Races: The Long March

(See Cover)

The first Negro student ever admitted to the University of Alabama, Autherine Lucy, met with a violent barrage of hate. During her first day of classes, in February 1956, a mob of 1,000 students marched to the university president’s house shouting “To hell with Autherine!” and “Keep ‘Bama white!” Two days later, rioting students hurled stones and eggs at the car in which she was riding to class, pursued the car to the classroom building. With the mob yelling outside, she waited in the building until state policemen arrived to escort her to safety. She shortly went home to Birmingham. And she never returned to Tuscaloosa.

For seven years, no Negro followed Autherine Lucy to the University of Alabama. One by one, the states of the South submitted to at least token school integration—until Alabama stood as the only state in the nation without a single Negro attending a state-supported school with white students.

Last week, in an event of historic contrast with the 1956 episode, Alabama fell too: enrolled at the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama were two Negroes, Vivian Malone and James Hood, both 20. The only opposition was an empty gesture of defiance by Governor George C. Wallace. On the campus, the Negroes encountered no hostile mobs, no shouting, no thrown stones. Instead, they met with smiles and friendly greetings from white students. The Negroes merged into the life of the campus so uneventfully that it almost seemed as if the color of their skins made no difference.

The Promise. The contrast between 1956 and 1963 in Tuscaloosa was paralleled in Washington. In 1956, President Eisenhower remained a bystander when violence erupted at the University of Alabama. He would, he said, be inclined to “avoid interference.” But in the years since then, the Executive Branch under both Eisenhower and Kennedy became closely and inextricably involved in the Negroes’ march toward equality. Last week President Kennedy played an active role in the drama at Tuscaloosa. The man he assigned to direct events was his younger brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Bobby rolled up his sleeves and turned his office into a command post. With him there were Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, several other aides, four maps of Tuscaloosa, a TV set and a radio. An open telephone line and a radio-telephone hookup linked him with the Administration’s field force in Tuscaloosa: a team of U.S. marshals and Justice Department officials, headed by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas de Belleville Katzenbach, a big, balding man who is even tougher than he talks. At Fort Benning, Ga., 400 Army troops, specially trained for riot duty, sat in helicopters, ready to spin away to Tuscaloosa if they were needed.

Standing in almost pitiable solitude against Bobby’s forces was Governor Wallace, 43, a former state judge and sometime amateur boxer, now grown a bit pudgy. During his raucous campaign for the governorship last year, Wallace vowed that he would oppose any federal school-integration order “to the point of standing at the schoolhouse door,” defying the feds to arrest him.

Now the time had come to deliver on that promise. But Wallace’s fighting spirit had pretty well drained away. Alabama was sick of racial violence; the state’s most influential citizens put heavy pressure on Wallace, urging him not to cause trouble. Moreover, Federal Judge Seybourn Lynne had ordered Wallace not to obstruct the Negro students. The judge privately warned Wallace’s lawyers that if he disobeyed the order he would face a prison term.

Thus, while he stood last week in the doorway of the university building in which the students were to register, Wallace was visibly pale and trembly.

The Charade. What happened was a charade. It went off with such precision, such inevitability, that some observers, aware of Bobby Kennedy’s propensity for manipulation, suspected a fix. The Justice Department vehemently denied any deal with Wallace, but there was at least an unspoken arrangement. Both sides knew that the Negroes would eventually be enrolled in the university. The feds were willing to let Wallace put up his farcical show—for a while. Wallace wanted to avoid a long stretch in jail—and the Administration, bent on stirring up as little political resentment as possible in the South, desperately wanted to keep him out of jail. In first confronting Wallace, the Administration team thoughtfully kept the Negro students out of the way, inside automobiles parked well away from the door. That way, Wallace was not actually obstructing them and could not be charged with contempt of Judge Lynne’s order.

There were two separate confrontations between Wallace and the federal officials. In midmorning, Katzenbach rode up in a border patrol car and strode purposefully to the doorway. There Wallace stood waiting. He had a lectern in front of him, a microphone draped from his neck and a swarm of state troopers near by. As Katzenbach reached the spot, Wallace snapped out a crisp command: “Stop!”

