Tomorrow-Land (9 page)

But it was Horne, the elegant and beautiful singer-actress, who delivered the most shocking message to Kennedy when he tried to defend his brother's administration. “If
you
are so proud of your record, Mr. Attorney General,” she said, “you go up to Harlem into those churches and barber shops and pool halls, and
you
tell the people. We ain't going to do it because
we
don't want to get shot.”

After two hours, the meeting ended when the guests walked out. Kennedy, not one who liked to be challenged, was furious. True to his ruthless reputation, he degraded Baldwin to his aides for being gay and requested FBI files on the entire group. But despite his petulant reaction, Kennedy must have realized the racial problems in the North were just as complex, if not more so, as in the South. Certainly, Kennedy must have begun to wonder, if his celebrated guests were this angry—and they were successful by any conceivable standard—how must the average man
(and woman) on the streets of Harlem feel? It was a question that the White House would eventually have to answer.

In the meantime, the situation in the South continued to unravel. James Hood and Vivian Malone, two African-American students, had won a court order in May to register for a class at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa—the alma mater of Governor Wallace, who had promised during his 1962 campaign that he would personally “stand in the schoolhouse door” if the federal government attempted to desegregate Alabama's university system, as they had in neighboring Mississippi.

True to his word, on the morning of June 11, Governor Wallace stood beside a podium in front of the main entrance of the administration building, where Hood and Malone hoped to register for their classes (clinical psychology and accounting, respectively). This would be Wallace's last stand. With the television cameras rolling, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, backed by a contingent of national guardsman, sought assurances from the governor that the students would be allowed to register since, he said, “after all, they merely want an education in this great university.” Wallace then read a four-page statement denouncing “this illegal and unwarranted action” before stepping aside. While the repercussions and the potential for violence were very real, the outcome was predetermined. Robert Kennedy and Katzenbach had been negotiating behind the scenes with Wallace, who had agreed to make sure his police officers kept the peace but demanded he be allowed to make a dramatic stand for the cameras in order to save face with his Jim Crow–loving supporters.

That afternoon, during a civil rights session in the White House, the president discussed his next move. One aide suggested Kennedy make a major speech on national television, taking his case directly to the American public. “I didn't think so,” the president demurred. But before he could continue, his brother cut him off. “I think it would be helpful,” opined the younger Kennedy. The others didn't know what to say; the brothers didn't make a habit of contradicting each other in public. Then the attorney general, the president's closest advisor, laid out his case for making a televised speech, concluding by saying, “I don't think you can
get by without it.” The younger Kennedy's evening with Baldwin and company may not have been a total loss after all.

“Well, I suppose we could do it,” said the president, warming to the idea.

The speechwriters got to work. Now it was President Kennedy's time to make a dramatic stand for the cameras. After the evening news replayed the day's events at the University of Alabama, Kennedy delivered one of the most powerful speeches in American history. The subject: why the time had come for a comprehensive and meaningful civil rights law, one that would seek to finish what the Emancipation Proclamation had begun a century earlier.

After detailing the day's events in Alabama, the president looked into the camera and into the living rooms of Americans in every corner of the country and announced that the right of equality could no longer be denied to the nation's twenty-two million African Americans. “We face, therefore, a moral crisis as a country and as a people,” he continued. “It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act in the Congress, in your State and local legislative body and, above all, in all of our daily lives. It is not enough to pin the blame on others, to say this is a problem of one section of the country or another, or deplore the facts that we face. A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful, and constructive for all. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.”

Then came the moment that every Southern Democrat who ever whistled Dixie feared most. “Next week,” the president said, “I shall ask the Congress of the United States to act, to make a commitment it has not fully made in this century to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

The millions of Americans watching from home, or their local bar or church basement, may not have realized it at the time, but a page had been turned in America's history. Not since the Civil War, which raged
exactly a century earlier, had the issue of race so preoccupied the nation or an American president. But the country wasn't going to change that easily, or peacefully. Just hours after Kennedy finished, Medgar Evers, a former Army sergeant who had fought in France during WWII and the NAACP's field secretary in Mississippi, pulled into his driveway at his ranch home in Jackson. It was Evers who had counseled Meredith to enroll at Ole Miss and sounded the death knell of Jim Crow's hold on the state's university system.

