Penguin History of the United States of America (119 page)

But what was all this to the African-Americans? Their movement had continued to gather and exert strength, but it was clearer and clearer that what was now needed was the fullest backing from the federal government. And Kennedy, during his first eighteen months in office, had shown himself to be little more of a civil rights activist than his predecessor. As he had promised, he issued an order forbidding racial discrimination in all housing projects that received financial assistance, of whatever nature, from the federal government; but though he had said, during his campaign, that it could be done with ‘a stroke of the pen’, he did not wield that implement until November 1962. He established a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, headed by Lyndon Johnson (now the Vice-President), which in a quiet way discouraged racial discrimination by all employers; and he made some highly visible black appointments to federal positions in his
gift; but that was all, and even the appointments were offset by the elevation of three notorious racial reactionaries to the federal bench in the Deep South. While Kennedy, like FDR, exuded goodwill to the blacks, their needs did not come very high on his list of priorities, any more than they had oh Roosevelt’s. But times had changed, and soon his priorities were to change too, in a hurry.

For the civil rights movement, 1961 was the year of the Freedom Rides. These entailed groups of young people travelling through the Deep South by bus, often on the new highways built by the Eisenhower administration; as they went they defied the segregation laws, whether on the buses or in the bus terminals, and in response were met with threats, insults and violence. White Southerners were not only reacting to the threat to white supremacy: they resented the intrusion of these aliens. It was like Reconstruction all over again. The first Freedom Ride, in May 1961, led to the burning of a bus in Anniston, Alabama; a riot in Montgomery; the arrest of the riders in Jackson, Mississippi; and the dispatch of an escort of federal marshals, and then of National Guardsmen, by the US Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy. More and more Freedom Riders followed this example during the next twelve months, and tension rose steadily in the South.

The Kennedys had hoped to channel civil rights energies into the orderly pursuit of voting rights: they heeded King’s cry for the ballot. They thought that a sustained campaign to get blacks to vote in the South, especially if it had the covert backing of the administration, would more or less painlessly achieve the necessary transfer of power: after all, the black population of the South in 1960 was 20 per cent of the total, and if it voted its full strength ought to be able to further its interests without any other assistance. Unfortunately this missed the nub. Southern whites had developed a whole battery of weapons to impede the registration of black voters. Unfair literacy tests, delays of all kinds in the process of registration, economic intimidation, physical violence: all were available, all were effective. It was no help, in the Deep South, to have a doctorate, a college education, property or a decent income. It did not help to be a medalled veteran – if your skin was of the wrong colour. The power structure of the Southern states was securely in the hands of the African-Americans’ enemies; to change that would require vigorous and specific national action.

The same lesson was rubbed in by the events of the autumn of 1962. A young black, James Meredith, applied for admission to the University of Mississippi. The N AACP had to bring suit in the federal courts to get his right to enrol acknowledged; when he first tried to exercise that right he was turned away by the university authorities and by the Governor of Mississippi in person. When renewed court action – an injunction for contempt – removed these obstacles, Meredith was met by a wild mob. Protected by hundreds of federal marshals and 3,000 federal troops he was eventually able to register as a student at the university, but first there was
a spectacular riot which ended with two dead and 375 wounded. True, at the end of it all the university was integrated, and gradually, during the next few years, the rest of the state universities in the South fell into line (not without incident); but it was a maddeningly slow business, and there was no guarantee that there would ever be more than a token handful of black students at these institutions.

So in 1963 a campaign on a monster scale was launched to get justice done to the black citizens of America. ‘Free by ‘63’ was the NAACP’s slogan (an allusion to the centenary of the Emancipation Proclamation): brisk action was necessary if anything was to be achieved in time. There were signs that the President was moving: in February he sent a message to Congress asking for a law to protect black voting rights. Then in the spring the movement took to the streets in a big way.

