The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Still, as an old soldier he knew that orders must be obeyed. The Court had interpreted the Constitution; the chief executive had to carry out its instructions. At his direction all District of Columbia schools were integrated at once. He ended segregation on all Navy bases where it was still practiced—Truman had abolished it on Army posts—and overnight, literally over one night, the COLORED and WHITE signs over drinking fountains and rest room doors disappeared from naval installations. Lois Lippman, a Boston Negro, became the first black member of the White House secretarial staff; a few months later another Negro, E. Frederic Morrow, was appointed an administrative assistant to the President. Hagerty saw to it that all these facts reached the press; no one would say that Eisenhower wasn’t practicing what he expected of others.

  Over the next several months Oklahoma, Texas, Kentucky, West Virginia, Maryland, Tennessee, Arkansas, and Delaware reported partial integration in 350 school districts. Elsewhere the picture was less encouraging. Legislatures in Virginia and the Deep South passed complex measures designed to lead to long, involved court battles and circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling. Their governors were speaking stubbornly of “state sovereignty,” “nullification,” and the “interposition” of state authority to balk enforcement of federal laws—antebellum expressions which had not been heard since the death of John C. Calhoun. Encouraged by the warlike stance of their leaders, southerners on the lower rungs of the social ladder were reviving the Ku Klux Klan and organizing White Citizens’ Councils to resist integration. Tempers were short throughout the white South.

  But there could be no turning back now. Blacks had tempers, too. Over a century earlier de Tocqueville had predicted that once Negroes “join the ranks of free men, they will be indignant at being deprived of almost all the rights of citizens; and being unable to become the equals of the whites, they will not be slow to show themselves their enemies.” That was the alternative to substantial integration. The Court had stirred hope in Negro hearts, and it is hope, not despair, that is the fuel of social action. J. Edgar Hoover reported to the White House that the sale of small arms had increased all over the South. In some communities it was up by as much as 400 percent. The most volatile rhetoric was coming from whites, but it was also notable that throughout the winter of 1954–55 the Black Muslims, with their gospel of inverted racism and retaliatory violence, were expanding rapidly.

  Americans found, to their consternation, that they were rapidly moving into an era of racial incidents. Given the deeply held convictions at either end of the spectrum, such episodes were unavoidable. Militant whites vowed to defend the racial status quo, which the NAACP and the new Negro organizations springing up around it were bound to challenge. As often as not the officials in the middle simply came apart. With Thurgood Marshall as her adviser a twenty-six-year-old black woman, Autherine Lucy, announced her intention to enroll at the University of Alabama. The university trustees were distraught. After three days of unruly crowds at Tuscaloosa, during which her car was stoned and pelted with rocks, Miss Lucy reached the registrar’s office, only to be handed this telegram from the trustees: FOR YOUR SAFETY AND THE SAFETY OF THE STUDENTS AND FACULTY MEMBERS OF THE UNIVERSITY, YOU ARE HEREBY SUSPENDED FROM CLASSES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. Marshall led her to a court, which lifted the suspension. The trustees then met that night, accused Miss Lucy of making “false, defamatory, impertinent, and scandalous charges” against the university authorities—and ordered her permanent expulsion.

  Frustration ran high on both sides in such episodes. With the power of the federal courts behind her, Autherine Lucy was bound to win in the end, and the trustees knew it. Only a bullet could stop her—a haunting possibility. Not only were guns and gunmen all around; it was possible, and indeed in some cases probable, that such a killer would go free. The same Constitution which required desegregation entitled a defendant to trial before a jury of his peers. His peers, in large areas of the South, were likely to acquit him. This happened. The first such incident occurred in Greenwood, Mississippi, in August 1955. Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old black youth from Chicago, was visiting relatives there. Rumor spread that he had insulted a white woman, and three white men dragged him from his relatives’ home and drowned him. Witnesses identified two of the three killers to federal agents, but an all-white jury acquitted them. The two—they were half-brothers—were then charged with kidnapping by a U.S. attorney, but a grand jury refused to indict them, and the FBI, which had painstakingly assembled irrefutable evidence, reluctantly closed its file.

