Burned, Baby, Burned

But political rebellion always leaves in its wake people who are moved more by the sheer theatrics of acting up than by the actual goals of the protest. At the University of California at Berkeley in 1964, for example, the Free Speech Movement rose up against indefensible suppression of students' speaking truth to power. But on the same campus the following year, a new bunch started the "Filthy Speech Movement," based on emblazoning curse words on placards and watching the suits squirm. It was rebellion for rebellion's sake.

That kind of unintentional by-product of genuine activism hit black America between the eyes. Seasoned black civil rights leaders like Bayard Rustin and A. Phillip Randolph -- who had made real, if gradual, progress in the struggle -- watched as younger sorts shunned their brass-tacks lobbying and rhetorical persuasion in favor of high-profile altercations, preferably involving getting arrested on television. In 1963, Rustin told the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that "the ability to go to jail should not be substituted for an overall social reform program." But Rustin's speech didn't go over too well with SNCC that night, and three years later, the group edged out undramatic but proactive John Lewis as its leader in favor of rabble-rousing polemicist Stokely Carmichael. Acting out was now the main point.

The idea that rebellion for its own sake was the soul of black authenticity began with some charismatic figures like Carmichael and H. Rap Brown, but soon imprinted a new generation of black artists and intellectuals. The new mood was seductive in its visceral impact, especially to a people whose history had given them so little else to base an identity upon.

Certainly not all blacks fell for it. But enough did that some hotheads surrounding some police cars in Watts one night could spark a vast rebellion instead of being shouted down and ignored.Why not just embrace August 1965 as the time when black America, for whatever reason, started "speaking up?" Because to settle for this is to ignore the destruction of black communities that the new mood left in its wake.

This was not only the physical destruction still on view in the black sections of cities like Detroit, or in less renowned cities like Indianapolis, where solid businesses never returned after the 1967 riot, leaving once-fabled Indiana Avenue hard to imagine as anything but the downmarket stretch that it has since been. There is the deeper destruction that was ultimately wrought. The hopeless plight of today's black inner city is often blamed on the flight of low-skilled factory jobs and the rise of drugs in poor urban neighborhoods. These factors surely contributed to inner-city misery, but my research leads me to conclude that they were hardly the leading causes of the psychic deterioration that soon overtook poor black America. That, instead, was the urban welfare state that was in large part the product of the model of high-pitched, menacing protest that had now been established.

That model was quickly taken up by the National Welfare Rights Organization the year after Watts. As has been documented in many studies, Columbia University professors Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven declared to the press and beyond that poor blacks would be better off seeking welfare payments than working in low-level jobs. They explicitly predicted that if they brought enough people onto the welfare rolls, it would force the government to give a guaranteed income to all poor people. They taught a squadron of activists, many of them black women, to stage rallies across the country and disrupt public meetings calling for welfare to be easier to get, more generous and easier to stay on.

Rarely has radical idealism had such a destructive effect on so many lives. Before the '60s, welfare payments had been intended for widows and women whose children's fathers were nowhere to be found. But in the wake of the new agitation, municipal governments relaxed the old requirements bit by bit.

The new politics of protest was a potent weapon. The riots loomed always as a threat (partly because the Black Panthers loomed menacingly at many of the rallies), and many politicians knuckled under. From 1966 to 1970, the number of people on welfare nationwide doubled from under 500,000 to almost a million. This was not part of Washington's Great Society agenda, which focused on job creation and training. It was a radical side effort, with grievous consequences.

The change was most profound in black communities -- because blacks had been the main target of the recruitment efforts. In Indiana from 1964 to 1972, welfare recipiency tripled in only 11 of 92 counties. Of those 11, only one did not have a heavy black population -- in a state where about 75 counties were almost all white and poverty widespread in about 30 of them.

Over the next 30 years, multigenerational families lived on government money, fathers had no incentive to take care of the children they made, and poor black communities devolved from shabby but stable slums into hopeless, violent deathscapes. This lasted for so long that the precarious stability of old-time black communities was all but forgotten. But while communities changed, black attitude and political protest as performance has come to seem normal. The models for leadership are not Shirley Chisholms, but talkers like Al Sharpton. And when a spark falls, like the Rodney King verdict in 1992, the same impulses and often the same type of violence travel through black communities as did in Watts.

These are the sad examples of what happened when agitprop went mainstream in black activism. The Watts riots were useful in helping push racial injustice further into the national conversation. But the kind of protest model Watts exemplified would best have been left on the margins, as it had always been.

The new mood that the Watts riots inaugurated was a tragedy for black America, dragging poor blacks into depths of malaise they might never have known otherwise. This is why the Voting Rights Act is not the only reason that 1965 is the year that black America must never forget.

John McWhorter, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is the author of "Winning the Race: Beyond the Crisis in Black America," to be published by Gotham Books in February 2006.