The anxieties of the 1950s intensified as the Cold War heated up. JFK ’s election promised a New Frontier, and then his assassination extinguished that flame. On the one hand, the civil rights, Chicano (El Movimiento), women’s, student democracy, labor union, environmental, and public interest movements of the 1960s promoted a robust government response in which Congress passed hundreds of new laws to address the concerns raised by the movements. LBJ’s Great Society also included an array of social program that addressed the extraordinary level of poverty in the country. On the other hand, the Vietnam War significantly dampened the hopes for a Great Society as tensions arose between those for and against our continued presence in Vietnam, weakened trust in government. The political movements added to this lack of trust when they supported legal procedures to make sure that government did its job. As faith in government receded, and the reaction to the extraordinary expansion of government intensified, the table was set for a new allegiance to a market economy.

The War on Poverty was in many ways a political slogan rather than a concrete set of policy initiatives. Often invoked interchangeably with the “Great Society,” it included anti-poverty programs that contributed to America’s patchwork safety net and other initiatives intended to maximize the individual citizen’s ability to realize his or her fullest potential. Conservatives then and later derided the War on Poverty as a failed attempt at economic redistribution that led millions of Americans into a state of permanent dependency on the government, but in truth, LBJ and his aides never seriously contemplated policies that would enforce equality of income, wealth, or condition. They did not broadly support quantitative measures like a guaranteed minimum income or employment. Instead, they believed that qualitative measures like education, workforce training, and access to health care and food security would level the playing field and help poor people realize their share of a growing economy. When economic growth sputtered in the early 1970s, the limitations of these policy decisions became immediately evident. But, considered on its own terms, the War on Poverty proved a lasting and important component of the nation’s response to poverty.

President Lyndon B. Johnson and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. stand out as remarkable co-architects of the movement for racial progress and just democracy that marked the decade of the 1960s. Individually, each put an indelible stamp of the civil rights and Great Society eras. Together, for a time, they formed perhaps the most formidable political tandem between a president and social justice movement leader in American history. Yet their relationship was also a fraught one,  filled with creative tension, political conflicts, and personal disappointments. This chapter delves into the arc of Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King Jr.’s relationship to tease out the extraordinary ways they were able to galvanize America toward some of the most remarkable achievements of the nation’s Second Reconstruction; yet, by the end of the public political careers, they grew increasingly distant, combative, and disappointed in the other. Ultimately, the chapter argues that, despite their political differences, their evolving relationship helped to fundamentally transform postwar American democracy even as it framed the limits of the political liberalism within which such change could occur.

The Great Migration ended in 1970 as manufacturing was replaced with electronic goods. Wages stagnated, and income inequality increased rapidly. This led to a new Gilded Age. Nixon replaced Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty with his War on Drugs. Blacks were opposed to Nixon’s Vietnam War, and he penalized them by incarcerating them. This, helped by state laws and President Reagan, led to mass incarceration – which became known as the New Jim Crow. Public education was reserved for suburban whites, while urban Blacks were in prison or attended underfunded schools. The Flint, Michigan, water crisis demonstrates the difficulty of urban Blacks as jobs and urban facilities disappeared. President Obama was the first Black president, elected in the financial crisis of 2008. The Supreme Court nullified the 1965 Voting Act as it had done with amendments in the 1880s. Obamacare was the most enduring achievements of Obama’s presidency.