The Democratic Party is the party of most of the great social, political, and economic reforms of the 20th century, and going into the 21st century. A small number of Republican political leaders, whether governors, senators, or congressmen, joined the cause, and at times Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon joined in, but the Democrats were still the vast majority of those who promoted reforms we think we can now take for granted, but which conservative and Tea Party Republicans today wish to reverse!
The Democratic Party outside the South had to struggle against the right wing conservatism of most of its Southern members, including governors, senators, and congressmen, but in 1948, led by Mayor Hubert Humphrey of Minneapolis, they came out for civil rights in the national convention platform.
The Democrats came out for women’s rights, including the right to control their own bodies, in the 1970s after Roe V. Wade.
And now the Platform Committee of the Democratic National Convention of 2012 is moving toward adoption of a plank in the platform, backing gay rights and gay marriage explicitly!
This is a great victory, and follows in the tradition of the Democratic Party, being the party of openness, tolerance, and human compassion!
Hell Professor,
A while back I did a posting of the history of my home area titled THE CAMBRIDGE CONVERGENCE. It was a night in Maryland 41 years ago which changed the Nation’s Course of Racial Politics. I hope that this is not too long but I did want to pass this information on.
I have often said that “Everyone is the sum of one’s own life’s experiences,†which developed my viewpoints over the years. My family moved back to the Eastern Shore of Maryland in the summer of 1967 from the suburbs of Baltimore and I had just turned 14 that spring. That summer H. Rap Brown gave an impassioned speech on civil rights in the town of Cambridge, Maryland which resulted in a riot. The National Guard was called in along with local and state police to restore law and order. As a result Brown found himself on the FBI’s top ten list of most wanted. He was finally apprehended, paid his debt to society and is now living in Georgia. Below is a recounting of my first summer in 1967 after being uprooted from the urban life by my parents and placed in the country of the Eastern Shore of Maryland.
During the hot summer of 1967, racial disturbances swept through Detroit and Harlem and then through Minneapolis, Dayton, Cincinnati and other cities unaccustomed to civic violence. But the turning point that summer – indeed for that era – occurred in a town few Americans knew existed.
Forty one years ago in the small city of Cambridge, Md., H. Rap Brown crossed rhetorical swords with then Maryland’s Gov. Spiro T. Agnew. The two put the convulsive actions of that summer into words in ways that deepened the nation’s racial divide. They popularized a style of political speech that would increase black-white antagonism and draw millions of white Democrats into the Republican Party.
“If America don’t come around, we’re going to burn it down,” shouted Brown, standing on the trunk of a car, to a crowd of 500 cheering Cambridge supporters. His speech occurred an hour before police exchanged gunfire with residents and several hours before a blaze engulfed a black elementary school and most of the city’s black-owned businesses.
Violence, Brown would later explain, “Is as American as cherry pie.”
The day after the fire, Agnew inspected the Eastern Shore city and scratched out a statement. “It shall now be the policy of this state to immediately arrest any person inciting to riot, and to not allow that person to finish his vicious speech.” Agnew had been known as a moderate, but from this day forward he lashed out against civil libertarians. He refused to meet with black leaders unless they first “shun lawlessness,” specifically denouncing Brown and other black power advocates.
Through their uncompromising rhetoric, Agnew and Brown climbed instantly from obscurity to icon status and would rise unexpectedly to positions of national importance, swept along in historical currents beyond their control.
Of course, there were black militants who preceded Brown, and there were tough-talking governors before Agnew. But the rhetoric both men employed 41 years ago grabbed the national consciousness, inaugurating a new politics of racial polarization by ambitious black activists on the one hand and white law-and-order politicians on the other.
Their words split the pro-civil rights coalition, inspired the Southern Strategy of the Republican Party and led to an unprecedented federal counterintelligence campaign against black political moderates.
Just three years before the Cambridge riots, Americans had elected President Lyndon Johnson by a wide margin. It would be the last election up to the present in which a majority of whites and blacks would vote for the same candidate.
Ironically, both Brown and Agnew were elected to their positions as moderates, not firebrands. Brown’s appointment as head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was intended to soften the organization’s image following Stokely Carmichael’s tumultuous leadership.
Agnew was elected governor in 1966 with considerable black and liberal support. He was viewed as a moderate, clearly preferable among black voters to his opponent, George P. Mahoney, a conservative Democrat and a perennial candidate running on an anti-integration platform known for opposition to open housing laws. Coming on the heels of the recently-passed federal Fair Housing Act of 1965, Mahoney’s campaign embraced the slogan “your home is your castle”. Many Democrats opposed to segregation crossed party lines to give Agnew the governorship by 82,000 votes.
