An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy 1917-1963 (100 page)

Nevertheless, Kennedy sent Burke Marshall to Birmingham to work out a settlement. King believed that the administration wanted him to suspend demonstrations until the Alabama Supreme Court had ruled on the legitimacy of a more moderate city government battling Connor for control of city hall. But King saw delay as defeat. In a famous letter to white clergymen written from the Birmingham jail, where he had been imprisoned after an April demonstration, King expressed disappointment at their opposition to civil disobedience and their counsels of patience. He wrote: “‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’ . . . When you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness’—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.”

King reserved his strongest complaints for white moderates, among whom he included the Kennedys. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice, who . . . constantly says, ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action,’ who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.” King publicly took issue with Kennedy’s assertion that “there were no federal statutes involved in most aspects of this struggle. . . . I feel that there have been blatant violations of basic constitutional principles.”

During a week of tedious negotiations, Marshall convinced both sides to compromise: The SCLC won agreements to desegregate department store fitting rooms, downtown lunch counters, washrooms, rest rooms, and drinking fountains. Blacks were to fill a small number of white-collar jobs, and a committee would be formed to discuss future racial problems and employment. Under direct pressure from cabinet secretaries Dillon, McNamara, Hodges, and W. Willard Wirtz, and U.S. Steel president Roger Blough, who called Birmingham business chiefs as a way to get back in Kennedy’s good graces, the white power structure agreed to the changes, which promised an end to demonstrations and a return to normal business activity.

But the compromise agitated diehard segregationists. They could not abide a King declaration that the concessions were a great civil rights victory opening the way to the end of discrimination in Birmingham, or Bobby’s description of the agreement as “a tremendous step forward for Birmingham, for Alabama, and for the South generally.” Birmingham’s new moderate mayor, Albert Boutwell, announced that he would not be bound by the settlement, and, as King anticipated, Alabama’s segregationist press dismissed the agreement as a defeat for the SCLC. On Saturday, May 11, Alabama and Georgia Klansmen staged a rally in a suburban Birmingham park, and that night bombs exploded at the home of the Reverend A. D. King, Martin Luther King’s brother, and at the black-owned Gaston Motel, where King stayed during his visits to Birmingham. Blacks responded with attacks on police and firemen, which brought state troopers and city anti-riot forces to the scene. A four-hour rampage by local residents left a nine-block area of the black ghetto a smoldering shambles. The explosion of violence by southern blacks against white oppression was unprecedented in the twentieth century. “The passivity and nonviolence of American Negroes could never again be taken for granted,” two experts on southern race relations said. “The ‘rules of the game’ in race relations were permanently changed in Birmingham.”

Now Kennedy was forced toward a fresh response to the civil rights crisis. His first concern was to stem the violence, which threatened to destroy the compromise agreement. He knew that he could not rely on Alabama governor George Wallace to help. Wallace had begun his political career in the fifties as a moderate and promptly lost a gubernatorial campaign to an out-and-out racist who had openly courted the Klan. Determined not to let any political opponent ever again outdo him as a segregationist (to be “out-niggered again,” Wallace said), he had won the governorship in 1962 by infamously promising segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. He also personally pledged to stand in the schoolhouse door to block any “illegal” federal court order mandating integration. It was clear that if Wallace controlled the state’s National Guard, they were likely, Kennedy thought, to be “sticking bayonets in people and hitting people with clubs, guns, et cetera.” And this seemed certain to destroy black adherence to the Birmingham compromise, as Wallace hoped. Kennedy feared the result would be “rallies all over the country . . . with people calling on the President to take forceful action.”

If the White House decided to federalize the Alabama National Guard and send troops to Birmingham, it seemed certain to antagonize just about everyone. The guard, after all, would be deployed to counter not white rioters, as in Mississippi in 1962, but the rampaging blacks, who might return to the streets on Sunday night. Yet despite being sent to curb black violence, federal troops would remind southerners of military reconstruction and could undermine Birmingham’s white moderates, who had agreed to the settlement and were already under attack for having allied themselves with the SCLC. “If that agreement blows up,” Burke Marshall told the president, “the Negroes will be —” Kennedy finished his thought: “Uncontrollable.” Marshall added: “And I think not only in Birmingham.”

