Blog for class 17

It seems that whatever progress the civil rights movement had achieved stalled in 1968, with King and Kennedy’s assassinations. I was also a bit surprised by the extreme backlash to the civil rights movement. Patterson mentions the millions of white Americans who seemed to be angry with everything, from the “outrageous excesses” of the blacks, as well as “a mounting unease with much that was modern”. It seems that this environment was the perfect storm for Nixon in to swoop in and win the election. He managed to exploit the public’s dissatisfaction with Vietnam, as well as their resentments towards “far-off government bureaucrats, especially liberals, who tried to tell people what to do,” and also destroyed Humphrey in many Western states.