The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (8 page)

The message was notable for several reasons. Kennedy was the first president, in fact one of the first national politicians, to say explicitly that ending racial discrimination was a moral issue. That alone, said Wilkins, was enough to give hope that the president would act more forcefully in the coming year. Kennedy had “finally recognized the need for legislative action,” he said. “I’m not sure whether we had reached him or whether all those inside agitators down South had gotten his Yankee dander up, but he was beginning to move.” Whitney Young, the head of the National Urban League, agreed, calling it “the most comprehensive statement on this complex and sensitive subject ever in our time by a chief executive.” Nevertheless, Young added, the statement did fall short. “There is no legislation recommended in the area of racial discrimination in employment to strengthen the program of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity.” A skeptical Martin Luther King Jr. praised the message simply as “constructive.”
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To judge by the Southern Democrats’ reaction, though, Kennedy had just fired the opening salvo of the second Civil War—Richard Russell claimed that the proposed legislation threatened “almost every phase of social and racial relations.” But among the civil rights community, Kennedy’s proposal fell flat. Even the ADA, no friend of the Republicans, declared that their civil rights proposals “have caught the Administration off guard. In each area of civil rights the Republican proposals have greater comprehension than the administration’s recommendations.” Indeed, “in contrast with the Republican package, the President sent an eloquent civil rights message to Congress but accompanied it with minimal proposals.”
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The Republicans gleefully shot holes in the proposal, too. Lindsay called it “thin.” Nelson Rockefeller, a likely contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 1964, noted that the president’s message included only five of the twenty-eight recommendations made by the Civil Rights Commission in its report earlier that month. The Kennedys, choosing to hear what they wanted, interpreted silence as apathy. “There wasn’t any interest” in the bill, Robert Kennedy complained. “There was no public demand for it. There was no demand by the newspapers or radio or television.”
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A few days after Kennedy sent his message, Joe Rauh met with several fellow civil rights leaders in New York. As they commiserated over what they considered unnecessary timidity on the president’s part—Rauh later said the message represented “such an inane package of legislation as to make the civil rights movement feel that it wasn’t worth going for”—his comrade in arms and the NAACP’s head lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, walked in the door. He was carrying a sheaf of congressional bills under his arm—Republican bills. At least someone’s trying to get the ball rolling, Mitchell said, chuckling. With a Democratic president and large Democratic majorities in both houses, the chances of a Republican-authored bill passing, on civil rights no less, were vanishingly small. “If you need to be cheered up with bills like that that can’t go anywhere,” said Rauh, “you’re in pretty bad shape.”
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It appeared, said King, “a melancholy fact that the administration is aggressively driving only toward the limited goal of token integration.” And yet King held out hope that forces of action within the White House—or even within Kennedy himself—would draw out the president soon. “It would be profoundly wrong to take an extreme position either way when viewing the administration.”
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King wrote those words in an article for the
Nation
in March 1962. By the end of the year he was much less sanguine—the literacy test bill had failed, the housing executive order was a bust, and Kennedy seemed even less interested in civil rights legislation than the year before. Meanwhile, King’s Albany campaign had failed spectacularly, with King and his supporters in jail and the Kennedy team praising the nonconfrontational strategy of the Albany police. If Washington was ever to take civil rights seriously, King realized that dark winter, it would take a new, much riskier strategy on the part of the movement.

Chapter 2

“A National Movement” to Enforce National Laws”

The momentum on civil rights changed at 1:00
p.m.
on May 2, 1963, when the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, burst open and dozens of schoolchildren poured forth into the warm spring sunlight, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Wyatt Tee Walker, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the strategic visionary behind the protests, sent the children out in waves; a dozen here, a score there, coursing in different directions through and around Kelly Ingram Park, a block-size plaza southeast of the church. Hundreds of onlookers, having heard rumors of the march, were gathered around the park, as was a sizable chunk of the Birmingham police department.
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The children were marching without a parade permit, and officers immediately corralled them into waiting police vans. But the children kept coming. When an officer saw Fred Shuttlesworth, a local preacher and one of the Birmingham movement’s leaders, standing on the side, he shouted, “Hey Fred, how many more have you got?”

“At least a thousand!” Shuttlesworth replied.

“God almighty.”

Shuttlesworth was hardly exaggerating. By the time the day’s marches were over, three hours after they had begun, the police had run out of wagons and were resorting to school buses. Six hundred children were taken to jail.

