Parting the Waters (70 page)

In Atlanta, where student demonstrators still were trying to match the lunch counter victories attained in Nashville the previous year, continuing sit-ins and boycotts caused the white owners of thirteen corporations to close more than seventy of their downtown stores for three months, through February 1961. With business paralyzed and all employees, including some five hundred Negroes, laid off, pressure for settlement built on both sides. Mayor Hartsfield, still feeling injured politically by his inability to broker an agreement after the fall elections, stepped aside when white businessmen agreed to negotiate directly with Negro leaders. In the opening round, Chamber of Commerce president Ivan Allen, Jr., received A. T. Walden, an elderly lawyer and dean of the Auburn Avenue business fraternity, at his office supply company. Walden was a fixture of the old guard, known by honorary titles such as “Colonel” and “Judge.” There was a sticky moment when Walden asked to be shown to a bathroom. Allen hesitated briefly. He knew he could not ask a man of Walden's rank to use the unkempt separate restroom for Negroes, but he also knew that his white employees would rebel if he allowed Walden to use the restroom reserved for them. Allen, quick-witted and instinctively gracious, invited Walden to use his own private bathroom.

Many of the students maintaining the boycott against segregated stores might have taken the bathroom episode as an allegory of Negro leadership in Atlanta. They believed that the entrenched old leaders like Walden had made a lifetime habit of being satisfied with executive treatment for themselves alone. The elders believed that the young people were trying to undercut them in public, and strains worsened dramatically on March 7, when terms of a proposed deal were revealed at a climactic meeting of the negotiating teams. A joint statement, released by the Atlanta Chamber of Commerce, made front pages in the North as well as the South. Carefully written to protect the signatory white merchants from charges of capitulating to the Negroes, its central premise was that “the fine relationship which has existed between the races for a long number of years in Atlanta should be reinstated in every way.” The statement concealed the obligations of the white parties in a convoluted sentence that avoided any explicit mention of integration, promising only to adopt “the same patterns…as are finally decided upon in the public school issues in Atlanta.” No such ambiguity shielded the ten Negro signatories, who pledged immediately to “eliminate all boycotts, reprisals, picketing, and sit-ins, and to bring back a condition of complete normalcy as soon as possible.”

Whatever soothing effect this unbalanced language may have had on Atlanta's whites, it carried an offsetting political cost among Negroes. Speakers at campus rallies denounced the provisions making lunch counter integration hostage to successful integration of the public schools, warning that if whites found a way to hang on to segregated schools, as they had done for almost seven years since the
Brown
decision, they could delay lunch counter integration not just six months but indefinitely. One student-body president advocated continued demonstrations, saying that the Negro leaders who engineered the agreement had not really supported the protest in the first place. With substantial numbers of adult Negroes falling under the sway of student objections, as measured by the buzz of street talk, Daddy King, Walden, and Borders searched under duress for a way to explain themselves, to keep their traditional authority from being proved hollow. The front page of the next day's
Daily World
advertised their next move in a blaring headline: “Clarification Mass Meeting at Warren Church Tonight.”

An apprehensive Ivan Allen was one of the few whites in the manifestly tense crowd of two thousand that jammed into the Warren Methodist Church for a heated debate of the settlement. When Borders tried to give assurances that the lunch counters would be desegregated in September regardless of what happened in the schools, citing his own private understandings with the white business leaders, student and adult speakers alike challenged the value of his word and ridiculed an agreement that failed to say on its face what it meant. After the two student negotiators—the presidents of the Morehouse and Spelman student bodies—refused to defend the settlement, Daddy King strode to the pulpit for the unaccustomed purpose of justifying himself before a sea of skeptical teenagers. “For the first time in years, as far back as I can remember, the Chamber of Commerce agreed to take it upon itself the responsibility of working with the merchants to agree and settle this thing,” he said. “We've got to give and take.” At first there were only scattered rumbles of dissatisfaction, but when he said, “I've been around this kind of thing for thirty years,” a student shouted out, “That's what's wrong!” The church erupted in laughter. Boos greeted Daddy King's next words. As he became flustered, he tried more persistently to invoke the weight of his experience, but this tactic only provoked his hecklers to drown him out in showers of catcalls and hisses.

