Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (70 page)

Instead, the Kennedy brothers relied on deal-making with southern politicians. Robert Kennedy spent many hours on the phone reasoning with segregationist officials such as Barnett and Eastland of Mississippi, who finally agreed that freedom riders in Jackson would be arrested peacefully. In defending this approach the administration advanced constitutional arguments, notably its exposition of "federalism." As enunciated by Assistant Attorney General Burke Marshall, Kennedy-style federalism asserted that it was the responsibility of local authorities, not the national government, to preserve order and to protect citizens against unlawful conduct. Only when local officials completely lost control should the federal government consider responding with force of its own. "We do not have a national police force," Marshall explained. "There is no substitute under the federal system for the failure of local law enforcement responsibility. There is simply a vacuum, which can be filled only rarely, with extraordinary difficulty, and in totally unsatisfactory fashion."
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Violent confrontation at the University of Mississippi in September 1962 revealed the dangers of this approach. This turmoil followed the efforts of James Meredith, backed by the federal courts, to enroll as the first black student at the university. Barnett, however, drew on long-discredited claims for states' rights to oppose Meredith's admission. He also whipped up a racist frenzy among students and citizens of the state. "No school will be integrated in Mississippi while I am your governor," he declared. He demanded the resignation of any state official "who is not prepared to suffer imprisonment for this righteous cause. . . . We will not drink from the cup of genocide."
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The Kennedys, as in the past, hoped to defuse the possibility of violence by negotiating secretly with Eastland and Barnett.
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By the eve of Meredith's arrival they thought they had struck a deal. Barnett, they believed, would keep order on the campus. Federal presence could therefore be limited to around 500 marshals. The army would remain on call in Memphis, sixty-five miles away. But by 7:30 on the evening of September 30, the day before Meredith was due to enroll, a hostile crowd (peaking at around 3,000 later that night) of students and outsiders gathered on the campus and began to throw bricks and Molotov cocktails at the marshals. Eight were injured, whereupon the marshals retaliated with tear gas. The Mississippi Highway Patrol, which was supposed to curb the crowd, instead withdrew; Barnett had broken his word. The crowd became a mob. Gunshots rang out in the dark, wounding marshals and bystanders. The deal between Kennedy and Barnett had ended in a riot.

By 10:00 p.m. the badly outnumbered marshals were besieged, and Robert Kennedy sent word to Memphis to bring in the first of 5,000 troops. But a series of snafus fouled up the intervention, and the men did not arrive until 2:15
A.M.
, nearly seven hours after the trouble had started. By that time the marshals had no more tear gas, and two bystanders had been killed and 160 wounded, twenty-eight by gunshots. The troops then restored order, and Meredith was admitted. He endured the year at the university and graduated (protected the while by federal guards) in 1963.

The rioting at "Ole Miss" did not make much difference at the time in the daily lives of the masses of black people in the United States. Meredith was an embattled, courageous token. Nor did the confrontation do much to change the strategy of the Kennedy brothers. As before, they clung to the illusion that the national administration could keep its distance. But it was increasingly clear that deal-making and "federalism" were weak reeds upon which to rely. How long could the federal government depend on others to maintain the peace?

N
OT VERY LONG
, for Martin Luther King determined in 1963 to force the dismantling of Jim Crow. Preparing thoroughly, he resolved to stage massive demonstrations in Birmingham. This was known as perhaps the most systematically segregated city in the South. Fifty or more racially inspired bombings of black homes and facilities had poisoned postwar race relations. Blacks held only menial jobs, even in the city's booming steel industry. Lunch counters and all public facilities were segregated. There were drinking fountains for whites only. The city even closed its parks and playgrounds rather than submit to federal orders to integrate them. It barred performances of the Metropolitan Opera because the company refused to appear before segregated audiences. Public safety commissioner Connor and his men regularly terrorized black people in the city. This was one of the main reasons why King chose it for his major effort. Connor, he expected, would overreact and draw national attention to the civil rights movement.
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When King and his coalition of civil rights workers launched their boycotts, sit-ins, and demonstrations in April 1963, Connor and other officials tried at first to act with restraint. King was arrested for violating a state court order barring demonstrations and spent a week in prison, where he penned "Letter from Birmingham Jail," a widely read summation of his commitment to racial justice and non-violence. The demonstrations continued, but city authorities arrested hundreds of protestors and threatened to deplete King's available volunteers. At this point King sent out some 1,000 children from his church headquarters on a demonstration march into the downtown. Connor's forces rounded up more than 900 of them, who ended up in jail. The next day Connor ordered a new group of children not to leave the church. When some of them came out, Connor and his forces lost their heads. Firemen turned on high-pressure hoses, water from which knocked demonstrators to the pavement and cracked them against the side of buildings. Some lay bleeding and unconscious. Policemen turned on marchers and beat them with nightsticks. Other police held attack dogs on long leashes and seemed to revel in the sight of the dogs snapping at and biting the demonstrators as they fell back from the onslaught.
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The violence exhilarated Connor, who ultimately threw more than than 2,000 children in jail. When one of his officers held back a group of white people, he called to him, "Let those people come to the corner, sergeant. I want 'em to see the dogs work. Look at those niggers run." A few days later, with demonstrations continuing, a blast of water hit the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, a top King aide, slammed him into the wall of a church, and left him unconscious. When an ambulance came to take him away, Connor exulted, "I wish they'd carried him away in a hearse."
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Connor's activities were more than the demonstrators could tolerate. Some of them reacted by throwing stones and bottles at the police. One waved a knife at an officer. This was the first time that a significant number of black people had broken with the non-violent mandate. On the other side the violence became much worse. Opponents of the protests bombed the Birmingham home of King's brother. Another bomb exploded in a Birmingham motel where King was thought to be staying. These bombings sent blacks to the streets in a spasm of rock-throwing. Police retaliated by beating blacks at random. As many observers recognized at the time, non-violence was losing its power as an energizing ideology. A new, more bloody phase of the civil rights movement had begun.

