From time to time articles and web posts pop up referring to the concept of a "Black-White Alliance in the 1960s." Sometimes to lament its end, sometimes to attribute its death to Black Power, or Black militants, or Black nationalism, or ...
While that concept can be a useful shorthand in some contexts, once you dig beneath the surface I believe a more accurate concept would be a Black alliance with a portion of white America. The fact is that back in the 1960s, the percentage of whites who supported the Freedom Movement were never a majority of the white population.
Southern whites overwhelmingly opposed the Black Freedom Movement from A to Z — as did some whites in the North. Today, it's my personal belief that the political descendants those segregationists form the core of the Republican Party's MAGA base.
In the North, the courageous nonviolent protests of the Civil Rights Movement, solidly backed by Black and other nonwhite communities, slowly, carefully, painfully, built a base of support among northern whites to form a legislative coalition that managed to force passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Together, those two laws, significantly addressed Jim Crow dejure "white-only" segregation "in the South, and broadened nonwhite voting rights nationwide .
But when you take into account southern whites and northerners who answered "Don't Know" or "No opinion," what can be said is that at some times and in some places on some issues, the number of whites who supported the movement outnumbered those who actively opposed it by a modest margin. So it's a feel-good myth on a Santa-Clause/Tooth-Fairy scale to inflate that small plurality into nation-wide, white-majoritarian support for the Black Freedom Movement as a whole.
After passage of those two civil rights bills — which were hugely controversial at the time (and in some quarters still remain so) — that legislative coalition began to unravel, primarily due to diminution of support from liberal whites in the North (there having been no numerically-significant white support in the South).
In August of 1964, the MFDP defied Johnson by rejecting his so-called "compromise" at the Democratic Party convention in Atlantic City. Some months later, in 1965, Black activists began building political organizations in Black communities that were independent of the Democratic Party. Funding from liberal foundations in the North for grassroots organizing projects in the South suddenly dried up. Black SNCC and CORE field-secretaries who had been the backbone of the movement were defunded and forced to seek employment elsewhere. Without dedicated organizers, projects began to wither and slowly died.
At the same time, the Freedom Movement as a whole began to shift from opposing southern-style Jim Crow segregation and denial of voting rights to broader issues of poverty, economic justice, and northern-style "defacto" school, employment, housing, and job discrimination. That shift directly impacted northern white communities — and in some cases the personal finances of affluent whites who had politically supported the Civil Rights Acts.
And the violent mid-1960s urban uprisings in Black communities — sensationalized by mass media "Black militants" "kill honkies" stories — frightened and alienated many whites. A palpable decline in northern white support for the Civil Rights Movement soon manifested. In California, for example, voters overturned a fair housing bill that the Civil Rights Movement had championed, and the Civil Rights Act of 1966, which addressed northern issues, was strangled to death in the Senate.
Yet the legislative coalition that forced through the passage of mid-1960s civil rights legislation was not the same thing as the "Black-white Alliance" that characterized the Freedom Movement of the era.
In the face of the late 1960s "white backlash" and their fear of alienating white voters (particularly in the South), Democratic Party leaders retreated from civil rights issues and focused their energies on pursuing the disastrous Vietnam War. But for the most part, the Black and white activists who had marched and sat-in and engaged in grassroots community organizing continued to fight for racial and social justice (though not necessarily in integrated organizations). Over and over in this site's Roll Call, personal statements by both white and Black activists affirm that the Freedom Movement shaped and changed their lives forevermore.
Civil rights activists both Black and white played leading roles in the Womens and Student Movements, the Latino and Gay Rights Movements, the struggles to expand the Voting Rights Act, end apartheid in South Africa, and pass the ADA to provide equity and justice for the disabled. Whites joined Blacks in protesting the murders of Oscar Grant and Trevon Martin during the Black Lives Matter marches, and helped fill the streets nationwide in 2020 after the police murder of George Floyd. Today on the snow-covered streets of Minneapolis and in towns across the nation, Americans of all colors and backgrounds are standing with nonwhite immigrants against the ethic-cleansing atrocities of militarized ICE agents and Border Patrol troops.
So in my opinion, that 1960s Black-white alliance lived on, and what we can now think of as a modern "rainbow alliance" for racial justice continues — though perhaps not yet as strongly as I hope it will soon become.
Copyright © Bruce Hartford
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