American Experiment (351 page)

The episodes that followed burned into the nation’s memory: the President dispatching federal marshals to the Oxford area—rednecks and Citizens’ Council militants advancing into the area by the truckload—the President’s telephone appeal to Barnett to carry out the court orders—the governor’s public defiance even while he privately discussed deals with the Kennedys—the President federalizing the Mississippi National Guard— the marshals moving onto the campus, five hundred strong—the gathering crowd becoming increasingly hostile, while Meredith waited in a dormitory—the mob surging into the line of marshals behind a barrage of rocks and bottles and, soon, bullets, while the marshals tried to protect themselves by firing canisters of tear gas—the beleaguered marshals’ request that the Army be sent and then the agonizingly slow arrival of the troops— the two bystanders killed, the scores of marshals wounded, the hundreds of rioters taken into custody—finally, the registration of the indomitable Meredith at daybreak, on a campus reeking of smoke and hatred.

During the ten days leading to this night of violence, Robert Kennedy had been in repeated telephone contact with Barnett. Each had done his share of feinting, bluffing, dealing. They agreed on a “sneak registration” (which Barnett shortly repudiated); Kennedy for a time pulled back a federal convoy, to avert violence and save the governor from political “embarrassment.” He had also instructed the marshals in their remarkable self-restraint. The Kennedys operated amid intense pressures, ranging from Third World reactions to those of southern Democrats on the Hill, while Barnett had more leeway. Both sides wished above all to avoid violence; both got it. The Oxford crisis shocked the Kennedys. With all the
good communications and give-and-take, how could it end in bloodshed? “We lacked,” an aide said, “a sense of Southern history”—a sense of the power of rooted ideology and historic extremism. At Oxford, Arthur Schlesinger wrote later, the Kennedys began to understand “how profoundly the republic had been trapped by its history.” The Kennedys were trapped too by their own history, above all by the notion that the give-and-take of brokerage politics would work amid the polarized politics of reaction and revolution. Hence it was not surprising that, when Robert Kennedy and his associates conducted a review of their handling of the situation, they appeared mainly concerned about their operational failures, as though they could outmaneuver history through tactical methods rather than through a transformation of their own moral attitudes and political strategy.

Black leaders had even more reason than the White House to reassess the lessons of Ole Miss and the earlier struggles. For them registering one man at the university was only a start; they viewed the Kennedy’s efforts as, at worst, manipulation of blacks as pawns, mere tokenism at best. Even moderates like King felt depressed after Oxford. The Kennedy Administration was better on civil rights than its predecessors, he granted, but it was helping to constrict a movement that should be “breaking out into the open plains of progress.” A “sweeping revolutionary force,” he said, was being “pressed into a narrow tunnel.”

But even if only a tunnel, a tunnel to where? Black leaders disagreed not only over means—nonviolent direct action appealing to the liberal conscience against more conventional pressure on the federal government— but also over goals. Should across-the-board civil rights policies be the top priority, or was it better to concentrate on voting rights as the crucial first step to all other rights? A conflict simmered inside SNCC between advocates of more civil disobedience against desegregation and those who held that racism would not be overcome until blacks had political power, which meant vote power. The direct-actionists suspected that the voting registration strategy was merely a White House device to enlarge the black constituency for the next election.

King and the SCLC leadership, after a two-day strategy review, decided to put desegregation first. Direct action in department stores and lunch counters, they calculated, could bring concrete results and at the same time focus intensified pressure on the White House. For their next target they chose Birmingham.

Birmingham. For blacks, this city, the industrial center of the South, was
the American Johannesburg, the most segregated metropolis in the country, the self-styled “magic city” that was really the “tragic city.” The white power structure consisted of three mutually reinforcing elements: the business and industrial elites who ran the Birmingham economy; the political elites who maintained the racial status quo, ranging from Governor George C. Wallace in Montgomery to the “magic city’s” Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor; and the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups that abounded in the city and its outskirts. To challenge this structure SCLC had in Birmingham one of its strongest affiliates, headed by one of its most militant leaders, Fred Shuttlesworth. SCLC’s strategy was to throw its resources into mass demonstrations and store boycotts, with the hope of splitting the business elite from the political leaders. SCLC saw the campaign as a drama, progressing act by act until it reached the crisis, followed by the denouement when white power would be forced to yield.

By March 1963, SCLC people were moving into the streets. After a few skirmishes Connor won a state court injunction barring King and his companions from leading more protests. He would violate the order, King asserted at a spirited mass meeting, even though the movement had run out of funds and he was needed to raise bail money. On Good Friday the jeans-clad King and Abernathy and fifty others marched downtown in a glare of publicity. When the two walked up to the burly Connor and knelt in prayer, police grabbed them by the back of their shirts, threw them into paddy wagons, then seized the others. King was held incommunicado in a dark cell with no mattress or blanket until, at Coretta King’s request, John Kennedy interceded and conditions improved.

Soon the prisoner was busy scribbling on scraps of paper and in the margins of a newspaper. He was responding to a letter in that newspaper by white Alabama clergy condemning his tactics and timing. In biting sentences King laid down his creed: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. … I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.… If our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble-rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action and if they refuse to support our nonviolent
efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies—a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.” This became the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the most cogent and moving justification of civil disobedience since Thoreau’s essay.

