At Canaan's Edge (46 page)

By December, there would be tensions within the hybrid network of organizers and volunteers. Some Chicagoans believed King's staff too readily downplayed their years of work on local school conditions. Others felt that King and his lieutenants were long on eloquence but short on concrete objectives. Andrew Young invoked historic experience in Birmingham and Selma to counsel patience with tumultuous experimentation, which he called inevitable in a movement gearing up through the Chicago winter. “When the grass turns green,” he said, “we've gotta have something in the streets.” King promised “something new” in the Northern campaign, but he did not advertise one glaring omission. With national prospects threatened by Vietnam, if not severed by President Johnson's preemptive bond with Mayor Daley, he framed Chicago as a localized struggle aimed at home decision. King set aside his drumbeat call for the whole nation to “rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed.” For the first time in his career—or in the tradition stretching back to Frederick Douglass's constitutional arguments against slavery—a campaign for racial justice would aim short of decisive intervention by American citizens as a whole.

October 1965

F
ERMENT
swirled the notions of group identity that shape politics. Almost daily, stark new dramas shifted meaning back and forth along the broad range of collective disposition toward people—from dear kinfolk all the way to enemy vermin, with intermediate stations including citizen, stranger, and foreigner. President Johnson's private chat with Mayor Daley about Chicago school money took place in Arthur Goldberg's new U.N. apartment at the Waldorf Towers, after ceremonies in New York harbor for the immigration bill. Standing beneath the Statue of Liberty, Johnson looked beyond an era long “twisted and distorted by the harsh injustice of the national quota system.” He said most of the world's people had been barred from naturalized citizenship in the United States “because they came from southern or eastern Europe, or from one of the developing continents,” while only three countries in Northern Europe received most of the legal entry slots. The law of selective national quotas “violated the basic principle of our democracy,” he declared. It was “un-American in the highest sense…untrue to the faith that brought thousands to these shores even before we were a country.”

“Today, with my signature, this system is abolished,” the President announced on October 3. “We can now believe it will never again shadow the gate to the American nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.”

Henceforth, aspiring immigrants from all nations would stand in one line for spaces within an overall yearly limit, which inexorably diversified American culture. The number of formerly proscribed Asian families grew sixteen-fold within the next ten years. Asians joined Latin Americans, Africans, and natives of the Middle East to become the vast majority of new immigrants, taking places formerly reserved for the few nations deemed the most Anglo-Saxon. Admissions from the whole of Europe declined to roughly 15 percent of the annual total. A separate stream of illegal aliens helped swell the nonnative population to 31 million people by the end of the century, but the law ensured a qualified influx from every spot on the globe. Mexico supplied a fifth of the 889,000 new citizens at naturalization ceremonies of 2000, according to Yale scholar Peter Schuck, with its leading share followed by successively smaller portions from Vietnam, China, the Philippines, India, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Jamaica, Iran, and on down the list. A school in Falls Church, Virginia, that remained white and Protestant as of 1965—J. E. B. Stuart High, named for the Confederate cavalry general—would draw fully half its 2001 student body of 1,400 from births dispersed among seventy countries.

Johnson embraced this future. “America was built by a nation of strangers,” he said on Liberty Island. Its founding ideals, “fed from so many cultures and traditions and peoples,” shaped an outlook of unique experience. Americans “feel safer and stronger,” he asserted, “in a world as varied as the people who make it up.” By its visionary conception, and immense effect, the Immigration Reform Act of 1965 rightfully joined the two great civil rights laws as a third enduring pillar of the freedom movement. Yet these high stakes went strangely unnoticed from the start. Despite Johnson's sweeping rhetoric, leading newspapers characterized the measure as a blow aimed at the Fidel Castro regime—“Johnson Offers Haven to Cuban Refugees”—delivered almost incidentally with a bill that “liberalizes immigration policies.” Few outlets went on to describe the law itself, or predict significant change. None detected a purpose akin to civil rights. An inherited belligerence in Cold War politics obscured the welcoming new premise that no foreigner was too foreign to become a fellow citizen.

