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The new decade began with America's invasion of Cambodia, the killing of student protesters at Kent State University and at Jackson State University, George Wallace urging his fellow southern governors to defy federal integration orders, and hopes of racial peace deferred. The promised land glimpsed on that fateful April evening in Memphis had vanished into a pale horizon, and the moral reserves of a nation that had once applied its energies to racial equality and reconciliation were now extended elsewhere, and they were running on empty.
For years the civil rights preacher Will Campbell had complained about the civil rights movement's priorities: why had organizers been singularly concerned with access to public bathrooms, coffee shops and waiting rooms in bus stations?2 Why make these places the battlefield for racial equality? They were the last places you could expect to find the men who controlled the social arrangements. If white power was the real culprit, Campbell insisted, then stage sit-ins at the Rotary Club or during the mid-summer debutante cotillion; then seek to reform the culture of the white church. Forcing a short-order cook at the five-and-dime lunch counter to remove the "colored-only" sign was too easy a target; and, in any case, it was not going to bring electricity and plumbing to needy families, alter the subterranean world of feeling and opinion, or halt a retreat of the sentiments and of white people to the suburbs.
The rise of the private "Christian" seg-academies was but one manifestation of an expanding range of creative options that fortified the walls of social segregation. The claim recently set forth by some African American intellectuals that the real winners of the civil rights movement were the white Republicans who came into power during the 1980 presidential election may be an exaggeration, but it is also a completely understandable response to the depressing fact that the shifting legal landscape of race left unchanged too many of the supporting structures of white supremacy. The movement had unsettled the world of working and middle class whites even as the privileged classes continued their bridge games without interruption. "The ultimate solution to the problem of race," King had said, "lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable."3
National conviction for racial peace languished. As something called a civil rights establishment emerged in response to diminished public concern for racial justice, the piecemeal work of social reform and renewal was largely abandoned. Activists seeking the hard-earned rewards for years of sacrifice and struggle abandoned the poor neighborhoods and communities that had once been at center stage of the civil rights story. One could not really blame these men and women for cashing in on their overdue promissory notes. Nonetheless, as members of a generation of creative and skilled black (and white) activists moved out of poor communities and into networks of political influence, non-profit work, cultural and academic leadership and corporate boardrooms, no one took their place in the freedom houses and community centers.
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