Reading List to Help Make Sense of the Civil Rights Revolution and Post 1960's America
Getting to the Core of the United States' Refounding Six Decades Ago
2024 is shaping up to be a “make it or break it” year for the country past, present and future. Presidential elections, economic instability, wars abroad and several other potential unknown events yet to be recorded. The year also marks the 60th anniversary of the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act which prohibited discrimination on the basis of Race, Sex and later other factors in housing, education, government positions, etc. The legislation was written in order to do away with the de jure racial segregation in the South as well as the de facto existence of this practice in the North and other parts of the country at the time. It paved the way to establishing other laws like the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, the creation of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to oversee the implementation of Civil Rights at all levels. Many other social movements modeled their paths to power after Martin Luther King Jr’s methods in order to achieve their goals. We are told and shown footage of this period as one of triumph over the dark days of “Jim Crow” and backwardness of pre-1960’s America. Truly the promises of equality under the law and fairness to everyone would be fulfilled and the nation would be better off as a result. Right?
Looking back on what has transpired since then, something seems amiss given the crusade against injustice doesn’t seem to ever end. In fact, one of the reasons for today’s mass racial psychosis in the general public is both these promises not being kept and the reaction to double down on the failures to bring about such equality. The acronym DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) has come up in many circles and is proceeded quite negatively for disallowing corporations and institutions to be run by competency and meritocracy. And instead resembling an ethnic spoils system that sees frauds like Claudine Gay arise to becoming Harvard’s President. She was forced to resign after much of her work was discovered to have multiple examples of plagiarism that violated the university’s standards.
The reexamination of that era has not stopped there. The third month in January is the federal holiday “Martin Luther King Day” that was signed into law over 38 years ago. He is held up as one of modern America’s heroes for being the main figurehead of the Civil Rights Movement from 1954 to 1968 before his assassination in Memphis. Once seen as unfavorable back in the 1960’s, his is regarded as a hero that is up there with Lincoln, Washington and other notable national figures. However, this is a change in the current given that King has many flaws about him as a progenitor of today's DEI. When pundits like Charlie Kirk, Jack Posobiec start criticizing him and the effects of civil rights law on America, that means something is up considering the recoiling reactions for house conservatives who venerate MLK. Even Nikki Haley, who helped kick start the attacks and vindictive tearing down of American History, Symbols and Monuments, accidently said something truthful regarding the origins of the War Between the States. Another event that is popping up in rhetoric as Biden compares Trump and his supports to the defeated South at the site of the Charleston Shooting nine years ago. Weaponizing history and twisting historical narratives was bound to cause both periods of time to be warped as the consensus begins to break down on partisan lines.
Revisionism of the 1960’s is becoming more common as Americans feel a sense of deterritorization and a weakening society despite the superpower status of the United States. Rather it feels like a separate country was created that follows a different set of laws and precedents. One that is not the same country that was forced back together after the events of 1861 to 1877. What is to blame for this feeling? This reading list of books and articles will begin to help you understand what happened to the American nation since the mid 20th century and understand where recent critics of civil rights law and of MLK are coming from.
The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties (Christopher Caudwell)
The first of this reading list is the most recently published and came out in early 2020. Just before COVID, the Floyd Riots, Election “Fortification”, Jan 6th and other events that have further polarized the country. Meaning that if it gets a second edition, these events will likely be written about regardless of who is president in 2025.
My first exposure this book was a couple years ago but I got the chance to be part of a book club hosted by Marcel Dumas Gautreau which really studied it in depth and broke it down the main points chapter by chapter. It lives up to it’s highly regarded reputation considering Caudwell’s focus is to challenge the way in which we look back at laws and movements like civil rights in a cost/benefit way. The main argument of his thesis is that the Civil Rights Act and similar legislation, marketed as way to do away with the embarrassing optics of the Jim Crow segregation system in the South, went as far as to create a second constitution that the ascendant progressive coalition uses to get all of their policies in all places of power and culture. It also nationalized and bureaucratized every possible level of interaction between different individuals in the business world. Leading to the rise of HR departments, agencies dedicated to rooting out “discrimination” in order to eliminate all disparities between races, the sexes and other groups in order to achieve the idea of an equal society.