Katzenbach called upon Wallace to give “unequivocal assurance that you will not bar entry to these students.” Wallace broke in: “We don’t want to hear any speeches.” Then, while Katzenbach fidgeted under the broiling Alabama sun, Wallace read off a ponderous, five-page proclamation. Concluded he: “I denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the Central Government.”

When Wallace finished, Katzenbach asked him to “step aside.” Wallace simply stood there. “From the outset, Governor,” said Katzenbach, “all of us have known that the final chapter of this history will be the admission of these students.” Wallace remained silent, glaring with melodramatic scorn. “Very well,” said Katzenbach. He turned away, and, under a prearranged plan, the feds escorted the two students to their dormitory rooms.

Katzenbach telephoned Bobby. Bobby called the President, who ordered that the Alabama National Guard be called into federal service.

“My Sad Duty.” The second confrontation came 4½ hours after the first. In midafternoon, Brigadier General Henry V. Graham, assistant commander of the 31st Infantry, an Alabama Guard division, walked up to Governor Wallace and saluted. “It is my sad duty,” the general said gently, “to inform you that the National Guard has been federalized. Please stand aside so that the order of the court may be accomplished.”

Wallace read off a parting-shot statement and then walked away. Shortly afterward, the two Negroes went into the building and were registered. “Hi, there,” a man seated at a desk said to Vivian Malone. “We’ve been waiting for you.”

Two days later, Dave Mack McGlathery, 27, a Negro employed at the U.S. space research center at Redstone Arsenal, went to the University of Alabama’s Extension Center at Huntsville and registered for night classes in mathematics. Not a single hiss, boo or catcall was audible. Governor Wallace did not even bother to show up.

Enough? With that, Alabama was breached as the last state fortress of total school segregation. Attorney General Kennedy’s tactics, to which he applied all his shrewd, tough abilities for detail-by-detail planning, had worked. But was that enough? Was it in any substantive sense a settlement to the Negro revolution? The answers could only be no.

Nine years had passed since the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic school-desegregation decision. To some, the mere fact that now all 50 states had integrated schools might seem reasonable progress. But not to Negroes in the late spring of 1963.

Successful revolutions typically originate less from a sense of hopelessness than from aroused hope. What began as a legal evolution with the Supreme Court’s May 1954 school-desegregation decision has now burst into a feverish, fragmented, spasmodic, almost uncontrollable revolution.

In the last three weeks alone, by a Justice Department count, some sort of facility was desegregated in 143 different cities or towns. Last week Atlanta desegregated its public swimming pools, and in Nashville, Tenn., all the major hotels and motels and most of the restaurants agreed to integrate their facilities promptly. In a single recent week Bobby Kennedy counted 60 separate demonstrations by Negroes in various U.S. cities. Last week Negroes marched, picketed, sat in or rioted in Savannah, Ga., Danville, Va., Cambridge, Md., New York City, Providence, R.I., and dozens of other cities. In Washington, a crowd of 3,000 Negroes marched to Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department. When he came outside to speak to them, a Negro spokesman complained to him that “We haven’t seen many Negroes coming out of the Justice department.” Kennedy, using a bullhorn, replied that “individuals will be hired on their ability.”

In the pattern of revolutions, the recent Negro victories have only whetted their hunger for full equality. Cries the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Negroes’ most outstanding leader: “We’re through with tokenism and gradualism and see-how-far-you’ve-comeism. We’re through with we’ve-done-more-for -your -people -than -anyone -elseism. We can’t wait any longer. Now is the time.”

The torrent of Negro demands has caught many men by surprise—including the President of the U.S. and his brother, the Attorney General. The torrent has, indeed, forced them into a drastic revision of their civil rights policy.