Getting out of his car, Evers collected a stack of T-shirts with the logo
Jim Crow Must Go!
and walked toward his front door. Inside were his wife, Myrlie, and the couple's three small children. She had allowed the kids to wait up to see their father and discuss the president's historic speech. But before Evers could reach the door, he was shot in the back by a Klan terrorist. Evers staggered toward his home and collapsed. His wife and children rushed outside to find him lying in a pool of blood, and watched helplessly as he bled to death.

Just 150 feet away, hiding behind a honeysuckle bush, was the assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, a white supremacist and local fertilizer salesman who murdered Evers with a bolt-action rifle. An ex-marine and WWII veteran, De La Beckwith was charged with the crime, but an all-white jury failed to find him guilty of any wrongdoing. Not that he was repentant in the least. “Killing that nigger gave me no more inner discomfort than our wives endure when they give birth to our children,” he later boasted at a local Klan rally. “We ask them to do that for us. We should do just as much.”
*

Battle lines were being drawn all over the country, not just in Mississippi and Alabama, but even in New York. The summer of 1963 was a long, bitter season for race relations in the Empire State. Inside the gates of Moses' World's Fair, the utopian theme of “Peace Through Understanding” might reign, but outside of Flushing Meadow Park, blood would flow.

9.

We will not stop until the dogs stop biting us in the South and the rats stop biting us in the North.

—James L. Farmer Jr., August 28, 1963

 

We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

—Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963

 

By the time of President Kennedy's speech on June 11, 1963, many civil rights groups had already turned their attention northward. Local chapters of CORE, the NAACP, the Urban League, and other groups were staging a sustained campaign of direct-action protests throughout New York City, demanding jobs for African-American and Puerto Rican workers in the building trades—industries that were forever busy in Robert Moses' New York. Despite its having some of the most liberal politicians in the country who all supported civil rights, there was still racial inequality in the Empire State, especially when it came to taxpayer-­financed public works programs, which were flourishing throughout the five boroughs.

In June protesters blocked trucks and stopped construction of the Harlem Hospital, chanting, “If we don't work, nobody works!” In July CORE activists marched and clashed with police at the construction site of the Rutgers Housing project on the Lower East Side, and held sit-ins at the Manhattan offices of Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. (which lasted forty-four days) and Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, who took the protests in stride. “I have no objection at all,” he said. “This is a free country.” At the construction site for the Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, protesters marched through the streets carrying a coffin that read
Bury Jim Crow
and demanded that a quarter of the workers be hired from within the local African-American community.

On July 31 roiling tensions between protesters and police boiled over into a riot. A local preacher, Reverend William A. Jones of the Bethany Baptist Church in Bedford-Stuyvesant, tried in vain to quell the anger of the surging crowd. As violence erupted, Reverend Jones, who would one day succeed Martin Luther King Jr. as the head of the Southern Christian Leadership Council, uttered aloud what many of the younger, more militant civil rights workers were already thinking. “This proves there's no difference between New York and Alabama,” he shouted in his resonant baritone as the police attacked the crowd. “No difference between the United States and South Africa. This nation is going straight to hell!”

By the end of July 1963, nearly seven hundred men, women, and children had been arrested at the Downstate Medical Center, including one Brooklyn mother who, as she sat in the back of a police patrol wagon, attempted to calm her crying twelve-year-old daughter. “Don't cry,” she told the girl. “We're fighting for freedom. Sing now.”

That same month, members of this broad coalition of civil rights groups began targeting Moses' beloved Rochdale Village project in Jamaica, Queens. Although the construction crews building the complex were mixed—some 210 of the 1,350 workers were African Americans—it was hardly a model of integration. Rochdale Village, which would become the world's largest integrated housing complex, was being built in the third-largest African-American neighborhood in New York City and being bankrolled with nearly $87 million of state funds. Even the left-wing chief of the United Housing Foundation, Abraham Kazan, was no help. “We can't tell the contractors whom to employ, and we certainly don't practice discrimination,” he said.

