Sometimes he ran out of words. “I don’t know what you can say about a day in which you have seen four beautiful sunsets,” he said. It was at that point that he forgot his travelogue commentary. So did his listeners. He was having trouble. As he passed over Mexico a small jet, meant to keep his capsule steady, developed a malfunction. He reported to the control center that the vehicle “drifts off in yaw to the right at about one degree per second. It will go to 20 degrees and hold at that.” That was the end of the tests; the flight now commanded his entire attention; he had to take over the controls and fly it himself. That wasn’t the end of his difficulties. During his second pass over the Pacific, his gyroscopes went out. The capsule began “rolling”—turning on its horizontal axis. Glenn eliminated that by skillful handling of the controls. Then, in his second orbit, he developed what looked like real trouble. An ominous light flashed on the control board at Cape Canaveral. It meant that Friendship 7’s fiberglas heat shield had come ajar. If the shield came off at any time before the capsule reentered the atmosphere, Glenn would be instantly incinerated. As it turned out, the fault was in the warning light, not the shield, but neither the astronaut nor his mentors on the ground knew that then. They made adjustments to change the reentry procedure, retaining the vehicle’s retro-rockets—which were to be jettisoned—in the hope that their metal bands might help keep the shield in place. Then they prayed.
Glenn knew that this was the moment of maximum peril. His braking rockets were fired in sequence, and he braced himself. As the pressure on him mounted, Friendship 7 shimmied. He gasped, “It feels like I’m going clear back to Hawaii.” The G forces were mounting, squeezing him against his contour couch. He was coming down, and the heat shield was disintegrating, breaking up into growing fragments. Later he said, “You could see the fire and the glow from them—big flaming chunks.” He couldn’t explain it at the time because he had lost radio contact. That was to be expected; he was in the delicate process of reentering. The blackout lasted seven minutes and fifteen seconds. As it ended he could be heard shouting, “That was a real fireball!” At 2:43 P.M. the glowing capsule hit the waters of the Atlantic and was instantly enveloped in clouds of sizzling steam. At 3:01 the destroyer Noa rescued Glenn. A steward handed him a glass of iced tea. Glenn said, “It was hot in there.”
Idolatry awaited him. His footprints on the carrier deck were traced in white paint for later exhibition in the Smithsonian Institution. Cameramen recorded the fact that his eyes were full at the moment of reunion with his wife and children, and after he had wiped his eyes the handkerchief was set aside so it, too, would be preserved. As he fielded questions from the press, reporters noted that in speaking of himself and Friendship 7 he often said “We”—just like Lindy at Paris’s Le Bourget Field thirty-five years earlier. Vice President Johnson was there to greet him. Johnson said, “In my country we’d say you’re pretty tall cotton. Were you very tense at takeoff?” Glenn replied that he supposed so. LBJ said, “You were about as near the Lord’s end as a person ever is.”
At Cape Canaveral one banner read: WELCOME TO EARTH. There the Vice President was replaced by the President, who had just flown over from Palm Beach. There was a bit of byplay as Glenn tried to put a hard hat on Kennedy and failed—JFK had once seen a picture of Calvin Coolidge in an Indian headdress and had vowed never to pose in a funny hat—and then the country’s first astronaut was off to address a joint session of Congress. “Usually the honor is reserved for heads of state,” Johnson told him, “but in this case the whole country has elected you.” A gala parade in New York was next, featuring Glenn, the other six of the original astronauts, and a star-studded cast of big-name scientists. After that Glenn flew abroad to tour other continents, telling America’s allies and the uncommitted peoples that truly great achievements were possible in a free society. Time commented: “In terms of national prestige, Glenn’s flight put the U.S. back in the space race with a vengeance, and gave the U.S. and the entire free world a huge and badly needed boost.”
“This is a new ocean,” said Kennedy, “and I believe the U.S. must sail on it.” At Cape Canaveral American rocketeers, confident once more, talked enthusiastically of launching two-man capsules by 1964; of giant, solid-propellant boosters to lift great payloads off the earth; and of plans for Project Apollo, aimed at putting three men on the moon and bringing them back, perhaps as soon as 1968. A passionate interest in space travel took on the proportions of a national rage. It was the theme of that year’s Century 21 Exposition, in Seattle. “Orbit” entered Madison Avenue’s vocabulary as a noun and as a verb. Small boys launched water-propelled toy satellites that landed in trees, like kites before them. Wernher von Braun, whose skills had played a major part in the success of the Atlas, became a national celebrity. (“He aimed for the stars,” Mort Sahl said of his earlier years, “and often hit London.”) Europeans of all convictions were tremendously impressed. Even Pablo Picasso, no Americanophile, said of Glenn, “I am as proud of him as if he were my brother.” Presently all sorts of people were launching satellites—American Tel & Tel, for example, put up Telstar, and even the Canadians sent a small vehicle into orbit.
