Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (64 page)

The protestors had not entered upon their challenge carelessly. They knew a good deal about the boycott at Montgomery and had learned about tactics of resistance from a pamphlet on the subject circulated by CORE. A local white storekeeper, an NAACP member, had urged them to struggle against racial discrimination. They were understandably frightened. When they sat down, a black dishwasher behind the counter, afraid she would lose her job, loudly berated them for being "stupid, ignorant . . . rabble-rousers, troublemakers." Behind them a white policeman, confused and nervous, paced back and forth and slapped his club in his palm. No one served them, and the store closed a half-hour early at 5:00
P.M.
When they went back to campus, they discovered that they were local heroes. So they remained decades later.
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From those modest beginnings emerged a wave of sit-ins that transformed the civil rights movement. In Greensboro the four became twenty-four by the second day. By the fourth day white women from the local University of North Carolina Women's College joined them. By then protestors, mostly black students, were starting to sit in at lunch counters elsewhere in the state. Within a week the movement had spread across the border to Hampton, Virginia, and Rock Hill, South Carolina. A week later fifty-four sit-ins were under way in fifteen cities in nine states in the South.
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It was obvious from the way that the spark of protest jumped from place to place that black resentments, which had somehow failed to ignite other sit-ins between 1957 and 1959, had exploded.

The sit-ins of 1960 arose, as did the civil rights movement in later years, from the collective efforts of unsung local activists: they sprang from the bottom up. Many later leaders, unknown in 1960, jumped into action. One was Cleveland Sellers, then a sixteen-year-old in Denmark, South Carolina. He started leading protests there. Another was Ruby Doris Smith, who joined demonstrations in Atlanta. A "Nashville group" included such later well known activists as John Lewis, Marion Barry, ministers James Lawson and C. T. Vivian, and Diane Nash. Schooled in Gandhian principles, they believed in developing a disciplined "beloved community." An "Atlanta group" included Julian Bond. Stokely Car-michael, a student at Howard University in Washington, headed South to become involved. In New York City, Robert Moses, a twenty-six-year-old high school teacher, looked at newspaper photographs of the Greensboro youths and was inspired by their "sullen, angry, determined" look that differed from the "defensive, cringing" expression common to blacks in the South. Moses, who was to become a legendary activist, soon joined the student movement.
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In mid-April Ella Baker, the fifty-five-year-old executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, thought it was time to bring the student protestors together and develop strategies that would go beyond what she considered the old-fashioned approaches of Martin Luther King. The conference that she called, at Shaw College in Raleigh, attracted numbers beyond all expectations: more than 300 students. While most came from southern black colleges, those in attendance included nineteen white college students from the North. King addressed the students, but Lawson, who had engaged in the Nashville sit-ins, sparked the most enthusiasm. When the students adjourned, they had formed a new organization, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC. Barry became its first chairman.
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When Baker addressed the students at the gathering, she urged them to challenge racial injustice in all walks of life, including housing, health care, voting, and employment. "The current sit-ins and other demonstrations," she said, "are concerned with something much bigger than a hamburger or even a giant-sized Coke."
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At that time, however, SNCC was dominated by black students at southern colleges such as Morehouse and Fisk. Bent on attacking legalized racism in the South, they did not much concern themselves in 1960 with problems in the North.
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In focusing on Jim Crow in Dixie, SNCC did not differ greatly from King and other major leaders of the movement at the time.

The protestors quickly encountered all kinds of resistance. This was expected, for the vast majority of whites in the Deep South remained implacably opposed to desegregation. On the segregated beaches of Biloxi, Mississippi, a white man shot and wounded ten black people. Even in the Upper South whites generally refused to desegregate (Greensboro did not give in until July, by which time the Woolworth store had lost an estimated $200,000 in business, or 20 percent of anticipated sales). Normally they summoned police to arrest demonstrators on charges such as trespassing or disturbing the peace. Some 3,000 protestors went to jail in 1960.
⁶⁵

The activists also encountered reluctance from within black communities, which had never been monolithic. Much of this resistance reflected generational divisions, which persisted in later years. The NAACP, with some 380,000 members at that time, remained by far the largest civil rights organization in the nation, and it was dominated by older leaders who never endorsed the sit-in strategy. Local branches of the NAACP sometimes helped the protestors by providing legal services and bail money but did so on their own. Thurgood Marshall derided the Gandhian "jail-in" tactics of demonstrators as impractical and expensive and angered Nashville activists by advising them, "If someone offers to get you out, man, get out."
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The president of Southern University in Baton Rouge, a black institution, suspended eighteen sit-in leaders from school and forced the entire student body to resign and reapply so that he could screen their applications and weed out trouble-makers. He said, "Like Lincoln, who sought to preserve the Union, my dominant concern is to save Southern University."
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Even so, the sit-ins spread rapidly, not only to all southern states but also to Illinois, Ohio, and Nevada. It was estimated that 70,000 demonstrators took part in them. The protestors challenged segregation at lunch counters, parks, pools, beaches, restaurants, churches, libraries, transportation facilities, museums, and art galleries. The movement for rights, once unbottled, spilled out to challenge discrimination in voting and in employment. When the campuses reopened in September, a new surge of activism indicated that pressure for change, far from abating, was unstoppable.