Taking matters into their own hands, local activists focused on Rochdale as part of their effort to end discrimination in the building trade unions. During their first day of protests, some two hundred activists formed a picket line blocking workers from entering the site, resulting in twenty-three arrests. The protests continued for months throughout the summer and fall. Several times a week activists would descend upon Rochdale Village and attempt to disrupt the site by blocking traffic with
their bodies. In September nine activists caused a stir when they snuck into the site and chained themselves to cranes thirty feet in the air. The protests eventually attracted national attention when John Lewis, the onetime Freedom Rider turned SNCC leader—and eventual Georgia congressman—addressed the protesters at an October rally, claiming now was the “time to put the movement back into the streets.” He wasn't the only heavyweight to lend his credibility to the protests. Malcolm X appeared at rallies at the Queens housing complex, too, impressed by the persistence and growing militancy of the protests.

Then, in a brilliant tactical move to elevate their battle against Moses and the World's Fair, protesters marched in the streets outside the United Nations, carrying signs that read
End Apartheid at the Fair
and
African Pavilions Built with Lily White Labor
. It was not lost on the Joint Committee for Equal Employment Opportunity, the coalition of civil rights groups sponsoring the direct-action campaign in New York that summer, that the World's Fair was playing host to many African and Latin American countries. They jumped at the chance to use the Fair's utopian message against Moses, who was unable—or unwilling—to integrate fully the construction crews at the World's Fair or his other projects.

A spokesperson for the group noted that the laborers busy working on the Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Vatican Pavilions were all white, and only two of the sixty-eight workers erecting the Philip Johnson–designed New York State Pavilion were black. “We hope that you will not allow your country to become an unwitting partner to the furtherance of discrimination in any form, at any place,” read the letter addressed to the foreign nations erecting pavilions in Flushing Meadow. Although Moses refused to give in to any demands, the UN protests yielded some visible results. One member of the Guinea delegation who traveled to Queens to check on the progress of his country's pavilion received assurances by a subcontractor that five of the six workers that had just began work were indeed African-American.

In early August, Alfred Stern, a noted set designer whose New York–based firm was handling a number of pavilions at the Fair, including the Tower of Light—“the brightest show on Earth”—wrote Moses,
suggesting a new pavilion that could solve the Fair's and his racial troubles: an exhibit devoted to “the progress and problems of the American Negro” created with the help of the NAACP, CORE, the Urban League, and other civil rights groups. Such an exhibit would be “compatible with the Fair's theme of ‘Peace Through Understanding,' ” wrote Stern, and “would tend to neutralize any negative attitudes or activities such groups may contemplate in regard to . . . the Fair.” It could also end the picketing that was already wreacking havoc with construction schedules. And should Moses approve, of course, Stern's firm would certainly be happy to design it. Self-interest aside, Stern's idea was loaded with pros and had few—if any—cons.

Moses, however, declined. While noting that such an exhibit “would be of great interest,” pulling it together with just nine months to opening day made it “a practical impossibility at this late stage . . . there simply is not enough time remaining.” Such an excuse would be readily believable had Moses not sent a telegram to US Secretary of State Dean Rusk four days earlier, pleading with him to pressure the Soviet Union to reconsider making an eleventh-hour return to the Fair. “We know it is possible for them to construct an attractive, suitable and representative building,” Moses wrote, after he had asked Rusk to discuss the matter “personally” with Nikita Khrushchev.

By August ongoing protests in the Bronx threatened to erupt after the local CORE chapter picketed two local White Castle restaurants for refusing to hire African Americans. “We are not pressing toward the brink of violence, but for the peak of freedom,” CORE's national chairman, James L. Farmer Jr. told the picketers. The Bronx was “a bomb,” a policeman warned the
New York Times
, “and it may explode any minute.” He wasn't exaggerating: That same month eight members of the National Renaissance Party, a local neo-Nazi outfit, were arrested for conspiring to incite a riot at the Bronx marches. When their homes were raided by police, an arsenal of firearms was found and confiscated. The differences between the Bronx and Birmingham were slowly eroding.

The civil rights movement was changing. Younger, more militant leaders—like the activists in the Bronx and Brooklyn chapters of
CORE—were beginning to break away from the national leaders of their own organizations. These activists wanted more than the ability to exercise their right to vote; they wanted access to better jobs and education, and they wanted an end to police brutality, which was all too common. Like the New York City protests that summer, direct-action campaigns in many northern cities—Boston, Cleveland, Newark, Philadelphia—devolved into violent confrontations with police. Nonviolence was quickly becoming a thing of the past.