  By the first anniversary of the Supreme Court decision, racism lay like an ugly blight across much of the South. Rabble-rousers stirred up mobs which frightened, and sometimes attacked, blacks insisting on their constitutional rights. The cruelest incidents were in the grade schools, where children, most of them too small to understand the savage struggle being waged over them, were subjected to intimidation and outright terror. The return to school each September is a familiar American ritual. Mothers dress youngsters in new clothes, brush their hair, give them pencil cases, and send them off to their new classrooms. It is at precisely this time that boards of education introduce whatever changes in regulations there are to be—such as desegregation. Beginning the year after the Supreme Court decision and extending to the end of the 1950s, American front pages each fall carried accounts of ghastly demonstrations in front of bewildered pupils. Sometimes there was violence.

  Two representative incidents erupted almost simultaneously in one week of 1956. In Clinton, Tennessee, mob hysteria was whipped up by John Kasper, a racist zealot from Washington, D.C. (He saw no irony in his charge that desegregation was the work of “outside agitators.”) Until Kasper arrived, Clinton had been a quiet backwater town of four thousand people, where twelve black students were preparing to enroll in the local high school. Goaded by him, a thousand Clinton citizens disrupted the school, blocked traffic, battered the cars of Negroes who happened to be passing through, and then threw themselves on the eight-man Clinton police force shouting, “Let’s get the nigger lovers! Let’s get their guns and kill them!” After a night of fear 100 state troopers, 633 National Guardsmen, and seven M-41 tanks put down what looked like an incipient revolution. That was a lot of law enforcement for one township, but the country was learning how vulnerable to hotheads schools were. Mansfield, Texas, with a population of 1,450, was even smaller than Clinton. There a federal district court had ordered the integration of three blacks with three hundred white high school students. On registration day four hundred men barged into the school waving placards that read DEAD COONS ARE THE BEST COONS AND $2 A DOZEN FOR NIGGER EARS. The three Negro students quickly withdrew. A fourteen-year-old white girl told a reporter: “If God wanted us to go to school together He wouldn’t have made them black and us white.”

  It was easy for Americans outside the South to be scornful of it, but it wasn’t necessarily fair. The fact that racist vigilantes could disrupt the peace did not make them a majority. In the aftermath of the Clinton disorders the town looked like a stronghold of bigotry. Kasper, arrested on charges of instigating a riot, was freed. In a current election campaign the White Citizens’ Council there nominated its own candidate for mayor. Bumper stickers urging his election seemed to be everywhere. In the school students wearing Confederate flags sewn on their sweaters stoned black boys, shouted “Nigger bitches” and “Dirty nigger whores” at black girls, and poured ink over the blacks’ books. On the morning of election day a white minister attempting to escort the Negro children past a mob outside the school was badly beaten; so were two people who tried to come to his assistance. The principal expelled a thirteen-year-old white boy for assaulting a black girl and then, after he himself had been threatened, announced that the school was being closed “because of lawlessness and disorder.” At that point, just as Clinton seemed lost to decency, the tide shifted. On orders from Attorney General Brownell, the FBI arrested sixteen of the mob’s ringleaders. Fifty white high school students,
led by the seventeen-year-old football captain, asked people to comply “with the federal court order to provide an education for all the citizens of Anderson County who desire it.” Then came a surprise, even to those who thought they knew the town well. The polls closed, the votes were counted—and every segregationist candidate for local office was defeated by a margin of nearly three to one.

  That year a new phrase was on the lips of public speakers: “the winds of change.” The expression came out of Morocco, where French troops transferred from Vietnam were fighting another losing battle against anticolonialists, but it also seemed applicable to the United States. The Warren Court in particular appeared to be a storm center for winds of change. In time its reinterpretations of the Constitution would bar prayer from classrooms, expand defendants’ rights to counsel (notably in Miranda v. Arizona), extend freedom of speech and freedom of the press to moviemakers, strike the bonds of censorship from pornographers, and lay down guidelines for legislative apportionment in the states.

