problem of moral insufficiency on the part of whites did more to muddy the race issue than to clarify it. Racial prejudice persisted, but opinion polls continued to mark its decline and its ebbing social legitimacy, especially among the generally well-educated Americans who make the society’s most important political and economic decisions. Most whites, even if they continued to harbor negative personal feelings about blacks, recognized racism as socially counterproductive.

One did not, I concluded, have to presuppose heroic moral sensibilities on the part of whites to assume that they understood by now that the degradation of black people operated in no one’s interests. Slums, poverty, and the social pathologies accompanying them degraded all Americans, regardless of their color or the state of their moral imaginations. Those psychic benefits that some whites might derive from clinging to a sense of racial superiority could hardly compensate for the grievous and evident social costs that racial inequality exacted with respect to crime rates, welfare expenditures, visual blight, civil disorder, and the general deterioration of the social fabric. Whether or not whites were capable of learning to love blacks, surely they could and did see that the provision of social justice for blacks coincided with their own self-interest.

That led to the real heart of the problem: the definition of “social justice” as it applied to civil-rights policy. How, in particular, was society to get at the problems of those lower-class blacks who, for a variety of reasons, had not participated in the striking advances that the black working class and middle class had made? Policy disputes over issues of welfare, job programs, housing policies, income supplements, and educational improvement (which it is not possible here to detail) dragged on inconclusively through the 70’s and into the 80’s, as did the more general disagreement over whether the major continuing sources and solutions of black difficulties lay outside the black community or within it.

Like most people, I knew that the latter question was not an either/or matter; also like most people, I vacillated uncertainly in trying to discern the right balance. By the early 80’s, after I had returned to Valparaiso University to teach and edit the Cresset, the university’s journal of ideas, I had come to the quite unsatisfactory conclusion that on the single most important domestic issue of the society, Americans simply did not know what needed to be done. The problem was not lack of will; it was the absence of dependable knowledge.

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Not everything was uncertainty, however. I was convinced that certain causes taken up by the latter-day civil-rights movement—busing, for example—represented a diversion from the real issues, while other causes—notably quotas—involved a repudiation of the very principles the movement represented.

One of the worst mistakes the modern civil-rights movement (the NAACP in particular) ever made was to invest so much of its time, energy, and moral fervor in such a dubious cause as mandatory school busing. The attempt to require racial balance in the schools (busing may originally have been intended as a means to end segregation, but it quickly became an instrument of forced integration) lacked either a mass constituency or a plausible rationale. Most parents, black and white, were reluctant to send their children out of their neighborhoods to attend distant schools, especially when those schools were perceived, often correctly, as educationally inferior or even physically dangerous. Those who favored mandatory busing were seldom those whose own children were involved.

No one ever satisfactorily explained why racial balance was necessary to achieve decent education for black children, and the apparent assumption that those children could only learn effectively in the presence of some critical mass of white children understandably struck many blacks as condescending at best. Busing wasted money that would have been better spent in classrooms; it created unnecessary racial and class divisions; and, after all that, it wound up failing anyway: one school system after another on which busing was imposed resegregated itself through white flight. Well-intentioned people supported busing because it seemed a symbol of a noble end; seldom has the price of symbolic politics been so high.

Busing was bad; quotas were worse. The concept developed, innocently enough at first, from the idea of affirmative action. Although the definitional distinction has been hopelessly obscured over the years, the idea of affirmative action did not necessarily imply quotas. No one could reasonably object to efforts to seek out qualified members of minority groups for educational or occupational advancement, and it was not wrong to offer special training or remedial opportunities to disadvantaged minorities to improve their levels of qualification. But when affirmative action shaded into quotas, when efforts to make equality of opportunity more meaningful got translated into demands for mandated equality of condition, legitimate questions arose.

Quota systems do, in practice, require reverse discrimination, as a number of Supreme Court decisions from Bakke onward have demonstrated, and they thereby contradict what the idea of civil rights has always been presumed to mean. Moreover, those thus discriminated against are in many cases themselves members of ethnic groups that can in no reasonable way be classified among the privileged classes in America. The belief that advancement in our society should come according to individual effort and skill without regard to attributes of ancestry, class, or religion stands at the very heart of the American idea—it forms the core of the American Dream—and attempts to remedy prior violations of that ideal through a system of group rights that imposes new modes of discrimination while it subverts the ideal itself make no moral sense.

Acts of racial discrimination require compensation, but the basis for judgment in such cases should, in equity, be specific and individual, and not simply a mark of color. Quotas, in any case, often work in favor of those in minority groups least likely to have been victims of educational or occupational deprivation. Black applicants to law and medical schools, like their white counterparts, tend to come from the middle class, not from depressed urban slums.

