1 June 2020 — 1855 mdt
Nixon exploited the 1968 race riots to win the presidency —
Donald Trump could do the same with today’s riots
James Earl Ray assassinated civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April 1968 in Memphis, TN, inciting race riots across the nation. At least 40 persons were killed, sections of cities were set ablaze, and stores were looted. The extent of the rioting is displayed in this map from Clay Risen’s A Nation on Fire:
In Washington, D.C, where federal troops were deployed, the flames of our nation’s capital city burning were visible from the White House. Large numbers of Americans, although appalled by King’s murder, fearing for their own safety, made law and order, not racial justice, their highest priority.
In his speech accepting the Republican nomination for president that summer, former vice president Richard Nixon said:
The choice we make in 1968 will determine not only the future of America but the future of peace and freedom in the world for the last third of the Twentieth Century.
And the question that we answer tonight: can America meet this great challenge?
For a few moments, let us look at America, let us listen to America to find the answer to that question.
As we look at America, we see cities enveloped in smoke and flame.
We hear sirens in the night.
We see Americans dying on distant battlefields abroad.
We see Americans hating each other; fighting each other; killing each other at home.
And as we see and hear these things, millions of Americans cry out in anguish.
Did we come all this way for this?
Did American boys die in Normandy, and Korea, and in Valley Forge for this?
Listen to the answer to those questions.
It is another voice. It is the quiet voice in the tumult and the shouting.
It is the voice of the great majority of Americans, the forgotten Americans—the non-shouters; the non-demonstrators.
They are not racists or sick; they are not guilty of the crime that plagues the land.
They are black and they are white—they’re native born and foreign born —they’re young and they’re old.
They work in America’s factories.
They run America’s businesses.
They serve in government.
They provide most of the soldiers who died to keep us free.
They give drive to the spirit of America.
They give lift to the American Dream.
They give steel to the backbone of America.
They are good people, they are decent people; they work, and they save, and they pay their taxes, and they care.
Like Theodore Roosevelt, they know that this country will not be a good place for any of us to live in unless it is a good place for all of us to live in.
This I say to you tonight is the real voice of America. In this year 1968, this is the message it will broadcast to America and to the world.
Donald Trump, crude, cruel, a provocateur, not a conciliator, is fanning the flames of the riots triggered by the homicide of George Floyd, throwing red meat to his core supporters. So reprehensible is his behavior that it’s tempting to believe that his approach will backfire.
But that might not happen. Humankind’s primal instinct for safety first kicks in when civil unrest occurs; law and order becomes the highest priority of voters.
America is burning again, and the flames may turn Joe Biden’s candidacy into ashes.