Kennedy: The Classic Biography (90 page)

ALABAMA

The Negro revolution had built rapidly in the several years preceding 1963 for many reasons. Negroes who served side by side with whites in World War II and Korea were less willing to accept an inferior status back home. They were more likely to get an education through the “GI bill of rights.” Those leaving the mechanized farms for Southern cities found strength in numbers. Those displaced by automation in the factories were hungrier—so were those who had seen a different world on TV—so was a whole new generation of proud, unfrightened Negro youngsters. Even the rise of nationalism in Africa sparked interest in their own lack of freedom. But white political and business leaders were hostile or indifferent, particularly but not exclusively in the South. Denied communication, impatient with litigation, the Negroes revived the familiar weapon of minority protest: demonstration.

“The fires of frustration and discord,” the President would say in June, “are burning in every city, North and South, where legal remedies are not at hand.” They burned in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and Philadelphia, Mississippi; in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Cambridge, Maryland; in Shreveport, Clinton and nearly a thousand other cities—through demonstrations, marches, picket lines and mass meetings. But the hottest flames that seared the nation’s conscience were those spreading in the state of Alabama and particularly in the city of Birmingham.

Birmingham—“the most thoroughly segregated big city in the U.S.,” according to the Rev. Martin Luther King—had long been considered by civil rights groups to be a prime target for “nonviolent resistance.” Inasmuch as the city’s ardent segregationist Police Commissioner, T. Eugene “Bull” Connor, was a candidate for mayor, King was persuaded by the Attorney General to delay his move until after the April 2, 1963, election. But after April 2—despite a legal struggle for power growing out of Connor’s defeat—King’s carefully prepared campaign could be delayed no longer. Parades, petitions, boycotts, sit-ins and similar demonstrations by an increasingly aroused Negro community followed daily. Bull Connor and his men met them daily—with police clubs, police dogs, fire hoses, armored cars and mass arrests. More than 3,300 Negro men, women and children, most of them trained in passive resistance, were hauled off to jail, including King himself. His wife, fearful for his safety on Easter Sunday when her husband was held incommunicado, telephoned the President and was heartened by his reassurance.

“The civil rights movement,” the President often said thereafter, “should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.” But news photographers deserve a share of this credit. Frontpage pictures of Connor’s police dogs savagely attacking Negroes, of fire hoses pounding them against the street, of burly policemen sitting on a female demonstrator, aroused the nation and the world. Previously timid Negroes were spurred into action in their own cities. Previously indifferent whites were shocked into sympathy. And President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, recognizing that the American conscience was at last beginning to stir, began laying his own plans for awakening that conscience to the need for further action.

Because he said little publicly, because he still sought the least divisive answers, because he still relied on reason and persuasion, most of the Negro leaders complained about the administration’s attitude toward Birmingham. They were angry at the Kennedys for requesting a moratorium on demonstrations while an agreement was worked out and the city government settled. They resented the Kennedys’ questioning their use of small children in demonstrations which subjected them to possible injury as well as jail. They were suspicious of Burke Marshall and other Justice aides who had been striving for more than a year to negotiate privately some peaceful progress in that troubled community.

Above all, civil rights leaders impatiently demanded that the President “do something” as he had in Mississippi. But troops had been sent to Mississippi because Federal court orders were defied by both officials and mobs. No Federal court orders had been broken by Bull Connor, nor were any crowds massed in Birmingham other than Negroes. Segregated lunch counters and an all-white police force were not contrary to Federal law. Even passage of the civil rights bill then pending would have been of little value; and the White House and Department of Justice began at this time their deliberations on further legislation. There were recurring suggestions that the President should personally appear in Birmingham and take a Negro child by the hand into a school or lunch counter. But that suggestion badly confused the physical presence of the President with the official presence of his powers. It would have demeaned the dignity of the office by relying on the same kind of dramatic stunt and physical contest that was staged by those Southern governors who “stood in the doorway.”