It was in August that the Soviet Union’s Major Gherman S. Titov circled the earth seventeen times. This was seized upon as a new evidence for the need to mobilize America’s industrial and technological might in a great effort to surpass the Russians once and for all. By now there were some dissenters, particularly on the campuses and in the U.S. intellectual community. The President answered them in September. Speaking at Rice University in Houston he said:
“But why, some say, the moon?… And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?… Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it, and he said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and… the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there.”
The black problem was also there, however, and it was much closer. In retrospect Kennedy’s underreckoning of it seems astonishing. He was, after all, a northern liberal and an admirer of Martin Luther King. But the liberals, and even King, were about to be pressed hard by militant young northern blacks. While America’s eyes had been turned upward toward the stars, they had been searching for ways to distract the country. The first attempt, and it was memorable, came in the spring of 1961. On May 4, three weeks after Gagarin’s flight, seven black and six white members of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) left Washington by bus for an expedition through the Deep South. Their purpose was to challenge segregation in interstate bus terminals in defiance of local custom—in waiting rooms, restaurants, and toilets. They called themselves freedom riders.
***
The course they had charted zigzagged across Dixie: south through Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; southwestward to Atlanta; westward through Alabama, and then on across Mississippi and down to New Orleans. It was bound to be a memorable trip. Their flouting of the customs of the region was breathtaking. After four years Little Rock was all but forgotten, and Arkansas was a border state anyway. Here in the real southland the relationships between the races were still very precise and had scarcely changed in the ninety years since the departure of the last carpetbagger. In that respect there were almost no southern liberals as the term was understood above the Mason-Dixon line. The WPA guidebook to Alabama, written by native New Dealers in 1941, pictured the sort of welcome wayfarers might expect in Montgomery, one of the state’s three largest cities:
The atmosphere of measured dignity tempered by cordiality is matched nowhere else in Alabama. A Negro boy—his face wreathed in smiles—usually accosts the traveler with, “You don’t have to tote that grip, boss man; I’ll do it cheap”; and a resident will willingly give directions and accompany the stranger a block or more to set him on the right road.
That was not an accurate
description of the greeting awaiting the freedom riders, a fact so obvious that they can be fairly said to have been looking for trouble. The nature of their sponsorship was less clear. Under the leadership of James Farmer CORE was an independent, self-supporting organization and had been active since 1942. But in the seething days ahead many southern leaders and southern editorials would charge that the administration (“the Kennedys”) was behind them or had at least encouraged them to come. The truth was that no one in the government had known of their journey until they had left on it. CORE had sent an advance copy of a press release about the trip to the Department of Justice, but it had wound up on the desk of Burke Marshall, chief of the Civil Rights Division, who was out with the mumps. Newspaper accounts of the departure had been buried on the inside pages. The White House first heard of it when the story erupted on front pages, and then its reaction was anger—directed at the riders.
From the administration’s point of view, the timing was dreadful. Not only had the Russians just won the race for the first manned space flight to encircle the earth; the week after that the Cuban brigade had been overwhelmed on the beach. On June 3, less than a month away, Kennedy would meet Khrushchev in Vienna. The new President needed a victory or, if that was impossible, the absence of a fresh defeat. The last thing he wanted was an ugly racial incident. The Russians were still exploiting Little Rock for propaganda directed at the Third World, portraying America as racist. Any episode which could be interpreted as evidence of that would be a humiliation for the United States. That was how the White House first regarded the rides—as an embarrassment. Later John Kennedy, and particularly Robert Kennedy, would see the civil rights struggle as a moral imperative, but in their first months in office it was not yet that. An understanding of their position then is important, because it was shared by most liberal Democrats, including some who thought themselves to be very advanced.
Their commitment to end prejudice was total. It was a wrong, and they were determined to right it. It was intolerable to them that the Negro condition should be unchanged in the world’s oldest and greatest democracy. Throughout that campaign John Kennedy had reminded audiences that “The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed, about one-seventh as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, a life expectancy which is seven years shorter, and the prospects of earning only half as much.” As President he had pledged himself to support programs aiming at correcting that injustice. What more could the blacks ask?
The first thing they asked was that liberals stop thinking of blacks as statistics. After that they expected an end to gradualism. They realized that the spring of 1961 was an awkward time for the government to deal with the freedom riders. Every season for the past century had been awkward, and so they had waited and waited and waited. What they expected their white sympathizers to understand was that to the new Negro, freedom for his people was more important than any issue in Vienna—or in Vietnam, or Cuba, or outer space.
