The next chapter in Wallace’s burgeoning gubernatorial career put him in the path of Attorney General Kennedy. Robert Kennedy didn’t want the conflict, and in the beginning he thought it might be avoidable. He had come to believe that the Mississippi crisis might have ended differently if he had cultivated Ross Barnett earlier. He hoped to do better with Wallace, though the prospects could hardly have been called auspicious. Not only had Wallace been elected as a racist; it had been, and still was, his only issue. In his campaign he had repeatedly vowed to stand in the doorway of any white Alabama school to drive away Negro children, and he had ended his florid inaugural address with the incendiary passage: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod on this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” Still, Bob Kennedy thought a man-to-man exchange with him might prevent future grief. The fact that he thought that is curious. Demagogues have never been responsive to the voices of reason, and Bob’s manner did not encourage moderation in those who differed with him. But he never saw himself as others saw him. He thought he might bring George Wallace around to his way of thinking.
His suit bogged down from the very beginning. Like his predecessor in Montgomery’s executive mansion, Wallace was almost impossible to reach from Washington by telephone. Intermediaries arranged a meeting, and Bob did everything he could to make it seem casual, even scheduling other appointments in Alabama to make it seem one of many calls there. But Wallace had other ideas. He wanted his constituents fully informed about his battles for white supremacy, and to that end he did everything but greet the attorney general at the airport with a band playing “Dixie.” The statehouse was ringed by state troopers. Pickets carried placards reading: CHRISTIANS AWAKE, “COME OUT FROM AMONGST THEM AND BE YE SEPARATE,” and KOSHER TEAM: KENNEDY KASTRO KHRUSHCHEV. The place where Jefferson Davis was sworn in as President of the Confederacy was marked by a fresh wreath, and a Daughter of the Confederacy clad in spotless white stood guard there with folded arms, presumably to prevent Kennedy from defiling it. Inside, Wallace greeted him by turning on a tape recorder “as a precaution.” It was a waste of electricity; nothing of substance was said. The most urgent racial problem in Alabama, which Bob hoped Wallace would share with him, arose from court orders ruling that the state university must admit black applicants. Over and over he told Wallace that the law must be enforced, that it was their sworn duty to do so; over and over Wallace said that this would mean violence and that the blood would be on Kennedy’s hands. At the end of the conference the governor called in the press to announce that nothing which had been said altered his vow to stand in the schoolhouse door. Kennedy said he hoped local authorities would discourage mob violence. Ed Guthman, who was with him, thought that “Bob was dumbfounded by Wallace’s attitude. It was the closest I ever saw him come to throwing up his hands in despair.”
The Kennedys were determined to prevent another Oxford. They had the campus photographed with the same reconnaissance planes which had been used over Cuba, and troop commanders used the photos to map maneuvers. Flying down to Muscle Shoals, the President spoke from the same platform as Wallace and elliptically warned him not to defy the law. Again the governor told reporters that his mind was unchanged. They were moving rapidly toward confrontation. Under the terms of a court order three Negroes had been declared eligible for the university’s summer term, beginning June 10, one of them to an extension course and two to the main campus at Tuscaloosa. These two, Vivian J. Malone and Jimmy A. Hood, were in the same situation as James Meredith twenty months earlier. Wallace, more audacious than Barnett, announced that he intended not only to bar Hood and Miss Malone from the Tuscaloosa campus; he also meant to force federal officers to arrest Alabama’s governor. After a U.S. District Court enjoined him with interfering with their enrollment, he declared: “The action I am going to take involves even my personal freedom, but I intend to carry it out, regardless of what risk I take.”
As Bob Kennedy’s deputy, Nick Katzenbach was again cast in his difficult Oxford role, leading the federal officers at Tuscaloosa. In the name of states’ rights Wallace had mobilized his seven hundred deputy sheriffs, game wardens, liquor agents, and state troopers, plus several National Guard companies. Unlike Barnett, Wallace wasn’t taking university administrators into his confidence. They didn’t know whether he planned to seal off the campus, issue guns, or what. The situation had comic aspects. The administrators reported to Katzenbach that Al Lingo, the state patrol chief, had painted a white line on the pavement in front of Foster Auditorium, where students would register. Wallace was occupying an office just inside the entrance. He had installed two air-conditioners, and there, as the sweating deputy attorney general tried to guess what he was up to, the bantam governor of Alabama sat coolly reading the Montgomery Advertiser. In the White House the President and his brother listened to Katzenbach’s running analysis on an open telephone line and watched events develop on television.
They decided to let Wallace have his show. Katzenbach’s plan, which was adopted, was to make the governor look ridiculous by robbing his doorway stand of meaning. Katzenbach would drive Miss Malone and Hood to the campus. Parking the car and leaving them in it, he would confront Wallace himself, telling the governor that going through the door was unimportant, that the government considered the two students enrolled, and that they would begin classes in the morning. The President would federalize the 31st National Guard division if Wallace continued to obstruct them.
