The Left Is Misremembering Civil Rights
Boomers have encouraged a legacy of violent protest. That gets the ’60s all wrong.
Violent protests don’t work in a democracy. They don’t create change. They destroy opportunities to reform America.
Several times a year, there’s another burst of moral enthusiasm on some issue followed by disruptive protests. Shabbily dressed rowdies emerge, faces covered, to shout, obstruct, and intimidate. They block streets and entrances. They take over public spaces. They chant angry slogans and carry vulgar signs. They get in people’s faces. They pull offensive stunts like tossing soup at art. If passions get high enough, they set things on fire, loot, or outright riot.
It isn’t just a problem of the progressive left, although it’s endemic there. There’s a right-coded version too, with tricorn hats in place of balaclavas. It’s a problem across America.
I blame the Boomer generation that sold a deeply misleading history of civil rights in a case of generational stolen valor.
When you ask protesters why they employ these tactics, they tell you it’s how you create real change. If you tell them this is counterproductive, they tell you you’re naïve. The only way to change things is to force it. Take a noble stand, threaten revolution, and roar to make them listen. After all, isn’t this how America won civil rights?
Except that’s wrong.
Civil rights didn’t happen because of rowdy and violent protests—nor did Social Security, the expansion of free speech, or even the Great Society. That’s a myth told by a Boomer generation that employed such tactics to steal the achievements of a prior generation that didn’t. Until we dispel this widely believed untruth among younger generations raised on the falsehood, we’ll continually botch any potential at making America better.
The Civil Rights Movement—The Spirit of 1964
America’s Civil Rights Movement is usually lumped into the cultural turmoil we call “the ’60s.” In reality, what we remember as the ’60s was two entirely different periods of history. Most of what we remember as the 1960s in reality happened in the 1970s. A lot of the Civil Rights Movement that we also remember as the 1960s in reality happened in the 1950s. The dividing line between these eras is 1964. On one side is the Civil Rights Act and Great Society of 1964, which we can think of as the culmination of reform efforts of the ’50s. On the other side are the explosive protests and public upheaval of 1968, which ushered in a new era of radicalism that American society is still, in many ways, attempting to recover from.
The crowning achievement and touchstone of the era that ended in 1964 was passage of the Civil Rights Act, ending segregation and beginning the legal enforcement of civil rights. It arrived right after the Kennedy presidency, and alongside most of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. In other words, it all happened before the social upheaval that we associate with the ’60s.
What began America’s Civil Rights Era was the Second World War, a war waged in the name of democracy in which over a million black Americans bravely fought for freedom. Then they came home to a country that treated them like dirt. As soon as the war ended, America pivoted to a Cold War also fought in the name of democracy against another tyranny in the Soviet Union. The inconsistency between America’s noble principles and nasty practices had become deeply embarrassing and impossible to ignore—a hypocrisy the Soviets loved to rub in America’s face.
After the war, America started moving slowly to finally do something about racism and segregation. President Truman finally desegregated the military in 1948. In response to pressure from black war veterans, he also created a Presidential Committee on Civil Rights that issued a report recommending a forced end to segregation. The Supreme Court issued Brown v. Board of Education of 1954, and Eisenhower sent federal troops into the South to enforce it. Three years later, Eisenhower pushed through the Civil Rights Act of 1957—the first major civil rights bill in over a generation. Public opinion in the North was steadily turning against this national embarrassment.
Out of that sensibility emerged a Civil Rights Movement eager to end this hypocrisy and which was led by the World War II generation of the Greatest Generation and Silents. The Boomers, the children born after the war’s end, were just kids during this era, not old enough to participate meaningfully in any of it. Martin Luther King, a youthful 35 when the Act passed, wasn’t a Baby Boomer but a Silent. The very oldest Boomer in 1964 was still only 18. The Civil Rights Movement fought through the 1950s to put this hypocrisy of segregation and racism in people’s faces and to force them to act. Under Thurgood Marshall, the NAACP was bringing cases. Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in 1955, starting the bus boycotts. In 1960, four black college students sat at a “whites only” lunch counter, starting the sit-ins. That helped launch the youth activist organization of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC)—when the very oldest Boomer was just 14. The Freedom Rides came in 1961, and the Birmingham campaign and March on Washington in 1963.