Plainer news dominated the week. The President stayed in New York to greet Paul VI, the first Pope ever to visit the Western Hemisphere, and Sandy Koufax of the Los Angeles Dodgers refused to pitch the first game of the World Series on Yom Kippur. Months before, the congressional immigration debate had wafted quietly behind the Selma breakthrough. There were no marches or demonstrations to mark a civil rights controversy in black and white. On the House floor, Representative Emanuel Celler denounced the quota system for discriminations within Europe, “because it says, in effect, that an Englishman is better than a Spaniard, that a German is better than a Russian, that an Irishman is better than a Frenchman, that a Swede is better than a Pole.” In the Senate, Sam Ervin of North Carolina fell into thickets of antique science when he tried to explain the minuscule quota for Ethiopia. “Anthropologists, historians, and lexicographers assure us that the Abyssinians belong to the Semitic race, which is a branch of the Caucasian race,” he ventured. Protesting that he meant no “oblique aspersion upon American Negroes,” Ervin bemoaned the charged atmosphere. Comparative discourse on nations and peoples “nowadays arouses great emotions,” he warned, “and such emotions magnify the occupational hazards of senators.” Later, he candidly allowed that his Senate allies—being committed through the summer in desperate opposition to the voting rights bill—avoided combat on a second front by declining the “forlorn fight to preserve the national origins quota system.” Ervin and the once impregnable judiciary chairman, James Eastland of Mississippi, retreated with thanks for the restraint of the opposing floor manager, Edward Kennedy. As a young freshman senator, President Johnson's handpicked choice lacked the seniority customary for the task, but Kennedy marshaled votes to overwhelm the isolated core of Southerners by a tally almost identical to that of the final passage on the Voting Rights Act, 76–18. “It's really amazing,” Kennedy told
The Wall Street Journal.
“A year ago, I doubt the bill would have had a chance. This time it was easy.”

T
HE IMMIGRATION
debate, like the Selma movement, tested the most basic assumptions about humanity. What is race? What are its raw ingredients, if any? What is racial identity, and can boundaries or gradations be defined? These questions long had generated novel theories and unstable alliances across the disciplines of religion, science, and law. In early America, a prominent theorist of liberal faith on race was Rev. Charles Colcock Jones of Georgia, who had agonized from Princeton and Andover Seminary over slavery as “a complete annihilation of justice…fearful in the extreme.” Following the future abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, young Jones made a special trip in the late 1820s to consult the pioneer pamphleteer of emancipation, Benjamin Lundy, a Quaker harness-maker of Baltimore. Unlike Garrison, who first went to jail under Lundy's spell (“My soul was on fire then”), Jones inherited more than a hundred slaves on three plantations near Savannah. “Could I do more for the ultimate good of the slave population by holding or emancipating what I own?” he asked, and his answer was a lifelong quest to reconcile slavery with the full humanity of Negroes. He baptized and preached among them nearly alone for three decades before the Civil War. Called “Apostle to the Negro Slaves,” renowned as an author and national authority on race, Jones rebuked fellow Southern clergy for their indifference to the souls of slaves. “There has been neglect—shall it be said, a
criminal
neglect?” he wrote. “I feel it…. The whole country sees it. Can there be no reformation?” He convened planters in Charleston, South Carolina, to resolve that masters could address slaves as brothers or sisters in Christ without endangering the temporal order, but the opposition gentry swiftly imported the eminent Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz, to deliver a withering counterattack. “The brain of the Negro,” Agassiz told the Charleston Literary and Philosophic Society in 1845, “is that of the imperfect brain of a 7 month's infant in the womb of a White.”

Agassiz declared as a matter of science that the Negro was an entirely different species, separately created and grossly inferior, which brought enormous relief to slaveholders who denied or feared the implications of common humanity. Horrified, some in the Jones group tried to refute him by arguing that if whites and Negroes were distinct species, mulattoes would be as sterile as mules. The husbandry of mulattoes was an uncomfortable subject for them, however, and many professed with Agassiz that interbreeding was both “abhorrent to our nature” and potentially catastrophic for “the manly population descended from cognate nations.” So Jones thundered that slaveholders must stand first on the book of Genesis to proclaim the truth of a single human family sprung from Adam and Eve. “We cannot cry out against the Papists for withholding the Scriptures from the common people,” he wrote, “if we withhold the Bible from our servants.” Into the ravages of the Civil War and old age, Jones clung steadfastly to his theological truce with slavery, still “certain that the salvation of one soul will more than outweigh all the pain and woe of their capture and transportation, and subsequent residence among us.”