The most important demonstrations were those at Birmingham, Alabama. There, Martin Luther King and the S C L C put their Gandhian philosophy to its stiffest test. Birmingham, a huge industrial city, was wholly unreconstructed. It would smash sit-ins and ignore boycotts. So King and his followers marched, in wave upon wave, on the city hall. The streets were filled, day after day, with singing, shouting multitudes, proclaiming ‘We Shall Overcome’, ‘Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round’, ‘Woke up This Morning with My Mind Stayed on Freedom’. Those who were arrested were quickly replaced, in the end even by children, some no more than six years old. Elsewhere in America the people witnessed, thanks to television, the response of the city authorities. Led by one ‘Bull’ Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety, they turned police dogs, fire-hoses and police truncheons on the demonstrators, even the children. King was thrown into jail again, twice. Eventually the businessmen of Birmingham accepted that they could not imprison the whole of the city’s black population and agreed to substantial measures of desegregation. It was a triumph of non-violence, but the threat of violence was also effective and might not be contained for ever. On the same day as the desegregation agreement was announced two time-bombs were exploded against black targets, and in consequence a riot exploded in the Birmingham black ghetto: policemen were attacked, white-owned property was burned down. Kennedy sent federal troops to the neighbourhood to take control if there was a further outbreak.

Birmingham was the most spectacular of these springtime convulsions, but by no means the only one. It stimulated others throughout May and June, in the North as well as in the South. In Mississippi a black leader, Medgar Evers, was murdered, as so many others were to be later in that terrible decade. Here and there the Southern white power-structure made concessions under duress, but it was plain that such piecemeal victories would never solve the national problem: national action was needed more than ever. Fortunately the Birmingham disturbances had at last made up the President’s mind. He appeared on television to tell the nation, ‘We face… a moral crisis as a country and a people… It is a time to act in the
Congress, in your state and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives.’ A few days later he sent a comprehensive civil rights bill to Congress.

The conversion of the Kennedy administration to the view that civil rights was a matter of supreme urgency was a notable achievement, but, it soon appeared, too limited. There remained Congress, where the bill was opposed as being far too radical. To stimulate the Senators and Representatives A. Philip Randolph’s old idea was resurrected, and a ‘March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom’ was organized. It was enthusiastically supported by a very broad spectrum of citizens, and on 28 August 1963 more than 200,000 blacks and whites appeared in Washington. It was the largest demonstration so far in the capital’s history; its leaders were received by the President (they included not only stalwarts of the movement such as Randolph, King and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP but also Walter Reuther of the United Automobile Workers, who had greatly assisted with the funding and organization of the march); some members of Congress showed themselves sympathetic; but Congress as a whole gave no sign of getting on with the civil rights bill, and the South still threatened a filibuster. Then in September a black church in Birmingham, Alabama, was bombed, four children being killed; and in November President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

This event hit the world like a thunderbolt of despair. Kennedy had charmed the millions and had indeed ‘got America moving again’ as he had promised, though signs were beginning to multiply that she might be moving out of control. Of these signs his murder was the most appalling. An official investigating commission, headed by Chief Justice Warren, found that the President had been shot by a solitary psychotic, like Lincoln and McKinley before him; but though its conclusions were sound, the reasoning used to get to them was not – as critics soon pointed out. It took thirty years for further investigation to put Lee Harvey Oswald’s guilt beyond reasonable doubt, and meanwhile conspiracy theories of all kinds flourished, weakening American faith both in rationality and in their political system (since, if Kennedy had been killed by conspirators, there must have been a cover-up at the highest levels of government to conceal the fact). And in any case, Kennedy’s death was a reminder of all the ugly, chaotic forces in American life that the framework of democracy and Christianity controlled with difficulty; any of them might have brought about the murder, and every bugbear – the CIA, the FBI, organized crime, Fidel Castro, Castro’s Cuban enemies – had its accusers.

