Why a Civil Rights Veteran Thinks the Protests Are More Like 1963 Than 1968

The summer of 2020 is certain to be included in future history books, not only for Covid-19 but also for the wave of demonstrations across the country sparked by the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May. But just as the pandemic is not truly unprecedented, neither is the mass movement for racial equality. Except it’s not 1968 that we should compare with the current moment. According to historian Clayborne Carson, it’s 1963.

When it comes to the struggle for civil rights, Carson, a professor of American history at Stanford University and the director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, knows the past better than most. He attended the March on Washington. He experienced police brutality firsthand in the 1960s. And he’s studied and written about the life and legacy of civil rights activists ever since.

Politico Magazine spoke with Carson this week to ask what he thinks of the current iteration of the struggle, how it compares with the previous era and what protesters today could learn from their predecessors. He’s impressed by the number of young activists who have taken to the streets, and he rejects the notion that looters are representative of the movement. But he also notes the conspicuous absence of “moral leaders” who take it upon themselves to maintain a peaceful public image for the protests. “Having these people be role models for how you can do it a different way, how rage can turn into the kind of commitment that John Lewis displayed, I think that kept the movement more or less in the realm of nonviolent activism.”

For Carson, however, it’s not so much the demonstrations that will determine whether King’s vision will be realized but what comes after. “Of course, there are lessons that we can learn from the past. There always are, but it’s true that the movement in the past didn’t get the job done.” For the rest of this decade to not look like the '60s, he believes this generation should take some of what worked back then and combine it with their own 21st century skills and experiences to “translate the protest into something enduring.”

A transcript of the conversation is below, edited for length and clarity.

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RUAIRI ARRIETA-KENNA: As a scholar and a participant of what you describe as the long struggle for African American freedom, how does what’s going on right now in the United States compare to and build off of the protests of 50 years ago?

CLAYBORNE CARSON: I’m glad you put it in those terms. When people say things like “back in the Civil Rights Movement days,” I kind of cringe at that. It’s a very romanticized notion of the 1960s that treats the first half of the decade as if it were unconnected to the second half. And people tend to view the early ’60s as a “good” civil rights movement that was followed by a distinct era seen very negatively as just riots and Black Power and all that sort of stuff. In reality, I experienced it as one ongoing and connected movement. Martin Luther King Jr. was there for part of the late ’60s, too. The situation at the time of his death was very different from the situation where he was giving the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, but it was the same person. His agenda was much broader by the end of the ’60s. He had been through Chicago, he had been on the Black Power march through Mississippi, and that was when the divisions within the movement became more evident, but it was a division within the movement. Stokely Carmichael came out of the same movement that King came out of. He didn’t come from Mars.

So, I see what’s happening now, to the extent that it’s replicating the ’60s, that we’re probably somewhere around 1963. That might be the best analogy. King described that year as the year of our revolution. There were protests in Chicago and New York and Los Angeles and all these different places. That’s kind of where we are now. There’s a lot of conflict. We’re at an early stage of another era of grassroots activism to achieve political change. And on the whole, I’m happy that we’re having it because I don’t think we’ve answered King’s question in his last book: Where do we go from here? I think we’re seeing an attempt to answer that question.

ARRIETA-KENNA: What’s different this time?

CARSON: One of the things is scale. The notion that everybody was out in the streets in the ’60s—it’s closer to that now than it ever was then. I was at the March on Washington in 1963, and I was so impressed to see 200,000 people. I grew up in a small town in New Mexico, so that was more than I had ever seen in my lifetime, and it seemed rather amazing to me. But when you think about what happened after George Floyd’s murder, probably in that week over a million people mobilized, and since then millions more. The scale is rather astounding, and a lot of it has to do with the technology that’s available now. News can travel more rapidly, and it’s less centralized. To advertise something like the March on Washington, you had to build a network to get the word out because you were not going to get on the evening news. One way of looking at the current moment is that people who are familiar with social media and are able to use the internet effectively can do what it took experienced organizers like A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin months to do, and they were the best at it of their era.

We’re working within a climate in which there is this stimulus for change that is coming from young people, in the same way that young people have always been the most impatient. But again, it’s important to note that a larger proportion of young people are involved in protests and demonstration today than ever in the 1960s. I think the hopeful thing is that unlike the civil rights protests of the early ’60s, some of these protests now are majority white, or at least majority non-Black. I think it indicates changing minds, but I think it more so indicates that even among white Americans, there’s a generational gulf.

