American Experience; 1964; Interview John H. Bracey, Historian, part 3 of 3

What happens to the political coalition in the South in this year, the most extraordinary upending of an entire region of the United States for a couple of years? They start to scramble, like they just basically like look for the door, if black people come in this way, the white people go out to the way, again it's like, I thought you wanted integration. Well we could have had it integrated, no, no, because you could have the Democratic Party. We're now all Republicans. And all these people just flood out, literally black people come in and sit down, and there are a lot of vacancies because the white people leave, and they say, okay, so much for integration. I mean, that's just an example, like, okay, you knew this was going to happen. And then what do you do now? And it also is messing up the Republican Party because there were liberals in the Republican Party. You couldn't have got the civil rights bill without Republicans, you know, the Senator Clinton and Illinois. In fact, I went down and thanked him because he was very, you know, Everett Dirkson, who was a complete kind of Midwest populist type.

He just loved to make speeches. I don't think he actually cared about a lot of stuff other than Illinois, but he loved to make these wonderful speeches. And we convinced him that he would go down to history as Abraham Lincoln, if he'd supported the civil rights bill. So he made this wonderful speech about civil rights bill. And voted for it. I mean, you know, I don't know what he really, but he just wanted to, you know, pontificate it. So, but there were Republicans like him, or like Rockefeller, or like Jacob Jarrett, who got black votes over his black people that ran against him. You know, all of a sudden, there was another guy before him, Lerman, he was about four five of them, who constantly got black votes, but there were Republicans, liberal Republicans. They supported the civil rights bill. They supported, they helped you fight trade unions because, you know, they were, you know, free market people, but they also thought you have an equal opportunity to get a job. And I think when he mentioned your grandmother, how was she representative of the change, politically that happened, and so on? Okay. Okay.

I'm going to never, she's, she never trusted Democrats anyway. She never, I got to tell you. She said, I'd rather vote for a dead dog than a Democrat. You know, to her, the Democratic party was the party of bill, bill, you know, in Eastland and Strom, Thurman. And she, she was Abraham Lincoln Republican. I think that's what happened with Republicans, but she never stopped being a Republican. Those people joined her Republican party, you know, I mean, she said, you know, with Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, I remember Perry Howard, who came out of Mississippi, who was a delegate from Mississippi to Goldwater, people ran him out. There was a strong contingent of black Republicans, you know, I asked him how I got a significant amount of the black vote, Nixon got a significant amount of the black vote. The Republican party was not seen as a party of Neanderthals. I mean, you got joined by, you know, Southern white racists to push it that way, but there was space in the Republican party, you know, they get run out, you know, all the back delegates get run out.

Perry Howard looses his seat. He had been running pretty much on a pose because they weren't in the white Republicans in the state and literally none, they were zero. And so he would live in Washington DC and go back and put his name on the ballot and get, I don't know, two votes him and his wife or somebody, and he'd come back to be the delegate living in Washington DC. The Goldwater people ran people against him and they cleaned out all those black delegates. You know, they ran black people out of the Southern Republican party, you know. So in fact, they had to begin to, if you're going to be in politics, you got to go become a Democrat. So it's just some amazing kind of flipping of the two parties. It may really take the whole thing, okay, you be this, I'll be that. Happens really in a couple of years. I mean, it's quite astounding, you know, I mean, it's really just like you take the thing and turn it upside down. Did Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston represent different, you know, visions of the black man in America?

No, not Liston. People thought Liston was just kind of, kind of doofus. Clay was interesting. I let the men in when he became Muhammad Ali, people liked him because he was like Ali. And he, I mean, he would, he would say anything. And that's why you liked him. And nobody would start about him becoming a Muslim because it just meant like, now he's the Muslim's problem because he's still going to say anything, you know, like if they're going to get him to like behave, good luck. And so they never actually tried. They just kind of let him kind of float do whatever you wanted to. But he was extremely charismatic. He's one of the most, you know, some people, you talk about charisma. He really could just suck all the oxygen out of the room. And you know, I met him two or three times and we had him speak at the anti-war rally about 1967, I think it was. But when he lost his title, when he also gave up money, I mean, he was, he was, he could have made a lot of money by selling out too. He didn't have to join the nation as well. He could have, he could have made all kind of deals, never did.