King now emerged as a crucial, if unacknowledged, ally, in trying to save the Birmingham settlement. Kennedy asked Marshall to find out what King intended. Marshall reported back to Kennedy that King, indeed, hoped to control “his people” and believed he could if there were no other incidents. Kennedy wanted to know if King had said anything about troops, which he had not.

Although he did not underestimate the dangers Birmingham posed to civic peace across the South and to the future of his presidency, Kennedy’s success in managing the Cuban missile problem had given him confidence that he could find a satisfactory solution to the current crisis. He was also confident that the American people would back appeals to equal treatment under the law. He instructed McNamara, Marshall, Katzenbach, and Edwin Guthman, Bobby’s public affairs spokesman at the Justice Department, to draft a declaration promising a restoration of public order and constitutional rights for blacks. Although Kennedy eventually complained that their statement “leaned too much on the side of the Negroes,” his announcement left no doubt that he wished to preserve the gains made in the Birmingham agreement. In a televised Oval Office speech to the country on Sunday night, May 12, he praised it as “a fair and just accord,” which “recognized the fundamental right of all citizens to be accorded equal treatment and opportunity.” He promised that the federal government would not permit “a few extremists” on each side to sabotage the settlement. To facilitate these goals, Kennedy announced the return of Burke Marshall to Birmingham for additional consultations, the dispatch of riot control forces to military bases near the city, and steps to federalize the Alabama National Guard, should they be needed to keep the peace. The next day the White House released a telegram to Wallace describing the basis for presidential authority to suppress domestic violence and the preparations for such possible action.

The combination of King’s appeals to the black community for quiet and Kennedy’s determination to maintain order and support the Birmingham settlement disposed of the immediate crisis. But Kennedy did not believe that the Birmingham agreement ensured future improvements in race relations or an end to civil rights conflicts across the South. A survey Bobby made of southern cities suggested that as many as thirty of them might explode in violence during the summer.

Events in Alabama and Mississippi during the next two weeks confirmed their fears. On May 22, Wallace, who had pledged to go to jail rather than allow integration of the University of Alabama, the last remaining segregated state university in the nation, responded to a May 21 federal district court order by restating his determination to resist the enrollment of black students. Privately he rejected Bobby’s overtures to talk, telling his state attorney general, “Dammit, send the Justice Department word, I ain’t compromising with anybody. I’m gonna
make ’em
bring troops into this state.” When Bobby persisted, Wallace agreed to see him in Montgomery if the attorney general requested the meeting in writing.

On April 25, after Bobby had sent a telegram asking to see him, Wallace met with him in the governor’s office. On the ride to the state capitol, observing pickets carrying inflammatory signs, Bobby told Burke Marshall, “It’s like a foreign country.” As he walked up the steps of the capitol, Bobby saw state troopers with Confederate flags painted on steel helmets. A crowd of onlookers was friendly and eagerly shook Bobby’s hand, but the troopers were overtly hostile. The head of the protective detail turned his back when Bobby extended his hand, and one of the troopers put his nightstick against Bobby’s stomach and shoved him back as he attempted to approach some excited young women trying to greet him. The only ground for agreement Bobby could find with Wallace in their eighty-minute conversation was that the governor would greet the president when he paid a visit to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, on May 18 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

That encounter between the president and Wallace gave Kennedy no hope that Wallace would desist from his bitter-end segregationist views. Though he would deny it later, during a fifty-minute helicopter ride from Muscle Shoals to the Redstone Arsenal at Huntsville, Wallace replied to Kennedy’s questions about black employment in Birmingham department stores by denouncing King and other black activists as self-indulgent, cigar-smoking womanizers who drove around in big Cadillacs and lusted after black, “white and red women too.” Not amused, Kennedy made it clear at Redstone that he did not wish to be photographed with Wallace.

