Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy's America in Black & White, America on Fire, Hierarchy in the Forest

Growing up in a large Irish Catholic family, Bobby was a loner with an instinctive sympathy for people who were having a hard time. He was the most devout of nine children and possessed a moralistic streak, but his questioning spirit helped guard against the rigidity that might have accompanied that attribute. Murray Kempton once commented that the one thing Franklin Roosevelt could have learned from Joseph Kennedy “was how to be a father.” Joe was often away from home—in Hollywood, London, and Palm Beach—and he sent his kids to boarding school, but he cultivated an affectionate and close relationship with them all the same. Bobby was “the gentlest and shyest” of the Kennedy boys and “the least articulate orally.” A childhood nurse remembered him as “the most thoughtful and considerate of all the children.”

Attorney General Robert Kennedy, in his office at two o’clock in the morning on May 22, 1961. He is on the phone with his deputy Byron White in Montgomery, Alabama, after a raging mob attacked the First Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King Jr. and other supporters of the Freedom Riders had gathered. RFK advised: “Half a million American soldiers with 700,000 Vietnamese allies, with total command of the air, total command of the sea, backed by huge resources and the most modern weapons are unable to secure even a single city from the attacks of an enemy whose total strength is 250,000.” The time had come to take a new look at the war in Vietnam, “not by cursing the past but using it to illuminate the future.” Furthermore, it was not in the national interest to wage a war so destructive and cruel that “our best and closest friends ask, more in sorrow than in anger, what has happened to America.” In their responses to Watts and successive summers of uprisings and civil disturbances, Johnson and Kennedy could not have been further apart. Johnson’s escalation of the Vietnam War divided the country and sapped resources for anti-poverty programs at a time of urgent need. 

Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King emerged as leading critics of cutbacks to poverty programs and as increasingly vocal opponents of the war. King and Kennedy were also closely aligned in their concerns about urban conditions and the oppression of Black youth. Early in 1966, King moved into a Chicago tenement and joined community groups in organizing a campaign to end housing discrimination. For their part, Kennedy and his aides met with residents, community leaders, and activists in the impoverished Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant and, drawing on what they learned from the community, established a major redevelopment project. The goal was to bring government, foundation, and private funds to bear on shortages of decent housing, jobs, recreational facilities, and education—all under the direction of a community board. The Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Corporation marked a shift toward community control of urban revitalization, and the project remained a major focus of Kennedy’s until the end of his life. “As implemented and augmented by opportunistic Congresses,” writes biographer John Farrell, “governors like Nelson Rockefeller, and Nixon’s successors, notably Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton—the ‘war’ on drugs and the battle for ‘law and order’ would metastasize, yielding punitive measures like mandatory sentences, no-knock raids and other relaxations of defendants’ rights.” Starting in the late 1960s, America’s prison population skyrocketed, with a move to mass incarceration that disproportionately impacted Black Americans. 

As historian Elizabeth Hinton pointed out in her study of the transition from the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, “African Americans born after 1965 and lacking a high school diploma are more likely to eventually go to prison than not.” Ending inequality would require nothing less than overcoming “the scarred heritage of centuries of oppression” manifested throughout America life, most notably in white attitudes and beliefs. Kennedy warned that “it would be a national disaster to permit resentment and fear to drive increasing numbers of white and black Americans into opposing camps of distrust and enmity.” There was but one choice, he said: “to face our difficulties and strive to overcome them, or turn away, bringing repression, increasing human pain, and civil strife.” —Justice Rising: Robert Kennedy’s America in Black and White (2021) by Patricia Sullivan

No social world ever went from an egalitarian community to an elite-dominated, state-structured society in one fell swoop. It’s a gradual movement towards inequality. The pathway to inequality leads through unequal, but still small-scale and stateless, communities, in which incipient elites lived with and among their neighbours, and without control of coercive state institutions. As such, they were vulnerable, and as Christopher Boehm notes in Hierarchy in the Forest (1999). Today, the top one per cent of incomes in the United States accounts for one fifth of US earnings. The top one per cent of fortunes holds two-fifths of the total wealth. Just one rich family, the six heirs of the brothers Sam and James Walton, founders of Walmart, are worth more than the bottom 40 per cent of the American population combined ($115 billion in 2012). Bottom line: egalitarian, cooperative human communities are possible. Widespread sharing and consensus decision-making aren’t contrary to ‘human nature’. Indeed, for most of human history we lived in such societies. But such societies are not inherently stable. These social practices depend on active defence. That active defence failed, given the social technologies available, as societies increased in scale and economic complexity. Source: aeon.co