  Diehard conservatives dug in. IMPEACH EARL WARREN billboards went up all over the South. The Chief Justice had become the most controversial figure in the government since Franklin Roosevelt; all turmoil and racial tensions were laid at his door. Yet the Supreme Court was but one of many federal institutions which were acting to alter the system. Congress was fashioning the first of what would eventually be five civil rights acts. The Civil Service Commission was speeding up the advancement of black workers, and federal regulatory agencies were taking a sudden interest in charges of discrimination. One of them, the Interstate Commerce Commission, was weighing a proposal to forbid the interstate segregation of travelers on trains, buses, and in waiting rooms when a black seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama, anticipated it.

  ***

  Her name was Rosa Parks, she was forty-two years old, and on Thursday, December 1, 1955, she was very tired. She found a seat on a Montgomery bus, but when the bus filled up the driver told her to stand so a white man could sit there. It was an old southern custom for Negroes to surrender their seats to whites. It was also against the law for anyone to disobey a bus driver’s instructions. Mrs. Parks thought about it for a moment and then said she wouldn’t move. At that moment, Eldridge Cleaver later wrote, “somewhere in the universe a gear in the machinery had shifted.”

  Arrested at the next stop, she was charged with a misdemeanor, found guilty, and fined ten dollars. That made Mrs. Parks’s friends angry, and she was a popular woman; within forty-eight hours mimeographed pamphlets being distributed in Negro neighborhoods called for a one-day boycott of all city transportation. The boycott was so spectacular a success that leaders of Montgomery’s black community started asking one another larger questions. The city’s 25,000 blacks accounted for 75 percent of the bus company’s patronage. Suppose they extended the boycott and set terms for an end to it? Eventually the management would either yield or go bankrupt.

  That was how it started. The company was told that it would have no more black passengers until Negroes were seated on a first come first served basis and allowed to keep their seats. In addition the Negro leaders demanded that drivers be ordered to treat blacks courteously and that black drivers be hired for buses in Negro districts. The management replied that white drivers would be polite, but that was all. So the passenger strike continued. It was 95 percent effective, and as the weeks passed with no compromise on either side, the determination of the blacks simply increased. The rest of Alabama began to watch Montgomery; then the rest of the country; and then the world. The segregationists were led by W. A. Gayle, Montgomery’s mayor. Gayle and his fellow members of the city commission ceremoniously joined the local White Citizens’ Council. Then he declared that the city would never capitulate to the boycotters. He said, “We have pussyfooted around long enough and it has come time to be frank. There seems to be a belief on the part of the Negroes that they have the white people hemmed in a corner and they are not going to give an inch until they can force the white people of the community to submit to their demands.”

  Gayle’s chief adversary, the leader of the blacks, was Martin Luther King, an unknown twenty-six-year-old clergyman. King had come to Montgomery the year before to become pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. The white South paid grudging respect to black clergymen, but King was one of the new Negroes, and he lay outside the southern white experience. He was a Ph.D., a product of Harvard, and a genuine scholar. In his sermons he dwelt less on the river Jordan than on the wisdom of Socrates, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Galileo, and Toynbee. Writing in his small white Montgomery bungalow to the soft accompaniment of classical music, he had fused Christianity, Hegelianism, and Gandhiism into a philosophy teaching strength through struggle and harmony out of pain. Gandhi’s satyagraha—passive resistance and noncooperation as a way of opposing mistreatment—had become King’s “soul force.” He showed his congregation films of the Indian mahatma and said of the boycott:

  This is not a tension between the Negroes and whites. This is only a conflict between justice and injustice. We are not just trying to improve Negro Montgomery. We are trying to improve the whole of Montgomery. If we are arrested every day; if we are exploited every day; if we are triumphed over every day; let nobody pull you so low as to hate them.

  He taught the Dexter Avenue church’s worshippers the meaning of “victory over your enemies through love,” and he inspired them with rousing old Baptist hymns and camp-meeting tunes, sometimes with new words:

  Deep in my heart,

  I do believe

  We shall overcome

  One day.