Marching to Birmingham’s city hall, wave after wave of men and women were mauled by police dogs, hurled against walls and pavements by fire hoses that shot out water with cannonlike force, jammed into jails that soon were overflowing. But when King and Abernathy were released, the crusade began to flag. As a last resort to revive media attention, black leaders dispatched battalions of children—some as young as six—who marched with songs and shouts of “We want freedom,” endured dogs and fire hoses, and rode off in school buses to jail cheering and singing. With the passing days the police became rougher, as young blacks on the sidelines hurled the usual street missiles.

Black activists fought the battle of the media along with the battle in the streets. They had long experienced not only the conservative bias of many southern newspapers but also the tendency of the southern media to play down or even ignore demonstrations taking place in front of their own offices. “We don’t want to fan the flames,” an editor explained. But the activists needed to break through middle-class white apathy. Thus it was all the more crucial to arouse the national media, which reached not only a mass audience but to some degree brought the news of southern conflict into southern homes.

Just as SCLC leaders hoped, Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses galvanized the nation’s conscience, including the leaders’ in Washington. Fearing a violent uprising, the White House sent in mediators. This interposition, combined with efforts of local white moderates to negotiate a compromise, touched off a raging dispute among the black leadership. When King agreed to a temporary halt in the protests, Shuttlesworth, who had been hospitalized with a severe fire-hose injury, rounded on the pastor. He shouted that President Kennedy “doesn’t live down here, and I live down here.… Tell him King can’t call it off.”

King pleaded for unity. “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this,” Shuttlesworth cried. “You’re mister big, but you’re going to be mister S-H-I-T.” Then he walked out.

Yet both the blacks’ militance and their moderation were working. The business leaders, threatened by the paralyzing boycott and damning publicity, agreed to desegregation demands, though city officials remained intransigent. The vaunted white power structure was not so shatterproof after all. Still, the blacks’ victory was a mixed one, with continuing divisions
among their leadership, recriminations from George Wallace and others of the white old guard, a Ku Klux Klan rally in a local park, the bombing of the home of King’s brother, and more rioting. Bull Connor had clearly lost, however, as the electrifying drama of Birmingham, conveyed by extraordinary television coverage, projected his snarling, biting police dogs to the nation and the world.

Birmingham projected into the White House. The President told a group of civil rights liberals that a newspaper picture that morning of a police dog attacking a black woman had made him “sick.” John Kennedy was going through his own crisis of conscience during the spring of 1963. At the start of the year he had decided once again not to seek major civil rights legislation, for the usual reasons—it would not pass, it would alienate southern Democratic leaders, it would hurt the rest of his program. He had begun to move from this position by the end of February, when he submitted proposals to strengthen desegregation programs and to buttress voting rights, and told Congress flatly that racial discrimination was not only economically costly: “Above all, it is wrong.” Black leaders were disappointed by the slimness of the program, however, and even more by the President’s failure to push even these proposals. He himself believed the Administration was “sincere,” King said, but he floated what he called the “cynical view” that it wanted the votes of both sides and was “paralyzed by the conflicting needs of each.” The Administration did indeed seemed paralyzed on civil rights legislation.

But events—and those who made them—were in the saddle. The SCLC’s “street leaders” and their jailings by Bull Connor brought tempers North and South to a fever heat. In New York, Robert Kennedy met with a group of blacks gathered by the novelist James Baldwin, including the singers Lena Home and Harry Belafonte, the brilliant social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, and Jerome Smith, a freedom rider who held a CORE record for beatings and jailings. Smith drew Kennedy’s attention at the start by saying he was “nauseated” at being in the same room with him, that he was not sure how long he would stay nonviolent, that he would “Never! Never! Never!” fight for his country. The artists joined in with their own castigations. The Attorney General vainly tried to turn the subject to Clark’s facts and figures, but “none of us wanted to hear figures and percentages and all that stuff’ in the light of Birmingham, Lena Home said.

“It was all emotion, hysteria—they stood up and orated—they cursed— some of them wept and left the room,” Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger despairingly. In three hours of confrontation neither side believed it had
communicated with the other. And yet the blacks in their outrage had. Kennedy “resented the experience,” Schlesinger wrote later, “but it pierced him all the same. His tormentors made no sense; but in a way they made all sense.”

The tormentors of the centrists, the activists on both sides, were still in the saddle. Armed with a federal district court ruling, young blacks planned to renew their effort to register at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Alabama governor Wallace, having sworn at his inaugural that he would “draw the line in the dust” and stand and fight for “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” and having resolved that he would never again be “out-nigguhed” following an earlier electoral defeat, prepared to defy the feds publicly while dealing with them privately. John and Robert Kennedy, still haunted by Meredith and Oxford, were ready to let Wallace have his day in the sun if he would then let the blacks register. So after further posturing and fire-breathing, Wallace positioned himself for the best television shots at the registration building door and read his proclamation denouncing the feds, while Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronted him. Then both retired; the blacks proceeded to their dormitories and later quietly registered. No one blocked the door.

The day was June 11, 1963. That evening, after anxious hours, the President addressed the nation on radio and television. The nation faced a moral crisis, he said.

“The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed.…

“The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.…