Before focusing in on the court cases and legislation that lead to the 1960’s turmoil, Caudwell argues that the Civil Rights Revolution began as the United States entered WWII. Especially as the country banded together and technologies like television, radio which exposed previously unaware Americans to the backward-looking imagery of government mandated segregation by race and the poverty-stricken area of the Southern region. Springboarded by events like the Assassination of JFK, new interpretations of how the law works in the Brown v. Board case, and reactions to police in places like Alabama cracking down on Civil Rights marches, the country had become primed to accept civil rights to blacks with the promises that whites would also stand to gain morally and even legally.
However, things did not calm down after 1964, peaceful movements turned into riots in many major cities. Instead of creating a “colorblind” society, Civil Rights Law intensified racial consciousness. Especially as other court cases like 1971’s Gregg v. Duke Power Company established the doctrine of disparate impact as the main driver for policing all kinds of outcomes that resulted in inequalities regardless of intent. The changes in law, demographics and culture started to rack up huge amount of debt, spending and other costs to social engineering that would play indirect roles in several recessions including the 2008 housing crisis. Race riots would also return given the rise of the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement in the aftermath of the Treyvon Martin case. Cities like Fergeson, Baltimore, Dallas and others that had seen relatively low levels of crime had the trends reverse as riots, lootings and killings that came after played a role in the 2016 election.
Events like the Vietnam War, the Sexual Revolution and the landslide elections of Richard Nixon would also find origins in the upheaval of the 1960’s. Especially as the Johnson Administration continued the hawkish policies that Kennedy had put in place which led to a sharp divergence of opinion at home. Despite electoral successes stemming from the backlash to policies like forced busing and the loss of freedom of association, neither Nixon nor Reagan was able to roll back any of the civil rights legislation effectively. Political correctness, censorship by regulation, the fraying of the sexes, affirmative action and other formed of legalized barratry continued unabated due to the capture of institutions of the press, academia and the majority of the federal bureaucracies by the American left. America had become a totalitarian state in the guise of fighting “racism” and ending “discrimination”.
By the time of the 2016 election, it was obvious that the main victors of the Civil Rights Revolution were racial, sexual and other minority identity groups who had achieve cultural ascendency. Yet, the movements continued onward to find new frontiers in which the regime creates new rights and protections no matter the absurdity. Meanwhile, the core demographic of conservatives: Christians, whites, middle class and suburbanites, had been effectively rendered “untouchables” where politics excluded their interest. It had become an endless event of using lawsuits, social ostracism, economic and cultural pressure with street intimidation that turned the original system of federalism into a managerial system that wears “democracy” as a mask. Is it any wonder that they would take a chance with Donald Trump when the GOP and other conservative movements had failed?
The book is very airtight in it’s presentation. Caudwell does not offer any solutions but sees where Trump came from. Given what has happened since his book was published, he might write that his time as president was another blimp that was more rhetoric than reality. New developments such as the overturning of Roe v. Wade (returning abortion to being a state matter) and the striking down of race-based Affirmative Action which also overturned Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in university admissions would also have to be addressed should a second edition be released.
The next two books that I will include also fill in the gaps where Age of Entitlement had fallen short; the demographic decline of whites in the cities and how the late 1960’s to 1970’s had a forgotten wave of domestic terrorism that was covered up.
Left Behind in Rosedale: Race Relations and the Collapse of Community (Scott Cummings)
Attention to this book was reignited a few years ago due to Nightmare Vision's thread covering several passages from the chapters with commentary on all of them. (You can read in here for easier viewing.) Published in the late 1990’s by academic Scott Cummings, his main focus was on a real town that he gave a fictious name called “Rosedale” that was undergoing the massive shift in demographics along with several other major metropolitan areas after the 1960’s. The massive crime wave that came about following the changes to the laws and culture, caused the urban decay and mass exodus from most cities into suburbs for 30 years until anti-crime bills in the 1990’s and mandatory minimum sentencing polices started to turn things around.