The younger King was in town for an SCLC meeting about foundation grants for voter registration. As was his habit, he arrived late for the mass meeting, just in time to witness his father's humiliation. He was not scheduled to speak, but he began to make his way through the crowded aisles. Recognition of him ran through the church, quelling the noise, and when he reached the pulpit he slowly and deliberately surveyed the faces before him, with a pained look on his own face that imposed an expectant silence. There were tears in his eyes.

“I'm surprised at you,” he said, beginning a soft lamentation against what he called the surrender of a nobly struggling people to “the cancer of disunity.” Slowly, King waded into an extemporaneous speech praising the wisdom of the elders, the innovations of the young people, and the courage of everyone. He knitted the contending factions together with a passionate description of their purpose, which to him was larger even than freedom and dignity because they had a chance to show the world that strength and morality could rise together above primordial hatred. After a peroration on the fullness of his vision, he returned finally to the relatively small matter of the dispute over a settlement he called “the first written contract” Atlanta's whites had deigned to make with them. “If this contract is broken, it will be a disaster and a disgrace,” he declared, in a voice close to fury. “If anyone breaks this contract, let it be the white man.” With that, he vanished from the hushed church, leaving Daddy King rescued, Lonnie King relieved (though suffering from a bleeding ulcer), Ivan Allen in awe, and the settlement effectively ratified.

 

The race issue was intruding on Kennedy's early presidency so persistently as to be irksome. Even before the inauguration, he had been forced to pass over his first choice for Secretary of State, Senator William Fulbright of Arkansas, because of Fulbright's segregationist voting record. Similarly, he dropped plans to make Governor Ernest Vandiver Secretary of the Army after aides realized that the press was sure to make sport of Vandiver's ceremonial duties as head of an integrated army in contrast with his highly publicized battle to thwart integration. Fortunately for Kennedy, plans to announce the Vandiver nomination were set aside shortly before white students rioted over the court-ordered admission of the first two Negroes at the University of Georgia, putting Vandiver on television as the central figure in a controversy that Kennedy believed detracted from the world image of the United States.

The President believed that segregation, like colonialism, was an anachronistic addiction curable by the steady advance of modern attitudes. To him, this required the exercise of cool, detached reason in an atmosphere of public calm, which was incompatible with emotional demonstrations by either whites or Negroes. Like any President, Kennedy responded instinctively against “unrest” within his domain, but in the area of civil rights especially he stressed calm as a condition of progress. Such a posture necessarily placed civil rights on the periphery of his ambitions in the White House, inasmuch as no President, and certainly not one so romantic as he, could or wanted to accomplish his major goals in seclusion.

On February 7, still in his first round of appointments, Kennedy received John Hannah and Father Theodore Hesburgh, two of the leading Eisenhower appointees to the Civil Rights Commission. His goal was to persuade them to remain in office during his term, as he considered them to be highly qualified and did not wish to see expectations of new civil rights policy raised by their resignation and replacement. The two men agreed to stay on, but they asked the President's help in correcting several minor impediments to their work. One of them was the absence, since Rocco Siciliano's abrupt resignation in 1958, of a White House staff person formally in charge of civil rights. They wanted someone to make sure the President was receiving the commission's views. Kennedy dismissed this request before they could list the next one. “I already have a special assistant who is working full time on that,” he said. “Harris Wofford.”

Hannah and Hesbergh said nothing more about the matter until they left the White House, when they promptly called Wofford. They both knew him well, as Wofford had worked at the commission and once taught at Notre Dame under Hesbergh, who was president of the university. In fact, they had consulted with Wofford only minutes before going in to see President Kennedy, at which time Wofford had still been a talent searcher without position in the Administration, planning to work with Sargent Shriver in the creation of the Peace Corps. When Hannah passed along what the President had just said, a stunned Wofford assured Hannah that he did not know anything about a White House job. Minutes later, he received an urgent summons to Kennedy's office, and as he sat outside waiting to be shown in, a strange man thrust a book before him and said, “Are you Mr. Wofford? Please raise your right hand and repeat after me.”

