(8 of 14)
But in the long recessional from the '60s, and especially during the Reagan years, the moral will to advance the cause of blacks through Government action has waned, a function of straitened budgets and a kind of cultural recoil from the principles of Johnson's Great Society. The black middle class has grown and in many ways prospered, and yet the black underclass has hardened into a cruel permanence. Says Charles Stith, pastor of Boston's Union United Methodist Church and a highly regarded black activist: "Martin Luther King fought for our rights to ride in the front of the bus. But folks still can't afford to ride the front of the airplane. This isn't a civil rights issue. We've dealt with that. The crisis now is economic."
The night that Martin Luther King died, Bobby Kennedy was in Indianapolis. He stood on a flatbed truck in a parking lot and addressed an angry, grieving crowd of blacks. "Those of you who are black can be filled with hatred, with bitterness and a desire for revenge," he said. "We can move toward further polarization. Or we can make an effort, as Dr. King did, to understand, to reconcile ourselves and to love."
What died with Martin Luther King Jr. and later, in great finality, with Robert Kennedy, was a moral trajectory, a style of aspiration. King embodied a nobility and hope that all but vanished. With King and Kennedy, a species of idealism died -- the idealism that hoped to put America back together again, to reconcile it to itself. In the nervous breakdown of 1968, the word idealism became almost a term of derogation. Idealism eventually tribalized into aggressive special interests ("environmentalists, feminists and radical gays," et al.), doing battle in a long war of constituencies. Georgia Congressman John Lewis, a veteran of the long civil rights movement, says now that the '60s put the nation on a "freedom high." But after King's death, Lewis observes, "people just dropped out. It had an effect on the American psyche. I think some people were afraid to hope again, afraid to get involved."
The Students Rise
Abbie Hoffman, founding father of the Yippies and still, at 51, a social activist, has an arresting theory about time and the stages of human development. "The world really began for us," his idea goes, "on Aug. 6, 1945, when the atom bomb was dropped. So that during the '60s we were all young. The whole world was going through its youth, its atomic youth. If you looked at the magazines at the time, they were all youth oriented, and the culture was all youth oriented." Today, says Hoffman, it is not only that the baby boomers are getting middle-aged. The entire society, he thinks, is in its atomic middle age -- even the young today are middle-aged. The theory has a limited, even narcissistic logic and a certain charm.