The Birmingham struggle was pivotal in other respects. It was the first protracted demonstration to be carried live and nationwide on television. More than any event to that time, it forced Americans to sit up and take notice. Many who saw the brutality of Connor and his forces, especially to women and children, began to speak out against racial discrimination, to write outraged letters to the editor, and to put pressure on their representatives in Congress. Larger numbers than ever before went south to participate in a wave of new demonstrations and boycotts. Birmingham did much to awaken hitherto passive people in the North.

Black people, too, were aroused by these events. Thanks to Connor's overreaction, white moderates in Birmingham recognized that they had to make some concessions. Settling, they promised to desegregate public eating facilities and to hire black salespeople. Other galling Jim Crow practices survived, however, and blacks emerged from the struggle feeling angrier than before. James Baldwin, publishing
The Fire Next Time
earlier in the year, had already concluded that desegregation would make little difference in a systematically racist society. "Do I really
want
to be integrated into a burning house?" he asked.
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Militant civil rights workers in the South, most of them still loyal to CORE and SNCC, grew increasingly critical of King's adherence to non-violence, and they renewed protests throughout the nation. It was later estimated that more than 100,000 people took part in demonstrations over the next seven months. At least 15,000 were arrested.
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Kennedy, too, moved off the center. The struggle at Birmingham upset him for several reasons. He was outraged by the brutality, noting that he felt "sick" when he saw a picture of a police dog lunging at a Negro woman. He worried about the wide publicity, especially the television coverage. This had flashed about the world and damaged America's image. How could the United States claim to lead a "Free World" when it trampled on the rights of its own people? Kennedy also feared new waves of violence if he did not do something. He worried above all that he—and the government—might lose control of the dynamics of protest. Kennedy told people that he wanted to "lead," not be "swamped" by what was happening.
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For all these reasons Kennedy gave aides the go-ahead to prepare a civil rights bill. When Governor George Wallace of Alabama, a demagogic segregationist who had taken office earlier that year, then emulated Barnett by trying to bar two black students from the state university in June, Kennedy went on the air to announce his support of the legislation.
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In doing so he brought an unaccustomed passion to his delivery. "The heart of the question," he said,

is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities. . . . If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place?
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Kennedy's engagement marked an important turning point in the history of the civil rights movement.
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But it was blighted that night in Mississippi. Among the many Americans who learned of his message was Medgar Evers, an activist NAACP field secretary who had devoted much of his life to civil rights activity in Mississippi. He stayed late at an NAACP meeting in Jackson, returning to his wife and three children shortly after midnight. As he climbed out of his car, a sniper shot him in the back with a bullet from a high-powered rifle. Evers staggered toward the kitchen door where his family was waiting for him and collapsed in a pool of blood. He died en route to the hospital.
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The martyrdom of Evers threatened to destroy Kennedy's hopes for peaceful, legislative solutions to racial conflict. In Jackson a riot was narrowly averted. Many activists, moreover, rejected Kennedy's bill as too little and too late. The measure at the time focused on curbing racial discrimination in public accommodations, a major goal of the movement. But it was crafted cautiously so as to secure the backing of congressional moderates, especially Republicans, without whose votes the bill was doomed. It authorized the Justice Department to litigate in support of non-discriminatory public accommodations only if individuals were willing to initiate the suits. Its weak voting rights section excluded elections at the state and local levels. Its sections concerning schools dealt only with de jure segregation, thus ignoring widespread de facto segregation in the North. The bill offered no answers to the problems of police brutality and of racial discrimination in employment.
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Moderate leaders of the civil rights movement nonetheless were encouraged by Kennedy's support—at last—of a civil rights bill. Perhaps it could grow some teeth. Led by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, longtime activists, they resolved to stage a March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom to exert pressure on behalf of legislation and jobs for black people. As originally designed the march, which was set for August 28, would include a prolonged sit-in of thousands of demonstrators at the Capitol until Congress enacted a satisfactory law.

A demonstration such as this greatly alarmed Kennedy and his aides, who labored hard to tone down the plans. Their efforts brought results, convincing King, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, and Urban League head Whitney Young to agree to changes. By August these advocates, supported by many white liberals, labor union officials, and church leaders, had managed to craft an agreement that would limit the march to one day. Participants would be allowed to walk from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial, where speech-making would close the event. It was further understood that there would be no sit-in on Capitol Hill and that organizers would do their best to have substantial numbers of whites at the rally. Marchers were to dress in respectable clothing. Washington area liquor stores would be closed on the day of the march, a provision that rested on the assumption that blacks would otherwise get intoxicated and rowdy. Although many of these provisions offended SNCC leaders, including their chairman John Lewis, they agreed to take part, in the hope that the march would give them a chance to speak their views.
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