You know, it's still, I'm still puzzled by that because you tell millions and millions and millions of dollars, you know, I mean, it was like, well, if you do this, you can make millions of dollars. If you do this, you want to get a penny. And it said, well, I'll take, not getting a penny. I said, oh, no, I was, I was very impressive, you know. In 1964, though, he, he does, he fights Liston. Yep. His first big win. Yep. Liston is this. Yeah, the bear. Yeah, the bear. Yeah, the bear. And Americans just don't know what to make of this. No, we thought, we thought, no, he was us. He was, he was us. He was like, whatever, I mean, he talked a whole bunch of smacks and he really wanted somebody to go, you know, he really got tired of the Joe Lewis thing. White Americans like a faithful, noble, black, you know, athlete that, the white people just love because he waived the flag and all this kind of stuff. What you wanted was somebody that had a little spot like another Jack Johnson, you know. He was the closest to like Jack Johnson, you know, in the sense that I can do whatever I want.

And I don't care, you know. And Liston just got stuck in the moment. I don't think Liston was a bad person. Liston got stuck as being the alternative to Muhammad Ali, who didn't know, I don't think he quite understood anything about what was going on. And Ali was bigger than him. They got to know how small he was. Ali was just as big as he was. Bigger? Yeah. You said that Ali brought sort of a kind of street, you know, language to Americans for the first time in a way. Yeah, it was just, you know, rhyming, and we rhymed all the time, you know, and before you had rapping all that, black people just did that all the time, right? That's when rap for a star that kept saying, we used to do this for free on a corner like why they getting paid for. And he didn't drop that, usually when you become a national professional figure, you have to drop all of that. Like Joe Lewis couldn't, Joe Lewis had to like stop sounding like he wanted to sound, he had to sound like, you know, died out of it, like athletes today, they just talking this kind of monotone thing, they're not really themselves.

But he just kept right on talking, I mean, he just, he didn't shut up, you know, he just, you know, he's rhyming all the time, he's making predictions, he's not supposed to make predictions when you fight because you get in trouble, he didn't care. You know, I'm a knock him out in four and all that's like, why are you saying that? And you say, well, because I'm a knock him out in four and it's like, in the managers probably say, oh God, why don't you shut up? No, he was, he was, he was us, he represented that, that, like, I'm not following the mold, whatever the mold was, like, I'm not in it, I'm going to be myself and whatever that is. And I'm going to change my name, you know, like it, too bad, you know. What, what did the, what is conversion to Islam, what was the impact of that on African Americans? It's actually tremendous, it's very tremendous. He, he validated, you know, an impact you see now even more than in, you know, 40 years later as much, you can see it really, really being, he and Malcolm, and he validated Islam as, as an alternative religion to Christianity among African Americans, you know, it wasn't

just a small sad thing anymore, like, you know, noble Jewelry in the nation, which was, never got over, say, 100,000 members. Now, once Malcolm made the chip to, to, to mech of the hush, it's like, just like a billion people out there, and you're a part of this billion people, you're not a part of this tiny little group anymore, you're part of this billion people. And they have a view, you know, especially after Malcolm came back and talked, because I was in 64, too, you know, I was at the Chicago Opera House when he had the debate with Louis Lomax, and he came back and, man, he gets it wrong in his book, he came back and said that he had been on a hush. And they had been people that he would have thought, well, white people, but who all prayed next to him, and it was just like him, and there was no sign of racism. So we started boo, we said, oh, Malcolm's going to suffer white people, and it said, be quiet, you know, we're up in the cheap seats. It said, be quiet, be quiet. That's not what I said. I said, if they converted to Islam, they, they, they lost their racist, and then about white Christians, it said, it said, white Muslims, it said, because Islam doesn't believe