This was a reality that the “Big Four”—Martin Luther King, Farmer, Whitney Young (of the Urban League), and Roy Wilkins (of the NAACP)—had been warning the Kennedy administration about for some time. In the months leading up to the World's Fair—one of the largest public works projects in New York City history—these local activists focused their attention on the event that would bring the entire world and, more importantly, the global media to Queens. The Fair provided a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to capture the world's attention for their cause with one collective act. But they needed a bold new tactic, maybe even some new form of protest.

The idea for their grand gesture would come from Louis E. Lomax, an African-American author and journalist. Lomax understood the desire among young activists to embrace radical tactics and move away from the approach of national civil rights groups. And he was close to the most militant African-American leader in the nation: Malcolm X. It was Lomax who helped create the 1959 television documentary
The Hate That Hate Produced
with CBS's Mike Wallace, which introduced Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam to a national audience. The documentary gave white America a glimpse of a different kind of black leader—proud, strong, charismatic, and unafraid to vent his rage. Speaking with the righteousness of a preacher but with the savvy street smarts of a hustler, Malcolm X didn't believe in the Christian notion of turning the other cheek. Instead, he thought that black men should defend themselves against the blue-eyed white devil “by any means necessary.”

Like Malcolm X, Lomax lived in Queens and was all too familiar with the more subtle forms of New York City's de facto segregation
.
“The mood of the Negro particularly in New York City, is very, very bitter,” Lomax warned. “He is losing faith. The Negro on the streets of Harlem is tired of platitudes from white liberals.” Whether those liberals were Rockefeller Republicans or Kennedy Democrats, it didn't matter; for black America, progress was moving too slow. “White liberals . . . have been making a great fuss over the South, only to blind us to what is happening here in the North,” Malcolm X told a DC crowd in August.

Lomax had been predicting a split between younger African Americans and their elders as early as 1960. He covered the protests of the Greensboro Four—a quartet of college students who rejuvenated the civil rights movement after attempting to desegregate a “whites-only” lunch counter in North Carolina. The Greensboro Four inspired scores of imitators throughout the South, and Lomax saw the writing on the wall, predicting that such youthful activists would eventually clash with members of their own race, whether it was with “moneyed Negroes in high places” or with the Southern blacks who had grown accustomed to life under Jim Crow.

“The student demonstrators have no illusions,” Lomax wrote. “They know the segregationists are not their only enemies. But the students told me they are not prejudiced—they are willing to stand up to their enemies, Negro and white alike.” After taking their seats at the “whites-only” counter, the quartet were refused service by a black waitress, who told them, “Fellows like you make our race look bad.” In 1962 Lomax expanded his article into a book,
The Negro Revolt,
just months before one of President Kennedy's advisors assured him that African Americans were “pretty much at peace.”

It was Lomax who dreamed up a radical and ingenious way to crash the World's Fair, a move that would force the likes of Moses, Mayor Wagner, Governor Rockefeller, and even President Kennedy and his brother the attorney general to finally take heed of their struggle. Just two miles from Flushing Meadow Park, during a lecture at Queens College—then a hotbed of political activism—Lomax introduced the novel idea of a “stall-in.”

If Wagner and Rockefeller and Moses chose to ignore the pleas for equitable hiring practices in New York City and at the World's Fair, then
Lomax suggested using the Master Builder's beloved arterial highway system against him and his bosses: Activists could clog all the expressways and highways that led to the Fair on opening day by having hundreds of people run out of gas, or just stop their cars, causing the largest traffic jam in New York history. Moses might be able to keep protesters outside the Fairgrounds, but he couldn't keep them off the highways. “Imagine the confusion which might result if five hundred people get in their cars, drive towards the Fairgrounds and run out of gas,” Lomax told the crowd of activists. It was a question the political elites of New York and Washington, DC, were afraid to fathom.

The
New York Journal-American,
a conservative broadsheet closely aligned with Moses and a key paper in the Hearst publishing empire, covered the speech and quickly denounced the idea. The so-called stall-in, the paper wrote in an editorial, was “going too far . . . stalling hundreds of autos on crowded highways is not peaceful assembly. It is a clear threat to law and order which must be prevented.” Furthermore, the paper's editorial stated that such a tactic would “only harm their cause by alienating the innocent citizens who would suffer untold hardship.”