Kennedy: The Classic Biography (88 page)

In a mid-1961 news conference, without endorsing all the tactics of the “Freedom Riders” who chartered integrated bus trips into Dixie to test the desegregation of interstate travel facilities, the President endorsed their right to cross any and all state lines free from interference. The Freedom Riders situation—including the unchecked violence of Alabama mobs that burned buses and stormed churches—was a hint of the chaos to come. It tested the determination and patience of not only the President but the Attorney General, whose deepening convictions and unceasing effort in the civil rights area played a major role in all the events related hereafter.

It also tested their ingenuity, for there was no clear-cut Federal solution. “The Kennedys,” as they would thereafter be lumped in the South, dispatched six hundred deputy U.S. marshals to Alabama to protect the Freedom Riders, shamed Southern governors and mayors into enforcing law and order, brought suit against police officials and Klansmen interfering with interstate traffic or permitting violence against the travelers, initiated action before the Interstate Commerce Commission to enforce integration in the restaurants, waiting rooms and rest rooms at interstate rail and bus terminals, and prodded the major rail and bus lines into ending segregation for all terminals and passengers. Using Federal airport and other aviation funds as leverage, fifteen air terminals were also desegregated, two after legal action. By the end of 1962 enforced segregation in interstate transportation, theoretically outlawed by the Supreme Court back in 1950, had finally ceased to exist, and a Negro could travel for the first time from one end of the country to the other without seeing “White” or “Negro” signs in the waiting rooms.

Meanwhile the President tackled voting rights. He was convinced that enfranchising the Negroes in the South—where less than 10 percent were registered in many counties, compared to two-thirds of the Negroes in the North—could in time dramatically alter the intransigence of Southern political leaders on all other civil rights measures, shift the balance of political power in several states, and immunize Southern politics from the demagogue whose only campaign cry was “Nigger!” Later he was to realize that gaining the vote could not go far enough fast enough to remove a century of accumulated wrongs. But it was an important start. One of his earliest actions in 1961 was to aid Negro tenant farmers evicted for their voting activity in Haywood and Fayette counties, Tennessee. A Federal court order halted their eviction, Federal surplus foods helped them survive in the interim, and looking around at other Southern counties, the Justice Department cited sixteen where Negroes were in a majority but did not have a single registered voter.

Under the limited 1957 and 1960 voting rights laws, less than a dozen cases had been initiated in three years. None had been brought in Mississippi, home state of the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman. Beginning in 1961, more than three dozen were initiated and won in the next three years, with dozens of others in process (including many in Mississippi). Investigations, settlements or court actions were undertaken in practically every Southern county where discrimination prevailed. Many states and counties were voluntarily persuaded to abandon discriminatory or segregated registration and voting practices. In others—such as Forrest County, Mississippi, where the local registrar responded to a court order by accepting applications from 103 Negroes and finding 94 of them unqualified, including those with graduate degrees—follow-up court action was required. In still other areas the fear of reprisal was the chief deterrent to Negro registration, and in those areas suits were filed or assurances received against economic, physical, legal or other intimidation. In East Carroll Parish, Louisiana, a series of Federal lawsuits enabled Negroes to vote for the first time since Reconstruction. In Macon County, Alabama, newly registered Negroes comprised some 40 percent of the vote—and a racist candidate lost. In other areas Negro candidates emerged for the first time. Private foundations and organizations worked to interest and prepare Negroes for registration once the bars were down. Across the Attorney General’s report on two years of voting progress, the President wrote: “Keep pushing the cases.”