This movement was built around an ethic of non-violence. The Civil Rights Movement had grown around the black Christian church, which engrained Christian ethics of loving enemies and turning the other cheek. It was also influenced by Gandhi’s success using non-violence to shame the British out of India. It believed non-violent tactics weren’t just effective, but could shape hearts and minds and redeem souls in addition to defeating enemies. Groups like CORE and the SCLC trained activists in how to conduct themselves nonviolently during protests. They were taught to behave with discipline. Dress neatly. Behave with dignity. Don’t curse, fight, or argue. Don’t respond to provocations. Deescalate situations whenever possible. The organizations would even hold drills to test participants in how to carry out these principles in tense situations.
Civil Rights Era protests were ones in which well-dressed people arrived to respectfully make their presence known. They wouldn’t comply with unjust laws or systems, but behaved with dignity and restraint.
Dignity in resistance wasn’t meant to scare America into doing the right thing. It wasn’t about making unreasonable demands to spark a political revolution. It was meant to shame America into doing what it already knew was right. It worked because Americans deeply understood their hypocrisy was a national embarrassment. It was impossible for America to claim to be the guardian of democracy abroad while failing to uphold those values at home.
This isn’t to say change was moving fast enough, or many didn’t drag their feet. By putting segregation in everyone’s faces, activists made it impossible to ignore. This is why their protest tactics worked.
The Civil Rights Act passed with wide bipartisan support. It passed the House 290-130 with 152 Democrats and 138 Republicans voting for it, and 96 Democrats and 34 Republicans voting against. After overcoming an historic filibuster from Southern segregationists in the Senate, the Act passed with 46 Democrats and 27 Republicans voting for the bill and 21 Democrats and 6 Republicans voting against.
The protesters who brought about this achievement hadn’t shouted, waved their fists, or cursed—much less burned things, threatened people, or rioted. Why then do so many young protesters think otherwise? Why do they think Civil Rights was the result of wild and violent protesting? Because of the myths of the Baby Boomers who wrote the story, stealing the valor of the previous generation to cover their own failure.
The New Left—The Spirit of 1968
While the Civil Rights Act is the touchstone of the Spirit of 1964, the Spirit of 1968 was the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago in which protesters fought a street battle with police on national television.
A lot had changed between 1964 and 1968. Lyndon Johnson, who had done so much for the Civil Rights Act, was no longer a liberal hero, but now the hated architect of the Vietnam War. Discontent from young anti-war protesters had already pushed him off the ticket for renomination, and the establishment had rallied around his vice president Hubert Humphrey. A flood of young protesters had arrived in Chicago that year for the Democratic National Convention to support the anti-war Eugene McCarthy for president. Thousands of rowdy young protesters crowded into the city intending to make a ruckus.
The young protesters who packed into the city were looking for a fight. Mocking the DNC as a “Festival of Death,” activists held a counter program “Festival of Life.” Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies pulled stunts like nominating a pig for president, “Pigasus the Immoral.” Activists staged mock trials and mock funerals for democracy. Thousands of police and soldiers from the National Guard were called into the city to keep order.
After days of clashes, things came to a head the night of Humprey’s nomination. Police used tear gas to flush the protesters out of Chicago’s Grant Park. When protesters refused to disperse, thousands of police and soldiers moved in swinging batons and making mass arrests. Protesters darted around the city, in and out of buildings, through the swinging batons and gas, shouting at the police. The chaos was captured on television while Humphrey accepted the nomination, creating an iconic contrast.
That was the Spirit of 1968. This was the epitome of the Baby Boomer protest movement.
Boomer protests were centered around the war in Vietnam, for quite understandable reasons—and opposition to the war, and the draft, created the core of a New Left. While Vietnam was center stage, New Left activists merged this antiwar movement into a flurry of other causes: ending racial inequality, empowering women, and saving the natural environment. In each, they maintained the same militant tone claiming the impossibility of reform and the need for revolution against the system. Their protests were rowdy, with stunts and shouting and theatrics. New Left activists rejected the nonviolent principles of their predecessors.