This is one of the most underreported and understudied eras in American history. So much so that one could easily have a sense of a deliberate coverup by those in charge of pop culture and media in order to memory-hole or give incorrect answers as to what happened to the cities. Many academic disciplines and their proponents will blame the original inhabits like various white ethnic groups from WASP founding stock to Ellis Islanders or other nebulous factors that contributed to the “White Flight” phenomenon. Scott’s findings pull the rug out from under this perception by show what amounted to a state sanctioned ethnic cleansing as the Civil Rights Revolution’s new policies and activists enabled social dysfunction and crime which force millions of people to leave their communities that had been established for multiple generations.
The process of the transformation of the majority white population of “Rosedale” to extreme minority in the span of a couple decades began in the 1970’s where the crime wave started out with small levels of activity like break-ins and vandalism. Things began to escalate quickly into serious crimes involving robberies, violent assaults and murders. Especially when it was directed at the elderly residence of the town. Many of which were unable to leave and were thus some of the most targeted victims of such vicious crimes. Many of the perpetrators were the criminally inclined and most socially dysfunctional elements of the black community that had already driven out middle-class blacks and other whites in previous areas. This kind of passive aggression that flared up into violence against older residents wasn’t treated as harshly as it could’ve been due to the fear of civil rights law and social stigma associated with violating the regime.
Other factors like deindustrialization and the financialization of the economy also played a part in the declining white population. But this book shows that primarily race and violence was the unspoken main reason for the inhabitants of the town no longer wanted to risk their lives and fleeing. Contradicting many liberal assumptions about where crime and poverty come from, Scott is left feeling conflicted as more examples in the book show the depravity of the situation. Residents felt like their community was destroyed by natural disasters instead of social policy. Law enforcement was too lax, and the violence continued as the years went on. The most angering part for the reader is how other academics mentioned in this book had great antipathy for white former residents as everything from previous experiences with minorities and other non-factors was blamed on for them wanting to leave. In the end, the diversity came, and “Rosedale” was never the same place it once was. No amount of development projects or revitalizations of the town could ever bring back the original community that once resided there.
The collapse of “Rosedale” and several other areas simultaneously for the same reasons goes to show how big of a cover up job mass media and pop culture did. Forcing people to rely on euphemisms in order to never quite get to the bottom for why America went from a high trust to low trust society in many parts of the country. Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s recent presidential campaign ended following the Iowa caucus, made the pundit class shrivel up when he talked about “The Great Replacement” not being a theory. But instead, as a deliberate policy decision by the Democratic party to import untold amounts of immigrants in order to forever hold power on the national level. As a matter of fact, it had already occurred and the crime wave and subsequent decrease of the population of cities across the board did the same thing decades prior.
With another wave of people moving away from cities and “blue states” into “red states”, the revealed mood is one of defeat and loss for Americans who know what happened to the places they grew up in but are robbed of the words to properly articulate them due too political correctness and indirect censorship that is enabled by Civil Rights regulations and laws. Thankfully more people are beginning to question the approved narratives of the past as books like Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America's Cities continue to appear, so the topic remains in the overturn window.
You are probably wonder how is it that more people are not aware of what they are living though is another repeat of the 1960’s to 1990’s crime wave despite technologies like smart phones and more surveillance than ever that show social decay happening. That is because many of the academics who ran cover were also involved in crime and domestic terrorism long before the War on Terror began abroad and eventually came back home.
