Between You and Me (10 page)

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W A L L A C E : Senator, if a Negro maid or nurse is good enough to care for a white infant in the South—live with that infant, feed that infant, et cetera—why is not the same Negro maid allowed to eat in the same restaurant with southern whites?

E A S T L A N D : It’s a matter of choice.

W A L L A C E : Choice by the whites?

E A S T L A N D : No, it’s a matter of choice by both races.

W A L L A C E : Are you suggesting—?

E A S T L A N D : You know that in Mississippi, it was a Reconstruction legislature composed principally of Negroes that enacted our segregation statute.

W A L L A C E : Are you suggesting the Negro—?

E A S T L A N D : I’m suggesting that the vast majority of Negroes want their own schools, their own hospitals, their own churches, their own restaurants . . .

W A L L A C E : Are you saying that the Negro in the South wants segregation?

E A S T L A N D : Ninety-nine percent—yes, sir!

At another point in our interview, I asked Eastland if he thought

“the day will come in your lifetime when we will see an integrated South.”

“No,” he replied without hesitation.

But James Eastland and his fellow segregationists were on the wrong side of history, for by 1957 there were already signs that the tide was turning against the status quo they were trying to preserve.

Three years earlier, in one of the pivotal events in the advance toward civil rights, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitu-tional. That historic decision set in motion the long and difficult pro-

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cess of integrating schools in communities throughout the South.

The first major confrontation in that struggle took place in September 1957, and the battleground was Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas.

In many ways, Little Rock was an unlikely setting for the racial violence that erupted there. Arkansas had a reputation for being more moderate than most other southern states, and its governor, Orval Faubus, was regarded as one of the region’s more liberal politicians.

(Shortly after he was elected in 1954, Faubus desegregated public transportation and appointed six blacks to the Democratic State Committee.) But resistance to legally imposed integration was hardening in Arkansas, as it was elsewhere in the South, and in the spring of 1956, the entire state legislature signed the Southern Manifesto, which denounced the Supreme Court’s decision as “naked judicial power.” Orval Faubus did not need a refresher course in political sci-ence to understand that if he hoped to remain in the governor’s chair, he would have to come down firmly on the side of the segregationists.

In the summer of ’57, the Little Rock school board put the finishing touches on its modest plan to integrate Central High School.

Nine carefully selected Negro students were enrolled for the fall semester, and on September 2, the night before the new semester was scheduled to start, Faubus made his move. Citing “evidence of disorder and threats of violence,” he called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black youngsters from entering the school. His action contravened a federal court order, and far worse, it fomented the smoldering resentments that had been building up in Little Rock.

Emboldened by their governor’s act of defiance, angry segregationists converged on the school, where they jeered and cursed at the black students and any other Negroes who happened to be in the vicinity.

For the better part of a month, the “Little Rock crisis” (as it came to

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be called) made headlines around the country and much of the world. Although President Eisenhower was reluctant to intervene, the escalating violence and rioting eventually forced his hand, and on September 25 he dispatched one thousand paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the desegregation order.

Throughout the crisis, Orval Faubus was generally portrayed in the national press as a cynical opportunist. It was often pointed out that until recently, he had leaned toward a pro-integration position, and the prevailing view was that he had exploited the school controversy to save his own political hide. In a cover story on the governor, Time magazine characterized him as “a sophisticated hillbilly.” We gave Faubus an opportunity to speak for himself on national television, and he took us up on it. So at the height of the disruptions, just a few days before Ike sent in the troops from the 101st Airborne Division, Yates and I and a camera crew flew to Little Rock.

In the course of our interview at the governor’s mansion, I had ample opportunity to form my own impressions of Faubus; he didn’t strike me as a rabid segregationist or any other kind of firebrand. His answers to most of my questions were measured and restrained, and in every other respect, he came across as a voice of moderation.

W A L L A C E : Governor, what’s your opinion of the crowds of white adults who gather outside Central High School each weekday morning? They curse at any Negro who happens to pass by. They call Negroes animals. And almost to a man, they say Governor Faubus has done the right thing. What do you think of these people?

F A U B U S : Well, malice, envy, hate is deplorable in any place or in any circumstance. But as President Eisenhower has said himself, “You can’t change the hearts of people by law. . . .” So

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why should we be so impatient as to want to force it? Because force begets force, hate begets hate, malice begets malice. . . .

W A L L A C E : Governor, we, of course, all know that the Supreme Court has ruled that there must be integration. You have said that you respect that ruling. Tell me this: Personally, do you favor Negro and white children sitting together in classrooms?

F A U B U S : I have never expressed any personal opinion as to the matter.

W A L L A C E : Why not?

F A U B U S : I feel that it is best not to.

W A L L A C E : Why?

F A U B U S : I am the governor of a state, pledged to uphold its laws, to keep the peace and order and also the laws of the nation. My personal views are not relevant to the problem.

W A L L A C E : You will make no further statement than that?

F A U B U S : No.

That was one of the rare occasions in those days when an interview I did was on the cutting edge of a major news event, and I remember how pleased I was the next day when The New York Times ran a front-page story on the exchange with the embattled governor.

As for the noncommittal posture he displayed in our interview, that was typical of Faubus, who, throughout the crisis, shrewdly played his cards close to the vest. If his main goal was to hold on to his job, then the strategy worked. Faubus was reelected in 1958, and he was still running the show in Little Rock in the summer of 1960 when I paid him another visit. I was crisscrossing the country that summer on an extended election-year assignment for the Westinghouse broadcasting chain, and when I made a stop in Little Rock, Faubus

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gave me a cordial welcome. Altogether, he served six straight two-year terms as governor, a winning streak that came to an end when he was upset in the 1966 Democratic primary.

