civil rights movement. Ironically, Wilkins’s position broadened the appeal of more forceful activists like Stokely Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, who had advocated black power and rejected nonviolence. As a result the possibility of a united movement was falling apart, with Wilkins getting pushed toward the sidelines. At the same time Bob Carter quietly began to act independently of Wilkins and the NAACP old guard that supported him. In the area of school desegregation, for example, Bob began supporting community control in the predominantly nonwhite schools of the North.
For Bob, however, segregation remained a critical issue. Having decided Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court proceeded in a series of cases to strike down openly enforced Jim Crow segregation in public facilities, and to uphold the new provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. But its failure to take meaningful action in the South, where for many years school segregation remained the norm, or to review any of Carter’s Northern school cases, underscored the Court’s avoidance of enforcement, leaving that issue to the next generation of justices. As a result Bob’s Northern campaign had made little or no progress, not because it was ill conceived but because he was attacking deep-rooted prejudice supported by multiple components of the white power structure—from the politicians to the courts to the unions and the school boards—as well as white majority voters who felt they’d “given” enough.
As for me, I was battling burnout. We were running a footrace in a bog, and the NAACP legal department had developed a siege mentality. Younger activists began advocating more aggressive tactics. Roy Wilkins and the old guard on the NAACP board believed in the long view—that you push for change, and that meaningful reform took time. But what was writ large in the form of racial unease and uprisings across the nation was creeping into the fabric of the NAACP, where the board was divided between “young Turks” who said it was time to get tough and the old guard. Under Bob’s leadership the legal department increasingly found itself aligned with the young Turks. It was a natural evolution: Bob wanted results. He wanted black kids to get educated, and black workers to get their fair share of the better-paying jobs. The cases that came our way reflected the change among Movement people, and the tension was palpable.
At black colleges and universities in the South, we were increasingly involved with aggressive student leaders at odds with administrators who were more interested in maintaining calm than promoting racial progress. In the cities there was an increasing number of uprisings, called riots by the media. The causes were different—ranging from poverty, joblessness, and disenfranchisement to the predatory draft that was sucking black youth into the war in Vietnam—but all boiled down to protest against the untenable existence to which the nation’s black population was relegated. As the protests mounted and the NAACP scrambled to deal with one legal fire after another, the courts—including the nation’s highest—became more and more hostile toward anything that did not involve some form of overt racism.
Fatigue, anger, and a sense of frustration were constants. Ironically, it was my work in the North that really focused these feelings for me. Nothing appeared to be changing in the North. The schools remained segregated. Construction sites swarmed with white workers—no blacks to be seen. I still had to hail taxis for Bob. Black unemployment was high, and the cities were exploding with racial violence. The police were engaging with trapped ghetto black youth as if they were the enemy—and in some instances that wasn’t too far from reality. In the South, by contrast, there were signs of change in the cities. Hotels and restaurants were no longer enforcing Jim Crow, and blacks were beginning to vote. That said, the benchmark for social change in the South was low.
The Vietnam War started out as a tough issue for me. I was not like Major Warner, whose jingoism and hatred of the Soviet Union blurred his ability to see the issues around anything tinged red, but I had hawklike reactions to what was called the “domino theory”—the idea that if all of Vietnam turned communist, other nations would follow. Perhaps it had been my Culver training. But the barbaric senselessness of the war eroded my views. Somewhere, too, I knew that the black waiters at Culver were now fighting for their lives in the jungles of Vietnam.
“It’s a civil war,” Kitty kept saying. “We’ve got no business being