“Unfinished Business”—Unveiling A World Beyond Whiteness
Chapter Thirteen of A Family History of Whiteness: American Roots of Racial Injustice
As a child, before I had any political awareness, living in my small Midwestern hometown was like inhabiting a snow globe. I felt isolated from all danger. The center of my self-contained world was West White Street, a neighborhood full of White children like me. But the isolation was far from complete.
I grew up during the height of the civil rights movement, from the mid-1950s to the early 1970s. During that historic epoch, long before I could make sense of what I was seeing, even in my rural, remote, and virtually all-White community, I was exposed to images of the fierce determination of Black Americans to achieve civil rights and of the ferocious reactions of White Americans standing in their way.
Many of those images are etched indelibly in my memory. When I was eight, I saw photos by Charles Moore taken in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 of peaceful Black protestors being blasted by high-pressure fire hoses and attacked by police dogs. When I was twelve, I saw photos by Frank Dandridge of the urban warfare and bloodshed of the “long hot summer” riots against racist police brutality in Detroit in 1967.
Seeing unforgettable images like these (and many others) revealed an ugly side of White American bigotry and violence I could not ignore.
As I became a teenager, whatever feelings of comfort and security my rural community had once given me faded away. I began to feel trapped, cut off from the wider world beyond racially-segregated central Illinois.
In 1968, the year I turned thirteen, the feeling of entrapment intensified. From start to finish, it was a bloody mess of a year.
In those days, after dinner, my father would turn on our little black and white TV so the family could all watch Walter Cronkite intone the CBS Evening News.
Near the end of each newscast, Cronkite would read the daily body count from Vietnam; dead and wounded, numbers for American and for enemy soldiers. It was a box score for a horrible game that seemed to have no end.
In January 1968, the Lunar New Year (Tet) offensive began and U.S. troops suffered the heaviest casualties of the war. And the carnage kept coming.
In April 1968, in Memphis, on the balcony outside room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed. The news filled with images of the grief, anger, and agony of Black Americans.
As I recall, most of the White folks in my hometown appeared to feel very distant from the tragedy of King’s brutal murder. I suspect many of them felt King had brought it on himself somehow by aggravating racial tensions, tensions and resentments they fooled themselves into believing had been put to rest a hundred years earlier at the end of the Civil War.
Although the news of Martin Luther King’s death made barely a ripple on the eternally placid façade of daily life in my hometown, I felt its weight.
In the summer of 1968, between seventh and eighth grade, the idea came to me to redecorate my bedroom. I decided to cover the walls and ceiling of my bedroom with red, white, and blue paint in the form of a gigantic, ironic American flag.
Before I could start painting, I had to say goodbye to an old friend and protector—the tiger skin that had hung on my wall above my bed for years.
Many years before I was born, the tiger skin had been shipped from India by a Methodist missionary as a gift to my Grandpa Stites. Having it up on the wall beside my bed was comforting. I had night terrors when I was little. From my bed cocoon, I could free a hand to reach out and stroke the short, coarse hair on the tiger’s belly.
By 1968, the tiger’s head was just a shriveled mask and ears. The tail was tattered. Hair had been rubbed off entirely from patches on the back and flanks. But up close, the pelt retained, after all those years, a musky hint of big cat, a whiff of wildness.
It troubles me now to recall that I took comfort as a child from this macabre artifact of the exploitative cruelty of White American imperialism.
Once the tiger was down I began my art project by covering the walls and ceiling of my bedroom with milk-white paint. Next, I painted the slanted portion of the wall that followed the roof line a deep blue. On the blue background I used a stencil to paint a row of two-foot high, five-pointed white stars. Then, starting from the floor on the opposing wall and across the ceiling, I painted three evenly-spaced, two-and-a-half-foot wide crimson stripes.
When it was done, I felt like I was sleeping beneath a monstrous American flag, like a dead soldier in a flag-draped coffin.
My dad must have assumed my flag-decor bedroom was patriotic and if my mom ever caught on to my subversive intent she never acknowledged it.
