1965 was a pretty good year to be free, white and a working class American.  The Second World War had concluded only twenty years before and America remained the 800 pound gorilla of world economic and military might. Three years earlier any remaining doubt as to our global dominance had been favorably resolved when we stared down the Soviet Union during the Cuban missile crisis.  Even those of us who were awaiting the military draft were not overly concerned by Vietnam.  Only Special Forces and the volunteer Rangers of the New Frontier were being deployed there.

In our working class neighborhoods the future appeared secure.  Over a third of all non-government employment was unionized. Today that statistic is down to 12.5% and nonunion workers now earn less than 80 cents for every dollar the union worker takes home.  In 1965 it was the rare family where both parents were compelled to work.  The GI Bill had opened college education to the citizen soldiers of the war generation and, by implication, to those of us who were their children. The welfare safety net gave a sense of security but no one you knew had ever been forced to rely on its benefits.  By and large our fathers worked at jobs of dignity, our mothers cared for us at home and there were few latch key children. We had health care when we needed it and our parents looked ahead to the golden years of their retirement. 

In 1965 it made sense to envision that then -Vice President Hubert Humphrey would succeed Lyndon Johnson as President.  Hubert Humphrey who in 1948 had staked his political future on Civil Rights and whose passionate speech to the Democratic Convention that year had driven Strom Thurmond and the Dixiecrats from the Party.   “I do not believe that there can be any compromise on the guarantee of civil rights… the time has arrived in America for the Democratic party to get out of the shadow of state's rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!”.  Hubert Humphrey who stood for those who knew in their bones that full employment was more critical to the peace and tranquility of our democracy then tax cuts for the wealthy ever could be. 

Looking back, 1965 now appears to be the year the dialectic turned in American life.  Lyndon Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act that year and presciently stated that in so doing he would cause the Democratic Party to lose the South for a generation.  Actually, Johnson understated the consequence, as he was the last Democratic candidate for president to carry a majority of the white vote nationally. The dirty secret of the thirty year rule of the liberal FDR collation was now exposed: Jim Crow was an indispensable member. In 1965 the Democratic Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee was James O. Eastland. The same James O. Eastland who was nurtured by the power structure of Ruleville Mississippi, the town where Fannie Lou Hamer was bound to plantation life until she liberated herself and inspired us all.  No American political party was capable of maintaining itself as the national ruling party unless it was ready and capable of playing the ugly card of race.   

Two years earlier I had received a preview of the new center of gravity in American politics as the Republican Party found its way from the Main Street Party of Lincoln to the politics of racial division. In 1963 I was going through the period that my mother referred to as, “his adolescent rebellion”: I decided that I was a Conservative.  In those days my family lived in the NCO quarters at Homestead Air Force Base, about thirty miles south of Miami and I attended Homestead High School.  Homestead High was comprised of roughly half air force brats and half townies and in 1963 remained a racially segregated high school.  Negro students from Air Force families were made to ride a separate school bus almost an extra hour each way to an all black school where they were welcome. 

That year we took an American History course that was televised simultaneously to all 10^th grade students in Dade County.  Miraculously, considering that I was maintaining a close to perfect GPA of zero, I received the highest score in the county on a county wide standardized history test.  My reward was that I would be allowed 5 minutes to address the entire sophomore class of Homestead High.

That year I was supporting Barry Goldwater, so I used the opportunity to pimp his platform:  We needed an aggressive foreign policy so that no one would mistake our desire for peace with weakness; polite applause and the sense of an audience nodding off on me.   Fiscal austerity from the government and a balanced federal budget were the only way to insure the future growth of our great economic engine; polite applause and the background mummer of conversation.  The federal government needs to honor the constitution and respect States Rights; my audience were on their feet, shouting, clapping, cheering, stamping their approval.  At that instant I was sick to my stomach, I could no longer pretend that States Rights was an abstract issue of constitutional allocation of power; this was racism and I had just played the role of demagogue.  

Even the air force brats who daily took the bus with me to and from the air base had enthusiastically joined in the cheering. Yet, the military had been fully integrated since President Truman and none of my fellow white tenth grade military dependants had ever know anything but  integrated base housing and their fathers being assigned equally to work units of black and white Airmen.  When these kids, with all the sincerity they could muster, told you that some of their best friends were Negro, they were not only oblivious to the joke, they were also probably telling the truth.

Military dependent housing was laid out much like many of our Southern cities.  Unlike many Northern cities, where rigid geographic markers enforced separation of white and black as well as rich and poor, the South remained a hodgepodge of race and class.  In many Southern towns the wealthiest white families might well live only a stones throw from the most destitute black families and early in life the bonds of friendship often did leap across racial and class lines and often lasted for life.

So when my classmates cheered segregation I truly believe that it was an act committed absent malice toward any.  From their point of view they held no brief against any Negro in particular or the Negro race in general.  I believe that their response was fashioned from the same impulse that allowed their great-grandfathers to enlist and suffer the horrors of the civil war in defense of an aristocracy that by then had already victimized them and their ancestors for generations.  They wanted to guard that no one took from them what they held to be theirs by right of birth: their being free and white and American.  As long as the Negro existed no white American need ever fear finding themselves at the back of the line. To their lights no one deserved to trump their status.  Is it any wonder that in years to come affirmative action would prove to be such a potent issue for the Republican Party?

But the national Republican Party of George W. Bush with tax cuts for the wealthy and ignorance for all does not thrive on racial division alone. No single ethic, no matter how divisive could explain their control of the Presidency, Congress, Courts and media.  It is axiomatic that if the white working class voted its pocketbook George W would still be dissipating his family’s fortune in Texas.  So what is the root of this “culture of life” which seems to dovetail so neatly into the racially motivated fear of a lost place at the table held by so many of those who flock our evangelical churches? 

In 1973 the Court decided Roe v Wade and many of us viewed it as merely another step on the march of evolving human decency. A step away from the back ally and coat hanger abortions of our youth.  What we missed was that to millions of our fellow citizens Roe was nothing less then a direct assault on the sanctity of their very lives as ordered by religious faith. To them Roe opened the gates to genocide against the innocent unborn; genocide being conducted in their name. 

This is the fight that gets them out of bed in the morning and it is what they go to sleep agonizing over. In pursuit of their single issue victory they tolerate alliance with sleazy gambling lobbyists and passively accept tax polices that penalize their entire class and put at risk the economic future of their children.

Yet, as they tally each electoral victory rendered by their effort and sacrifice they find themselves no further ahead in line.   If the Negro is now too vocal and empowered to confidently be predicted to queue last, then how about the gay who must often risk their very place in the social order if they choose to even reveal their spouse?  Or, what of those who are so desperate for any spot in line that they are willing to trust their lives and those of their children to the crazed “coyotes” of the southwestern smugglers trade? 

The Bush Court will soon relegate Roe to the dust bin and the fight will then shift to the State Legislatures.    African Americans will soon be replaced by Hispanics as the minority of significance in America.  History will have rolled and a new dynamic will be in place.  Are you ready?