The publication of Charles Darwin's
On the Origin of Species
in 1859 eventually finished off Agassiz's theory of polygenism, or multiple creation of distinct human prototypes. By then Agassiz had captured Boston as the fresh celebrity of globe-trotting science. He drew crowds of five thousand to speeches on biology, paleontology, and his famous discoveries such as the Ice Age, married a Boston Cabot (who became the first president of Radcliffe), and inspired the industrialist Abbott Lawrence to endow for him the Lawrence Scientific School. “His Harvard appointment [in 1848] marked the beginning of the professionalization of American science,” observed intellectual historian Louis Menand, and Agassiz gained lasting stature as a founder of both the National Academy of Sciences and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Biology.

Early associates of Agassiz, both Darwinist and anti-Darwinist, labored for the rest of the nineteenth century to classify people by race. Craniologists Samuel Morton of Philadelphia and Josiah Nott of Mobile collected skulls. Phrenologist Peter Camper of Germany measured facial angles, foreheads, and jaws. Thomas Huxley of England (inventor of the term “agnostic”) and Paul Broca of the Paris Anthropological Society isolated thirty-four distinct shades of skin color. Robert Bean of Johns Hopkins compared brains by weight, John Fiske of Harvard analyzed wrinkles in brain lobes, and Peter Browne studied hair. An explosion of typologies from these among a host of literal racists—who sought to create a science of human variety—obscured the shortcomings of every effort. Scientists seldom agreed even on the number of categories, as Huxley counted four races, Joseph Deniker seventeen, Ernst Haeckel thirty-six. Proposed systems faltered on skillful demand for verification, often by Franz Boas of Columbia University, because the skulls of Lithuanians unaccountably matched those of Ethiopians. “It is possible that Boas did more to combat race prejudice than any other person in history,” race historian Thomas Gossett concluded in 1963.

The failed pretensions of science heaped pressure on judges at the turn of the twentieth century. Always, since the first Naturalization Act of 1790, federal law restricted eligibility for nonnative citizenship to “free white person[s],” and Congress raised the stakes of whiteness in 1907 by mandating that any American woman who married an ineligible alien be stripped of her own citizenship without trial. Courts accepted citizenship applications from some Syrians, Armenians, and Moroccans, but rejected others as nonwhite. A New York judge turned down a decorated U.S. Navy veteran of twenty-five years' service, born at sea to a British father, because his mother was of mixed Oriental descent. When Palestine native George Dow asserted in 1914 that Jesus “cannot be supposed to have clothed His Divinity in the body of one of a race that an American Congress would not admit to citizenship,” a South Carolina federal judge dismissed the argument as “purely emotional and without logical sequence,” but confessed perplexity over the maze of contending definitions. “What is the white race?” he asked.

The Supreme Court settled the statutory meaning twice within three months, holding first in November of 1922 that “the words ‘white person' are synonymous with the words ‘a person of the Caucasian race.'” This anthropological standard doomed the citizenship petition of Takao Ozawa, a Japanese immigrant of twenty-eight years' residence, who had submitted evidence of his own white skin along with scholarly opinions that “in Japan the uncovered parts of the body are also white.” The test of “mere color,” while obvious, had proved “manifestly…impracticable,” declared a unanimous Court, citing expert accord that skin tone “differs greatly among persons of the same race, even among Anglo-Saxons, ranging by imperceptible gradations from the fair blond to the swarthy brunette, the latter being darker than many of the lighter hued persons of the brown or yellow races.”

Only weeks later, the Justices were plainly vexed to hear in arguments for Bhagat Singh Thind that their own experts considered high-caste Punjabi Indians along with certain Polynesians and Hamites to be of Caucasian descent. Even worse, the racial term “Caucasian” appeared to rest on a single specimen in the collection of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach of Göttingen, who in 1795 had conjectured from the resemblance to his German skulls that ancient Europeans may have lived near the specimen's retrieval site in the Caucasus mountains of Russia.
*
The Justices reversed the
Ozawa
test with howls of newfound contempt for “the speculations of the ethnologist,” again unanimously. “What we now hold is that the words ‘free white persons' are words of common speech,” wrote Justice George Sutherland, “to be interpreted in accordance with the understanding of the common man, synonymous with the word ‘Caucasian' only as that word is popularly understood.” The
Thind
decision not only threw up expandable barriers to citizenship but also supported a wave of federal denaturalization actions and state laws against land ownership by Asians. “For the Court, science fell from grace,” concluded legal historian Ian Haney Lopez, “when it contradicted popular prejudice.”