“What for?” asked Wofford.

“I'm supposed to swear you in,” the man replied.

“But I don't know what the job is, and I haven't talked to the President yet,” said Wofford. When the man dismissed the questions as irrelevant to his orders, Wofford asked plaintively, “Do
you
know what the job is?”

“That doesn't matter,” the man said crisply. “The President knows. All you do now is swear to uphold the Constitution. Is there anything wrong with that?”

A shrugging Wofford swore the oath just before he was shown in to see the President, who told him briskly that he needed him on the staff, working under the general mandate of “minimum civil rights legislation, maximum executive action.” Kennedy, already late for an urgent foreign policy meeting, brushed aside Wofford's questions about his authority with a general instruction to work with Sorensen at the White House and with the Justice Department. “You're the expert,” he said with a smile. “Get going.” He told Wofford to search the Executive Office Building and commandeer “the best office that's left.”

Theoretically, Wofford occupied the ideal government position for a man of his convictions: the one in the White House, closest to the power emanating from the President, with an exclusive civil rights portfolio. As a practical matter, however, he knew he enjoyed little rapport with Sorensen or any other central figure on the White House staff, and less with Byron White at the Justice Department. White believed that the passions of race politics would undermine respect for law if handled at Justice, while Kennedy's closest aides feared they would hurt the President if publicly associated with the White House. All these people were much closer than Wofford to President Kennedy. They would soon learn of the ad hoc, almost flippant manner in which Kennedy had appointed him, and react accordingly. Wofford began his tenure in grave danger of becoming an ornament at the White House.

Quite apart from the political dangers perceived, those closest to the President shied away from civil rights because they considered the racial controversies being publicized too prosaic, too small and quirkishly human, for the President's attention. The Iowa legislature was debating a bill that would require the state's barbers to know how to cut Negro hair. In baseball, the annual rash of spring training disputes featured a running story out of Bradenton, Florida, where owners of the best hotel agreed, after a long battle, to give rooms to Milwaukee Braves star outfielder Hank Aaron and other Negro players, provided they consented to take their meals behind a special partition in the dining room. Such entanglements of segregation were always being presented for comment in Washington, only to be brushed aside by the savviest advisers as inherently belittling to the President.

Only once that first winter did President Kennedy allow himself to take sides in a public squabble over civil rights, and he came to regret it. On the approach of the Civil War Centennial, trouble stirred in Charleston, South Carolina, where reporters learned that a Negro delegate to the National Civil War Commission would not be permitted to stay in the hotel hosting the commemoration of the battle of Fort Sumter. When the legislature of New Jersey, home state of the Negro delegate, passed a resolution urging all states to boycott the opening ceremonies, President Kennedy bowed to pressure and wrote a letter to General Ulysses S. Grant III, chairman of the commission, stating that all delegates deserved equal treatment as officials of a government body. This venture earned him only scorching rejoinders from Southern delegates, who maintained that the President had no authority over the private affairs of South Carolina hotels.

The controversy escalated rapidly. General Grant supported the South against Kennedy, declaring through a spokesman that the commission's business was to commemorate the war and not to interfere in “racial matters.” New York, California, and Illinois joined New Jersey in calling for a boycott. Administration officials, scrambling now that the authority of the President was publicly at issue, eventually conceded that they could not force any suitable Charleston hotel to integrate for the occasion. To save face, they did muster the votes to move the ceremonial banquet out of the segregated hotel to a U.S. Naval Base three miles outside Charleston, only to have Southerners gleefully notify reporters that the Navy still segregated its own personnel on the base. Then, on the eve of the Fort Sumter ceremony, a Southern delegate made a speech to the commission containing what Northern delegates called slurs on the ancestry of President Abraham Lincoln, racial and otherwise. After an escalating exchange of insults, the commission delegations acted out an upside-down parody of Civil War politics. Northerners called on President Kennedy to “relieve” General Grant for failing to preserve the honor of the federal government, while Southerners rallied to support the grandson of the man whose troops had mowed down their forebears from Shiloh to Appomattox.