The Historical Necessity for Practical Political Action
Again, a major plank of our thesis is the premise that progress beyond the heroic drama required practical leaders who might attempt a new biracial Southern politics. As we have already noted, the dramatic struggle between heroes and villains had so divided and traumatized Southern politics that our hypothesized reconstruction could come only when those heroes and villains yielded the historical stage to less confrontational types and times.
In fact, the broader environment for sweeping transformation of the South altered substantially and adversely. Radical ideas and actions of black unrest had spread nationally, leading many Americans and the federal government to temper their feelings about the civil rights movement.
President Lyndon Johnson and Congress felt that legal victories—such as the Civil Rights Act of 1964—had effectively addressed the situation and that further aggressive actions from the federal government or from blacks themselves might be counterproductive. As King biographer David J. Garrow noted in Bearing the Cross: Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference:
The president used the signing ceremony not only to congratulate those who had contributed to the passage of one of the legislative milestones in modern American history, but also to caution the black leaders about how they should greet this new achievement. After the public ceremony, the president spoke in private with King, Wilkins, Whitney Young, and other black representatives. He told them that there had to be “an understanding of the fact that the rights Negroes possessed could now be secured by law, making demonstrations unnecessary and possibly even self-defeating.” Johnson suggested they would be self-defeating for the movement, but most of those in attendance, King included, knew that the president’s real fear was that protests would play into the hands of Republican candidates seeking to convince fearful whites that someone other than Lyndon Johnson should be in the White House to preserve public order throughout America.[6]
In When the Marching Stopped: The Politics of Civil Rights Regulatory Agencies, Hanes Walton Jr. studied regulatory implementation of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and found that subsequent enforcement slowed considerably in the Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations. Walton found that the federal government spent only 15 percent of its civil rights budget on investigating complaints of discrimination and enforcing the law regarding the nondiscriminatory use of federal funds.[7]
As the heroic drama began to experience these adversities and other tensions, Dr. King realized that the movement had to revitalize and refocus itself in a more pragmatic manner. In 1967, he spoke of the necessity for practical political action both in his final presidential address to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference[8] and in his last book before being assassinated in Memphis.[9]
In the SCLC speech on August 17, 1967, Dr. King attempted to reorient his followers from moral and legal concerns to the political task of integrating blacks into American life. First, King proudly hailed the inspiring accomplishments of the heroic drama:
. . . when our organization was formed ten years ago, racial segregation was still a structured part of the architecture of Southern society . . . all too many Negroes were still harried by day and haunted by night by a corroding sense of fear and a nagging sense of nobody-ness.
But things are different now. In assault after assault, we caused the sagging walls of segregation to come tumbling down. This is an accomplishment whose consequences are deeply felt by every Southern Negro in his daily life . . .
But in spite of a decade of significant progress, the problem is far from solved. The deep rumbling of discontent in our cities is indicative of the fact that the plant of freedom has grown only a bud and not yet a flower.[10]
King then called for a strategic shift toward the everyday realities of political power and action:
Now a lot of us are preachers, and all of us have our moral convictions and concerns, and so often we have problems with power. But there is nothing wrong with power if power is used correctly.
You see, what happened is that some of our philosophers got off base. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love . . .
Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic . . .
This is no time for romantic illusions and empty philosophical debates about freedom. This is a time for action. What is needed is a strategy for change, a tactical program that will bring the Negro into the mainstream of American life as quickly as possible.[11]
In his final book, expanding that discussion, Dr. King talked about new strategies and tactics for real political power. In addition to promoting the election of black officials, he advocated alliances with responsive white politicians, and he spoke specifically about the changing nature of such relationships and Southern politics in those days:
A primary Negro political goal in the South is the elimination of racism as an electoral issue. No objective observer can fail to see that even with a half-finished campaign
