Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (69 page)

Problems in uniting local blacks became especially visible in McComb, a southwestern Mississippi town where segregationists had total control. To shake their hold SNCC leaders led by Marion Barry favored "direct action" campaigns, such as sit-ins at drugstores and other segregated facilities. Moses went along with such efforts, but he was also anxious to coalesce with local NAACP leaders whom he considered to be vital to the success of long-range change on the community level. Most of these leaders wanted to concentrate on voter registration, a traditional goal of the NAACP. Endorsing this emphasis, Moses pointed out that direct action, such as a sit-in, was often "a one-event thing, and not something the movement could sustain."
³⁴

By the end of 1961 Moses's worries about sit-ins proved prophetic. White authorities in McComb responded to the SNCC sit-ins by arresting and jailing demonstrators, who remained incarcerated for thirty-four days before being released on bond supplied by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the NAACP. Two of those released then attempted to return to their all-black school, only to be barred by their black principal. This action enraged many of their classmates, more than 100 of whom dared to march through town, carrying banners and singing "We Shall Overcome." Incredulous whites surrounded them and savagely assaulted a newly arrived SNCC worker, Bob Zellner, the only white person in the march. Police then arrested SNCC organizers and 116 students, some of whom went to jail for more than a month. Meanwhile, the principal expelled all the marchers from school, requiring them to promise not to participate in future demonstrations as the price for readmission. Most refused.

As Moses had feared, the sit-ins had the further result of dividing local black people, some of whom blamed him along with other SNCC workers for what had happened. Many African-American parents had been cool to sit-ins from the beginning. Others were appalled that SNCC "outsiders" would encourage a march by students, most of whom were under eighteen years of age, and they blamed SNCC when their children were banned from school. By the end of the year, when Moses was finally released from jail, SNCC activity in McComb virtually ground to a halt, not to revive substantially again until the summer of 1964.
³⁵

Violence by whites further ensured the defeat of civil rights activities in the area. In the county seat of Liberty, E. H. Hurst, a member of the state legislature, shot and killed Herbert Lee, a black farmer and father of nine who had been so bold as to drive Moses around the county to contact potential voters. An African-American eyewitness, Louis Allen, told a coroner's jury that Hurst had acted in self-defense, and Hurst was quickly cleared. Allen then told Moses that whites had coerced him into perjury—Hurst, he said, had shot Lee in cold blood—and that he would say so in public if offered protection. Moses called the Justice Department in Washington, demanding that the government provide it. The Justice Department replied that it could not possibly do so and that Hurst would be found innocent whatever it did. Allen, fearing for his life, then stuck to his original story. A year and a half later he was ambushed, shot in the face, and killed. No one was charged in the slaying.
³⁶

Tensions elsewhere within the movement afflicted the reputation even of King, who devoted major attention to direct action protests in Albany, Georgia, between October 1961 and August 1962. The Albany Movement, as it was called, was one of the most frustrating of all civil rights efforts of the early 1960s. Local authorities, led by police chief Laurie Pritchett, shrewdly curbed white extremists and avoided excess. King was twice jailed but each time released on bail without securing anything of significance. Arrested and jailed a third time, he came before a judge who gave him a suspended sentence. King then left town, having failed to overturn segregation in the city.

The fate of the Albany Movement brought into the open already brewing complaints by activists about King. Many younger militants, while appreciating his enormous contributions to the cause, were irritated by his style as a preacher. King, they sneered, was "de Lawd."
³⁷
Others said he should risk jail more often, that he made key tactical errors, that SCLC was disorganized. Local black people in Albany and other places sometimes grumbled that he was above all a media star who swept into their communities, inflamed local whites, gained only token concessions (if any), and then departed, leaving them to face the angry retribution of white society.

The struggle at places like Albany accentuated other internal divisions as well. Some of these were organizational, pitting the SCLC and the NAACP against each other. King, for instance, expected the NAACP's Legal Defense and Education Fund to cover his mounting expenses. Thurgood Marshall, who headed the fund, bitterly complained, "With Martin Luther King's group, all he did was to dump all his legal work on us, including the bills."
³⁸
Both the SCLC and the NAACP, moreover, clashed with CORE and SNCC. As in the past the NAACP mainly attracted older, middle-class blacks who believed in the efficacy of litigation. But legal action took time, and many younger civil rights workers would not wait. Committed to direct action, they pushed ahead, sometimes impetuously, without listening to their elders. Often they chose to go to jail rather than pay fines, whereupon they, too, turned to the NAACP. Roy Wilkins, head of the NAACP, complained that SNCC workers in Albany "don't take orders from anybody. They operate in a kind of vacuum: parade, protest, sit-in. . . . When the headlines are gone, the issues still have to be settled in court."
³⁹

W
HAT WOULD
K
ENNEDY
and his brother, in the key post of Attorney General, do about the civil rights revolution in America?

Then and later they maintained that they did a good deal to help it advance along peaceful lines. In 1961 the administration created a Committee on Equal Employment Opportunities. Headed by Vice-President Johnson, it was active in probing discriminatory practices. The administration also moved to hire more blacks in the federal government: in January 1961 only ten of 950 attorneys in the Justice Department and only fifteen of 3,660 foreign service officers were black.
⁴⁰
It nominated five blacks to federal judgeships. One was Marshall, who was named to the Court of Appeals. Responding to the freedom rides, it pressured the ICC to issue its ruling against segregated facilities in interstate travel. And it took special interest in voting rights efforts—these were less likely than demonstrations to provoke violence—in the South. By May 1963 the Justice Department had become involved in voting rights struggles in 145 southern counties. This was nearly a 500 percent increase over the thirty counties so affected when the Eisenhower administration left office in 1961.
⁴¹

