#election1964

A CIA officer named E. Howard Hunt—later made infamous for his role in the Watergate break-in—was in charge of the operation. Hunt’s role in the Goldwater caper can be traced back to his involvement in the CIA’s disastrous attempt to depose Fidel Castro by landing a ragtag group of Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in April 1961. Like many agency officers associated with the fiasco, he was put in a kind of purgatory, assigned to a desk job that lacked the excitement or career-advancement potential of foreign clandestine operations.

In National Review, Buckley gave Virginia newspaper editor James Kilpatrick a platform to assure readers that desegregation challenged American values. Black Americans had no right to the equality declared unanimously by the Supreme Court, Kilpatrick wrote. Rather, the white community had an established right “to peace and tranquillity [sic]; the right to freedom from tumult and lawlessness.” Desegregation would lead to bloody violence, he promised, implying that Black Americans would rage and riot, although, in fact, it was the white community that was attacking Black Americans. In 1964, Arizona senator Barry Goldwater brought these two themes to his presidential campaign. He stood firm on the idea that the federal government had no business either regulating business or protecting equality. In The Conscience of a Conservative, published under his name in 1960, Goldwater asserted that the federal government had no power over schools at all and certainly could not order them to desegregate.

Just as in the wake of the election the nation’s voting booths knew only two numbers—Johnson’s 61.2 percent to Goldwater’s 38.8—newspapers tended to stop at two as well: the $17 million raised by Lyndon Johnson, versus the $12 million raised by Goldwater. What that ignored was that in 1960, 22,000 people donated to JFK’s campaign and 44,000 to Nixon’s. Over a million gave to Barry Goldwater. And that made all the difference.

Fannie Lou Hamer didn’t go to the ‘64 convention demanding—as some Black Lives Matter activists do today—that Black leadership be foregrounded. As she stared down the Democratic party and their allies in the national Black leadership class, she did so as a member of a grassroots political party intimately connected with the needs of poor people in Mississippi. It has always been the centering of participatory politics, not the elevation of Black leadership, that has been truly threatening to white elites. That’s why a concerted effort was made to destroy Fannie Lou and the MFDP, and within ten years, their form of participatory political organizing had been all but extinguished.