If only people over 35 had responded to George Floyd, would we even be having this conversation? I don’t think there would be the same movement. It’s not that older people were not disturbed by it, but our response was more likely to be, ‘Oh, that was terrible, and it’s still happening, but what can be done about it?’ It takes a young person to come along and say, ‘Yeah, it’s terrible and it’s still happening, so I am going to do something about it.’

When we think about the people who started this latest upsurge of Black Lives Matter protests, think about their life cycle. They’ve been through 9/11, the election of the first Black president, the Occupy Movement, the Trayvon Martin shooting and Ferguson and all the incidents since then, the election of Donald Trump. They’ve been through so many politicized events in their short lifetimes. It’s condensed what would have taken decades in my generation—to accumulate that kind of experience and that kind of networking. That’s going to feed into the next 10 years. We’re going to see how well this generation translates their experience and that rage into positive lasting change.

ARRIETA-KENNA: Are there risks to the movement being so large today? It seems like the scale makes it more susceptible to being characterized by opponents as violent or unreasonable, even if specific incidents like the video last week of demonstrators yelling at a diner in D.C., are not representative of the vast majority of protesters out there.

CARSON: The scale now is possible due to decentralized leadership, but with that comes the downside of there not being a core group of people who are responsible. For the March on Washington, there was somebody who took responsibility and said, ‘If this ends up in violence, I’m to blame because I’m the one who’s organizing it, I’m the one who’s providing leadership.’ In this era, no one is really responsible, not only for the actions of the protesters but for the success of the movement. And by success, I mean not just in terms of having a protest but getting a positive result out of the protest.

The March on Washington was intended to get civil rights legislation passed, so that was the goal. It was not simply to bring 200,000 people to Washington and have them go home. The point wasn’t the demonstration. The point was that the demonstration was a means to an end, and you need leadership and structure in order to connect the protest to the end result. When I was 19, I wasn’t involved in the end result. I didn’t help write the Civil Rights Act of 1964. My participation was simply to be there and go home, but that meant that other people had to use my presence as a means of saying this is something that should be done. There has to be that entity or that set of leaders who can translate the protest into something enduring. At the end of the March on Washington, the leaders went to the White House and had a meeting about how to translate that into legislation. At the end of these protests, who sits down and works out the mechanics of police reform and some of the broader issues?

ARRIETA-KENNA: Does the fact that we’re still dealing with so many of the same racial injustices, like police brutality, more than 50 years after Martin Luther King and the March on Washington suggest that the tactics employed then maybe were not so successful in correcting the problems they were addressing? What does that say about the lessons to be learned from the past?

CARSON: Of course, there are lessons that we can learn from the past. There always are, but it’s true that the movement in the past didn’t get the job done. So looking back to then as the model for what will get the job done is maybe too much of that romanticizing of a previous generation.

I disagree with the notion that the movement should take responsibility for things that I would see as the result of bad policing or bad journalism. If you have some people who are peacefully demonstrating and other people who are looting and being destructive, I don’t think they even deserve the same label. What you have are people who are saying, ‘I know that the police are over there confronting peaceful protesters, so they can’t be over here protecting this property, and I’m going to take advantage of that by looting.’ Why call that person a protester? What are they protesting? They’re just using the opportunity of a demonstration in order to do something very selfish.

All it takes to set a fire is one person. All it takes to loot a store is somebody to break the windows. To see how that can be controlled, that’s something that, even during the 1960s in the South, was very difficult to do. How are you going to prevent somebody in Albany, Georgia, from throwing rocks at police? Well, King tried to do that, but only to modest success.

But I do think there’s one thing that I would see looking back as a positive lesson from the 1960s. There was violence and rage back then: Everything that went on in Birmingham in 1963 was not just nonviolent kids getting beaten by police; it was also people throwing rocks at police. There was almost a riot in Birmingham in 1963. But one thing that was different was that there was a very small cadre—maybe of all the people in the 1960s who were protesters, a few percent—who were deeply grounded in kind of Gandhian ideas of nonviolence, like the people who came through James Lawson’s workshops. It was by no means more than 5 or 10 percent of all the people in those protests who had that kind of training. But look at what happened with them. These are the John Lewises, the Bernard Lafayettes, the Diane Nashes, the James Bevels. These were the ones who provided a model and who shaped the public image of the movement.

