that whites ignored or threatened him and treated him as a lesser person. Such losses were part of what it meant to be a black person in America, and a burning reason to keep on fighting. To him losses were part of the struggle. I didn’t expect losses. I wanted something to take back to Bill, something to free me from feeling that I had taken part in a great wrong. I wanted to win.
* * *
The civil rights movement was not the ideal place for a young lawyer who measured success by wins, especially as the mood of white and black America alike turned bitterly angry following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. After its passage President Lyndon B. Johnson promised a War on Poverty, but to the blacks trapped in their ghettos, that was just more empty words. An ascendant militancy decried the lack of change, as moderates like Roy Wilkins kept hoping for incremental progress.
The schools, North and South, were still segregated. Most blacks living in cities, and especially the poor, were squeezed into white-owned, high-rent buildings, many of which were falling apart and never maintained. To escape the summer heat, people camped out on stoops and even in the streets. Across the nation police watched blacks suspiciously when they ventured out of the ghettos. Virtually all the cops were white, and they were quick to arrest blacks for whatever crimes came to mind. Black-on-white crimes led to coerced confessions and beatings. The sentences were more severe, including many more death-penalty convictions. Black incarceration rates were on the rise. Black unemployment was double the rate among whites, and when blacks did find work, it was in generally poorly paid menial jobs. There were so few black lawyers in the United States that Bob half seriously said he knew almost all of them. Black doctors were few and far between. The plumbers, pipe fitters, carpenters, electricians, and all the other craft-union men were white, and it was just a fact of life that their apprenticeship programs were closed to blacks.
For their part, most whites thought they’d done enough. They were angered by the unrest. In the North many whites thought the fight had been about segregation in the South. They had done no harm, and were just hardworking people trying to keep their neighborhoods intact, and if that meant keeping blacks out, it was okay because they had their own neighborhoods.
Demonstrations spread in the North over schools, housing, and jobs. As blacks became more demanding, whites dug in. In this atmosphere almost anything could spark an explosion.
When violence broke out in black neighborhoods, the media tended to call it a “riot,” but those incidents were more like miniuprisings or rebellions. Blacks destroyed blocks of businesses and stores in their own neighborhoods—many white-owned, some not—leading to finger-pointing among whites, who saw such behavior as proof that segregation, or to give it another name, exclusion, was a good thing. The major racial explosions lasted days on end—from Newark to Detroit to the Watts section of Los Angeles—where thirty-four people died over a five-day stretch, and more than a thousand were injured. Hundreds of buildings and cars were set on fire and destroyed.
For the NAACP legal department, it was a hard few years. There were more demonstrations, and more cases filed when private businesses sued the NAACP for engaging in boycotts and picketing, and local police in more and more municipalities started arresting leaders to crush public demonstrations. In April 1966 we lost a case called Overstreet v. NAACP that threatened the organization’s very survival, when the Supreme Court decided five to four against reviewing a Georgia supreme court decision that had upheld a large damages award against our national office for its purported involvement in a boycott conducted against a local market. For years Southern courts had tried to come up with ways to threaten the NAACP, and Bob had beaten them back. But now we had lost, and the fear was that there would be dozens of copycat cases aimed at putting the NAACP out of business. But the NAACP received an influx of donations to help it weather the storm, and thankfully we were not inundated with new lawsuits.
The North had its fair share of demonstration cases too, and I was assigned to handle some of them. In Springfield, Massachusetts, a thousand activists had marched a mile and a half past a thousand National Guardsmen armed with bayonets, 250 state troopers, and all 360 members