Shades of Black and Green

Abstract

Over the course of the 1960s and early 1970s, the nature and public perception of racial and environmental crises in American metropolitan areas shifted dramatically. In response to emboldened and expanding numbers of activists, urban politicians both re-doubled old efforts and adopted new approaches. But how and to what extent did policymaking change? This article focuses on a New York powerfully shaped by Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, a pragmatic and ambitious man who forthrightly embodied a liberal approach to governing that placed confidence in the state's ability to solve social problems. The complex storm of 1960s era activism and the Rockefeller administration's attempts to adapt to the times revealed important contours of postwar American liberalism—its internal tensions and evolutions and its potential and limitations.