The best that could be done in Birmingham was to initiate an investigation of voting rights, file a brief in a pending case against segregation, stay on the alert for official violations of the old civil rights statutes and work, as the President said, “on getting both sides together—to settle in a peaceful fashion the very real abuses too long inflicted on the Negro citizens of that community.” That was not enough to satisfy either the President or his critics. But it was all he had the power to do under the laws then prevailing in our Federal-state system.

In private conversations with the President and Attorney General, Negro leaders understood this. They understood also the need to confine their own charges to the provable and their objectives to the obtainable. But their public stance was invariably different. The NAACP had lost members when the Rev. King seized the initiative in the South. King had lost prestige when he stayed only two days in jail in Albany, Georgia. All the Negro spokesmen and action groups were competing for leadership, for followers and necessarily for headlines—and none of them intended to be outdone by any of the others in Birmingham, Alabama. They also believed that the greater the crisis, the greater was their bargaining power with Southern officials and their “creative pressures” on President Kennedy.

Finally, early in May, Burke Marshall convinced Birmingham’s more responsible business leaders that racial harmony was better for them than chaos. Changes in employment opportunities and public faculties were offered. The new Mayor promised a more moderate approach; Negro leaders suspended demonstrations; and the President expressed hope at his news conference for continued cooperation and progress. Asked if that settlement might be a model, he replied, “We will have to see what happens in Birmingham over the next few days.”

Three days later he had his answer. With my sons and a group of neighbors, I was playing softball on the ellipse south of the White House on Sunday afternoon, May 12. The police asked us to clear the area for a landing by the President’s helicopter. Surprised that he would be returning early from his weekend retreat in the country, I learned the reason as soon as I was home. He had been trying to reach me by phone. Late the previous night a Birmingham Negro home and hotel had been devastated by bombs. Fear, anger, rioting and counterrioting had taken over. By the time I reached the White House the President and Attorney General had decided on a new course of action. Some three thousand troops were being dispatched to bases near Birmingham. At 9
P.M.
the President broadcast over all networks a brief but strong statement of warning. Then, as the Attorney General talked with Rev. King by telephone, the President waited in his office for telephoned reports on the prospects for renewed violence. (Idly switching the channels on his TV set in search of news about the crisis, he came across a new political satire show which ribbed current political figures and failings, including a few of his own. Between telephone calls, he relaxed and chuckled appreciatively at each skit until the show ended.)

Tensions also eased in Birmingham. Alabama’s Governor George Wallace challenged the legal basis of the troop directive on the grounds that his state police were capable of maintaining order. But the President had already suffered once the consequences of being too quick to accept such assurances and too slow to move in troops; and he responded firmly that his authority to suppress domestic violence gave him full discretion as to how and when that authority should be exercised.

Even as Birmingham returned fitfully to the terms of the agreement that Marshall had negotiated, Kennedy and Wallace were moving steadily toward another confrontation which threatened to resemble that in Mississippi. On that long night in the previous September, after the Federal troops had finally arrived in Oxford and guaranteed Meredith’s safety, the President had wearily asked his brother whether there would be “any more like this one coming up soon.” Bob Kennedy had replied that he could look forward to losing at least one more state’s electoral votes—Alabama. A University of Alabama lawsuit similar to the
Meredith
case, he said, would reach the same critical stage in the spring of 1963. “Let’s be ready,” said the President grimly.

That same September night Alabama’s Wallace was also planning to be ready. Early the next morning he had warned that Alabama would never yield on segregation in education. He was publicly pledged to “stand in the doorway” of any schoolhouse under court order and defy the Federal Government to remove him. The Justice Department, in preparation for the eventual clash, began an intensive campaign of contacts with Alabama educators, editors, clergymen, business and other community leaders, hoping to build a climate that had not been possible in Mississippi.