The next day the marches resumed, and the police returned, this time with the fire department, fire hoses, and dogs. The marchers were hit with a light spray from the hoses at first, but when a determined core of them refused to retreat, the police captain in charge ratcheted up the streams to full blast, a hundred pounds of pressure. Many ran but several children did not budge. When the retreating children saw their fellow marchers’ example and turned around, K-9 units came at them with dogs.
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That afternoon Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to the president. “Will you permit this recrudescence of violence in Birmingham to threaten our lives and deny our rights?” he asked. Kennedy did not respond, at least not that day. But he was watching, like the rest of the world. Photographers had snapped hundreds of pictures of German shepherds, their teeth sinking into young boys and girls. It made him “sick,” Kennedy told an aide. And Kennedy was not alone. “A snarling police dog set upon a human being is recorded in the permanent photoelectric file of every human being’s brain,” said CBS News correspondent Eric Sevareid.
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The planning for the Birmingham campaign had begun at a meeting of the SCLC leadership in early January near Savannah, Georgia. King was licking his wounds from the failed Albany protests, but eager to apply the lessons learned. The consensus was to try again, but this time to do so in a way, and a place, that guaranteed a violent response by the police—and promised immediate national exposure. “What I did in Birmingham I learned in Albany,” Walker later said.
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And yet at first, the Birmingham movement sputtered, precisely because those lessons were not applied. The protests, consisting mostly of lunch counter sit-ins, were to begin in early March. But when the mayoral election, pitting the virulently segregationist commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor against the relatively moderate lieutenant governor Albert Boutwell, went into a runoff, the movement’s leaders decided to postpone.
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Meanwhile, events elsewhere threatened to upstage the Birmingham campaign before it began. In Greenwood, Mississippi, police attacked voting rights protesters with dogs, even as dozens of news photographers snapped pictures that would appear the next day on newspaper front pages nationwide, including the
New York Times
—under a photograph of the congressional Republican leaders who had just introduced a sheaf of strong civil rights proposals.
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Greenwood failed to generate the federal response that King was hoping would come from such a vicious display of raw state racism. At an April 2 press conference, Robert Kennedy, while admitting that “the laws are not adequate” to deal with the Greenwood crisis,” said, “I don’t think legislation per se is going to eliminate this problem for the United States.” And President Kennedy, when asked about the protests at an April 3 press conference, responded noncommittally: “There has been a denial of rights, which seems to me evident, but which the court must decide.”
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That same day, just 65 of the 250 or so people on Walker’s “arrest list”—those willing to go to jail as a result of their protest activity—showed up in the church basement of A. D. King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s brother. The problem was timing: Boutwell had won the runoff, but Connor had refused to accept the vote, forcing the election into the courts. Although Shuttlesworth called the moderate Boutwell nothing more than a “dignified Connor,” the city’s black elders urged restraint until the court ruling. Nor were they eager to see Shuttlesworth and King succeed. Shuttlesworth was already well known around town as the “Wild Man of Birmingham,” a verbally and tactically aggressive, at times reckless activist, while they saw King as an outsider who flew in from his home in Atlanta when he was not touring the country speaking and raising funds. The pressure came from outside as well: Burke Marshall called King and urged him to delay the protests, reporting that Robert Kennedy had deemed them “ill-timed.”
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After King and his deputy, Ralph Abernathy, were arrested on April 12 for violating an injunction against parading handed down the day before, eight local moderate religious leaders wrote a lengthy letter to the
Birmingham News
calling the protests extreme, “unwise’’ and ‘‘untimely.” A few days later King began scribbling a response on scraps of paper that he smuggled out to his lawyer, and which would come to be celebrated as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”
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The letter was barely noticed at first, and probably would not have had much effect on the White House anyway. The Kennedys had extra reason to avoid confrontations in the South that spring. During his State of the Union address, the president had proposed a $13.5 billion tax cut as a panacea for the country’s problems: lingering unemployment, trade promotion, the deficit, and even racial tensions. But to win the bill, he had to bring over Southern Democrats, who often aligned with Midwest conservative Republicans against spending and tax cut measures, both of which they said would create unsustainable deficits. And Kennedy was already facing a civil rights dustup in Washington: on April 16 the Civil Rights Commission had submitted its study of segregation in Mississippi, recommending that the president should cut off federal funds to the state. Kennedy did his best to distance himself from the proposal, but the report was catnip for Southern politicians—Mississippi senator James Eastland called it “a monstrous libel.”
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Things grew even more complicated on the night of April 23, when a white postal worker from Baltimore named William Moore, who had been on a peace march to deliver a letter to Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, was found dead on the side of a highway in northeastern Alabama, shot twice at close range. The next day, the president brought up the shooting at a press conference, unprompted. “We had outrageous crime, from all accounts, in the State of Alabama, in the shooting of the postman who was attempting in a very traditional way to dramatize the plight of some of our citizens, being assassinated on the road,” he said. “We do not have direct jurisdiction, but we are working with every legislative, legal tool at our command to insure protection for the rights of our citizens, and we shall continue to do so.” The killing drew the national reporters away from Birmingham, and it was unclear how many would return.
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When King got out of jail, his movement looked to be in tatters. Only a few hundred people had been arrested, far fewer than at the same point during the Albany protests, and much of the country had turned its attention elsewhere. On April 19, Shuttlesworth had flown to Washington to meet with Burke Marshall and request federal intervention, but Marshall, while sympathetic, said not to expect anything. “I told him that there was no basis upon which the federal government could take any action at present,” Marshall wrote in a follow-up memo to Robert Kennedy.
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The only way to get the federal government to act, King realized, was to take a dramatic step that would bring into sharp relief the everyday violence perpetrated against Birmingham’s blacks. Though skeptical at first, King eventually sided with James Bevel, an organizer from Mississippi in town to help with nonviolence training, who believed the choice was clear: send in the children.

Two days after the “children’s crusade” began, Robert Kennedy ordered Marshall to go to Birmingham to meet with King. Marshall had already called King twice to get him to call off the latest stage in the protests, and the attorney general had publicly criticized them: “An injured, maimed, or dead child is a price that none of us can afford.” But other politicians were more forceful in their denunciations of the Birmingham police. Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon said events like those in Birmingham presented “an infinitely greater threat to American freedom than Cuba”—tough words in a country still recovering from the shock of the missile crisis of October 1962.
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