Description
For different American "publics," how did the raging fires of the 1960s urban crisis illuminate, discolor, or cast into shadow the many threads of what Dr. Kenneth Clark called the "tangle of pathology and powerlessness" in America's racial ghettos? Scholars explaining the 1960s "liberal crack up"--with reference to Vietnam, the student revolts, the policy of "rights revolution," or the Democratic Party's purported shift to a "politics of entitlement"--have not fully appreciated the enduring political and ideological impact of these episodes of violent racial conflict. The "riots" and "rebellions" themselves--and how they were framed and interpreted by public officials, journalists, activists and ordinary people--had much to do with the nation's shift from a politics of equality to a politics of "law and order." Tom Jackson argues that mainstream liberal voices in the media, Congress, the Johnson Administration and even the Kerner Commission failed to appreciate what both conservative politicians and a range of black Americans took for granted: that in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., "the problem of the ghetto is the problem of power." In what became a national debate on the "causes" of violence--on "who rioted" and why, the academic "experts" did little to clarify the central importance of empowering nonviolent organizations and institutions among the ghetto poor, even though their data showed that the most volatile grievances poor blacks and their leaders voiced were directed against urban institutional, and especially police, abuses of power. In this national discursive vacuum, conservative political entrepreneurs met increasing success, arguing that nonviolent ghetto organizations and the federal agencies that supported them were actually principal causes of "riots, rebellions and civil disorder." Finally, when the media's insatiable thirst for violent "breaking news" fed the national fascination with violence, the cards seemed to be stacked against arguments such as those made by Dr. King's public relations director four days before King's assassination: "The issue is not violence versus nonviolence, but poverty and racism."