in race, it doesn't believe in nationality. He says, you know, when you're going to Hodge, everybody wears white, and you're all there together, and it doesn't matter how much money you got, or how low money you got, you said, that was the world, that, that's how he saw Islam in and said, and that's the vision that he brought back, that you now, that's the whole thing about human rights rather than civil rights. It's just, civil rights put you inside the United States. Human rights put you on a world scale, where you didn't can see yourself as part of this broad kind of world of humanity that once equal rights on a global kind of thing. And when Ali joins the nation, and accepts Islam, even if he stays inside, he's still seen as, as a Muslim like Malcolm is, and they're the two most popular figures. I mean, Ali even more than Malcolm, Ali was probably one of the most popular people on the planet. You know, just, and everywhere he went, there would be like, you know, go back and say something to Muhammad Ali for me. That was a tremendously important, you know, it legitimated that, and so people are now Muslims because of those two.

Yeah. Let's really get another 10 minutes or so, let's, this is great. Let's step back, maybe get up to, I don't know, 15,000 feet. This thing about super big picture, stop for a second. How do you think the 12 months from maybe Kennedy's assassination to Johnson's election? How does that change America's assessment of itself? I think is, I think if you have to break it down a bit. I think if you look at African American population, I think there's pretty much a kind of nail in the notion that you can trust the white America to do something based on what they say they believe, and that that happens in this year. I think it's done, it's done by the end of this year, that you don't see something believe in anymore, and then you begin to talk about questions of power. It's like, the question that you can have a white ally that will be on your side because

they believe something is, I was like, no, no, what are you going to do? What are you going to bring? You know, and you look at that rather than what they say, you know, up until, you know, the civil rights phrase, the earlier phrase, you say, well, we should overcome because we're together here. It says, you know, what are you getting out of this? What do I get out of this? You know, and you really do shift to a discussion of power dynamics. And it's that next year that the black power begins to come to language that we begin to speak openly, but that discussion begins in 64. And with the Atlantic City, it's like, no, like this, like, come on, like how many times you got to win and lose, you know, and then Malcolm backs with the nation and you begin to get that escalation in the North. There were the South's pretty bad, the North's not so hot either, that, well, wait a minute, where are we free? You know, where's the space that we can say you can move with equality anywhere in the country? And 64 pretty much is like, well, there's nowhere, you know, like the North South thing is

that the economy goes away, you know, and Harlem is just the kind of kind of exclamation point on that, that if black people in Harlem don't have it made, this will be the mecca of black life. And they shoot in black kids in the Harlem like, wait a minute, I thought we ran Harlem. Is that, well, I guess you don't, you know, and say, oh, well, what do we run? Well, it turns out you don't run anything. So it's just clear their question to power. You have a congressman from Harlem. Well, you know, I don't claim power couldn't stop that. No, no, no, all the things that are victories, you see that, wait a minute, we have to go fight, we have to get these things on another plane. And sort of power didn't, didn't make shoots in. I'm not sure what white Americans think at this point. I think they are probably a bit tired of black people asking for things. I mean, you get just kind of like, what do they want now? It was 64 a year in the end, in the aggregate, was it a year of hope or a year of disappointment? It depends on how you see, whether you see the long rain, you know, the art going up or

the art kind of bumping along, you don't know where it's going to go. If you wanted to be optimistic, you could hail the civil rights bill as a victory and say, wow, we made another step, women said, well, how many more steps after this one? If this is another step, does that mean there's another step after the other step, you know? But if you believe in the steps, then you, this is progress. I mean, things like, you know, we got this and then actually get the voting rights act and so forth. So if you believe in incremental kind of progress, you know, good, liberal kind of outlook, things are getting better. I said, okay, I know things are looking pretty bad, but look at this, we got this, we got this, we got this. If you look at, well, what is the cost of getting these things? Then do you want to continue at this pace with these casualties, you know? And so it can be seen as either way. If you stand back, again, if you put it out of the US looking to broaden the kind of world, this is a period of worldwide kind of rising of people of color, you know?