The finishing touch to my radical room decor was a three-foot by five-foot bulletin board that I propped up on a low chest of drawers. After painting the entire board white, I drew some stick figures, some holding hands, some carrying signs, and scattered the words “PEACE,” “JUSTICE,” “EQUALITY,” and “REVOLUTION!” in large red or blue letters across the board.
On top of all that, over time, I added to the bulletin board a collage of photos clipped from LIFE Magazine. Near the center of the board I put an image of Red Guards in China marching in formation waving copies of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book. Other parts of the board I filled in with pictures of Black Panthers in berets in California, pictures of wounded American soldiers in Vietnam, and one of John Lennon with Yoko Ono in New York.
Later I added images of protestors and police in the streets outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. One of those photos had at its center, facing the camera, crouching low, a shirtless and very angry young man flashing his middle finger. In the fall of 1968 I added a photo of two Black American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, raising their fists in protest on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics.
The pastiche of images on my bedroom bulletin board were glimpses of a remote but increasingly real world beyond my rural Illinois hometown. Seeing those images each night before bed, I must have wondered what it all portended for me and for the bigger world I hoped someday to inhabit.
Looking back, I see the bulletin board in my childhood bedroom as a beginning of my political awakening and as a rejection of the unblemished myth of White America I had been trained to put my faith in as a child.
At the end of February 1968, little more than a month before the assassination of MLK, the National Commission on Civil Disorders appointed by Lyndon Johnson to investigate the causes of the 1967 Detroit riots released its report.
I probably heard about the existence of the report at the time it was released. Otto Kerner, who led the commission, was Governor of Illinois. But I was certainly too young to read it.
Finding the report and reading it in 2020 in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd, I was struck by how much of the the report rings true, not just as an account of the roots of racial unrest in the 1960s, but as an unvarnished recognition of the historical and societal roots of American racial injustice and as a dire warning of troubles ahead if America did not make fundamental changes and redress racial wrongs.
The second page of the report contains the following summary statement and call for action:
What white Americans have never fully understood — but what the Negro can never forget — is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
It is time to turn with all the purpose at our command to the major unfinished business of this Nation. It is time to adopt strategies for action that will produce quick and visible progress. It is time to make good the promises of American democracy to all citizens — urban and rural, white and black, Spanish-surname, American Indian, and every minority group.
A full copy — all 440 pages — of the Kerner Commission Report can be downloaded here. A summary version of the report can be found here.
As promised in the abstract, the Kerner Commission report goes beyond recounting the civil disorders of the summer of 1967. It includes “…a detailed history of Blacks in American society…” as well as “…recommendations on police community relations and administration of justice…”
The Kerner Commission report was widely read after it was published. It sold more copies than the earlier and popular Warren Commission report on the assassination of JFK. However, unfortunately, the Kerner Commission report had very little effect on public policy or public education or on White American support for racial justice.
Back in 2018, Alice George, wrote a piece for Smithsonian Magazine entitled, “The 1968 Kerner Commission Got It Right, But Nobody Listened.” George explains that Lyndon Johnson had expected the Kerner Commission to lay the blame for the 1967 racial violence on “outside agitators” and therefore neither endorsed the report’s findings nor advocated for any of the reports’ policy recommendations.
In mid-1968, the political winds in America had shifted. White support for Civil Rights activism was declining and Richard Nixon would soon win the presidency running on a “law and order” platform which moved federal and local law enforcement and justice policy in exactly the opposite direction of the Kerner Commission’s recommendations.
For me, Nixon’s election in 1968 — fueled by White conservative reaction to the civil rights movement — was a confirmation that the “silent majority” of my fellow White Americans could not be trusted to support the American promise of “liberty and justice for all.”
And yet, as a thirteen-year-old in 1968, I had hope for a radical reconstruction of civil rights in America. I believed my generation would change America and demolish the old structures of racial injustice. I had no idea that we would still be engaged in the struggle more than half a century later.
I might be naive, but I still believe in the goal of racial justice. As I have gotten older, I see clearly that the struggle is long and progress is not easily won. There is no rest for the weary. We must persist.