Orval Faubus must have truly enjoyed being governor of Arkansas, because in the years that followed, he made three futile attempts to get the job back. He ran and lost in 1970, and again in 1974, and once more in 1986. Faubus’s campaign for governor in ’86

was his last hurrah, and the man who defeated him that year was an ambitious politician on the rise named Bill Clinton.

M a rt i n L u t h e r K i n g , J r .

I N 1 9 5 4 , T H E Y E A R T H E Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision on school desegregation, a young black minister arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to commence his mission as pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was only twenty-five years old and had just recently completed his studies at Boston University for a Ph.D. in systematic theology. Even then Martin Luther King, Jr., viewed his ministry as part of a larger crusade for racial justice and equality. But he had no way of knowing how soon he would be propelled into action as a leader of that cause.

The incident that was destined to change his life and alter the course of Americanracial history occurred onDecember 1, 1955, when a department store seamstress named Rosa Parks boarded a City Lines bus in Montgomery and took a seat. As the bus continued on its route, more white passengers got on, and in keeping with the local Jim Crow law, they had first claim onthe seats. So whenthe driver ordered Mrs. Parks to stand up and she refused, she was arrested.

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In response, King and other local Negroes organized a boycott of city buses. In the past, such attempts to challenge the status quo in Montgomery had failed due to weak leadership. But the city’s black community now had a strong new voice and presence to rally around.

King’s church soon became the command post for the protest action, and in his first television interview, the young pastor made it clear that the boycott’s primary goal was to force a change in the bus line’s seating policy “to a first-come, first-serve basis . . . with no reserved seats for any race.”

The boycott held firm and lasted for nearly a year, during which time King’s moral strength and resolve were frequently put to the test. The worst moment came when his home was bombed; he wasn’t there at the time, but his wife and infant daughter narrowly escaped death. A few weeks after that, King and other boycott leaders were arrested on charges of interfering with the normal flow of free enterprise. In the meantime, the battle was also being fought on the legal front, and that part of the struggle went all the way to the U.S.

Supreme Court. Its decision—handed down in November 1956—

was an unequivocal victory for the boycott and the young minister who had led it.

King emerged from the long confrontation as a hero to his people, and understandably so. Most historians agree that more than any other single event (even more than the Supreme Court’s school decision), the Montgomery bus boycott spawned the civil rights movement. King was at the forefront of that movement as it spread across the South, and by the time I interviewed him in early 1961, he and his forces were assailing the citadels of segregation with sit-in demonstrations, freedom rides, and other forms of protest.

My own career had gone through a notable change. When our first year at ABC came to an end in the spring of 1958, Philip Morris de-

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cided The Mike Wallace Interview was more trouble than it was worth.

In addition, the network brass’s former ardent enthusiasm for our program had cooled considerably. It was obvious that we were on our last legs at ABC, so Ted Yates and I and the rest of our original Night Beat team decided to return to the less stressful confines of a local station in New York. We didn’t go back to Channel 5; our new home was the small and independent Channel 13, which would later become the New York City station in the Public Broadcasting System. That was where I interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr., in February 1961 and asked him about some of the tactics he endorsed in the battle to overcome segregation.

W A L L A C E : Dr. King, do you feel that there is no feeling among some Negro leaders that the methods of sit-ins and economic boycotts, which you and your group employ, have perhaps alienated many southern moderates who were formerly more sympathetic to your cause?

K I N G : Well, I am sure there are some Negroes who feel this. I don’t think it’s a majority opinion. I think there are some few—

W A L L A C E : Some older, more conservative groups, perhaps?

K I N G : Well, there are some few, yes. But I don’t think this would be the majority. I think the vast majority of Negroes and Negro leaders feel that they are good.

I then quoted from an article of his that had appeared in a recent issue of The Nation, in which he charged that “the intolerably slow pace of civil rights is due at least as much to the limits which the federal government has imposed on its own action as it is to the action of segregationist opposition.” He went on to write that “leadership and

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determination . . . have been lacking in recent years,” and I pressed him on that.

W A L L A C E : Are you pointing the finger at President Eisenhower on that score, Dr. King?

K I N G : Well, honesty impels me to say that I don’t think Mr.

Eisenhower gave the leadership that the problem demanded. . . . I don’t think he’s a man of ill will, but I don’t think he ever understood the depths and dimensions of this problem. And I am convinced that if he had taken a strong forthright stand, many of the problems and the tensions that we face in the South today would be nonexistent.

Eisenhower was no longer president. John F. Kennedy had been inaugurated just three weeks before our interview, and King expressed confidence that the new president would be an active supporter of the civil rights movement. (He did add, however, “I hope I’m not engaging in superficial optimism.”) We discussed the enormous difficulty of getting a tough anti-segregation law through Congress, and I suggested that without such legislation, Kennedy could not be an effective leader on the issue.

W A L L A C E : What specifically can he do? You have said “the president could give segregation its death blow through the stroke of a pen.” What can Kennedy do?

K I N G : The president has the power—with a stroke of the pen, as I said—to end many of these conditions in housing, in employment, and in hospital and health areas. These are some of the things he could end almost overnight with a stroke of the pen. And we must never forget that the Emancipation Procla-