New Left activists also veered into outright political violence. The Weathermen, an offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, believed nonviolence had failed and revolutionary violence was needed, so they declared “Days of Rage” to riot and threaten the system. Other groups like the Symbionese Liberation Army conducted terror attacks, bank robberies, and kidnappings. The Black Panther Party openly broke with Martin Luther King’s ethic of nonviolence. Under this new spirit, riots broke out in major cities across America, sometimes burning neighborhoods to the ground. In the “Long Hot Summer” of 1967, America had over 150 urban riots.
What exactly did the New Left movement achieve? It failed to nominate its anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy in Chicago. The nomination went easily to Humphrey, who went on to lose to Richard Nixon 301 electoral votes to 191, with 46 more going to segregationist George Wallace. In 1972, the New Left captured the party apparatus to nominate its own New Left candidate, George McGovern. He lost to Nixon 520 electoral votes to 17.
What policies can the New Left claim? It didn’t even manage to stop the Vietnam War or end the draft. Vietnam dragged on for the better part of another decade after 1968, ending only in 1975 under Nixon when it was already clearly a lost cause. After all its sound and fury, the New Left and its radicalism resulted in fiasco.
Politically, the New Left so discredited itself with America that, on a national level, it destroyed the Democratic Party for a generation. The New Left was so unpopular by 1980 that Reagan won 489 electoral votes to 49. Reagan was re-elected in 1984 with 525 electoral votes to 13. The New Left and its antics had driven a winning coalition out of the Democratic Party, and a Republican Party that had struggled in the minority since FDR was now in the national driver’s seat.
Democracy Is About Persuasion
Set aside the moral debate about whether violent public threats are appropriate in a democracy. These tactics simply don’t work. Democracy is built around reason and persuasion. Civil rights happened because protesters convinced Americans to embrace necessary change—working through influence to change what the majority wants and believes.
Public tantrums do the opposite. According to democratic theory, if you can’t convince people to win enough votes to get the things you want, you’re supposed to lose. Violent protests are appropriate for toppling dictatorships, not influencing democracies. Storming the Bastille, jeering at Nicolae Ceaușescu—these can help you topple governments. If you aren’t actually intending to overthrow the republic, these tactics don’t work at securing democratic change.
Outbursts and performative displays harden hearts, distract from reasonable proposals, and stop change dead. When people are frustrated and frightened as you block their path to work, they don’t consider your perspective. They become outraged at your end-run around democracy and reject everything you believe.
This matters because we’re living at a time in which serious reform is needed. Americans, both on the left and the right, are frustrated with the country and fear the hollowing out of the American Dream. Tackling this is going to take hard work. In place of serious reform, we get threats and histrionics. We get more Che Guevara, and less Edmund Burke. The young people who should become the ground troops for serious reform have sidelined themselves as irrelevant.
I don’t entirely blame them. They’ve been lied to. In a bid to steal valor they didn’t earn, their teachers and leaders told them this is how change happens. It’s long past time for this dangerous myth to die.
Frank DiStefano is the author of The Next Realignment and writes the Substack Renew The Republic.
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That does get the 60s all wrong. But the idea that Boomers have encouraged a legacy of violent protest is the myth. Weeks ago, 5 million people hit the streets in protest. Where was this so-called Boomer encouragement of violence? There was no violence. The premise of the article is flawed even if the point of the article is valid.
I agree with the rehistoricized story of civil rights legislation as well as the critique of violent protest as not only failing to accomplish change, but as sparking backlash. I think it is appropriate to link that to the New Left and point to its failures.
I think the focus on "Boomers," though, is a little weaseling in that it makes the same myth-making mistake as originally criticized. The notion of 20-year generational spans lumps together too many folks without reference to what those people are experiencing at key formative moments of their lives. The oldest among the Boomers might have attended the MLK speech as teens. Their little siblings were young kids in 1964 and were still kids in 1968. The youngest Boomers voted by a large margin for Reagan in one of their first elections. That's why the "OK, Boomer" effect obscures as much as it reveals.
What, to me, is more interesting is the ongoing conversation on the Left, including the New Left (and now including the MAGA Right), about social change and violence. That should also include the Labor Movement over time, the Women's Movement, the Temperance Movement, and even Right-wing movements like Stop the Steal, which had its own set of issues about violence.