Civil Civil Rights Rights: More Anticlimax Than Crisis

Little Rock, Oxford, Tuscaloosa.

Each of these Southern communities required the presence of federal troops to achieve a measure of educational integration. In each, the federal-state confrontation amounted to a constitutional crisis, seemed to pose grave questions about the basic workings of the Republic, fanned emotions to white heat.

Last week Alabama’s Governor George Wallace did his level best to incite another such crisis. He failed. Indeed, what it added up to was a segregationist Southern politician’s being outmaneuvered— rather easily.

The Switch. Determined to goad President Kennedy into using federal troops to enforce integration, Wallace sent state troopers to try to close down schools in Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville and Tuskegee. The Administration refrained from rising to Wallace’s bait, but based its refusal to send in troops on a fairly legalistic argument: as long as the schools remained closed altogether, there was, technically, nodiscrimination against Negroes.

But then Wallace pulled a switch. Early in the week, the Governor’s troopers began to admit white students and turn away the Negro children at school entrances in Birmingham, Mobile and Tuskegee. Wallace deliberately avoided interfering with integration in Huntsville where sentiment was overwhelmingly against him, perhaps because a sizable portion of the population includes scientists and technicians, who are employed in Government-sponsored space-age projects.

Out of the Bushes. In Washington, Attorney General Bobby Kennedy huddled with aides and decided to move. All five federal judges in Alabama were asked to concur in a temporary restraining order to be issued against Wallace and his state police. The five, all Southerners, agreed. Swiftly, federal marshals fanned out in Alabama to serve the restraining order on the troopers and the Governor himself. Closeted in the statehouse in Montgomery, Wallace ordered his National Guardsmen to rout out the marshals, who were deployed on the capitol grounds waiting for him to come out. Then followed a comic-opera scene, with helmeted and bayonet-carrying guardsmen flushing sheepish marshals out of the bushes and sending them on their way.

At last came the break that the Justice Department was waiting for. Word got out late one night that Wallace would withdraw his state police and replace them with contingents of the National Guard. Early the next morning, President Kennedy signed a proclamation that federalized the guard. On his orders, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara simply retired the guardsmen to their armories. Wallace, shorn of his troops, gave up with a whimper. “I can’t fight bayonets with my bare hands,” he cried, ignoring the fact that there had not been a federal bayonet to be seen anywhere.

Getting Smart. With only local law-enforcement officers on the scene, four Negro students integrated white schools in Huntsville, two in Mobile, 13 in Tuskegee and five in Birmingham. There were, of course, some disruptive incidents. In Birmingham, dozens of white students left the schools to protest. A white man tossed a rock through the window of a car carrying two Negro girls. There were shouts of “Nigger! and torrents of curses. There was a lot of Confederate flag waving, and a few arrests. A majority of white students boycotted two of the schools. But perhaps a more meaningful sign of the times was a white high-school boy, who, determined to disregard the taunts and catcalls of his friends, stalked angrily into his Birmingham school explaining, “I came here stupid three years ago, and I ain’t going away stupid.”