“About one-fifth of the people are against everything all of the time.”

Some observers have expressed surprise that two populist, anti-establishment candidates who many people view as “extremists” won sizeable percentages of the votes in the 2016 presidential primary elections.

But in the past there have been other high profile populist presidential candidates who based their campaigns on disdain for “the establishment” and passionate opposition to something.

In 1964, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy uttered a oft-cited political quotation that is a reference to this phenomenon, though the connection is not widely known.

Speaking to a group of law students at the the University of Pennsylvania on May 6, 1964, Kennedy observed:

      “About one-fifth of the people are against everything all of the time.”

This quote (often given without the word “About”) is found in many books and on many websites, usually without any explanation of the context. 

Unfortunately, as far as I know, the speech is not posted anywhere online.

However, there is an old news story in the Google News Archive that sheds light on why Kennedy made the remark.

It’s a brief Associated Press article about the speech that ran in newspapers later that week.

The article notes that Kennedy was commenting on the fact that a sizeable percentage of U.S. voters had recently voted for Alabama Governor George Wallace in the 1964 Democratic Presidential primary elections.

Wallace was among the most prominent opponents of racial desegregation and efforts to secure equal rights for African Americans in the 1960s.

In his inaugural address as Governor on January 14, 1963, he famously committed himself to “segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

On June 11, 1963, Wallace took his infamous “Stand in the Schoolhouse Door” at the University of Alabama. He literally stood in front of the door of the traditionally segregated school to try to block the entry of two black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood.

That and other highly publicized anti-integration antics and statements by Wallace made him the darling of pro-segregation whites in Southern and Northern states.

Buoyed by his notoriety, Wallace ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1964 against incumbent President Lyndon Baines Johnson, who had succeeded John F. Kennedy after Kennedy was assassinated on November 22, 1963.

Like JFK, President Johnson was supportive of the Civil Rights movement and committed to enforcing court-mandated desegregation of schools and other public facilities.

As Attorney General, Robert Kennedy was in the forefront of that battle. He was also helping Johnson push for enactment of landmark civil rights legislation in Congress, which had initially been proposed by his brother in 1963.

During the Democratic primary race, George Wallace waged a fiery populist campaign against Johnson, the Democratic and Washington establishment and desegregation.

Editorial writers, church leaders, trade unions, Democratic Party leaders and many other people and groups denounced him as an extremist, a right-wing racist and kook.

Nonetheless, thousands of cheering supporters showed up at his campaign events. And, he did surprisingly well in many primary elections—including those in some Northern states.

He won a third of the votes in Wisconsin, 43% in Maryland and nearly 30% in Indiana.

Robert F. Kennedy’s May 6th speech at the University of Pennsylvania came one day after the Indiana primary.

Kennedy decided to comment on it.

Here’s how the Associated Press story summarized what he said:

     PHILADELPHIA (AP) – Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy says he “was not surprised” at the strong vote for Gov. George C. Wallace of Alabama in the Indiana presidential primary.
     Kennedy, speaking to 300 law students at the University of Pennsylvania Wednesday, said “there is a revolution now in the United States over civil rights and people don’t like to have their lives disturbed.”
     “It’s not surprising then,” he added, “that one-third of the people in Indiana voted for Wallace. About one-fifth of the people are against everything all the time.”
     Wallace, who campaigned against the civil rights bill pending in the Senate, got more than 29 per cent of the votes in losing to Democratic Gov. Matthew E. Welsh.

Of course, Johnson went on to win the Democratic nomination and the presidential election of 1964.

On that same election night in 1964, Robert F. Kennedy was elected U.S. Senator for New York.

Four years later, his own run at the presidency was cut short when he was assassinated by Sirhan Sirhan.

Would Kennedy have won the 1968 presidential election if he’d lived? Possibly.

Republican Richard Nixon won with less than a 1% margin in the popular vote over Democratic nominee Hubert H. Humphrey, who was less well known and less popular than Kennedy.