It was a mark of the departure of the civil-rights movement from its original meanings that issues like busing and quotas arose. Nonetheless, by the 1980’s they had become identified as the very essence of the movement; to oppose them was to be perceived by many as being opposed to civil rights itself. That was a lesson I was about to learn personally.

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IV

The Civil Rights Commission was created by Congress in 1957 as an independent, bipartisan agency to investigate complaints of discrimination, appraise federal antidiscrimination laws and policies, and make reports and recommendations to the President and Congress on how to end discrimination. Although it lacked enforcement powers, the commission, its six members appointed by the President, made itself over the years a visible and effective voice for civil rights under such prominent chairmen as Father Theodore Hesburgh.

As with all other voices of the civil-rights establishment, the commission opposed the policies of the Reagan administration, which rejected busing and quotas and which argued in general that civil rights, properly understood, had to do only with the guarantee of individual equal opportunity, not group rights or equal results. In 1983, unhappy with a series of reports that criticized his administration, President Reagan fired a number of commissioners and appointed new members more in line with his philosophy. A lengthy battle ensued, and Congress finally approved a compromise reorganization of the commission that divided appointments to the commission between Congress and the administration, with the result that the President was able to maintain a majority on the new eight-person body.

Led by the new chairman, Clarence Pendleton, a prominent black conservative, and by staff director Linda Chavez (later succeeded by acting director Max Green), the reorganized commission moved to make itself a forthright exponent of the Reagan philosophy of civil rights. From the beginning, the central issue was quotas. Critics of the commission majority, led within the commission by congressional appointee Mary Frances Berry, charged the administration with general dereliction in enforcing civil-rights laws, but no one doubted that the quota question was the heart of the matter.

New controversy arose early in 1985 over the question of the State Advisory Committees (SACs) of the commission. In establishing the commission in the first place, Congress had required that it appoint Advisory Committees in each of the states and the District of Columbia. Those committees were rechartered every two years, and 1985 offered the first opportunity for the new commission majority to restructure the SACs to meet its policy goals.

And so early that year I got a call from the commission staff in Washington asking if I would be willing to serve on the Indiana SAC. I wasn’t sure that the Reagan administration understood as urgently as it should the crisis of black America, but I agreed entirely with its views on the quota question, and so I quickly agreed to serve. A week or so later, I received another call: would I be willing to serve as chairman? I hesitated longer over that. What would be the nature of my committee? Would I have a workable majority? What about staff support? Things, I was told, were in transition and nothing was entirely clear, but the commission staff was prepared to offer full support. After a few days’ deliberation, I decided to accept the offer.

Before long, I began to see what I had let myself in for. News stories started to pick up on the reorganization of the SACs. The changes were startling. Only one of the former state chairmen received reappointment. White male chairmen increased from eight before the reorganization to thirty-three afterward. Minority males declined from twenty-two to fourteen, minority females from thirteen to one, white females from seven to three. I understood the reasons behind the demographic changes (how many minority females with civil-rights experience would one find opposed to quotas?), but I also understood that the changes constituted prima-facie evidence for those predisposed to find the commission guilty of disregard for minority concerns. The turnover in SAC chairmen received a fair amount of media notice and editorial comment, almost all of it negative or, at best, cautionary. “It would surprise me if anyone of integrity would want to serve,” said the dean of one law school.

The reactions of colleagues at the university (mostly liberal, of course) to my appointment further reflected the burdens of disbelief I faced. “But you don’t believe in civil rights,” they said, by which they meant not that I was a bigot or that I did not believe in equal opportunity, but that I was publicly opposed to quotas. So had the definition of civil rights now been reduced, and so was my problem defined (and this among friends).

The makeup of the new Indiana SAC was no help. The commission staff in Washington had not had the time fully to reorganize the overall SAC memberships, so I faced a committee with six new appointees (myself included) and five holdovers. The holdovers—each one of them committed to the establishment view of civil rights—were all black (three of them women); of the six newcomers five were white males, all of them, I soon learned, advocates of the administration’s anti-quota views. I never learned if I enjoyed a working majority or not. The sixth new appointee, a black woman, missed most of our meetings and when she was there never said a word.

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My service as chairman was brief, undistinguished, and generally unhappy. That should not be exaggerated or misunderstood. The members of the committee got along well personally and, I am genuinely convinced, respected one another. We accomplished a number of minor useful things, including the conduct of a quite successful fair-housing conference in South Bend. Beyond that, on a range of issues from desegregation of the Fort Wayne elementary schools to monitoring of the civil-rights aspects of the administration’s block-grant program, we treaded water. It seemed to me that with a committee so closely divided ideologically and so evenly constituted on racial lines it would not make sense to tackle directly the hard issues that separated the Reagan administration from its critics. As chairman, I was not prepared to lead a civil-rights committee that consistently voted 6-5, blacks on one side, whites on the other. That kind of symbolism, I decided, would be disastrous.