Political Coup. The Kennedys are nothing if not political-minded—and their approach to civil rights has been essentially political. During the 1960 campaign, they asked themselves not what a Kennedy Administration could do for the Negroes, but what the Negroes could do for John F. Kennedy on Election Day. In wooing Negro voters, Jack promised that there would be “much” new civil rights legislation, that he would end discrimination in housing with a “stroke of the pen.” A few weeks before Election Day, the Kennedys brought off a political coup by intervening when Martin Luther King was jailed in Atlanta for leading an anti-segregation demonstration. Bobby telephoned the judge in Atlanta in an effort to get King sprung. Whether or not the call actually swayed the judge, the Kennedys got full credit among U.S. Negroes when King was released on bail the following day.

The Kennedy campaign to gather Negro votes was spectacularly successful. By statisticians’ reckonings, Nixon got more non-Negro votes than Kennedy. Kennedy’s margin of victory derived from his lopsided majorities in Negro districts. Negro votes accounted for his capture of at least three close states, New Jersey, Illinois and Michigan. If Nixon had carried those states, he would have been elected President.

A Matter of Votes. But no sooner did Kennedy enter the White House than much of that brave campaign talk about civil rights went by the boards. As it happens, Massachusetts-bred Jack and Bobby Kennedy both genuinely believe in equal rights. But as it also happens, there is such a thing as practical politics—and the Kennedys figured that they would need Southern Democratic votes in Congress if the New Frontier’s legislative programs were to have a chance of passage.

Thus, in his first State of the Union message, President Kennedy barely mentioned civil rights. The civil rights policy that later emerged from the President’s huddles with Bobby was designed to keep Negroes on his side while avoiding deep affronts to the South.

This was a highly selective policy, concentrating on Negro voting rights. The brothers reasoned that once Negroes can cast their fair share of votes in state and local elections in the South, white politicians will be compelled to heed the Negroes’ demands. “The most significant civil rights problem,” Bobby kept saying, “is voting.”

In Attorney General Kennedy’s office is a large map of the U.S., resting on the floor against one wall. The map is studded with colored pins marking the counties in which the Justice Department has taken action to protect Negro voting rights. Bobby points out with pride that 28 pins mark places where his Justice Department has filed voting suits, while only ten pins indicate the suits filed during the Eisenhower years. He does not mention, of course, that the department’s authority to protect voting rights derives largely from laws passed during the Eisenhower years of 1957 and 1960.

Vanished Signs. On other civil rights fronts, the Kennedy Administration just inched along. In 1961 the Administration’s only legislative proposal was a routine bill to extend the life of the Civil Rights Commission for two years. In 1962, and again in 1963, the President’s legislative recommendations almost exclusively concerned voting rights. Not until last November did Kennedy get around to fulfilling his campaign promise to abolish discrimination in housing with a “stroke of the pen.” That act came after Negroes had taken to mailing him pens as sarcastic reminders, and even then it was a grievous disappointment to Negroes because of its limited scope.

Only under the occasional stress of crisis did the Kennedy Administration move vigorously. Last year, when the outbreak of freedom rides threatened violent clashes in the South, Bobby got the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue an order banning segregation in terminals serving interstate transportation. Under that order, the WHITE and COLORED signs have vanished from the lavatory doors and waiting room entrances of more than 300 Southern rail, bus and air terminals. When the enrollment of Negro James Meredith at the University of Mississippi last fall led to an explosion of mob violence, President Kennedy sent 16,000 federal troops to Oxford to put down the Ole Miss disorders.

A Multiplicity of Meetings. As Election Year 1964 drew closer, the Kennedys strove even harder to solve the nation’s civil rights dilemma without really offending anyone. In recent weeks both Jack and Bobby have used all their great powers of persuasion in numerous closed-door meetings with various groups—Negro and white, Southern and Northern, business and labor leaders. Last week Jack and Bobby, along with Vice President Lyndon Johnson (a key presidential adviser in the civil rights area) assembled 280 U.S. labor leaders in a futile meeting at the White House, called upon them to work against racial discrimination in their unions. It was in keeping with the Kennedy tactics that the unpleasant subject of possible legislation against such discrimination was never mentioned.