Watching these events 41 years ago in Cambridge was a slender teenager who was starting to take note of current events and the world around him.
Maryland’s Mississippi:
Freedom Riders from Swarthmore College came to the Eastern Shore to help the fledgling Cambridge Nonviolent Action Committee push open the city’s segregated restaurants and the chief source of entertainment, the local movie theater.
At this time, the Eastern Shore of Maryland was a lot like growing up in Mississippi. This fertile hook of Maryland that extends into the Chesapeake has always been isolated and heavily agricultural, with a profoundly different character from the rest of the state. While Maryland sided with Union forces during the Civil War, the Eastern Shore was a slave region and sympathized with the South. Harriet Tubman was born and was a slave on a farm outside of the city limits of Cambridge before escaping and starting the Underground Railroad. The attitude in this area as late as 1973 still had the “Black Only” and “White Only” signs on the bathrooms and water fountains and people still obeyed them! The local volunteer fire department admitted blacks in 1986 only after the Justice Department intervened. Even then, the tight white leadership of Cambridge complained about outsiders pushing them to change.
That summer in 1967 young, black, Cambridge high school students joined the Freedom Riders movement and when some sat down to pray in the restricted lobby of the town’s segregated movie theater; they were arrested and sentenced by a local judge to up to six years in a juvenile reformatory.
When state authorities released these youths after three months, they returned home heroes in their communities. In the following years, civil rights efforts in Cambridge sagged as key activists left and the Freedom Riders ceased their visits. To build support in 1967, the members of the recently organized Black Action Federation invited the new head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to speak.
Brown arrives:
H. Rap Brown had been in Cambridge before, as an organizer in the mid-1960s. He earned the nickname “Rap” because of his ability to talk easily with poor black people.
In 1967, just after his election to lead SNCC, Brown said at a San Francisco news conference that black people had a right to defend themselves. But he added that “if black people are organized, they can seize power politically. At this point we are against the use of arms.”
This moderate approach was just what SNCC leaders had in mind when they elected the 23-year-old Brown to succeed Carmichael, whose fiery leadership had alienated many SNCC supporters. In quieter times, Brown might have avoided major controversy, but the year that he assumed the SNCC chair was one of exceptional social turmoil.
When Brown came to Cambridge on July 24, 1967, he was at a point of believing that armed self-defense was necessary. Blacks had battled bitterly with police in Prattsville, Ala., Detroit and other cities already that summer.
Brown’s speech atop the car outside the federation’s headquarters 41 years ago repeated the themes of racial pride and assertiveness that were characteristic of Carmichael’s speeches, but Brown went further in urging listeners to take up arms against white society.
“Don’t be trying to love that honky to death,” he proclaimed. “Shoot him to death. Shoot him to death, brother, because that’s what he is out to do to you. Do to him like he would do to you, but do it to him first.” Later, he talked about how slowly Cambridge had changed. “If this town don’t come around, this town should be burned down.â€
At first people just thought, “Well, that part is just to play on people’s emotions.” There was no violence during Brown’s speech, but about an hour afterward shots were exchanged between black residents and police. According to police, Brown led a group of marchers to Race Street, the main commercial street of the city, which divided the black and white neighborhoods. Brown said later that he was simply escorting a girl home.
As he approached Race Street, a buckshot pellet struck Brown in the side of the face. He was treated at the home of Cambridge’s only black doctor and left town shortly thereafter.
Within hours of the shooting, however, the black elementary school in the heart of black Cambridge was in flames. Citing the threat of snipers, the local fire department refused to fight the fire despite pleas from black community leaders. Flying embers spread the blaze to 16 adjacent buildings and the sky over Cambridge was bright with fire.
Enter Spiro Agnew:
At dawn, with Cambridge’s black business district a smoldering rubble, Agnew left his vacation home in nearby Ocean City, Md., to tour the destruction.
Agnew had been known for sensitivity to black concerns. But when he toured the damaged neighborhood the next day his attention was on apprehending Brown. “I hope they pick him up soon, put him away and throw away the key,” Agnew remarked.
Despite a lack of evidence that Brown himself had participated in the burning of buildings in Cambridge, he was charged with arson and the FBI entered the case. Before being released on bond, he issued a statement declaring that America stood “on the eve of a black revolution.” The black masses were “fighting the enemy tit for tat” and “neither imprisonment nor threats of death would deter him.” At a Washington, D.C., news conference the following day he called President Lyndon Johnson a “white honky cracker, an outlaw from Texas.”