My caution (was I, I wondered, statesman or wimp?) was reinforced by the civil-service staff people I worked with from the commission’s Midwestern regional office in Chicago. I dealt mainly with two people there, the regional director and the civil-rights analyst assigned to do staff work for our SAC. As civil servants these two men were officially neutral on policy matters, but it was immediately apparent to me that they held to the establishment view of civil rights and that they were unhappy with the direction the commission had taken in recent years. Nonetheless, they were moved by the bureaucratic imperative to avoid controversy.

For the most part they did their jobs in a straightforward manner, but on occasion their biases showed. The most sensitive issue the Indiana SAC dealt with in my two years concerned the federal Justice Department’s attempt to get the city of Indianapolis to challenge the consent decrees it had entered into with the district courts during the 1970’s establishing minority- and female-hiring guidelines in the city’s police and fire departments. The Justice Department interpreted those guidelines as quotas, and it wanted them tested more fully in the courts. (The department at the time held out the hope that the Supreme Court would strike down direct quotas.) The Reagan administration had come under strong criticism from civil-rights spokesmen for its actions in the matter, and its situation was complicated by the opposition of the Republican Mayor of Indianapolis, William Hudnut, to any attempt to modify the consent decrees.

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At our first meeting in May 1985, the SAC members agreed to conduct a community forum in Indianapolis on the issue, and we assigned to staff the task of inviting speakers representing various perspectives to address the committee at a public meeting. Shortly before the meeting was scheduled in September, I got a call from the staff representative with the list of speakers he had invited. I was stunned. The list consisted of several representatives of the city administration, beginning with the Deputy Mayor, as well as spokesmen from various civil-rights organizations, all of which were publicly committed to the affirmative-action program the consent decrees had set in place. No one on the roster could be expected to support the Justice Department’s position.

I was, to put it mildly, unhappy with the list, and I made my unhappiness clearly apparent. The staff representative seemed genuinely surprised; he was obviously so used to assuming that there was only one legitimate view on civil-rights issues, and only one set of voices that needed to be heard on those issues, that he actually could not imagine that anyone of good will would think otherwise. When I insisted that we had to have some balancing voices and made some specific suggestions on which organizations to approach, he promised to try. Contacts were made, and two organizations that opposed the city’s affirmative-action program agreed to send representatives, but—probably because these were last-minute arrangements—the speakers never showed up.

The forum, therefore, consisted of an ongoing litany of praise for the city’s programs (which, it became clear, certainly did consist of quotas) interrupted only by some skeptical questioning by a few committee members. At our discussions afterward, all the other SAC members agreed with my view that because we had heard only one side of the argument it would be inappropriate for the committee to take any official stand on the issue. We thus inadvertently avoided what could have been a nasty split in the committee, but the entire experience had not been edifying for either the committee or the community.

As the Indianapolis incident indicated, the other members of the committee, whatever their own civil-rights views, were no more eager than I to precipitate a confrontation. The Indiana SAC could, in other circumstances, have become an effective committee. My fellow members were intelligent and able men and women—lawyers, academics, businessmen, executives in various private and public organizations—and, although with different understandings of what the idea meant, all deeply committed to the cause of civil rights.

We never confronted our disagreements head on, partly because all of us were uncomfortable that our ideological differences coincided with our racial ones, but more, I think, because we realized that our differences on controverted civil-rights issues were so deep as to constitute an unbridgeable gap. We all felt deeply, we all knew that we would not be able to convert those on the committee who felt otherwise to our own points of view, and so we preserved the peace among ourselves by not speaking—or by speaking only obliquely—of the most important aspects of the issue that brought us together in the first place. We did not know or trust one another well enough to risk our fragile good relations with plain speaking. That was sad for us, sadder still for what it suggested about the state of discussion of racial issues in America.

The wary civility we on the Indiana SAC maintained marked, in fact, a considerable improvement over the conditions that prevail in most discussions of civil rights in our society. We at least did not proceed on mutual assumptions of bad faith, as so many participants in civil-rights discussions seem to do. It is even possible that had the members of the committee worked together longer we might have managed to get beyond polite reticence on the issues that divided us.

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When I resigned as chairman, it was not in despair that the SAC could never be made to work—that remained undecided—but over certainty that under prevailing conditions the Civil Rights Commission at large had no useful function to serve, unless one finds it useful serving as perpetual whipping-boy for one’s opponents. Attitudes of much of the black community toward the commission and its dominant views had become so poisoned and hateful that nothing it said had any chance of being listened to by those who most needed to hear it. When Benjamin Hooks of the NAACP told Congress earlier this year that the commission was “a sham and a national disgrace” he was, as comment on the commission by civil-rights activists goes, exercising rhetorical restraint.

