Listening In (24 page)

MARSHALL:
Yes, it does, but it’s different, because there we had a white mob against a Negro. Here we have a Negro mob.

JFK:
Well, except, that’s why one of [the] things would be to control the Negro mob. That’s one of our purposes. That’s the only purpose, what we’ve got is twofold—to provide an atmosphere in which this agreement can be carried out, and in the meanwhile to prevent the Negroes from rioting, and therefore prevent the whites from reacting against it. That’s our purpose. The question really would be, what would be the thing about landing the troops at the airfield, outside, without going in?

GENERAL EARLE WHEELER:
⁹
Mr. President, there’s one other alternative, you could keep the troops in the air for a period of time. As a matter of fact, we could organize to keep troops constantly in the air if we had to. [unclear] They’ve got about seven hours of flying time, flying from Bragg, they have go, three hours down and three hours up, and they’d have to go and refuel, the turnaround time there is … We could organize to have a couple hundred troops in the air, on call in effect, an hour from downtown Birmingham.

MARSHALL:
I think the knowledge that the troops were sort of available, or were being moved in order to be available, might have a calming effect on Negroes.

WHEELER:
You got a couple of possibilities here. I’ve got 300 and, about 350 troops. [unclear] Which is an army helicopter … we could move to Fort McClellan, which is about thirty miles away, this is in Anniston. Now the airfield there is not very good, but we can get them in, about an hour after we get to work. They would be thirty miles away by road, Mr. President, from Birmingham. The troops that are moving from Fort Bragg in the C123s and the C130s, we could dispose of in two places. We could put Farnham into Maxwell Air Force Base, which is in Alabama. The rest of them we could put into Seward Air Force Base, which is near Fort Campbell, Kentucky. Now the flying time is much shorter, from both Maxwell, and from …

JFK:
What we want to get out of Martin King is … How freely do you talk to King?

MARSHALL:
I talk to him freely. I’ll tell you what he intends to do, Mr. President. He intends to go to this church and call upon his people to [unclear] the attorney general said. And then tomorrow, he intends to go around the city and visit pool halls and saloons and talk to the Negroes and preach against violence. Those are his intentions.

JFK:
Now, what has he, he’s issued a statement calling upon me to make a statement. But what our problem is here, we can make this statement, but if there’s going to be violence tonight, that is obviously what Governor Wallace wants. We don’t want to, we don’t like to put troops in there because then we think it is going to be more difficult for a success to be made of this agreement. But we will if there’s going to be violence tonight. Now, what is his judgment about that?

MARSHALL:
Well, now, do you want to get into a discussion I had about that?

[several people talking]

RFK:
He might say that we are talking to him about it.

MARSHALL:
I haven’t done that, sir.

JFK:
Well, I think you ought to look like you’re talking just on your own, without saying we’re considering it then. What our problem is, is to try to make a judgment on whether the Negro community is going to be out in the street tonight. If it is, then we are going to have to put troops in there, because they’re either going to get beaten up or they’re going to beat someone up. Maybe he can’t tell us that. The other thing, he wants me to make a statement. I don’t know what a statement … He said that “he hopes would not jeopardize these bombings, et cetera.” Now there’s one other thing where he’s asked me to make a statement, “said today the new outbursts would make it mandatory to take a forthright stand against the indignities as to …”

RFK:
I think you can make a statement, because, I mean, you can say about the fact that these two places have been bombed. His brother’s house was bombed.

JFK:
Yeah.

RFK:
And the motel was bombed.

JFK:
We’d also urge the Negroes to …

RFK:
I mean, you can make a pretty strong statement at this time.

MEETING ABOUT BIRMINGHAM, MAY 21, 1963

Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had been leading the Kennedy administration’s response to the violence in Birmingham, and as this recording makes clear, he felt a rising indignation. He launches the meeting with what is in effect a long soliloquy, including not simply a denunciation of violence against African-Americans, but the larger problem—that decent jobs are unavailable to them, including those they might expect from the federal government. He does not mention Martin Luther King, Jr., for some time, which only increases the perceived influence of this other powerful actor on the stage. Then, near the end of these remarks, King is finally named. He is clearly now seen as an ally, and a much-needed force for restraint. Simultaneously, the Kennedy administration was preparing a Civil Rights Bill. Birmingham was a watershed.

RFK:
… to come out for some accommodation with the Negroes were as against him
¹⁰
coming back, and we were against him coming back. And we tried to prevail upon him to wait until Boutwell
¹¹
had been able to take over the administration of the city, and put in the reforms that he indicated that he would do. So we were not successful. He came back and, as I say, did not have the support of the Negro community, and he sought a license to parade and to put on a demonstration, and Bull Connor refused. So he went out and got eight or ten people, and they were all arrested.

And then when they were arrested, that got a little bit more publicity, although the papers had arranged between them that they would never put this on the front page, and that they would play it down. Television played it up, and it got around the Negro community. So then he started to get more and more support as more and more of his people were arrested. Then he got himself arrested on Good Friday, so that he stays in jail over Easter Sunday, and then of course he got everybody around the Negro community, and then he came out. And he started having larger and larger demonstrations, and as more and more people were arrested, the Negro community, the local Negro community, felt that they couldn’t let him do all these things by himself, ’cause they didn’t have the support. So they started to support him.

