Monday, October 5, 2020

Pushin' too hard

 In 1962, the Gallup Poll asked "Do you think the Kennedy administration is pushing racial integration too fast, or not fast enough?"  They repeated it (with change to "Johnson administration" or sometimes just "administration" pretty frequently until 1968.  Here is a summary measure, percent "too fast" minus percent "not fast enough."

The numbers are always positive--that is, more people said "too fast."    The smallest values were around the time of Johnson's inauguration and just after the assassination of Martin Luther King.  The highest were in August 1963, just before the March on Washington, and the second half of 1966.  

The percentages for the individual categories ("don't knows" are omitted--they didn't show any pattern):  

"Too fast" and "not fast enough" both tended to increase over time, and "about right" declined.  The increase in "not fast enough" was mostly during the "long hot summer" of 1967, while the increase in "too fast" was more steady.   The ups and downs are intriguing, but I don't know enough detail about the history of the 1960s to offer a hypothesis. 

 

[Data from the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research]




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