In 1961 it was considered political bravery just to endorse equality before the law in front of an audience of southern whites. That was what Robert Kennedy did in his first major speech as attorney general, and he did it in Athens, Georgia, on May 6, two days after the departure from Washington of the freedom riders, of whose existence, however, he was still unaware. The occasion was Law Day at the University of Georgia. He went to explain to them that it was his sworn duty to uphold the law, a circumstance of which one might suppose law students would already be aware, but on this issue, in this part of the country, nothing could be assumed. “We are maintaining the orders of the courts,” he told them. “We are doing nothing more nor less. And if any one of you were in my position, you would do likewise, for it would be required by your oath of office. You might not want to do it, you might not like to do it, but you would do it.” This was hardly a passionate affirmation of the rights of an oppressed race, and there was even a hint in it that on this issue Robert Kennedy might be doing his duty against his better judgment, but there were no weasel words at the end: “Our position is clear. We are upholding the law…. In this case—in all cases—I say to you today that if the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act. We will not stand by or be aloof. We will move.”
In civil rights, as in the Third World, liberals of the early 1960s believed in the eventual triumph of right. This perhaps more than anything else sets the Kennedy years apart from what lay ahead and makes them seem almost naive now. Send surplus wheat to an emerging nation, send Peace Corpsmen, send a Chester Bowles as the American ambassador, the catechism read, and you will have a bright new democracy, a credit to the free world and a potential ally in the eternal struggle against the powers of darkness in Moscow. So at home: strong leadership and the fundamental sense of decency in the American people would overcome the bigotry implanted by generations of ignorance. Integration was just good sense, and Americans were above all sensible; it was just a matter of showing them the light; if Eisenhower had taken a stand he could have accomplished it in the 1950s.
The notion that there were dark places in the American mind was illiberal and therefore rejected. The liberal vision had no explanation for the phenomenon of the McCarthyism, the most recent instance in which decency and good sense had been scorned by masses of Americans, but in 1961 nobody talked about McCarthy any more. Optimism was almost a requirement on the New Frontier. General Harkins had the right idea, his body counts were certainly encouraging, and why couldn’t those American correspondents in Saigon join the team? On the domestic front good liberals would fight the good fight until the Negro baby born in America had just as much chance of completing his education as the white baby, no more chance of becoming unemployed, as much chance of earning $10,000 a year, and the same life expectancy. However, these things took time. They mustn’t expect it all now.
But the freedom riders wanted it all now.
***
Richmond, Petersburg, Lynchburg—here they stopped, stretched their legs, had a bite together at lunch counters under signs reading “White” and ignored the toilets designated “Colored” with no more than a few ugly looks and muttered obscenities from bystanders. Then stories about the trip began appearing in the newspapers of cities farther along on their route. They weren’t big news yet, not important enough to attract the attention of an attorney general or a governor; all they warranted was a couple of sticks, a squib or two, something to wrap around the ads. But that was enough to alert gas station attendants leafing through the inside pages in search of the comics, enough for ticket clerks in the bus terminals, for sheriff’s deputies passing by and the kind of men who hang around stations and depots waiting for something to happen.
The first incident was in Charlotte, North Carolina: a black freedom rider strolled into the bus station barbershop and refused to leave. He was arrested for trespassing and the others proceeded without him. It wasn’t much, but the word was sent ahead, passed on as such news is always passed, by a phone call, or another driver, or police radio. It doesn’t matter. It was inevitable and they expected it; that was why they had come. Still, the tension on the bus grew. When they saw the crowd at the station in Rock Hill, South Carolina, they knew the violence had begun to escalate. Three of them were beaten; then the Rock Hill police intervened. Again in Winnsboro, thirty-seven miles to the south, police stepped in before anything could start and arrested two riders. Next came another quiet stretch: Sumter and Camden, South Carolina; Augusta and Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta was an important stop. They divided there into two groups for the ride to Birmingham, one going on a Trailways bus and the other by Greyhound. There was no trouble here—Georgia troopers were everywhere—but after Rock Hill and Winnsboro they
were on page one of every newspaper in the South. It was a Sunday, the day papers are read most. They assumed that the population of Alabama would know all about them. It did.
Today travelers between Atlanta and Birmingham cruise easily across eastern Alabama on Interstate Route 20, but in 1961 that was still under construction, and they had to follow the tortuous curves of U.S. 78 through a succession of remote crossroads communities virtually untouched by postwar change. This was “upcountry” Alabama, an untamed region clothed with scrub pine—mostly high, with elevations of nearly 1,800 feet in the Raccoon and Lookout ranges, the southernmost spurs of Appalachia. Coming down off their slopes to the Cumberland plateau, the road descended to fields soybean farmers had reclaimed after the devastations of the boll weevil, to the coal region, and, beyond, to the Black Belt. Cleburne County, Calhoun County—these were an old breeding ground of wool-hats and red-necks, the strongholds of the camp meeting and the revival, and it was here, six miles from Anniston on U.S. 78, that a gang of Ku Klux Klansmen armed with blackjacks, clubs, and tire chains ambushed the Greyhound bus. A rock sailed through one window, followed by an incendiary bomb. As it burst into flame the riders fled. Twelve of them were being methodically beaten when policemen arrived and fired pistols into the air. Ambulances carried away the injured. Then Birmingham blacks who had heard of the battle arrived in cars and rescued the others.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 140