The essential problem was not, as critics of the commission so often charged, that it had by its own actions made itself “controversial” in civil-rights circles (although Chairman Pendleton, with his penchant for flamboyant language, may have made himself more of an issue than was necessary or wise); any individual or institution that has something politically worth saying will inevitably get branded as controversial. Indeed, I believe that the commission in its post-1983 phase established an admirable record. It spoke with an intelligent and tough-minded voice, and its official investigations and reports were thoughtful, even-handed, and anchored in evidence and reason rather than, as is so often the case in such matters, sentimental moralizing. It adamantly opposed quotas because, in order to defend what America at its best has always been about, it had no choice not to.

The commission’s actual record made little difference to its critics. It was enough for them that the commission was dominated by Reagan appointees and that it opposed quotas, which had become the litmus-test issue of civil-rights legitimacy. Those who opposed quotas were, as already noted, enemies by definition of civil rights and beyond the pale of civil discourse, functionally indistinguishable from out-and-out racists. I thought it wrong that the commission had not received a fair hearing from its critics, but I finally concluded that that fair hearing would never occur.

Congress would to my mind have done well to kill the Civil Rights Commission outright in late 1986 as it threatened for a time to do; instead, it crippled it by slashing its budget and leaving it to limp on in a mortally-wounded financial and political condition. Because of the budget reductions, the regional offices were cut from ten to three, which meant that staff support for the SACs would dwindle away. It was a good time to get out and so, rather than accept reappointment, in early 1987 I did.

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V

The bloody-mindedness of debate that has characterized the recent history of the Civil Rights Commission seems to me indicative of a continuing sense of near-apocalyptic desperation among some American blacks about civil rights. Large parts of the black community have come to insist on such dubious policies as busing and quotas—and to do so in such unmeasured terms of opprobrium for their opponents—because, it seems, they continue to believe that racism is so prevalent among whites and so operational in the workings of society that black people can only hope to advance through coercive programs that, in one way or another, force whites to grant them the equality they could not otherwise obtain. The perception of implacable white enmity sustains among blacks a sense of victim status that becomes an all-purpose explanatory device for analyzing the conditions of black life. I see no way for substantial progress to be made in race relations in our society until the black community disenthralls itself of those ideas. It would seem to be in its own best interests to do so.

There exist millions of black people today whose problems and possibilities can no longer be defined within the old categories of poverty, oppression, and powerlessness. The black community is not a monolith, and it seems politically self-defeating for it to act as if it were. Is it not possible for civil-rights organizations to maintain their commitment to those within the black community who have not made it and yet begin to address themselves as well to the concerns of those who have? America is predominantly a middle-class society, and any political or social movement that does not recognize that—and act accordingly—will condemn itself to ultimate futility.

Not all black people are social victims, and a truly comprehensive black politics will have to go beyond the assumptions and stances that the theory of victimization imposes. Our history demonstrates, as in the already-noted instances of Orientals and Jews, that there is room in the interstices of American society for oppressed minority groups to make a place for themselves and begin the long ascent out of their oppressed status. Blacks, who have suffered quantitatively and qualitatively as no other group in America has suffered, have nonetheless begun that ascent, and it is time more notice were taken of that by black and white alike.

To move out of victim status is to get beyond the mood and rhetoric of hopelessness, resentment, and comfortable (but ineffectual) moralism that can keep individuals and groups trapped in their own sense of futility. It may provide psychological comfort to dwell on charges of “racism” or “social meanness,” but it would not seem to be socially very useful. (The once-searing term “racist” has been so cheapened by casual and inappropriate use that it has almost entirely lost its capacity to shock, outrage, or shame.) Only a fool would deny that prejudice still exists and still inflicts social and economic damage, but it is not the all-consuming monster it once was, and it no longer has the power it formerly had to condemn virtually all black people to lives devoid of social decency.

Black people today hold more of their fate in their own hands than ever before, which makes it appropriate for black social critics like Thomas Sowell and Glenn Loury to emphasize internal elements of black culture rather than external elements of white attitudes in assessing the current condition of the black community. When these analysts include matters of family instability, social indiscipline, and educational unpreparedness in accounting for the economic plight of poor blacks, that is not an exercise in self-hatred; it is rather an attempt at a realistic examination of those forces within the black community itself that contribute to the agonies it endures. As Sowell in particular has suggested, it is essential that blacks transcend the current condescending understanding of minorities as being “people you feel sorry for”; such people will never be thought of, or think of themselves, as equals.

I wish there were some way to persuade people like my erstwhile black colleagues on the Indiana SAC of the truth of what I have said, but I fear that at present there is not. Which is why, for the next little while at least, I will be watching civil-rights developments from the sidelines.

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