So you say, well, okay, if I don't look at myself as a US citizen, but it's part of the banged-down world, it's part of the world of, you know, Asia, Africa, Latin America, we're doing pretty good, right? So if I see myself as part of that, then I don't miss a kid part of the civil rights bill. What I want to know is how much power does China have, how much power does Nigeria have, how much power is Brazil getting, you know? And then I'm optimistic. But did you just let out a bottle in 64, like, is it too late to go back on most of these issues? Certainly Vietnam's that way. There's no, there's no, Vietnam was the, that was the big mistake. That was really, why do you want to go in there after the French got stumped? And again, it's 54, 54 was big all around, you know? You could, if they had decided that 54, okay, black people get, you know, brown versus boy, and we're not going to follow the French in the Vietnam, it'd been different well. I mean, imagine if the same brains that figured out the brown decisions, okay, we got to get black people something, see what, why are we over here fighting for the French?

The French lost, that's their problem. Why are we going to make a deal with them, right? If you argue that 10 years later, it's almost the same sense of a watershed. And we're doing the same thing we could have done 50 years ago. We're now dealing with the Vietnamese. We could have, we could have sold them stuff in 80, 54. We could have set up shops in 90, 50 people. Why does it take a whole world to get around to where you could have been without the world? I mean, you know, you just wonder, like, what, you know, the anti-communist thing really does mess up people's view of the world. You know, if you see everything through the Soviet lens, everything's a Soviet plot. You know, even though you got the Soviets, you know, beat 10 to 1 with missiles and all, it distorts your perception of everything, you know. And so you, you wasted Americanized, the Soviets didn't lose anybody in Vietnam. We did. Russia didn't say, oh, we're going to come and fight for the Russian side. It was said, go fight the Vietnam in a place else, you want to go fight communism, go right ahead. Russians have sent a troop, no way, they had no Russian troops in any of these places fighting the US.

You know, I mean, you just, you just wonder how an ideological set of blindness can just stop you dead with reality. Like, you know, this is not a communist takeover with these as some Vietnam, we can go talk to them. You know, these black people don't want to take over the world, they just want the right to vote. It's like, it's talk to them. You know, so it's a lot of things, one cancels out the other. You know, if you look at it progress, the tongue can go, it's like, oh, come on. It's like, you supposed to be going the other way, not going in, you're supposed to be coming out. And why do you think it's important that we look back and remember 1964, why is what we're doing, worth the thing. You know, you know, the thing, you know, I was wondering that myself, but I came back from the group in Mississippi, the veterans of the Mississippi movement. And talking to the, a lot of the white people who are veterans and some of the black people who are still down there, hot as walkings and all that, they, this was a major, major career, you know, next year they're going to do a lot, a lot of stuff, you know, all over

the state. And it's absolutely clear that, that project and that effort in a certain sense, transform the way black people thought that they could deal with American society and that they thought they could do something and win. And that they don't mind the, the damage that they suffered because they thought that they did something worthwhile. And I got there talking to, you know, like, especially some of the white people involved who would just say calmly talk about, oh yeah, this is the time the bullet came through it almost got me and so and so got shot in the leg and this still there, they, they're not running and hiding and so forth. And yes, I'm like, well, are you kind of saw you did that and say, never do it again. If you think it's that important and if you think that that level of commitment at that time was necessary to move the country or shift it in a direction, in the long run that

direction is going to be a good direction, you know. And I think you look at it, you know, regardless of what my individual take on it or somebody else's individual take on it, that the country is probably in a better place now because of 1964, then without 1964, you know, even, you know, putting the box around me at now. Just looking at the black people learning what they have to do to move the country, white people risking their lives for the first time in large, large numbers, there's a fairly large number of people, not big, big numbers, but significant numbers. To, on the idea of racial equality, that's important. And there's no way you can, you can put a kind of, quite a friable thing on that. But those, those people are still there and these kids are still there. You know, you're talking about what are your kids doing, they, they feed off their parents like they do, they're doing good things, they're, you know, moving the thing forward, you know.

