Taeku Lee’s interesting, instructive book, “Mobilizing Public Opinion: Black Insurgency and Racial Attitudes in the Civil Rights Era,” examines the role of public opinion in galvanizing the civil rights movement of the 1960s. It became the considered opinion of the American people, especially after the horrendous events in Selma, Alabama, in1965, that segregation must end. The President of the United States, Lyndon Johnson, on March 15, 1965, was compelled to issue a nationwide speech from the Oval Office, the first such on domestic policy in nineteen years. Less than four months later, in August, Johnson saw his Voting Rights Act passed by Congress—an act hailed as a landmark in the history of U.S. lawmaking.
Lee wonders how the massive public forces unleashed by the Civil Rights movement in the mid-Sixties can be resurrected in modern times. It’s an important question, to which I’ll return in a moment, but for now it has to be said that the book’s weakness is that it examines only the mid-1960s that were the birth years of the movement. That was well before the rise of the Internet and social media, so those two forces, so crucial today, are missing from Lee’s analysis. Lee correctly points to public opinion in the 1960s, and how media dominated by“elites” such as Dr. King were central to the movement’s success. But in the 1960s public opinion was limited to the three T.V. networks, a few national newspapers, and a handful of magazines. Things are much more challenging today in our fractured, kaleidoscopic media landscape.
Lee recounts the civil rights movement’s origin story. It consisted of “the mobilization of black [sic] resistance and insurgency” in the South (protests, freedom marchers, Bloody Sunday in Selma and so forth), “…which in turn activate[d] mass audiences throughout the land.” And thus a sitting U.S. President solemnly tells that mass audience, “We shall overcome.”
Today, , nearly sixty years later, the remains of that civil rights movement, now calling itself “social justice” and “progressive,” have tried their best to reignite that “activation of mass audiences throughout the land.” But by any reading of current events, they have failed miserably. What Lee calls “the activism and mobilization of ordinary individuals, from the bottom up” that characterized the civil rights movement has not materialized, despite the progressives’ best efforts. Ordinary citizens have not only not rallied to the new racial progressivism, they have, by the tens of millions, rejected it.
Why?
In the mid-1960s, when Americans turned on their TVs, they saw the violent repression of peaceful protesters in Selma and elsewhere in the South and were outraged. Lee does a good job describing how “ordinary Americans” in those days literally dropped everything to travel, from all over the country, to join the Freedom marchers. I remember that summer of 1965 well. Many young people dropped out of college to go south. Others did what they could in the north and out west. It was the fashionable, right thing to do.
In 1965, there was an actual, tangible, visible evil that could be seen by everyone in America. It prompted an entire country to oppose segregation and to demand government action. Today, what do Americans see? There is no longer any actual, tangible evil that Americans perceive—at least, not enough of them to constitute a movement. The situation today is completely different. One evil thing people do see is crime and urban social decay—not an attack upon decent, peaceful citizens set on by dogs, water hoses and truncheons as in 1965, but criminals and ne’er do wells in Oakland and elsewhere bent on mayhem and violence, on destroying our cities and preying upon us, and who are enabled and supported by progressive politicians who egg them on and then let them get away with it. Most citizens today have no sympathy for these people, the way their parents and grandparents sympathized with the good people on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. If anything, it’s the other way around: people resent the sociopaths who are running amok in our cities, and no amount of propagandizing by progressives—no matter how elite, like Pamela Price and Sheng Thao--will change that.
As a result, this new progressive iteration of the Civil Rights movement has collapsed under its own internal inconsistencies. In fact, I would venture to say that the real new civil rights movement is the one that supports the police, cracks down on lawbreakers, and restores normalcy to our cities—in other words, you and me. We are the “ordinary individuals” who constitute this new movement. We are the new civil rights activists, the spiritual descendants of the southern freedom fighters, chanting freedom now from criminals, from encampments, from the derangement and despoiling of our cities, and from the tyranny of the reverse-racists who created and sustain these civic abnormalities from which we suffer.
Steve Heimoff