And then the NAACP, which had been strongly against him going in there and having these demonstrations, they started to feel that they had to support him, because they were losing everything to him. And so finally you start getting more and more people who come his way. And then he hit upon the idea of having children come out, and that’s when the thousands of people started to gather. He got these large groups of people out, Friday or Saturday, about two and a half weeks ago. And there was then, of course, with all those children and all those people, there was great danger.

The problem at that time was that the white people and the Negro people weren’t talking to one another. Many in the Negro leadership didn’t know what they were demonstrating about. They didn’t know whether they were demonstrating to get rid of Bull Connor, or whether they were demonstrating about the stores, or whether they were demonstrating against the city government. Ninety percent of the people who were demonstrating certainly didn’t know what they were demonstrating about, and none of the white community knew what they were demonstrating about. None of the white community would get near the Negro community at that juncture, because they felt that they were being disorderly, and so nobody was talking to anybody. And you had all these demonstrations, which were getting larger and larger.

So then the President sent Burke Marshall down … [to] Birmingham to see if something could be done about getting people together. First, he went to the Negro community to find out what they wanted. And that was difficult, because a lot of them didn’t know what they wanted. And finally, through efforts with Martin Luther King, found out what they wanted, which [unclear] to desegregate the lunch counters, which was to take the signs off the toilets and the drinking fountains, to have a better hiring system in Birmingham in the department stores, and to hire at least one clerk in one of the stores.

So he went back to the white community, to the department store heads, the majority of whom were branch stores and had their main offices outside the city, and told them this. So they started having meetings. Douglas Dillon
¹²
and some others called the heads of the big chains. I spoke to some of them and expressed our concern. Burke met with the local people in Birmingham, and finally they said that they’d be willing to do some of these things, but that they would want to wait until something else happened in Birmingham. They wanted to have some other desegregation take place before they took the first step.

And what they hit upon was the schools. When the schools were desegregated, they said that they would then do these other things. Well, the earliest the schools would be desegregated was September, so the Negroes were unwilling to wait until that happened. And the department stores said they were unwilling to take the first step, so the result was, this was into Monday, Tuesday. And then the demonstrations got larger and larger, and then, as demonstrations got into the thousands, of course they got out of hand. Then Martin Luther King preaches nonviolence, and if you’re hit you kneel down and say your prayers and don’t hit back, which is all very good. And those who hear him, they follow him exceptionally well. I mean, there is no violence as far as the Negroes are concerned.

But the Negro community of Birmingham has probably the toughest group of Negroes in the country. And so, when some of them started to turn out, they [unclear] with the police for a long period of time. And they came out with their bricks and their knives and started running through the park and going into the department stores. And so, the situation had gotten completely out of hand.

The white community, then, became, itself, became exercised, concerned as to what they should do. And we felt that if we could get the substantial white citizens who owned the, ran the financial life of Birmingham behind the department store heads, that perhaps we could get the department store heads to move. So they had a meeting down there, and Burke attended it, and said that what you were going to have in Birmingham was complete chaos. You would have bloodshed unless something was done. That the Negro demands were quite reasonable, that they should support the department store heads and urge them to make this agreement. Finally, some of these meetings went to four or five in the morning, and Burke was the only contact between the whites and the Negroes, and finally brought them together, and the white financial, economic leaders agreed to support the department store heads, and then they would go down the line and they also would take steps to improve the lot of the Negroes. When that happened, the department store heads said that they would make this agreement.

Then we got in touch with Martin Luther King and said that they had agreed to make the agreement, and he said, “Well, I’ve had businessmen tell me in Albany that they’d made an agreement, and then they didn’t keep their word, so we are going to go on with the demonstrations.” We said to him that you had the demonstrations to accomplish a certain purpose, you’ve accomplished that purpose, then to go on with the demonstrations doesn’t make a great deal of sense. He said, “Well, I’ve got to get people out of jail. The only way to get my people out of jail,” he then had a couple of thousand in jail, “is to have demonstrations so that they have so many people who are in jail and such a crisis in Birmingham that they let everybody out of jail.”

This really didn’t make a great deal of sense. But if he’d had another day of demonstrations, you would have had great bloodshed in Birmingham, and then the governor, who would then start moving into Birmingham, would have taken over the city. So you would never have anything accomplished. So we were able to prevail upon him to call off his demonstrations, just really in time because I don’t think there was any question by that Wednesday night, the governor would have moved into the city, and he would have had complete control of it, and you would never have had any of these gains.

So they called off their demonstrations, and then you had the Saturday night at ten after eleven, you had one stick of dynamite thrown in Martin Luther King’s brother’s house, and then thirty minutes later, eleven-forty, you had eight sticks of dynamite were thrown in the Gaston Motel where Martin Luther King had stayed. The Negroes gathered, several thousands, when the police came and the fire department came with their fire hoses. They threw rocks and stones, brought out their knives. They got out of hand.