After the Great Laws
By 1967 the civil rights movement had won most of its headline legal goals. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in public accommodations and discrimination in employment, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 allowed federal officials to oversee registration in areas with a history of exclusion. Yet the year showed how much remained unresolved. Laws had opened doors in the South, but they did little for the housing, jobs, schools and policing that shaped daily life in northern and western cities, where many Black Americans had moved over the previous decades.
That gap between legal equality and lived conditions runs through almost everything that happened in 1967. It was a year of real court victories, of new Black officeholders and of a growing sense among many activists that the earlier strategy was not enough.
Courtroom Gains
The most far-reaching legal event of the year came in June, when the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia. The justices ruled unanimously that state laws banning interracial marriage violated the Constitution. At the time, a number of states, mostly in the South, still had such laws on the books. The decision is covered in detail in our article on Loving v. Virginia; for the movement as a whole, it mattered because it removed one of the last explicit racial bans in American family law.
A second landmark followed. President Lyndon Johnson nominated Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court in June, and the Senate confirmed him at the end of August. Marshall had argued for the plaintiffs in the school cases that led to Brown v. Board of Education and had served as Solicitor General since 1965. He took his seat in October 1967 as the first Black justice in the Court’s history. The significance of the appointment is explored in the article on Thurgood Marshall.
Politics and Representation
Black political power was also visible in November 1967, when voters in Cleveland and Gary, Indiana, elected Carl Stokes and Richard Hatcher as mayors. Stokes is generally described as the first Black mayor of a major American city. Both were elected in cities with large Black populations, and their victories showed that organising and registration could change who held office outside the South.
Earlier in the year, in March, the House of Representatives voted to exclude Adam Clayton Powell, the Harlem congressman, from his seat. The reasons given related to allegations about his conduct and use of funds, but many Black Americans saw the episode through the lens of race. The Supreme Court later ruled the exclusion unconstitutional, in 1969.
In the South, there was one notable legal reckoning. In October 1967 a federal jury in Mississippi convicted seven men in connection with the 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner. Mississippi had never brought state murder charges in the case, so the federal prosecution relied on a civil rights conspiracy statute.
The Turn Toward Black Power
Inside the movement, the mood had shifted. During the 1966 march through Mississippi begun by James Meredith, Stokely Carmichael of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee used the slogan Black Power in a speech at Greenwood. The phrase spread quickly. It meant different things to different people: for some it was about political and economic control of Black communities, for others about racial pride and self-definition, and for critics it sounded like a rejection of integration and nonviolence.
In 1967 Carmichael and the political scientist Charles Hamilton published a book, Black Power, setting out an argument for independent political organisation. The book is discussed separately, and so is the organisation Carmichael led, which appears in the history of SNCC organisers. H. Rap Brown took over as SNCC’s chairman in 1967, and the group moved further from its early interracial, nonviolent approach.
Older leaders did not abandon their methods. Martin Luther King Jr. continued to argue for nonviolence while becoming more outspoken about economic justice. His Beyond Vietnam speech in April linked the war to the neglect of the poor at home, and his book Chaos or Community, published in 1967, asked where the movement should go after the legal victories. By the end of the year he was planning a campaign built around poverty, which became the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968. The tension between King’s approach and the new militancy was real, but it is easy to overstate. Many activists moved between the two camps, and public opinion often treated them as a single threat.
The Long Hot Summer
The year’s most visible event was the unrest in American cities. The largest outbreaks were in Newark in mid-July and Detroit in late July, and there were disturbances in dozens of other places. They followed unrest in earlier summers, but in scale and loss of life they surpassed what had come before. Each article covers them in turn: the Newark riot and the Detroit uprising. Causes cited by contemporaries and later historians included poor housing, high unemployment, aggressive policing and political exclusion, rather than any single spark.
President Johnson responded by creating the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders on 27 July, chaired by Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois. Its report, released in February 1968, is covered in the Kerner Commission article. Its widely quoted conclusion was that the country was moving toward two societies, one Black and one white, separate and unequal.
Backlash and Anti-Poverty Politics
Public opinion toward the movement was divided. Many white Americans who had supported the southern campaigns of the early 1960s were less sympathetic once the focus moved to northern cities, housing and economic inequality. Violence on television, whatever its causes, hardened attitudes, and political figures began to speak more about law and order. Meanwhile the Great Society programmes were under strain from the cost of the Vietnam War, a point taken up in the article on the War on Poverty.
What 1967 Left Behind
The year closed with the movement stronger in law and weaker in unity. Within months, the assassination of King in April 1968 and the Fair Housing Act that followed it would again change the picture. But the outline was already clear in 1967: the legal barriers of the Jim Crow era were falling, while the harder questions of income, housing and power remained.