George Wallace ran for president again in 1968 as a third party candidate.

His policy positions appealed to independent, anti-establishment voters. The majority were angry white men.

They felt the federal government and courts were trying to force things down their throats that they totally disagreed with and the politicians were wasting their tax dollars on welfare and foreign aid. And, they agreed with Wallace’s claim that “there's not a dime's worth of difference between the two major parties.”

Wallace pledged to address many of the key things they were against. He pledged to end federal efforts at desegregation, reduce spending on welfare programs, slash foreign aid, stop the “tyranny” of the U.S. Supreme Court and block gun control proposals.

In the November 1968 election he received 13.5% of the popular vote.

As in 1964, most of the people who voted for Wallace in 1968 clearly fit the demographics of the “antis” Robert Kennedy had in mind when he made his famous observation.

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“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Like virtually all African Americans who grew up in Mississippi during the first half of the 20th century, Fannie Lou Hamer endured many injustices in her life.

Some went beyond the typical day-to-day discrimination of the Southern “Jim Crow” social system.

In 1961, Hamer was sterilized without her consent or knowledge by a white doctor, as a part of an officially sanctioned plan to reduce the number of poor blacks in the state.

When she tried to register to vote, the white farmer she worked for fired and evicted her.

In 1962, Hamer become an active volunteer for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), one of the leading civil rights groups of the era.

In 1963, during a trip to register black voters in Winona, Mississippi, Hamer and four other SNCC volunteers were savagely beaten and arrested by the police. She later recalled that, from her cell, she could hear the sound of continued beatings and a policeman yelling: “Can you say, ‘yes, sir,’ nigger?”

It took Hamer more than a month to recover and she was left partially disabled for the rest of her life.

Undeterred, she went on to help organize the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

In 1964, the MFDP officially asked the the National Democratic Party to seat their chosen delegates at the party’s upcoming National Democratic Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey.

This created a dilemma for the Democrats. At the time, the official Democratic Party delegation from Mississippi was all white. Those members demanded that the Credentials Committee reject the MFDP’s request. They warned that Southern Democrats would abandon President Lyndon Johnson in the 1964 presidential election if any black delegates were seated.

The Credentials Committee members were concerned about a white voter backlash in the South. But they were also concerned about appearing to be opposed to the civil rights movement. So, they invited Hamer and her group to make a presentation to them during the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City.

Hamer appeared before the committee on August 22, 1964.

She gave an amazingly moving account of the harassment and violence she and other blacks had been subjected to while trying to gain the right to vote in Mississippi.

President Johnson quickly tried to divert attention from Hamer’s appearance and the delegate seating issue by holding an impromptu press conference focusing on other issues. But, to his dismay, Hamer’s speech received widespread coverage in the national press.

Johnson then sent Senator Hubert Humphrey and other Democratic leaders to meet with Hamer and her colleagues. He offered to give the MFDP two non-voting seats at the convention. They refused to accept this crumb or any other token “compromises” the Democrats offered.

When asked why she persisted, Fannie Lou gave an answer she’d used before when asked why she persevered in her civil rights efforts.

“All my life I’ve been sick and tired. Now I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.’”

The last part of Hamer’s response — “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired” — became a famous quote forever associated with her.

After failing to get Hamer and the MFDP to accept a compromise, Johnson and the Democrats decided they feared a white Southern backlash in 1964 more than rejection by the black Americans who were able to vote. They refused to seat any MFDP members as voting delegates.

But the public attention generated by the issue and by Hamer’s speech added to the momentum for change.

A year later, the Democratically-controlled Congress passed — and President Johnson signed into law — the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which prohibited states from denying voting rights “on account of race.”

For its 1968 national convention, the National Democratic Party adopted a policy requiring African Americans to be fairly represented in state delegations.

One of the voting delegates seated at that 1968 convention was Fannie Lou Hamer.

I wonder what she’d say about the recent sad series of events in Ferguson, Missouri.