The failure of these behind-the-scenes negotiations was demonstrated in a tragicomic fashion on May 24. At Bobby’s request, Negro Author James Baldwin (TIME cover, May 17) arranged for a New York City meeting. Among those present besides Bobby and Baldwin were Negro Singers Lena Horne and Harry Belafonte, Playwright Lorraine (A Raisin in the Sun) Hansberry, Psychologist Kenneth Clark. Bobby went into the meeting under the illusion that Negroes feel gratitude toward the Administration. What he encountered was a shouting, finger-shaking barrage of anger, disappointment and impatience. Afterwards, one participant said the meeting was a “flop,” another called it “tragic.” Said Baldwin: “Bobby Kennedy was a little surprised at the depth of Negro feeling. We were a little shocked at the extent of his naiveté.”

The Administration’s political approach to the civil rights issue has, in fact, satisfied nobody. Were a presidential election held today, President Kennedy would probably lose several Southern states to, say, Conservative Republican Barry Goldwater. At the same time, Negroes are out of sorts with the Administration. Early last week Kennedy’s old friend, Martin Luther King Jr., comparing the Kennedy record on civil rights with that of the Eisenhower Administration, said the New Frontier had merely substituted “an inadequate approach for a miserable one.” In New York, Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, declared that it was time for the President to “place human rights above regional politics” and to “exhibit the kind of guts that he himself described in his book, Profiles in Courage.” Author Baldwin has charged the Administration with “spinelessness,” and has demanded that the Kennedys take a moral position and stop playing politics.”

Such criticisms plainly dictated a shift in Administration strategy. In mid-May the President announced that he would soon send a package of civil rights measures to Congress. Since then the debut has been twice postponed while Justice Department lawyers worked over the details. Scheduled to be dispatched to Capitol Hill this week, the President’s package consists of four proposals that would: 1) extend the life of the Civil Rights Commission for four years, 2) fortify voting rights, 3) give the Attorney General broadened authority to intervene in school-segregation cases, 4) ban discrimination in hotels, motels and restaurants.

This legislative bundle is sure to bring on a Southern filibuster in the Senate. Once filibuster begins, the fate of the Administration bills will be up to Senate Republicans. To shut off the filibuster, Democratic leadership in the Senate must try to invoke cloture, which requires a two-thirds majority, or 67 votes. Since only 40-odd Democrats can be expected to vote for cloture, the Administration will need 20-odd Republican votes. To rally those Republican votes, President Kennedy last week talked long and earnestly to G.O.P. congressional leaders. He also called in former President Dwight Eisenhower for a talk. Earlier that same day, Ike had told a group of congressional Republicans that “passing a whole bundle of laws” would not solve the civil rights problem, and he repeated the same thought to Kennedy.

Eisenhower also seemed to suspect that the Democratic Administration would give Republicans none of the political credit for passage of civil rights legislation—but would love to blame the G.O.P. for failure. Late last week, in a scathing speech to a Republican group gathered at Hershey, Pa., Ike said: “To Republicans, ‘the rights of men’ is a living doctrine. To our opponents, it is a campaign catchphrase, a political gimmick to be cunningly exploited as part of the great mosaic which presents a public but deceitful image, known far and wide as concern for the common man—protection of the poor—champion of the people.”

With his legislative effort sputtering, and with the Negro revolution increasing in its impetus, President Kennedy last week decided, at long last, to appear on national television with a declaration of his own views about the moral issues involved. The decision to deliver the speech came suddenly, during the interval between Wallace’s two stands in the doorway at Tuscaloosa. By broadcast time, all was quiet in Tuscaloosa. But that did not matter. As President Kennedy well knew, the civil rights issue would be around for a long while. And by now the President was beginning to feel the necessity to put before the nation a civil rights manifesto.

Fires of Discord. A hundred years after President Lincoln freed the slaves, said Kennedy, the Negroes of the U.S. are still not “fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice; they are not yet freed from social and economic oppression.” As a result, “fires of frustration and discord are burning in every city, North and South.”

New laws against discrimination “are needed at every level,” the President said, “but law alone cannot make men see right. We are confronted primarily with a moral issue … a moral crisis as a country and a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. 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.”