  Hard-core segregationists were derisive. One described King as “just another rabble-rouser the Communistic N-double-A-C-P is sending down here to stir up our decent Nigras.” Not all whites felt that way. Mayor Gayle was discovering that families accustomed to Negro help were giving rides to their cooks and handymen or paying their taxi fares. He protested that the domestics “are fighting to destroy our social fabric just as much as the Negro radicals who are leading them,” and he said, “The Negroes are laughing at white people behind their backs. They think it’s very funny that whites who are opposed to the Negro boycott will act as chauffeur to Negroes who are boycotting the buses.”

  After three months of deadlock the city attorney produced a 1921 state antilabor law enjoining restraint of trade. Under it a grand jury indicted King and 114 other black leaders. “In this state,” the indictment read, “we are committed to segregation by custom and law; we intend to maintain it.” The defendants were fingerprinted and freed on $300 bond each. Late in March King became the first of them to come to trial on the charge of conspiring “without a just cause or legal excuse” to hinder a company in its conduct of business. Black witnesses testified that they certainly did have just cause. One told how a bus driver had shut the door on her blind husband’s leg and then stepped on the accelerator. A second described a Negro being forced from a bus at pistol point because he did not have correct change. A third said his pregnant wife had been compelled to surrender her seat to a white woman, and a fourth said a driver had called her an “ugly black ape.”

  King, who had waived a jury trial, pointed out that the boycott had begun spontaneously and that he had become its spokesman only after it was in full swing. The judge nevertheless found him guilty; he was ordered to pay $1,000 in fines and court costs and released on bond pending appeal. If the verdict was meant to intimidate Montgomery’s Negroes, its effect was the exact opposite. They promptly held a rally on the lawn outside the courthouse. One black shouted, “We ain’t going to ride the buses now for sure.” A middle-aged woman pushed through the crowd to tell King, “My heart and my pocketbook are at your disposal.” A mass prayer meeting was scheduled for that evening. One man called to the others, “Are you going to be there?” They called back, “Yes!” He asked, “Are you going to ride the buses?” and they roared, “No!”

  And they didn’t. Spring passed, summer passed, and still the spi
rit of the blacks showed no signs of flagging. The mayor confided to friends that he had never dreamed that Negroes could be this determined. The bus company sank into debt. Drivers drifted into other jobs or left the city. The Negroes showed every sign of being able to survive without them. Some had become accustomed to walking to work, some had bicycles, and for the others King had organized a vast car pool with two hundred automobiles. The mayor announced that this was illegal. In the twelfth month of the customer strike King and the other black leaders were arrested for running a business enterprise without a franchise. They were on trial in state circuit court when electrifying news arrived. The Supreme Court, which had already overturned the “separate but equal” doctrine for recreational facilities as well as in schools, had now killed it in public transportation. Discrimination on buses was now a violation of federal law. Martin Luther King was free. He was in addition a world celebrity. The unprecedented boycott had dealt Alabama segregation a devastating blow. American Negroes everywhere had found new hope, and the young black preacher had been catapulted into the first rank of the struggle for civil rights.

  King did not gloat. He advised his flock to act with dignity and without pride. He said, “We have been going to the back of the bus for so long that there is danger that we will instinctively go straight back there again and perpetuate segregation.” At the same time, he continued, “I would be terribly disappointed if any of you go back to the buses bragging, ‘We, the Negroes, won a victory over the white people.’ If you do, our struggle will be lost all over the South. Go back with humility and meekness.”

  He would have been less than human if he hadn’t ridden a bus himself when the boycott ended, 381 days after Rosa Parks had started it. The driver said to him, “Is this the Reverend?” The clergyman said, “That’s right. How much?” It was fifteen cents—up a nickel from the year before—and putting the coins in the slot he took a front seat. He said afterward, “It was a great ride.” Most Montgomery whites were relieved to have it all over, and some were in good humor. A bank teller wryly told a reporter, “They’ll find that all they’ve won in their year of praying and boycotting is the same lousy service I’ve been getting every day.” On one bus a white man said to nobody in particular, “I see this isn’t going to be a white Christmas.” A nearby black smiled. “Yes sir,” he said. “That’s right.”