Within days, more charges were filed against Brown. Rather than building a strong black revolutionary force capable of overthrowing the established social order, Brown became an issue in the struggle between liberal and conservative factions of that order. He became a symbol for millions of white people prepared to support repressive policies against high-visibility black militants.
End of a civil rights era:
The summer of 1967 revealed the power of black people to get national attention through unfocused expressions of rage. The summer also revealed that a year of talk about black power had left SNCC militants more powerless than ever.
In Washington, the government’s actions against Brown established a pattern for the suppression of highly publicized radical leaders. In August, a month after the Cambridge riot, the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Mississippi Democrat and plantation owner James Eastland, focused on the riots – with witness after witness, including the chief of the Cambridge police department, blaming Brown.
Congress passed anti-riot measures in deliberations that revealed the increasing ability of conservative politicians to strengthen their popular support at the expense of liberals over the issue of black militancy.
The most ominous news for civil rights organizations occurred off of Capitol Hill.
J. Edgar Hoover spoke before the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to condemn Carmichael, Brown and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. as “vociferous firebrands,” ordering his subordinates to include SNCC militants and member of other organizations on a “Rabble Rouser Index.”
For the next several years, Hoover emphasized concerns about Communist infiltration of civil rights organizations. Despite a paucity of evidence, these organizations were subject to Hoover’s Cointelpro operation.
On Aug. 25, Hoover ordered FBI field offices to begin a new effort to “expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit or otherwise neutralize the activities of black nationalist, hate-type organizations and groupings, their leadership, spokesmen, membership, and supporters and to counter their propensity for violence and civil disorder.” Among the groups targeted for “intensified attention” were the Nation of Islam, Congress of Racial Equality, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
The FBI goal was not only to stop violence but to prevent these organizations “from gaining respectability” by discrediting them in the respectable Negro community. . . . the white community . . . and in the eyes of Negro radicals, the followers of the movement.”
The aftermath:
Agnew’s response to Cambridge set the pattern for his future political career. The man elected governor as a moderate began a national ascendancy using the political instincts and style of George Wallace.
When the city of Baltimore rioted in 1968, in the aftermath of the assassination of King, Agnew asked 50 black leaders to meet with him. Most walked out as he immediately asked them to denounce inflammatory remarks from Carmichael and Brown.
“What possible hope is there for peace in our community if these apostles of anarchy are allowed to spew hatred unchallenged? . . . I call upon you to publicly repudiate, condemn and reject all black racists. This, so far, you have not been willing to do.”
The meeting was a disaster and Agnew’s relations with black leaders were nearly destroyed. But Agnew’s calculated tough talk earned him time on the national news and caught the attention of a young aide to Richard Nixon named Patrick Buchanan, who kept newspaper clips of Agnew to show to his boss, who eventually selected Agnew as his running mate in 1968.
As a vice presidential candidate and as vice president, Agnew delighted supportive crowds denouncing “thieves, traitors and perverts,” and “radical liberals.”
He became a leader in the Republican effort to woo white Southern and blue-collar voters who had traditionally voted Democratic.
Postscript:
Agnew resigned the vice presidency in October 10, 1973 because, while advocating law and order, it turned out that he had accepted kickbacks bribes from contractors. He was formally charged with having accepted bribes totaling more than $100,000 and falsifying federal tax returns, while holding office as Baltimore County Executive, governor of Maryland, and Vice President of the United States. Agnew pleaded nolo contendere to the latter charge in federal court, and resigned. He died bearing the shame of his crimes.
But Agnew’s legacy lives on. Republicans have picked up conservative white votes and become the dominant party in the South and among white men.
H. Rap Brown lives in Atlanta, where he runs a grocery store and is an active spiritual leader.
@E of K,
A wonderful, inspiring and insightful posting!!
P.S.–Although, I thought Brown was serving prison time for murder.
Thanks, Engineer of Knowledge, for your insightful posting.! I really appreciate it!
And thanks, Paul, for your compliment about this post! 🙂
Hello Paul,
He may have later on but the first warrants were for inciting a riot. Thank you for reading a little piece of my real life. 🙂
Professor,
I want to thank you for being tolerant for such a long posting but I knew of no way to shorten it and get the same amount of information across.
Enginer of Knowledge,
I was just commenting on your last sentence in your posting about Brown as spiritual leader. Don’t know when you originally wrote your posting that you generously shared with us.
Brown has been in further trouble, serving a life sentence for a murder about 10 years ago. As recently as 2009, he was connected with leading a group involved in radical Muslim
ideology.
http://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta/fbi-former-h-rap-178148.html