For the most part, however, John and Robert Kennedy moved cautiously concerning civil rights, especially in 1961–62. Their caution rested first on political considerations. Despite the rising tide of protest, civil rights at that time still did not command great public attention or passionate popular support. JFK, a careful listener to the public pulse, could see no political gain in pressing for action, especially from a Congress that was certain to be recalcitrant. If he pushed too hard for civil rights, he risked losing southern support he hoped to get in the 1962 and 1964 elections. Kennedy worried especially about southerners in Congress, notably powers like Senator James Eastland of Mississippi, who headed the important Judiciary Committee. Accommodating Eastland, Kennedy nominated four ardently segregationist men to federal district judgeships in the Deep South. One of these men, William Harold Cox, once described black people in his courtroom as "niggers" and compared them to chimpanzees.
⁴²

Political concerns also led Kennedy to back off from campaign promises. Although the Democratic party platform in 1960 had indicated support for a civil rights bill, Kennedy refused to introduce one in 1961 or 1962. Upset, NAACP lobbyist Clarence Mitchell observed that the "New Frontier looks like a dude ranch with Senator Eastland as the general manager."
⁴³
Kennedy also reneged on a campaign promise to issue an executive order banning racial discrimination in federally supported housing. Such an order, he had proclaimed, required no congressional action, just a "stroke of the pen." As 1961 and 1962 elapsed without such an order, disgruntled activists raised an "ink for Jack" campaign and sent thousands of fountain pens to the White House. Their campaign did no good. Kennedy waited until after the 1962 elections to issue the order, which he circumscribed carefully. It had little effect.
⁴⁴

Personal predilections reinforced the caution of the Kennedys. Concerning civil rights, as concerning other domestic issues, the President and the Attorney General remained cool and detached. While they believed abstractly in the goal of better civil rights, they felt no passionate attachment to the cause. The President's attitude became clear during his first week in office when black African diplomats complained that restaurants on roads to Washington were refusing to serve them. "Can't you tell them not to do it?" he asked his chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke. Duke tried to explain his efforts to educate the managers. But Kennedy interrupted. "That's not what I'm talking about. Can't you tell those African ambassadors not to drive on Route 40? It's a hell of a road. . . . Tell these ambassadors I wouldn't think of driving from New York to Washington. Tell them to fly!"
⁴⁵

President Kennedy worried especially that racial unrest in the United States would soil the nation's image abroad and sabotage foreign policy goals that he really cared about. While the freedom rides were starting, he was focusing intently not on race relations but on a forthcoming summit meeting with Khrushchev in Vienna. After the riders were arrested and beaten, he was worried and angry. "Tell [the riders] to call it off," he told his civil rights aide, Harris Wofford. "Stop them!" When the riders persisted, the Kennedys publicly called for a "cooling-off" period. Robert exploded to Wofford that the blacks totally failed to appreciate the need for national unity on the eve of the summit. Farmer replied that blacks "have been cooling off for 150 years. If we cool off any more, we'll be in a deep freeze."
⁴⁶

The Kennedys faced special dilemmas because of the role of FBI chief Hoover, as ever a consummate and well connected bureaucrat. Hoover had developed an overpowering hatred of Martin Luther King, whom he considered a "'torn cat' with obsessive degenerate sexual urges." He was further convinced that one of King's advisers, a New York lawyer named Stanley Levison, was a Communist. Worried about such rumors, Robert sent aides to urge King to sever his relations with Levison. (King did not.) In early 1962 Robert Kennedy authorized the FBI to tap and bug Levison's office and to tap his home telephone. In October he went further, giving Hoover the go-ahead to tap King's telephones in Atlanta and New York.
⁴⁷

Although the taps remained on King's phones for the remainder of Kennedy's presidency (and beyond), they revealed little of substance. King, they showed, liked parties and bawdy jokes and apparently engaged in a good deal of extramarital sexual activity. These discoveries, had they been publicly disclosed, would have damaged King's standing. No evidence, however, proved that Levison had associations with Communists after he had become close to King in 1956. The Kennedys nonetheless continued to sanction Hoover's obsessive and voyeuristic efforts.
⁴⁸

Why they did so remains debated. But it is obvious that they feared to challenge Hoover, who had powerful contacts on Capitol Hill and who was spreading rumors about King throughout Washington. Hoover, moreover, knew too much about President Kennedy's own reckless and irresponsible sex life. In March 1962 he apparently warned Kennedy that Judith Campbell, with whom Kennedy had been sleeping since early 1960 (and whose seventy-odd calls to the White House since January 1961 had been logged and made known to the FBI), was also the mistress of the Mafia gangster Sam Giancana. Giancana, in turn, was working with the CIA on plots to assassinate Castro. Documentation of such a network badly compromised chances of prosecuting Giancana and associated gangsters. (Robert, as Attorney General, nonetheless proceeded to do so.) President Kennedy had also exposed himself to blackmail and disgrace. Quickly he broke off relations with Campbell; so far as is known he had his last White House telephone conversation with her that afternoon. With Hoover in command of such damning information it could not have been easy for Kennedy to turn down his requests for taps on King.
⁴⁹

For all these reasons the Kennedys continued to give Hoover and the FBI wide leeway in handling racial confrontations in the South. This harmed the movement, for Hoover not only loathed King; he also feared and hated civil rights activists. Still obsessive about Communism, he was sure that Reds dominated the civil rights movement, and he amassed huge dossiers on left-wing sympathizers such as the composer Leonard Bernstein and many others.
⁵⁰
The FBI hired few black agents and had none working on civil rights matters in the South. It offered movement people no protection from white violence and sometimes (as at Birmingham) knowingly condoned it. Nothing enraged civil rights workers more than the failure of the Kennedy administration, about which activists had once had expectations, to use federal force to shield them from attacks.