P
OLITICS AS USUAL,
however, tended to persist amid this turmoil. The sit-ins still failed to arouse the conscience of the vast majority of white Americans at the time. Most whites in the North imagined that racism was a southern problem; most in the South refused to relent. Even during the fall of 1960, with sit-ins proliferating, the majority of candidates for national and state offices managed their campaigns as they always had—by saying little about race relations. This was equally true of the major presidential candidates, Vice-President Richard Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy. Both were party regulars and centrists who devoted relatively little attention to civil rights in 1960. The main issues at that time, as in most elections since 1945, remained the economy and the Cold War.

This focus was to be expected of Nixon, whose major crusade in life before 1960 had contested Communism. Many Democrats, indeed, had loathed him for his excesses in this effort since the 1940s. Nixon, they reiterated, had won a congressional seat in 1946 by falsely calling his opponent, the incumbent Jerry Voorhis, a Communist. Running for the Senate in 1950, he had Red-baited his liberal opponent, Representative Helen Gahagan Douglas. As Vice-President he proved to be an energetic and unfailingly partisan Cold Warrior. When he ran in 1960, he was still only forty-seven years old.
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Fellow Republicans admired Nixon's dogged tenacity and partisan spirit. But few of them managed to get close to one of America's most private politicians. Contemporaries remarked on Nixon's awkwardness in public and on his habit of constantly testing himself, as if in duels to the finish, against people he imagined were mortal enemies. Many of these enemies were well-connected figures: Alger Hiss, Acheson, Stevenson. Having grown up in a modest, hard-working California family, Nixon never felt secure in eastern Establishment circles, and he could scarcely conceal his resentments. Even partisan allies sometimes found him cold and excessively ambitious. Others deeply distrusted him. "Would you buy a used car from this man?" opposition posters of him proclaimed. Eisenhower noted unhappily that Nixon seemed to have no friends. Ike's secretary, Ann Whitman, agreed. "Everybody," she confided to her diary, "trusts and loves" Ike. "But the Vice President sometimes seems like a man who is acting like a nice man rather than being one."
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Those who opposed Nixon especially detested his style. The tasteless appeal of his Checkers speech in 1952 had appalled them. "No class," Kennedy had said. "No style, no style at all," the
Washington Post's
editor, Ben Bradlee (a Kennedy friend and supporter), had added.
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Nixon's labored attempts in 1960 to project a more genial persona especially irritated detractors, who thought that he remained a phony. Stevenson sniped that Nixon had "put away his switchblade and now assumes the aspect of an Eagle Scout." An editor added that the question wasn't whether there was a "new" or an "old" Nixon but "whether there is anything that might be called the 'real' Nixon, new or old."
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Kennedy, by contrast, seemed to promise some change. His supporters hailed him—often with hyperbole—as an accomplished writer, a hero in World War II, and a torch-bearer for a new generation.
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Only forty-three years old in 1960, "Jack" was the youngest presidential candidate of a major party in United States history.
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He was considered to be handsome, charming, and, with his stylish young wife, Jacqueline ("Jackie"), the epitome of cultured cosmopolitanism. A Harvard graduate, he surrounded himself with intellectuals who seemed to burst with ideas for the future, as well as with political professionals who worked effectively in the precincts. Kennedy beat Hubert Humphrey and others in a series of primaries, took the Democratic nomination on the first ballot, named Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, and promised a New Frontier for the United States.
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During the campaign, it became obvious that Kennedy had strong political assets, among them access to unlimited money from his wealthy family. When Humphrey lost the West Virginia primary, a key contest, he pulled out, complaining, "You can't beat a million dollars. The way Jack Kennedy and his old man threw the money around, the people of West Virginia won't need any public relief for the next fifteen years."
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Then and later foes of Jack especially distrusted Joseph Kennedy, the cold and ruthless patriarch of the family who stopped at almost nothing where the political advancement of his sons was concerned.
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Many liberals, too, found it hard to summon enthusiasm for Kennedy. Eleanor Roosevelt and others remembered bitterly that JFK had refused to speak out against McCarthy and that he had offered only perfunctory support for progressive social causes, including civil rights. (Kennedy in fact had not been a hard-working or especially distinguished senator.)
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The ADA had to overcome strong opposition within its ranks before agreeing to endorse him, and it never supported Johnson. Many liberals had unkind words for both nominees. Eric Sevareid of CBS complained that they were "tidy, buttoned-down men . . . completely packaged products. The Processed Politician has finally arrived." Richard Rovere wrote in
Harpers
that Kennedy and Nixon "tend more and more to borrow from one another's platforms and to assume one another's commitments."
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Rovere and others were correct that the candidates were packaged—each spent record sums on TV coverage and ads—and that they differed only marginally on the issues. Kennedy made much of the slow growth of the economy since the 1958 recession and of the oft-alleged lack of "national purpose" that commentators had claimed to discover in recent years.
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He also endorsed party planks favoring federal aid to education, a higher minimum wage, and governmental medical insurance for the elderly. Support of such policies helped him attract key interest groups, notably teachers and labor unions. But Nixon, too, promised to take positive action to improve economic growth; he seemed well to the left of Eisenhower on most domestic issues. Nixon also insisted that he (unlike Ike) would be a strong and activist President. Kennedy harped on the "missile gap," even though he was frequently told by high-ranking defense officials that no such gap existed. Kennedy also seemed to support an invasion of Cuba by anti-Castro exiles. This popular line privately enraged Nixon, who dared not reveal secrets about the CIA's training of exiles in Guatemala. If anything, Nixon sounded less hawkish on the issue than did Kennedy. Overall, however, both men were solid Cold Warriors.
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