Not everybody followed. Stokely Carmichael didn’t want to get his head beat in, and he was there too. But what the small cadre was willing to do is be the shock troops of the movement. They were willing to take the freedom rides into Alabama and Mississippi. They suspected that trying to do it nonviolently might get themselves killed, but they were willing to take that risk because they were highly committed and highly dedicated. I don’t see that kind of cadre in many places now. In part it’s because going through training like that is very intensive, but having these people be role models for how you can do it a different way, how rage can turn into the kind of commitment that John Lewis displayed, I think that kept the movement more or less in the realm of nonviolent activism.

Even those people who went South like Stokely Carmichael, they were willing to put up with that discipline because they saw it. Stokely Carmichael and John Lewis were actually in prison together in Mississippi in 1961. They did not agree then and they did not agree later, but Stokely Carmichael was able to admire that discipline and that commitment to nonviolence that he saw in John Lewis.

Now, I think that in some ways that had the bad result of keeping that rage pent up, and I think the Black Power slogan was that rage when it got to the point where you couldn’t keep it inside anymore, you didn’t want to be the victim anymore. So it’s not that surprising that at certain points, when you look closely at someone like Stokely Carmichael, he just got tired of getting beat up. But I think that for that period of the early 1960s maybe through the summit of the Montgomery March, the movement’s public image was shaped by people like John Lewis. That’s what you saw in the newspapers. That’s the image that people got, and what they didn’t see, at least not until the late 1960s, were people like Stokely Carmichael. So I wonder now, where are the people who have that same sort of deep spiritual commitment to nonviolence?

Just think of how different things would be if you had people today at the head of the demonstrations who were committed to confronting police but doing it nonviolently, and if that means taking a beating, then so be it. That would be sending a message to everybody else that you can express bravery not by battling the police but by confronting them nonviolently. That’s a very powerful symbolic message. That said, nonviolent protest is not an end in itself but a spearhead of the struggle for social justice.

ARRIETA-KENNA: Are you concerned that the protests could provoke a political backlash? That people will become more drawn to someone like Donald Trump who says he offers “law and order”?

CARSON: One thing that I did learn in the ’60s is that you can’t predict political consequences of your action, even under the best of circumstances. How could I have foreseen that what I was doing in South Central L.A. would lead to Ronald Reagan becoming governor? I don’t like to see arguments about how because some protests have involved violence, that’s causing white Americans to turn away from positive change. They’ve already made their choice.

You can always have laws that are unjust and order imposed from above. If that’s what’s being offered, people are right to reject it. That’s not a democracy. It’s ironic that we have a president calling for law and order who cannot even have a lawful administration. He’s hardly a symbol of law and order.

ARRIETA-KENNA: Do you have any last piece of caution or advice for today’s protesters?

CARSON: I hesitate to offer advice that I would not follow myself. I’m not out there in Portland or a lot of these places where the protests have been sustained. But I will say that struggling for something such as social justice and human rights is going to take a long time, and the only advice I have is to get ready for the long haul. Don’t ever think that the next protest is going to resolve the issue. We don’t even know what’s going to happen in the next election, much less what’s going to happen in the United States over the next 10 years.

You have to be a long-distance runner. You have to be willing to accept that change worth happening is going to take a long time to happen. And it’s going to take a lot of different skills. When you think of political activism, protest and demonstration is maybe a few percent of it. Of all the activities, it’s probably the most liberating because at least you’re doing something and at least you have a sense of momentum, but then you realize that protests come in waves. What do you do in between the waves? What kind of activism follows?

I think every person who ever engages in protest should ask themselves the question: What will I be doing next year, and the year after that? Because what they’re fighting for is not likely to be resolved in the next year. If it’s likely to be resolved within the next year, it’s probably not the major change we really want. If the end result is police can no longer use chokeholds, is that really going to satisfy the people who are outraged by George Floyd? I hope not. Because, to me, the knee on the neck is simply a metaphor for something much larger than that single incident. That’s why it’s so powerful. That’s why people can say, ‘Get your knee off my neck.’ What they’re really calling for is much more than just a change in police training, and that larger goal is going to take a lot longer to realize.