Under the 1954 decision, the Federal Government was given no right to “push” school desegregation cases. But some suits were initiated to implement court orders, and others already started by private litigants were joined by the Federal Government. Early in 1961 court action was obtained to protect the salaries of New Orleans teachers threatened by the state legislature for teaching integrated classes. The previous year, the Department of Justice had rejected the local Federal judge’s request for Federal help. Now all U.S. judges were put on notice that the government was determined to carry out the Constitution and court orders, regardless of the political consequences. Quiet and informal consultation with local officials in Atlanta, Little Rock, Memphis, Dallas and other cities helped open those schools to both races without violence. Negotiations and intervention were effective in the litigation over Prince Edward County, Virginia, where the public schools had shamefully been closed to prevent court-ordered integration (one of the few jurisdictions in the world outside of sub-Sahara Africa not offering free elementary education to all, the Attorney General pointed out—the President literally shook his head with incredulity when told of this situation, and continually pressed to end it). The Department of Justice helped arrange for the reopening of the schools and for the provision of temporary classes in the interim. An administrative order ended the Federally financed segregation of schoolchildren living on Federal bases.

A variety of other executive actions and orders barred segregation or discrimination in the armed forces Reserves, in the training of civil defense workers, in the off-base treatment of military personnel, in Federally aided libraries and in the summer college training institutes of the National Science Foundation and National Defense Education Act. The Department of Justice brought suits to end segregation in Federally financed hospitals; it filed “friend of the court” briefs on behalf of nondiscrimination in employment and public accommodations; and it brought police brutality prosecutions in all parts of the country.

Some of these moves were taken quietly to reduce resistance, some were made with fanfare to set an example. Some were taken in response to crises, some to initiate progress. The President still looked for the least divisive approach—but the walls of segregation were steadily leveled.

On the day after Thanksgiving, 1961, following a long day of meetings at Hyannis Port on trade, defense and other matters, the President, the Attorney General, Burke Marshall, O’Brien, O’Donnell and I met to reassess this approach. The President was generally satisfied with its progress. The literacy test and poll tax measures were to be sent up in January. The rate of executive actions was to be accelerated. The most difficult question was the timing of a long-promised Executive Order banning discrimination in Federally financed housing.

During the campaign the President had made much of Eisenhower’s refusal to implement “with the stroke of the pen” a Civil Rights Commission recommendation that such an order be issued. But once in office he moved cautiously. He waited until Congress acted on the nomination of Robert Weaver, who had previously spearheaded the drive for such an order, as head of the Housing and Home Finance Agency. Then he waited until Congress acted on his housing bill, of immense importance to Negro families in the low- and middle-income brackets. That bill, to be administered by Weaver, was dependent on Southern sponsorship and support in both the House and Senate. Then he waited for a full-scale report on housing from the Civil Rights Commission and for a more carefully drafted Executive Order to be prepared by the lawyers. Meanwhile he gave first priority to the Executive Order on employment and to administrative actions on voting, education and other areas.

But now it was late November. The order had been largely drafted, its remaining issues refined if not resolved. Civil rights groups were clamoring for the promised stroke of the pen. A new dilemma, however, had arisen. An important item in the 1962 legislative program was to be the elevation of the HHFA to Cabinet status as a Department of Urban Affairs. Weaver was to become the first Negro Cabinet member in history. The special concerns of the 125 million people living in urban and suburban areas were to receive the same representation at the Cabinet level as those of the thirteen million on the farm. Passage of the measure would be difficult. Its only hope rested with the two relatively moderate Alabamans who handled housing legislation in their respective chambers, Senator John Sparkman and Congressman Albert Raines. But their support, and that of their Southern colleagues, would not be possible if the Housing Order were issued first.

The President believed that the achievement of Weaver’s elevation, as well as the substantive values of the bill, were of sufficient importance to merit another delay. He would not renege on his commitment to issue the order, he said. But if the Urban Affairs bill could be passed promptly, the order would not be issued until a decent interval had elapsed—long enough for Congress to adjourn and be unable to protest, and possibly long enough for its Southern supporters to be re-elected, but in no event stretching beyond the end of the year.

