Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

This haunting line, combined with wildflowers I saw yesterday on my hike in the mountains, have set me to wondering what destroyed the hopes so many of us had in the sixties and seventies, when the deep-rooted racism in U.S. culture seemed to have been… well, not uprooted, but at least disturbed.

As unlikely as it seems for a man as coarse, ruthless and self-centered as Lyndon Johnson, as Robert Caro describes him in The Path To Power, the first of a three volume biography that could have benefitted from a good editor, Johnson introduced the Civil Rights Act of 1964—outlawing discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or country of origin. All inequality in voter registration requirements, as well as segregation in schools, employment and public transportation, must cease at once.

It took years to enforce these new regulations but at least they were on the books and gradually, with much resentment, the country seemed to comply.

And now, fifty-six years later, we find that discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex and country of origin is rampant: attacks on Jews and Muslims, cruel treatment of migrants at our borders, rampant discrimination in education—desegregated public schools are now only attended by the children of the poor—and, perhaps most destructive, the same racial division of neighborhoods into rich and poor, white and black, the wrong side of the tracks and the right side of the tracks that has bedeviled our country since its founding.

The attempt to end discrimination on the basis of sex never got off the ground in the 1960’s. It took the #MeToo movement of the past few years to begin to bring about change.

So why did the civil rights legislation of the 1960’s fail?

Perhaps because we fortunate white people, who have always benefitted, took the changes for granted. In much the same way, women took the changes for granted until the 1970’s when we fought and failed to pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Had the Civil Rights Act been enforced, there would never have been a need for an Equal Rights Amendment. And we still haven’t been able to get Congress to pass it. African-Americans whose hopes of a better future had been raised in the 1960’s saw all the ways around the loopholes, the exceptions, and—especially—that the hearts of most white people hadn’t changed.

Now we are reaping the whirlwind of rage and disappointment.

Legislation never changes hearts. That only happens through joint discussion, militancy, protests—and—must if be?—the continued martyrdom of black men.

As the song says, “Where have all the flowers gone? Young girls have picked them, everyone. Oh, when will we learn? When will we ever learn?”

In Politics The Sixties 20 Favorites of 2020