So, it's a, it's a, it's a, it cranks a lot to say it was a very good year, you know. Other legacies that we're living with today from 1964, as you say, they're still there. That's a positive legacy. But the Red State, Blue State World, you know, the culture wars, it would part up. What, are we living with a bunch of legacies from that year? It would, a good chunk of the Red States, a whole bunch of black people are going to turn up states purple. And with the Latino population coming in, they'll be blue states in ten years. That's why the Red State people make so much noise. If you, you know, you look at Mississippi, why people can't hold Mississippi, you know, the biggest factory in Mississippi is a Nissan factory, you know, and there's a growing Asian population, there's a growing Latino population, it's like, if I was right in Mississippi, I would go find some other white people somewhere to hang out with, because Mississippi is not

going to be the place after a while. And very short while. No, no, that, that, that's the holding action. I think, I think the, the people that believe in a world before 1954 are delusional. I think, you know, the whole kind of tea party mentality is delusional. You can't, the world is changing, you can't stop it, you know, you can't, you can't make the world until a world where white people run everything, as I guess not happening. And once, once people of color understand that, and a significant number of white Americans understand it, then you can move to make the country into a place where everybody can kind of, kind of work things out. It's not going to happen fast, right? But I'm not, you know, I see the red state and all this kind of father about Obama and so forth. It's just, it's, it's a death rose. You know, if the best you can do is jump up and down and, you know, and hold your breath till you turn blue and throw yourself on the floor, because you don't like a black person, then go ahead.

You know, but at the end of the day, the country is moved. You know, you can, you can hold things back a little bit, but the things that are necessary to live in a world where there are people of color, you have to deal with it. It was a 64-year-old moment, though, when there was a before and an after kind of a hinge. Some people said the good 60s were before and bad 60s were out. It depends on if you count bodies. I mean, if you count number of black people getting killed, there wasn't any particular good 60s. Yeah. If you're talking about a movement of people toward, I think we need to take good and bad. I think you talk about the loss of a possibility. You know, I think I think 64, what you got is a civil rights bill as a high point rather than as a beginning, and in that sense, that leads to what people claim of the bad 60s, which is to say, okay, we're not going to just take words anymore. We're going to have, we want power, power is the question. We need, we need the ability to control our own destiny.

We need to, you know, if you're going to be in a city, then at least we should run it. So if you're going to give us a school, we'll just get out the way and let us run it, you know. Since you don't want to integrate, then go right ahead, we'll take what you left behind and we'll make do with, we'll do with that. And it's bad only if you have a view that, that integration was going to proceed in some, you know, step by step logical kind of fashion, but history, history doesn't work that way. And so, you know, we're fighting some of those same battles all over again. Do you feel like, you mentioned it, but this is really sort of like gone around a little bit, sort of, but just sort of the last thought, which is, it just feels like 64, there's moments when you simply, like, like, relax it, where you just get to a point where there's this fork in the road, you know, there are these lines that are being crossed. Is that, is that what the, the ultimately the year is about?

You know, the, the year is about, if you, if you have one of the smartest politicians, white politicians, the country's ever produced, and he can't make it work, then who can make it work? You know, if this is the best that LBJ can come up with, in countries in trouble, it's like Jefferson, 1822, what they've got the wolf body is, you can't hold it, you can't let it go. That's not a policy. That's like, I don't know what to do, where LBJ with two seats in the Atlantic City is like, this is the best I can do, this is not good enough. And he's the smartest and he's not a stupid man, you know, he's the most sophisticated successful, you know, in American legislative politics with his lifetime, it's the best he could do. I mean, this is a lot bigger than just what one person can do, making, making deals, you know, and that's, that's what you look at it like, wait a minute, this guy can get only two seats like, with the arms, he's twisting, this is bigger than, this is bigger than fan of New Haven, this is bigger than Mississippi, just the best he can do, you know, that's

what you look at, he look at like, these are the big boys, you know, they're supposed to be able to handle this thing, and you expect a lot more than, come on, like all this squeeze and I can say, well, we come up with, no, no, no, come on, this is LBJ talking, it's like, come on LB, you go LBJ, man, come on, that's, that's when you know that we have a problem, and that's, that's when you say, okay, you can't rely on, this is the best you can get out of him, then we got to do this ourselves, you know. Great. John, this is great. We need 30 seconds of silence, this is 30 seconds of silence for room turn for John Bracer, starting now. Enrupter. Enrupter.