Days of Rage: America’s Radical Underground, the FBI and the Forgotten Age of Revolutionary Violence (Bryan Burrough)
In this 2015 book, Bryan uncovers the long-forgotten history of many groups that splintered off the Civil Rights Movement and forged themselves into more radical sections that created a wave of revolutionary violence that coincided with the rise in crime after the 1960’s had come to an end. If learning about the situation in the “Rosedale” town was depressing for the reader, what you uncover from reading this is the realization that one reasons we never learn about these groups is that they ultimately either are in positions of power or have sympathetic figures that run cover and make sure their radicals are never called to answer for whatever they have done.
Some of the groups featured range from the Puerto Rican communist separatist group FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional / “Armed Forces of National Liberation”) which had already attacked the capital in the 1950’s and nearly assassinated Harry Truman. The Symbionese Liberation Army which became infamous known for their abduction of Patty Hearst. And finally, the factions from the Students of Democratic Society (SDS) like the Weather Underground and Black Panthers. These various activist groups feed off the swelling social tensions and atmosphere given to the country by the Civil Rights Movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War. Much of this simmering radicalism boiled over when these groups descended on the 1968 Democratic National Convention hosted in Chicago. The resulting riots and split within the electoral coalition allowed for Nixon to win the presidency a few months later.
The following year began the event where the book’s title was named after. The Days of Rage on Oct 8th to the 11th by the same SDS and Weather Underground groups that attempted to cause mass uprisings across the country in an effort to increase opposition to America’s continuous involvement in Vietnam by “bringing the war home”. Although suppressed by the Chicago police and Illinois National Guard, the wave of violence and bombings had just begun.
At one point in the 1970’s, there had been anywhere between 1,900 to 2,200 incidents of bombings, robberies and riots orchestrated by any of the above groups. Not huge enough or damaging to capture the nation’s attention for more than a few days but noticeable enough to see the FBI create the unit “Squad 47” in order to track down and find the perpetrators. Even if they frequently went outside the boundaries of the law and due process in order to get them.
Bryan writes about how many of these groups conspired together even as fractions emerge as the Vietnam War began to end. Many even splintered into more radical groups like how the BLA (Black Liberation Front) split from the Black Panthers and went on to hijack Delta Airline Flight 841 in order to force a landing in Algeria so they could join African activists and other third wordlists. The Weather Underground group had an extensive list of bombings thorough the 1970's which included the White House and Pentagon.
While rarely any sort of fatalities occurred, that didn’t make any of these groups less dangerous. Many people have the false impression that the Black Panthers harbored good will towards other races and were more “respectable” since instead of wanting equality under the law, they instead wanted blacks to seek self-determination and form either an ethnostate within America or take after Marcus Garvey’s “Back to Africa” idea from before WWII. But as Bryan Burrough and documentation shows, this was a false. Members frequently expressed racial animus towards whites with many of them getting into shoot outs with police, robberies and often engaged in acts of intimidation. Which prompted then governor of California Ronald Reagan to sing the Mulford Act in order to prohibit them from engaging in menacing police officers and people by pointing guns at them.
Most writers, including the author of the book general mark the conclusion of the violence with the Brink's Robbey and Murders in 1981. With members from the BLA and Weather Underground being involved in a robbery of about 1,600,000 dollars and killing two officers and a guard. By then leftist terrorism has either been snuffed out or forced into the shadows even as the ability to arrest perpetrators was hamstrung in 1973.
The members of various groups would often be pardoned or given amnesty by presidents like Carter, Clinton and Obama much to the objections of Congress and other agencies. Most of the suspects were radicals middle class whites and black gangs who wanted to ride the momentum of the 1960’s and feel like they were a part of a grand revolution. With the main opponent being the “fascist” government of the United States. Many of them either got jobs in academia, headed NGOs that fund activist groups or went on to have descendants that run for political office. One notable example in recent memory was the former District Attorney Chesa Boudin who was the son of the two Weather Underground members Kathey Boudin and David Gilbert convinced in the previously mentioned robbery and murders of the 1981 Brink’s robbery in Nyack, New York. Elected in 2019, he was become notorious for his “restorative justice” reforms which amounted to a big spike in crime on all categories which would lead to his eventual ousting in a recall election on June 7th, 2022.