In May of 1963 the President added his weight to this effort. Less than a week after the Birmingham bombings, he made a one-day trip to Tennessee and Alabama, saluting the ninetieth anniversary of Vanderbilt University and the thirtieth anniversary of the TVA, but in addition reminding his listeners of their roles and responsibilities as citizens. At Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in the presence of Governor Wallace, he cited the TVA and other popular Federal efforts to show that the Federal Government was not “an outsider, an intruder, an adversary…[but] the people of fifty states joining in a national effort to see progress in every state.” In building the TVA, he said, Nebraska’s Norris and New York’s Roosevelt “were not afraid to direct the power and purpose of the nation toward a solution of the nation’s problems.” Even Governor Wallace could not have missed the meaning.

At Vanderbilt the President’s remarks were again directed to the point:

… liberty without learning is always in peril; and learning without liberty is always in vain….

Any educated citizen who seeks to subvert the law, to suppress freedom, or to subject other human beings to acts that are less than human, degrades his heritage, ignores his learning and betrays his obligations.

Bull Connor may have felt these words did not apply to him. But George Wallace made clear at a press conference that he had heard the message—had heard it again on the President’s plane—and had rejected it.

Alabama was now the only state in the Union without a desegregated state university. The court decisions on two Negro students were final—the university was willing to admit them—prominent Alabamans urged Wallace not to resist—but the Governor was apparently determined on a theatrical show for home consumption. This time each White House move was based on the Mississippi experience. This time the President and Attorney General made certain that troops in nearby Fort Benning were already sitting in helicopters. This time the campus was completely cleared of outsiders, and community leaders spoke out for acceptance. And this time the defiant Governor knew, from Mississippi’s experience, that no amount or kind of defiance could succeed.

In two press conference statements, the President expressed the hope that troops would be unnecessary—that all Alabamans would recognize that law “is not a matter of choice”—and that the way to avoid troops was to abide by the law. He also expressed to the Attorney General in our meetings his hope that Wallace would not have to be physically pushed or arrested, thus gaining the martyrdom he sought. As the day of decision neared, the President advised the Governor to stay away from the campus at Tuscaloosa. Wallace rejected the advice.

On June n, 1963, in a knowingly empty and foolish gesture, Governor Wallace appeared in the doorway of the university registration building, replied to Katzenbach’s reading of the President’s proclamation by reading one of his own, and made no objection as the two Negro students were taken to their dormitories. The President had been watching their “confrontation” on TV. As previously planned, he promptly federalized the Alabama National Guard. Less than three hours later, Wallace stepped back from a second confrontation with Katzenbach and the Guard commander, and the two students were registered without incident.
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THE KENNEDY MANIFESTO

That day, June n, 1963, marked the end of the state governments’ overt resistance to college desegregation. It also marked the beginning of the Federal Government’s full-scale commitment to the fight against all discrimination. Kennedy had contemplated a nationally televised address in the event of trouble at Tuscaloosa. When that trouble vanished, he decided at the last moment to address the nation anyway while attention was focused on the subject.

Trouble had not been confined to Birmingham and Tuscaloosa. A white Baltimore postman on a “freedom walk” to Mississippi had been found slain on an Alabama road. A Negro sit-in demonstrator in Jackson had been slugged to the floor, kicked in the face, stomped on again and again—and arrested for disturbing the peace. Rioting by both Negroes and whites in Lexington, North Carolina, had killed one and injured others. The nonviolent passive resistance strategy emphasized by Martin Luther King was not deeply rooted in Negro traditions, and there were signs that it might soon give way to a more violent strategy uncontrolled by responsible leaders. The essence of Kennedy’s civil rights strategy since inauguration had been to keep at all times at least one step ahead of the evolving pressures, never to be caught dead in the water, always to have something new. Now, in Jackson, Danville, New York and scores of other cities and states, “the events in Birmingham and elsewhere,” as he said, had “so increased the cries for equality that no city or state or legislative body can prudently choose to ignore them…. Where legal remedies are not at hand…redress is sought in the streets, in demonstrations, parades and protests which create tensions and threaten violence and threaten lives.”