"A War within Our Own Boundaries": Lyndon Johnson's Great Society and the Rise of the Carceral State

Abstract

Over the five summers of Lyndon B. Johnson’s presidency, the nation witnessed more than 250 incidents of urban civil disorder. The violence—termed riots by policy makers, journalists, and the public—swept American cities and resulted in the deaths of more than two hundred black Americans, thirteen thousand injured civilians and officers, and the destruction of billions of dollars worth of property. Beginning with the killing of an unarmed black fifteen-year-old boy by New York City police that sparked the Harlem riot in July 1964, the uprisings constituted a prolonged and sporadic conflict involving more than one hundred thousand black participants and law enforcement officials. By the close of the 1960s these uprisings—sparked not by white hostility to integration like earlier race riots but by the presence of exploitative and exclusionary institutions in black neighborhoods—constituted the greatest period of domestic bloodshed the nation had witnessed since the Civil War.1 Unprecedented in its fury and frequency, this disorder radically reshaped the direction of Johnson’s Great Society programs, resulting ultimately in a merger of antipoverty programs with anticrime programs that laid the groundwork for contemporary mass incarceration. The links that the fire of urban discord forged between the fighting of crime and the fighting of urban inequality were established as early as 1965, in the three pieces of legislation that represented the Johnson administration’s legislative response to the civil rights movement. In March of that year, the administration presented to Congress the