In 1963 many citizens found it hard to believe that Lyndon Johnson, who now became President, would turn out any better than had Andrew Johnson (no relation) a hundred years previously. Yet although he entirely lacked Kennedy’s charm, wit and scepticism – the scepticism which, applied to himself, was an excellent substitute for modesty, being so cool and level-headed – Lyndon Johnson, suspicious, insecure and monstrously
egotistical, had certain political skills which Kennedy lacked. He was only nine years Kennedy’s senior, but was a far more seasoned politician. He had emerged in Texas in the late thirties, and as a young Congressman had fallen under the spell of FDR (he himself was inclined to insist obsessively on his own initials, LBJ). Like Kennedy, like two generations of Americans in fact, his idea of the Presidency was governed by what he learned from Roosevelt; but he had been much closer to his
beau idéal
than most of them – certainly than Kennedy. As Majority Leader in the Senate he had shown himself a master of parliamentary leadership. He had been rather wasted as Vice-President (the common fate of men in that lofty but unprofitable job), but as President he soon showed that his skills had not been allowed to rust. He knew that it was absolutely necessary that he establish himself, in record time, as the legitimate heir of both Roosevelt and Kennedy, and that he could do so only by overcoming the suspicions that liberals, Northerners and blacks entertained of him as the first Southerner to have attained the Presidency since Reconstruction (except for the expatriate, Woodrow Wilson). Accordingly he brought all his talents to bear, took advantage of the universal mood of grief and repentance which followed the murder, and in an amazingly short time had the entire Kennedy legislative programme, which had been languishing in Congressional committees, hurrying onto the statute book. The civil rights bill, considerably strengthened, was the most important measure thus passed. As revised, it tackled almost all the problems about which Southern blacks had protested so vehemently in the past few years. It gave the US Attorney-General new powers to intervene to protect citizens’ rights; it outlawed segregation in public places and in most places of public accommodation – which meant all hotels and motels save the very smallest. On pain of withdrawal of federal funds, it forbade racial discrimination in any federally assisted undertaking whatever. The Office of Education was authorized to help peaceful school desegregation with advice and money; the Civil Rights Commission, set up under the act of 1957, had its life extended and two new federal bodies were set up, the Community Relations Service and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which together showed that the government knew that it was not enough simply to outlaw racial discrimination: for the peace, happiness and progress of America the process of dismantling white supremacy had to be supervised, encouraged and assisted.

The bill became law on 2 July 1964, in nice time for the Presidential election of that year, in which Lyndon Johnson, the bill’s architect, would run against Senator Barry Goldwater, who voted against it. Naturally the blacks voted for Johnson, who crushed Goldwater by one of the biggest margins in the history of Presidential elections: he got forty-three million votes to Goldwater’s twenty-seven million, and 486 votes in the electoral college to Goldwater’s fifty-two. But there was something ominous for blacks in this second set of figures: apart from Goldwater’s native Arizona, it consisted entirely of votes from the Deep South – Alabama, Georgia,
Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina. The battle was far from won, as was also proved by events during the ‘long, hot summer’ of 1964, when the Ku Klux Klan asserted itself once more in Mississippi and, besides bombing two dozen black churches and murdering several blacks in the ordinary way, also killed three young civil rights volunteers – one black Mississippian, two white New Yorkers. No one was ever punished for the deaths of these young men: certain fat, cowboy-hatted, grinning, beer-swilling white yokels were brought to trial, but acquitted by white Mississippian jurors.

Meanwhile the drive to register black Southern voters continued, and continued to run into difficulties. Conditions were particularly bad in Selma, Alabama, a town near Montgomery: two more civil rights volunteers (one white, one black) were killed there. The local sheriff thought of a new refinement of brutality: he and his men used electric cattle-prods on demonstrators to make them trot. (This was too much even for the sluggish consciences of some Southern whites: seventy ministers marched to the county courthouse to show their disapproval.) After an embarrassing false start a grand march of protest set off to walk from Selma to Montgomery, led by almost every prominent black in the country, and a good many notable whites too. Four days on the way, it was addressed on its arrival by the two African-American winners of the Nobel Peace Prize, Ralph Bunche, who had won his fifteen years previously for his work in Palestine, and Martin Luther King, who had been awarded his only a few months previously. But the Confederate flag waved over the state capitol, and that very night (25 March 1965) yet another civil rights activist was killed.