![]() ![]() Just as Johnson was held accountable for escalating an increasingly unpopular war, the current occupant of the White House will have to own the sickness of America today. In bad times, the challenger has a certain advantage. Biden has publicly recalled many instances of police violence against unarmed black people and promised to reform law enforcement. ![]() His sympathies are clearly with the demonstrators. Joe Biden, this year’s presumptive Democratic candidate, has shown that for all his flaws, he may not be another Hubert Humphrey. Nixon won the election that November not only because he soothed the panicked ‘silent majority’ with promises of law and order, but also because Hubert Humphrey, a decent mainstream Democrat, refused to condemn the Vietnam War. Robert F Kennedy, the candidate who promised to end the war and who visited the burning ghettos to calm African-Americans’ fears, was assassinated two months after King. The ‘shouters’ and ‘demonstrators’ that Nixon railed against were not just black people, but also young whites who resisted being forced to fight in a war they considered immoral. President Lyndon B Johnson, responsible for escalating that reckless and savage war, was a Democrat, the same man who passed civil rights bills that had actually improved African-Americans’ lives, and by doing so provoked the hatred of many Southern voters, who switched their allegiance to the Republican Party, helping to push it further to the right. The protests in 1968 were not just about racial inequality, but also about the Vietnam War. Being effectively locked up in relative isolation for several months will only have added to the frustrations of many young people, who are only too glad to vent them in the streets. The last point is not entirely frivolous. Once the global depression sinks in, many won’t be cushioned by anything at all.Īnd yet, there are important differences between now and the summer of 1968, apart from the fact that the music was more interesting then, and there were more sexual opportunities. ![]() Moreover, Covid-19 has hit African-Americans with particular fury, because many lack financial savings and are forced to work in risky areas, as nurses and other ‘essential workers’, often without proper health care. King’s violent death was echoed this year by that of George Floyd, the defenceless 46-year-old black man in Minneapolis killed by a policeman who kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes. The protests that followed were not just an expression of anger at King’s murder, but also the lack of economic and educational opportunities that were the result of a long and often violent racist history.ĭespite an African-American’s two terms in the White House, conditions today are hardly better-and in some ways worse. A day after Martin Luther King Jr, declared that ‘the nation is sick’, he was shot dead by a white racist criminal. The trouble in 1968, like the protests today, also started with anger against the oppression of black people in America. Devastated, mostly African-American urban areas were starved of federal funds and further isolated, white suburbanites bought more guns, and police forces were armed as though they were a branch of the military. The Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon promised the ‘silent majority’, the ‘non-shouters’, and the ‘non-demonstrators’, that he would restore law and order with force. The result of the civil disorder was what some liberals in America fear will happen later this year. Could the United States be facing a reprise of the summer of 1968? Then, too, the world saw images of popular rage boiling over in America, as mostly African-American inner cities went up in flames, and young people were tear-gassed, charged at, and often brutally beaten by riot police and National Guardsmen.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |