Chain Reaction: The Impact of Race, Rights, and Taxes on American Politics.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

I first learned what the word "race" meant when I was about six. That would have been 1964, the year identified by Thomas and Mary Edsall (*) as the moment when northern white support for the civil rights agenda reached its high watermark. In 1964, Lyndon Johnson signed a civil rights bill that for the first time prohibited racial segregation in all public facilities and brought the full weight of the federal government down on employers who refused to hire people then known as Negroes. Later that year, Johnson won a landslide presidential victory--the only Democrat to do so during my lifetime.

I remember LBJ's trouncing of Barry Goldwater, but I took no notice of the Civil Rights Act. Still, the word "race" must have been in the air in the uppermiddle-class section of New Rochelle, New York, where we lived, because one day I asked our housekeeper, Sophie, what the word meant. Sophie explained that race was a way to describe the color of your skin. She belonged to the Negro race because her skin was black. I belonged to the white race because my skin was white, I said I though race meant whoever runs faster wins, and Sophie matter-of-factly replied that black people and white people were in a race, and the white people were winning.

We were a liberal Democrat family in a liberal Democrat community. Then, as now, the whites most ardently in favor of expanding opportunities for blacks tended to be the same sort who could afford to employ a black live-in maid. (Today the domestic is more likely to be Hispanic, but that has less to do with changing mores than changing demographics.) Race was an increasingly visible aspect of our lives, and my family responded with the jittery, befuddled urge to do right that was typical of northern suburbanites of that era. When a middle-class black family moved onto our street--from Minnesota, of all places--we bustled about to make them feel welcome. My grade school principal was a black female Ph.D. whom we respectfully called Doctor, and several of the teachers were black, too. The pupils were mostly white, but that was mitigated somewhat by the busing of black kids from New Rochelle's vaguely raffish downtown.

These were the days when children were still taught that the suffering of blacks was entirely the result of southern oppression. The Mississippi killings of civil rights activists Andrew Goodman and Michael Schewerner, white New Yorkers, drove home the point that southern bigots were a menace to us all. The disdain with which we northern suburbanites viewed the mid-sixties white southern power structure was captured perfectly in the movie In the Heat of the Night. The Bull Connor-esque sheriff played by Rod Steiger was the very soul of southern bigotry; that the black detective played by Sidney Poitier was the sheriff's moral and intellectual superior was demonstrated most vividly by the fact that he didn't have a trace of a southern accent.

Civil whites

Of course, political events over the next quarter-century showed how smug we northerners really were, as busing, affirmative action, and Willie...