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“No rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

On March 6, 1857, the U.S. Supreme Court issued it’s controversial decision on Scott v. Sandford — generally referred to as “the Dred Scott case.”

The plaintiff, Dred Scott, was a slave purchased from the Blow family of St. Louis in 1831 by U.S. Army surgeon John Emerson.

Over the next 12 years, Emerson took Scott with him to various places where he was assigned. When Emerson died in 1843, Scott tried to purchase his freedom from the doctor’s widow, Irene. She denied his request.

So, in 1846, Scott sued for his freedom on the grounds that Dr. Emerson had previously taken him to Illinois, where slavery was prohibited by state law, and to the Wisconsin Territory, where federal law prohibited slavery as part of the “Missouri Compromise” in 1820.

Scott lost in his first trial, then won in a second — only to have that decision overturned by the Missouri State Supreme Court. In 1854, with the help of local abolitionists, Scott filed suit in Federal Court against John Sanford, Mrs. Emerson's brother and executor of the Emerson estate.

When that case was decided in favor of Sanford, Scott and his allies appealed it to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The infamous, oft-quoted conclusion of the Supreme Court’s decision, written by Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, was that current or former slaves and their descendants had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

Taney wrote in the majority decision:

“In the opinion of the court, the legislation and histories of the times, and the language used in the Declaration of Independence, show, that neither the class of persons who had been imported as slaves, nor their descendants, whether they had become free or not, were then acknowledged as a part of the people, nor intended to be included in the general words used in that memorable instrument...They had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit."

The Supreme Court’s decision in the Dred Scott case was among the most consequential in American history and key aspects of it are ironic in hindsight.

One irony is that the decision was not just a blow against the rights of blacks. It was also a blow to states rights, a principle often espoused by Southern states to justify slavery and oppose federal civil rights laws.

In the Dred Scott decision, the Supreme Court concluded that, under the U.S. Constitution, states had no right prohibit slavery. Many people on both sides of the slavery debate had hoped the Court’s decision would resolve the issue. Instead, it had the opposite effect. It made that issue hotter than ever and helped propel the country into a civil war that turned the temporary legal win of slaveholders into a final defeat.

The grave implications of the Dred Scott decision were clear to Abraham Lincoln. They were the main focus of his famous “House Divided” speech on June 16, 1858, at the Illinois Republican convention in Springfield, Illinois.

In that speech, Lincoln warned that the Court’s decision took away the rights of states to make their own decisions and would eventually force the legalization of slavery throughout the country.

“What Dred Scott's master might lawfully do with Dred Scott, in the free State of Illinois,” Lincoln said, “every other master may lawfully do with any other one, or one thousand slaves, in Illinois, or in any other free State.”

Using a quote from the Bible, Lincoln also made a famous, correct prediction:

“‘A house divided against itself cannot stand.’ I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved; I do not expect the house to fall; but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new, North as well as South.”

After the South lost the Civil War, the Dred Scott decision was nullified by the Thirteenth Amendment and Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which officially prohibited slavery nationwide and granted citizenship to former slaves. Dred Scott didn’t live to see those great legal victories. However, he did enjoy a brief period of freedom.

Shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision in 1857, Irene Emerson’s second husband convinced her to return ownership of Scott to the Blow family in St. Louis.

The head of the family at that time was Missouri Congressman Henry Taylor Blow, a strong opponent of slavery.

On May 26, 1857, Blow gave Scott his freedom — which was allowed under Missouri law despite the Supreme Court’s ruling that states could not prohibit slavery.

Once freed, Scott got a job working as a hotel porter in St. Louis.

A little over a year later, on September 17, 1858, he died from tuberculosis.

Today, his body lies in a grave in the Calvary Cemetery in St. Louis. For many years, it has been a local tradition to place Lincoln pennies on his headstone. Often, the pennies overflow and fall next to the commemorative marker on the ground, which says:

IN MEMORY OF A SIMPLE MAN
WHO WANTED TO BE FREE
DRED SCOTT

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