Even at its moment of triumph, the civil rights movement confronted a crisis as it sought to move from access to schools, public accommodations, and the voting booth to the economic divide separating blacks from other Americans. In the mid-1960s, economic issues rose to the forefront of the civil rights agenda. Violent outbreaks in black ghettos outside the South drew attention to the national scope of racial injustice and to inequalities in jobs, education, and housing that the dismantling of legal segregation left intact. Much of the animosity that came to characterize race relations arose from the belief of many whites that the legislation of 1964 and 1965 had fulfilled the nation’s obligation to assure blacks equality before the law, while blacks, aware of the discrimination they still faced in jobs, education, housing, and the criminal justice system, pushed for more government action, sparking fears of “reverse discrimination.”
In 1965, Martin Luther King Jr. and the black labor leader A. Philip Randolph called for a Freedom Budget, which they claimed would eliminate poverty by 1975. The proposal illustrated how the focus of the civil rights movement was shifting from desegregation to economic inequality.
The first riots—really, battles between angry blacks and the predominantly white police (widely seen by many ghetto residents as an occupying army)—erupted in Harlem in 1964. Far larger was the Watts uprising of 1965, which took place in the black ghetto of Los Angeles only days after Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act. An estimated 50,000 persons took part in this “rebellion,” attacking police and firemen, looting white-owned businesses, and burning buildings. It required 15,000 police and National Guardsmen to restore order, by which time thirty-five people lay dead, 900 were injured, and $30 million worth of property had been destroyed.
By the summer of 1967, violence had become so widespread that some feared racial civil war. Urban uprisings in that year left twenty-three dead in Newark and forty-three in Detroit, where entire blocks went up in flames and property damage ran into the hundreds of millions of dollars. The violence led Johnson to appoint a commission headed by Illinois governor Otto Kerner to study the causes of urban rioting. Released in 1968, the Kerner Report blamed the violence on “segregation and poverty” and offered a powerful indictment of “white racism.” It depicted a country in danger of being torn apart by racial antagonism: “Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” But the report failed to offer any clear proposals for change.
With black unemployment twice that of whites and the average black family income little more than half the white norm, the movement looked for ways to “make freedom real” for black Americans. In 1964, King called for a “Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged” to mobilize the nation’s resources to abolish economic deprivation. His proposal was directed against poverty in general, but King also insisted that after “doing something special against the Negro for hundreds of years,” the United States had an obligation to “do something special for him now”—an early call for what would come to be known as “affirmative action.” A. Philip Randolph and civil rights veteran Bayard Rustin proposed a Freedom Budget, which envisioned spending $100 billion over ten years on a federal program of job creation and urban redevelopment.
In 1966, King launched the Chicago Freedom Movement, with demands quite different from its predecessors in the South—an end to discrimination by employers and unions, equal access to mortgages, the integration of public housing, and the construction of low-income housing scattered throughout the region. Confronting the entrenched power of Mayor Richard J. Daley’s political machine and the ferocious opposition of white home owners, the movement failed. King’s tactics—marches, sit-ins, mass arrests—proved ineffective in the face of the North’s less pervasive but still powerful system of racial inequality. As he came to realize the difficulty of combating the economic plight of black America, King’s language became more and more radical. He called for nothing less than a “revolution in values” that would create a “better distribution of wealth” for “all God’s children.”