In its substance, the speech was possibly the most important that Kennedy has delivered as President of the U.S. Never before had a U.S. President appealed to the nation for an end to all discrimination against Negroes. And never had a President so forcefully pointed out that the Negroes’ right to equality with whites rests not upon law alone, but also upon morality.

Despite the power of his appeal, Kennedy’s speech did not and could not solve the civil rights crisis. A few hours after the speech, an assassin shot a Negro leader in the back in Jackson, Miss, (see following story). By the nature of the crisis, no single-front effort—whether by moral persuasion, court decision, legislative enactment, political action or street demonstration—can settle the U.S.’s civil rights dilemma.

The Shadowy Realm. For years after the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation decision, the Negroes’ drive for equality remained essentially a struggle of law. It was directed mostly against governmental authorities maintaining official segregation in the South and the border states. Gradually, however, the Negroes have come to demand the abolition of subtle, nonlegal discrimination as well as official segregation.

A decade after the Civil War, Congress passed a law to guarantee Negroes equal access to theaters, inns and transportation facilities. But in 1883 the Supreme Court struck down that law on the ground that the 14th Amendment, barring discrimination by states, contains no authority for federal legislation against discrimination in privately owned establishments. Now the Kennedy Administration plans to submit a similar law to the Congress. Not only are its constitutional underpinnings wobbly, but there is a very real question about where the right of civil equality begins to impinge upon the right of private property.

In the North, indeed, law cannot be expected to do much, if anything, to meet the Negroes’ demands. Negroes already have full equality before the law—yet they are angrily restive about the injustices that have been inflicted upon them. And in their struggle against unofficial segregation, the Negroes have come to rely, with ever-increasing intensity and tempo, on direct action—boycotts, marches, sit-ins, pray-ins, picket lines.

But, in common with law, direct action has limitations as a weapon against discrimination. The soundest and most enduring reason why whites should want to get rid of race discrimination is not that Negroes are protesting against it, but that it violates justice and morality. There is a blurring contradiction between the Negroes’ appeal to justice and their threats of certain violence to come—in Author Baldwin’s words, “the fire next time.”

Scars of the Past. If the combined working of law and direct action and morality could sweep away all race discrimination in the U.S., Negroes might still find the results somewhat disappointing. The condition of the Negro in the U.S. today results not only from present discrimination. That can be abolished. It results also from past discrimination, which can be eroded away only by the slow trickle of time. Past discrimination has left scars upon the Negroes. Their lower average levels of education and training, their higher rates of illegitimacy and violent crime* are facts of life as real as their desire for equality.

If race discrimination in employment suddenly vanished, deficiencies of education and skills among Negroes would still constitute an enormous barrier to equality with whites in jobs and incomes. Many employers in northern cities who would be willing to hire Negroes for positions of skill and responsibility never do so because no qualified Negroes present themselves.

Last week the National Urban League called for a special national effort “to overcome the damaging effects of generations of deprivation and denial, and to make it possible for the majority of American Negroes to reach the point at which they can compete on a basis of equality.” A “compensatory effort” on the part of the whites, said the League, “may well be the only means of overcoming the heavy aftermath of past neglect.” The organization’s Director Whitney Young argues that what is needed is a massive domestic Marshall Plan to help ready Negroes for acceptance of their legal rights. U.S. whites, he insists, have had “special privileges” for centuries. Now Negroes should be given “special privileges” for a limited period of time (say, ten years) to help them catch up.

Before the effects of past discrimination can be eroded away, the U.S. must abolish present discrimination. Some well-meaning whites exhort the Negroes to lift themselves up, study, aspire, become qualified, earn the equality they demand. Discrimination, the argument runs, would dwindle much more rapidly if disparities of culture and training were overcome. That is true enough, but the Negroes cannot wait that long. After generations of submission to segregation, they are marching in the streets, chanting “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

* According to the nationwide crime statistics gathered by the FBI, Negroes, making up 10% of the total U.S. population, account for considerably more than half of all arrests for murder, robbery, and other crimes involving bodily harm or the threat of it.