The prospect of race wars across the South convinced Kennedy that he had to take bolder action to address the problem. Burke Marshall recalled that the president now saw Birmingham as a pattern that “would recur in many other places.” Bobby told his brother, “There must be a dozen places where we’re having major problems today.” JFK, Marshall said, “wanted to know what he should do—not to deal with Birmingham, but to deal with what was clearly an explosion in the racial problem that could not, would not, go away, that he had not only to face up to himself, but somehow to bring the country to face up to and resolve.”

At meetings on May 20 and 21, Bobby and his civil rights and political advisers recommended personal appeals by the president to southern white officeholders and businessmen to meet with blacks to discuss opening places of public accommodation and jobs to them. But Kennedy saw the southerners as “hopeless, they’ll never reform.” He added, “The people in the South haven’t done anything about integration for a hundred years, and when an outsider intervenes, they tell him to get out; they’ll take care of it themselves, which they won’t.” It was time, he declared, to be less concerned about southern feelings.

KENNEDY BELIEVED
that he would now have to ask Congress for a major civil rights bill that would offer a comprehensive response to the problem. “These people who object to mob action, unreasonable demonstrations and so on [don’t get it],” Kennedy told aides. “The problem is [that] there is no other remedy for them [the black rioters]. This will give another remedy in law. Therefore, this is the right message. It will remove the [incentive] to mob action.” Kennedy was uncertain about what exactly to include in such a bill. Nevertheless, on May 22, when a reporter asked him if he was considering asking for new civil rights legislation as a result of the recent developments down South, he answered: “Yes . . . we are considering whether any additional proposals will be made to the Congress. And the final decision should be made in the next few days.”

Kennedy’s sense of urgency about a new legislative initiative increased in the next three weeks. On May 24, Bobby met in the Kennedys’ New York family apartment on Central Park South with an elite group of black activists. James Baldwin, the author of a disturbing November 1962
New Yorker
article on the condition of black men in America, organized the meeting at Bobby’s request. Jerome Smith, a black radical, dominated the discussion, describing himself as nauseated by the necessity of being in the same room with the attorney general. The fact that he had to explain the personal abuse inflicted on him in the South showed, he said, what little progress had been made in race relations, and he doubted that he could follow King’s prescription of nonviolence much longer. Indeed, he didn’t even feel he could fight for America were he ever asked to do so. Bobby’s evident anger at Smith moved the playwright Lorraine Hansberry to say, “Look, if you can’t understand what this young man is saying, then we are without hope at all because you and your brother are representatives of the best that a white America can offer; and if you are insensitive to this, then there’s no alternative to our going in the streets . . . and chaos.” When Schlesinger listened to a stunned Bobby describe his distress over the encounter, he feared that Bobby’s “final reaction would be a sense of futility rather than of the urgency of trying to bridge the gap.”

Schlesinger need not have worried. However strong Bobby’s initial indignation, he shortly asked the Senate Judiciary Committee, “How long can we say to a Negro in Jackson, ‘When war comes you will be an American citizen, but in the meantime you’re a citizen of Mississippi—and we can’t help you’?” An outburst of violence in Jackson at the end of May against protesters trying to desegregate a Woolworth’s lunch counter, combined with demonstrations over integrating Baton Rouge, Louisiana, schools, strengthened the Kennedys’ resolve to ask Congress for comprehensive civil rights legislation. And while Kennedy remained relatively dispassionate, there was a mounting sense of urgency. On June 3, when Louisiana governor Jimmie Davis told the president, “Either we have federal orders to stop some of these demonstrations, marches . . . [or] it is going to spread,” Kennedy replied, “It’s going to be up North. . . . This isn’t any more just a southern matter. . . . It’s Philadelphia and it’s going to be Washington, D.C., this summer, and we’re trying to figure out what we can do to put this stuff in the courts and get it off the street because somebody’s going to get killed.”