Weaver preferred the order to the departmental bill, but he agreed that, if the President’s strategy could obtain both, more delay was not intolerable. The plan was derailed, however, when the House Rules Committee, reverting to its old role as chief legislative roadblock, killed the Urban Affairs bill by a 9-6 margin. The Southern members who customarily supported the administration joined all Republican and Dixiecrat members in voting “no.” The bill was dead in the Congress and the President was alive with indignation. “Imagine them claiming,” he said to me over the phone, talking a little louder and even faster than usual, “that this bill was bad bureaucratic organization. They’re against it because Weaver’s a Negro and I’d like to see them say it.” He asked me to have the measure redrafted—this time as a reorganization plan, which by law could be blocked only by a roll call. He also decided to state flatly—in answer to a planted news conference question—his intention to name Weaver to the new post. “Obviously,” he said, “if the [bill] had been passed, Mr. Weaver would have been appointed. It was well known on the Hill. The American people might as well know it.” To the charge that his strategy was based on partisan politics as well as principle, the President would have privately pleaded guilty.

The strategy backfired. It was more combative, more partisan and more obvious than his usual legislative approach—“so obvious it made them mad,” the President later commented. Instead of putting Republicans on the spot as intended, it hardened the GOP-Dixie coalition’s resistance. Instead of being a political master stroke, it produced new excuses to vote the measure down—partly because of the limitations inherent in the reorganization-plan method and partly because of a tangle in the legislative signals.

The Republicans attempted to protect themselves with Negro voters by announcing, as the President described it with a touch of sarcasm, that they were

now ready to support [Weaver] for any Cabinet position he wishes….I considered him admirably qualified for this particular position because he has had long experience in it. While I am sure he is grateful for those good wishes for a Cabinet position where there is no vacancy, I think he feels…that this country would have been better served to have voted for an Urban Department, and permitted him to continue his service in that capacity.

The fact remained that the Urban Affairs bill was lost, and any immediate issuance of the Housing Order would be attributed to petty spite. The President bided his time, uncertain about the economy, uncertain about naming Weaver to succeed Ribicoff or naming Hastie to the Supreme Court and uncertain whether issuance in the brief period between adjournment and election would look too partisan. His desire was to make a low-key announcement that would be as little divisive as possible. He found the lowest-key time possible on the evening of November 20, 1962. It was the night before he and much of the country closed shop for the long Thanksgiving weekend. The announcement was deliberately sandwiched in between a long, dramatic and widely hailed statement on Soviet bombers leaving Cuba and another major statement on the Indian border conflict with China.

The order’s terms had been finally settled by the President in a meeting the night before with Justice and White House aides. To prevent its being tied up in a long legal battle and for other complex reasons (including no control over a key banking agency), the order provided only for voluntary efforts with respect to housing already built and housing financed by conventional bank mortgages. To enforce it, a new committee was established in the executive offices under Pennsylvania’s retiring Governor, David Lawrence. The predicted disruptions and decline in home-building and Federal financing never materialized.

MISSISSIPPI

The Housing Order had also been delayed by the priority given another racial issue in the fall of 1962. The issue originally pitted Negro applicant James Meredith against the all-white University of Mississippi. It eventually and unavoidably pitted the state of Mississippi against the United States. It was termed at the time the most serious clash of state versus Federal authority since the end of the Civil War; and its favorable resolution upheld not only the principle of equal rights and the sanctity of law but also the paramount powers of the Presidency.

Well over a year earlier, Meredith had attempted to enroll in the tax-supported public university located at Oxford in his native state. A long series of court rulings, all the way up to the Supreme Court, ordered his admission and an end to official resistance. When open and avowed defiance continued in a manner unprecedented for a century, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—consisting of eight Southern jurists—found Mississippi’s Governor Ross Barnett and Lieutenant Governor Paul Johnson guilty of contempt for blocking Meredith’s admission. The judges, their patience exhausted, then directed the Federal Government to enforce the court’s order and to put down what bordered on rebellion.