No act, but a turn in the mood
There was no Civil Rights Act of 1967. The landmark laws came in 1964, 1965 and 1968, and 1967 fell between them, in a period when much of the political energy that had passed the first two laws had drained away. The phrase “white backlash” was widely used in the press by 1964 and was in constant use by 1966. It described a real trend in public opinion and in voting, though it was never a single movement and it was never limited to one region.
What progress had been made
By the start of 1966 Congress had enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Public accommodations had been opened, voter registration in the South was rising, and the federal government was using funding to push school desegregation. Many white Americans, especially in the North, had supported these steps as a correction of Southern injustice.
The next phase was harder. Attention moved to the North and West, where discrimination took the form of housing patterns, school boundaries, job barriers and policing. Remedies there touched the lives of white voters directly, in their neighbourhoods and their schools, and support was less certain.
The Chicago marches of 1966
The sharpest test came in Chicago. In the summer of 1966 Martin Luther King and the Chicago Freedom Movement, working with local groups, campaigned against housing discrimination and slum conditions. They marched through white neighbourhoods such as Gage Park and Marquette Park, where crowds threw bottles and stones. King was struck by a rock in August. He reportedly said afterward that the hostility in Chicago was among the worst he had faced, including in the South.
A summit agreement with city leaders and real estate interests was reached late in August 1966. Many observers, and some activists, felt it did little to change practice. The Chicago campaign showed that open housing, unlike lunch-counter access, aroused deep resistance among many white homeowners.
Opposition to open housing and the 1966 midterms
Johnson’s 1966 civil rights bill, which included a housing section, passed the House in weakened form but died to a Senate filibuster in September. The details of how that bill was killed belong to the story of Congress, but the political fallout was immediate. Fair housing became an issue that candidates could use.
In the November 1966 elections the Republicans gained 47 seats in the House of Representatives, 3 in the Senate and 8 governorships. Many factors were at work, including the Vietnam War, inflation and the usual losses of a president’s party in a midterm. But concerns about crime, disorder and racial change were part of the mix. Ronald Reagan won the California governorship, and he had campaigned on law and order. Several of the new Republican members of Congress had come from districts where white voters were uneasy about the pace of change.
It would be misleading to read the 1966 result as simply a vote against civil rights. Many Republicans in Congress had supported the 1964 and 1965 laws, and Republican support had been vital in the Senate. But the new Congress was less inclined to push further.
Riots and public opinion
The urban riots of the mid-1960s deepened the shift. Watts in 1965 and disturbances in several cities in 1966 were followed by a larger wave in the summer of 1967. The Newark riot and the Detroit uprising were the largest, with 26 deaths in Newark and 43 in Detroit by the commonly cited counts. Many white Americans interpreted such events as lawlessness and argued that the movement’s gains were being repaid with violence. Many Black Americans, and a good number of white observers, saw them as the result of unaddressed grievances, from police treatment to housing and unemployment.
Opinion surveys of the time, as historians have described them, showed a widespread belief among white respondents that integration was moving too fast, and Black respondents often thought it was moving too slowly. Specific percentages are left out here because the figures depend heavily on the question asked.
Calls for Black Power, which was popularised by Stokely Carmichael in 1966, also alarmed many white observers, though the slogan carried varied meanings among activists. Some civil rights leaders, including King, warned that the backlash was real and that the movement had to find new strategies.
What came out of the mood
In 1967 itself the effect was seen in Congress. Proposals for new civil rights measures did not pass, while members spoke of “law and order” and pressed for anti-riot provisions. The anti-riot provisions eventually became part of the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which also contained the fair housing section. The mood explains why that bill passed only after King’s assassination changed the atmosphere.
The backlash was not the whole story of 1967, since the Supreme Court decided Loving v. Virginia that year and Thurgood Marshall joined the Court. But as a description of the political climate on racial questions, “progress and backlash” is a fair summary, with the caveat that it is a year without a Civil Rights Act of its own.