Nixon blamed rising crime on civil rights disobedience rather than poverty

Evidence

Conservative white people mostly rejected the Kerner Commission’s report, preferring to place responsibility for the widespread political violence directly and solely on the Black community and an imagined culture of lawlessness that had been encouraged by civil rights protests. Throughout the civil rights movement, conservative politicians like Richard Nixon argued that the increasing crime rate was not caused by poverty or joblessness but, instead, “can be traced directly to the spread of the corrosive doctrine that every citizen possesses an inherent right to decide for himself which laws to obey and when to disobey them.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 398

Categorization

• XREF: This conservative counter-narrative over riots connects to the chapter’s overall reframing dispute — who gets to name the cause of Black uprisings is itself contested history. — connects to: Nixon administration blamed fragmented local oversight, not ignorance, for sprawl — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 955