Fueling the Black Political Participation Movement: The Joint Center for Political Studies

Extract

Black America in 1970 was weary and frustrated. Old targets of its assaults on racial injustice were becoming more elusive and were changing their shapes through disguises. Demonstrations for pure civil rights causes resulted in fewer concessions. Charismatic black leaders, once able to stir the national conscience almost at will, had gone to the mountaintop. Riots had proved ruinous. Rhetoric was boring. The voices of old allies were raised in eulogy of “the movement.”

Cynicism enveloped black America like a fog, so sure were blacks that they had been placed near the bottom of the list of national priorities. For blacks knew that their aspirations remained unfulfilled, and they knew that minority participation in the affairs of the nation was still circumscribed by a variety of hostile forces. Not the least of the latter was the notion in white America that judicial pronouncements and legislation of the sixties had lifted the black man's burden; that it was time to back away from black programs and turn with some urgency to “business as usual.”