Two Americas in the 1950s and 1960s: Critical Essay

Two Americas: one of economic opportunity, prosperity, and equality, and the other of the ugliness of discrimination and poverty. This was the ever-present theme in the atmosphere of the 1950s and 60s. Three weeks before his assassination, Martin Luther King prominently and correctly claimed that America has failed to hear that the plight of the negro poor has worsened, the promises of justice and freedom have not been met, and white society is more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice and humanity. Ultimately, I agree with Dr. King’s perspective on the 1950s and 1960s with the exception of Johnson, Eisenhower, and Kennedy were complicit or did the absolute bare minimum for the civil rights movement or racism that permeated the country. And Johnson, while well-intentioned, proved bigger on promises and rhetoric than accomplishments; his anti-poverty measures coupled with the war on crime critically led the country towards prison America. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson provided tenuous, if any, assistance arguably worsening the negro plight.

The 1950s were a time of especially grand expectations and prosperity. The spirit was optimistic, dynamic, and materialistic, with no limits to what Americans could enjoy or achieve. However, this was merely to cover up the ugliness that pervaded the nation: it was thought that the new consumer culture could blur the old social and economic divisions with an emphasis on spending. Advertisers were very much a part of creating the ethos of the 1950s in creating new prosperity pushing the American people towards consumerism. Right on par with this notion of a separate America, such happy times with prosperity and opportunity, however, were reserved largely for whites, while poverty and discrimination affected millions of Americans of color. Outside the cities, many people of color and whites, whether migrant workers or rural poor, lived absolutely awful lives as 22% of Americans lived below the poverty line in the 1950s.

Dr. Martin Luther King first claims that the plight of the negro poor, and others of color, have worsened over the last decade or so. The 1960s are associated with a time of idealism, activism, and change. This change was often worse for African Americans and others of color. While the Warren Court exploded in the 1960s with rights, there were consequences of cases like Gideon, Mapp, and Miranda. The Warren Court’s efforts launched an army of overworked public defenders who relegated indigent clients to prison in America, a disproportionate number of whom were black or brown, and prompted them to accept guilty pleas rather than obtaining acquittals. The Warren Court, intentionally or not, contributed to the rise of prison America and mass incarceration involving a disproportionate number of minorities, essentially worsening the plight of people of color.

The war on poverty was intermingled with the war on crime and civil rights. President Kennedy was responsible for the beginning of an attack on delinquency and crime in the early 1960s by sending a bill to Congress that ushered “an unprecedented level of federal involvement in… [the] ‘inner city’”. The Youth Offenses Control Act of 1961 and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act of 1965 further criminalized people of color, labeled as delinquents, as well as propelled the federal government into local law enforcement. As Lyndon B. Johnson comes into the presidency, he ‘deals’ with racial inequality in the United States through the Moynihan report. The report blamed black families for causing black poverty, blamed inadequately socialized adolescent males for dangerous neighborhoods and schools, and suggested the ‘white’ standard should be the only ‘normal’ standard for families. It is also worth noting, according to Commentary Magazine, the Moynihan report (as well as the McCone report for that matter) steers clear of confronting the thorny issues of negro unemployment, which is significantly increasing. Going back to 1948, the black and white unemployment rates were roughly parity, as posited by Commentary Magazine, but over the next decade, negro unemployment was steadily double that of whites. In 1968, Martin Luther King again emphasized that unemployment among negros was twice that of whites revealing the worsening negro plight in the 50s and 60s, as well as demonstrating the notion of two separate Americas. Jamal Joseph discusses this separate America in the ‘Black Panthers Revisited’ short documentary: “During that time period, being black in America meant that you didn’t walk down the street with the same sense of safety and the same sense of privilege as a white person”.

Furthermore, the beliefs rooted in LBJ’s reading of the Moynihan report prompted him to call for the war on crime in 1965 and to adopt, in addition to the war on poverty, a strategy of managing poverty through better policing, surveilling, and incarcerating. All of which propelled the United States towards prison America, the criminalization of black males, and the increased normalization of police brutality. Moreover, In These Times explains the summer riots from 1964 to 1968, “fueled an already intense… demand for ‘law and order’ politics, including militarizing police departments and expanding the prison system”. Johnson’s war on poverty sought to foster equality and socioeconomic opportunity but was truly a manifestation of fear about the urban disorder and the behavior of young people, particularly African Americans.

Secondly, Dr. King correctly posits that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. A rights revolution took flight with Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) as the Supreme Court unanimously found school segregation as a matter of law unconstitutional. Triggering a massive movement of resistance to school integration, many schools outright refused, even closing some public schools altogether to avoid integration. Additionally, the hundred southern congressmen pledged open resistance to Brown in signing the Southern Manifesto as the National Endowment for the Humanities mentions: “We commend the motives of those States which have declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means”. This critically reveals the extent to which many politicians ignored or rejected civil rights legislation. President Eisenhower similarly did not enjoy dealing with racial issues, and while one could argue civil rights advances took place under Eisenhower, such as Brown, it is more accurate to say that he simply “had a constitutional responsibility to uphold the Supreme Court’s rulings”. Eisenhower never spoke out in favor of the ruling supporting black Americans. Similarly, a decade after Brown, nothing was changed in the South as ninety-nine out of every one hundred African American schoolchildren were still going to segregated schools, revealing the extent to which promises, legislation and case law were not fulfilled.

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President John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier made lackluster attempts surrounding social reform. In proposing new social programs such as a higher minimum wage, medical care for the elderly, and a Department of Urban Affairs, Kennedy was met with deep congressional resistance. The major medical program for the elderly went nowhere, while attempts to cut taxes and broaden civil rights were watered down on Capitol Hill. While it is clear that JFK faced obstacles of a conservative Congress in following through with his campaign promises, he just truly didn’t care much about domestic policy, even once saying, “Who gives a shit if the minimum wage is a dollar or a dollar and a quarter when you have something like Cuba”. While the Kennedy administration did indeed face opposition, the administration ultimately handled bills poorly, as demonstrated by the 1961 bill to increase the minimum wage, which was diluted in Congress and even excluded laundry workers who were supposedly the reason for a minimum wage in the first place; this was all too typical of JFK regarding domestic policy.

One of Kennedy’s most explicit 1960 campaign promises was to end racial discrimination in housing ‘with the stroke of a pen’. But it wasn’t until 1962, when people sent him thousands of pens in the mail, that he finally issued the executive order. Not surprisingly, supposedly the order was weak and rarely enforced. Similarly, Kennedy refused to broaden the scope of the narrow housing order at any time during his administration. Here, we see yet again that the promises made were in fact, not met or were only carried out after pressure was put on. Now, this is not to say that some gains were not made as displayed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which indeed represented strides. LBJ had the upper hand as the Warren Court and Congress were working in tandem with the President, unlike JFK, whose Congress squashed almost anything that he sent their way.

The Great Society didn’t do nearly as much to improve the lives of Americans as did the expanding economy that made the Great Society possible. According to the Washington Post, it was intended to be much more than anti-poverty, but “the Great Society programs [often] perpetuated the problems they aimed to solve, stirred social discontent and worked mostly to the benefit of the massive, intractable bureaucracies they created”. So, although the Johnson administration, with good intentions, had created a blueprint for a national crime-control program to improve American society and foster equality of opportunity, it ultimately led to the shift towards surveillance and confinement of African Americans and others of color.

Thirdly, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. correctly points out that large segments of white America are more concerned with tranquility and maintaining the status quo than with justice and humanity. To begin with President Eisenhower in the 1950s, such hesitation about civil rights that made him tepid about Brown was very much evident in the little rock crisis of 1957. Southern politics moved to the right in light of Brown v. Board, and in 1957 Governor Orval Faubus of Arkansas determined that he would resist integration as nine African American schoolchildren tried to enroll in Central High School. Eisenhower finally acted as if this was embarrassing to America’s reputation. Instead of declaring that desegregation was the right thing to do, he instead in a nationally televised address asserted that the violence that took place in Little Rock was “harming U.S. prestige and influence around the world”. As evidenced by the televised address, Eisenhower was more concerned with the United States’ appearance abroad than true justice and equality. Furthermore, insofar as Kennedy was concerned with civil rights, he viewed it as an image problem and was much more concerned with foreign policy than domestic issues. Believing that the Freedom Rides would interfere with the Vienna Summit, President Kennedy tried to convince the riders to call it off, critically revealing his intentions and concern for maintaining the United States’ image abroad rather than aiding the civil rights movement.

In the 1960s, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, a right-wing anti-communist, violated the law by using the FBI for illegal activities against civil rights advocates. In developing his counterintelligence program COINTELPRO, which in large part was to target civil rights activists for surveillance, blackmail, and dirty tricks, both JFK and LBJ were complicit. Both presidents allowed Hoover to do his dirty deeds because it was likely that he had information on them as well. Again, this demonstrates a concern with maintaining peace and tranquility and looking out for themselves rather than doing what’s right. Additionally, in 1964, three civil rights workers were grabbed by the deputy sheriff in Neshoba County and released to a Klan mob who murdered the three men. The documentary ‘Neshoba’ included opinions of white citizens: “Why bring all this thing back up? It’s not going to bring anybody back”, “My opinion is if it’s stirred up, something bad could happen again”, “I think we should leave it alone, it’s been so many years, what good is it gonna do? They’re all dead but one”. Evidenced by these statements white Americans were much more concerned with maintaining peace and the status quo rather than giving justice to Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman’s families, which ultimately and horrifically would not come for 40 years.

Additionally, Ike never seemed certain the problems the United States was facing (like immigration, civil liberties, civil rights, or poverty) were actually there, and arguably and typically was unwilling to use his prestige and popularity to solve them. Kennedy was customarily disinterested in civil rights reform except as a matter of necessity, but while sympathetic, he failed to provide solutions. While President Johnson took the lead here, he bit off more than he could chew, and while his policies were well-intentioned, the war on poverty was intermingled with urban unrest essentially prompting Johnson to call for a war on crime. Essentially, the policies of Eisenhower and the liberalism of LBJ, JFK, and others as the Students for a Democratic Society points out, are just a way of strengthening the status quo, introducing just enough reform to keep a revolution from happening.

Ultimately, I agree with Dr. Martin Luther King’s perspective of the 1950s and 60s as instead of seeing actual fundamental change, African Americans, at the end of the 1960s, still lived with all the struggles they did before, yet they were hidden behind civil rights legislation or case law. Everything looks good on paper, but in reality, people of color still faced voter discrimination, segregation, racial profiling, increasing incarceration, and violence. Promises of freedom and justice were often not met or took decades as displayed by Neshoba County and Brown. Large segments of white society were more concerned with maintaining the status quo rather than justice and humanity as displayed through the Neshoba County murders and the politics of Ike, JFK, and LBJ, and the negro plight has worsened as demonstrated by unemployment and the pairing of the war on poverty and the war on crime.