As an aside, You and I have noticed that many of these groups originated in California and the rest of the West Coast states. The Golden State appeared to be the ground zero of many of these groups as well as the strongest opponents of them. It wasn’t that long ago that the state despite having it’s famous liberal elements in Hollywood, San Franciso, and other cities had more conservative voters than total populations in many “Safe R” states. They had also elected Arnold Schwarzenegger in a recall as a Republican and in 2008 voted to narrowly ban same-sex marriage. Which seems unthinkable nowadays. Mass immigration, the loss of the aerospace industry, cultural shift and the site of crimes like the Zebra Killers (the last of which is rarely talked about considering as many as 73 murders were possibly perpetrated by the Nation of Islam offshoot group instead of just the 15 that were proven in court) were all factors that saw the state turn into a one party “blue” state with no meaningful opposition.
For more on the Zebra Killers, I would recommend another book like Clark Howard’s rundown of the crimes. As this was a classic example of how the civil rights law’s legal structure enabled this killing spree as the San Franciso Police Department was hit with lawsuits and was under a judge’s supervision. Based on a letter written by one of his colleagues, I would not recommend Earl Sanders’ account given the distortions and embellishments he put in his book. For a modern context as to how “extremism” is treated nowadays by the government as a threat only from a (quite depowered) American right, check out Josh Neal’s American Extremist: The Psychology of Political Extremism (2nd Edition).
As for the final note on this book, many of these extremist groups’ opposition to the War in Vietnam based more on common cause with communists and other anti-American reasons even if the War was based on false premises. Much like how Russia in WWI lost the war as it collapsed into revolution and civil war, a similar occurrence happened with the US as the Vietnam War was technically a defeat as the troops were sent to prop up the government in Saigon was overrun two years after the withdrawal. Both instances one could argue were caused by both countries’ liberals and radicals essentially stabbing it in the back with domestic turmoil. Yet if you look today, the reunited Vietnamese state is more Pro-US and well-integrated within the pacific economic zone and sees China as it’s main adversary. Guess defeat on the battlefield can be turned into victory in trade.
Follow-Up Recommending Books and Articles
To keep this essay shorter than my last reading list, I will finish by listing a few more books to read in parallel to the three previously mentioned above:
Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster by Helen Andrews.
The Slaughter of the Cities by E. Michael Jones.
The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics by Richard Hanania
Race War in High School: The Ten-Year Destruction of Franklin K. Lane High School in Brooklyn by Harold Satlzman
What Went Wrong?: The Creation & Collapse of the Black-Jewish Alliance by Murray Friedman
And here are the recommended articles to go along with the readings:
Employing Racism: Black Miners, the Knights of Labor, and Company Tactics in the Coal Towns of Washington by Jourdan Marshall
Their Malcom...and Mine by Murray N. Rothbard
The Truth About White Flight by William Voegeli
The Myth of American Meritocracy by Ron Unz
The Trillion Dollar Shakedown That Bodes Ill for Cities by Howard Husock
What's Behind the Race Gap? by Vikas Bajaj and Ford Fessenden
Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A by Sam Francis
McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank by Alexander Cockburn
Kissinger the Bombardier by Greg Grandin
The King Holiday and Its Meaning by Sam Francis
With the following links and books, I hope that the reader is able to comprehend the arguments and criticisms that have been recently directed at civil rights law, icons like Martin Luther King Jr, and the general zeitgeist of social changes since the 1960’s.
For the next post, it will be another look back but of more recent times. Join me next time as we look at 2014; how it was the year where I started my intellectual journey and all the events both in the real world and on the internet marked the cultural start of the 2010’s and led us to today’s predicament.
For the regular readers, I hope you enjoyed your day off for MLK day. For those unreconstructed, have a happy Lee-Jackson Day.