That is more or less what happened. Katzenbach told the press that the two blacks would arrive at 10 A.M. Wallace appeared at 9:53 escorted by towering state policemen in combat gear—helmets, side arms, gas guns, and truncheons. When Katzenbach and the two Negroes drove up, accompanied by marshals in mufti, Wallace’s public relations man darted out with a lectern and put it in front of the white line. The temperature was almost 100 degrees. The heat seemed to rise from the pavement in waves, and reporters and troopers tried to crowd in the building’s shadow as Wallace took his stand. He raised his right arm like a traffic-policeman. Katzenbach walked up with a marshal on either side and halted in front of him. He said, “I have a proclamation from the President of the United States ordering you to cease and desist from unlawful obstructions.” Wallace replied by reading a proclamation of his own excoriating “the unwelcome, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion upon the campus of the University of Alabama of the might of the central government.” He concluded: “Now, therefore I, George C. Wallace, as governor… do hereby denounce and forbid this illegal and unwarranted action by the central government.”
Arms folded, Katzenbach answered mildly that all this was about two students who simply sought an education—“a simple problem scarcely worth this kind of attention.” He asked the governor to reconsider, and, when Wallace refused to reply, he returned to the car and drove the two Negroes to dormitories which the administration had already assigned to them. Four hours later a brigadier general in the National Guard drove up. He saluted Wallace, who saluted back; he told him that the Guard had been federalized and asked him to “please stand aside so that the order of the court may be accomplished.” After a last bitter volley at Yankee justice Wallace walked away.
The Kennedys thought he had been made to look ludicrous, and that the country would see his posturing for the absurdity it was. Millions of Americans agreed, and since more than three hundred blacks enrolled in the university after Hood and Malone without incident—indeed, without a word or even a glance from the statehouse—it appeared that the governor had been outwitted. George Wallace didn’t see it that way, however, and neither did his admirers. He declared, “I stood eyeball to eyeball with them and they turned back.” So they had, on television; all that viewers of the news had seen was the exchange of statements between him and Katzenbach and Katzenbach’s departure. The registration of the two blacks had occurred off camera, and Walla
ce, then an underrated politician, had seen that in the eyes of the easily manipulated, his show in apparently staring down a federal official would carry more weight. In his book Wallace Marshall Frady wrote that the Alabama governor had “discovered a dark, silent, brooding mass of people whom no one—the newspapers, the political leaders, the intellectuals—no one but Wallace had suspected were there.”
***
The race issue had emerged as one of the great themes of the 1960s. Already the civil rights movement was being described as revolutionary. In a televised speech on the evening of that June 10, the day of the Wallace-Katzenbach confrontation, President Kennedy called it “a moral issue”—“as old as the Scriptures and… as clear as the American Constitution.” “A great change is at hand,” he said, “and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.” To that end he was asking Congress to enact a broad, sweeping civil rights bill committing it to the premise “that race has no place in American life or law.”
Medgar Evers was returning that night to his home in Jackson, Mississippi, after attending a civil rights rally in a church. As the NAACP field secretary in that state, Evers had been James Meredith’s friend and adviser, and that had marked him for Klansmen and the state’s White Citizens’ Councils. As he walked from his car he was murdered by a sniper lying in ambush. Discouraged and gloomy, the President said to Arthur Schlesinger, “I don’t understand the South. I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But when I see this sort of thing I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.”
When civil rights leaders told him that they were planning an enormous peaceful demonstration in Washington, he was appalled. “We want success in Congress,” he said, “not just a big show.” He was afraid it might get out of hand, or create “an atmosphere of intimidation.” A. Philip Randolph, head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, answered him. The march was Randolph’s idea. He had proposed it to Franklin Roosevelt twenty years earlier, and Roosevelt, equally apprehensive, had promised to establish a federal Committee on Fair Employment Practices if Randolph would call it off.1 That had been the end of it then, but this time Randolph was determined to go ahead. “The Negroes are already in the streets,” he said. “It is very likely impossible to get them off.” He argued that it would be better that they be led by responsible leaders than by others who would exploit them and encourage violence.
The March on Washington, held on August 28, was a high point for those who believed that the grievances of the blacks could be redressed by working within the system. “We subpoenaed the conscience of the nation,” Martin Luther King said. Nothing like it had ever been seen in the country—over two hundred thousand Americans, the largest crowd ever to gather in the capital, and all of them orderly. Most were Negroes, but thousands of whites came, too, led by Walter Reuther. They sang hymns and spirituals, and “We shall overcome,” and they carried placards reading: EFFECTIVE CIVIL RIGHTS LAWS—NOW! INTEGRATED SCHOOLS—NOW! DECENT HOUSING—NOW!
Their self-discipline was a marvel. The District’s fifty-nine hundred policemen had nothing to do but direct traffic; four thousand soldiers and marines who were standing by were never called. While the march was in progress the President received its leaders—among them King, Randolph, Reuther, Roy Wilkins, Whitney M. Young, Jr., Chairman John Lewis of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and Floyd B. McKissick of CORE. Kennedy said he had been “impressed with the deep fervor and the quiet dignity” of the demonstration. They left and he watched the rest of it on television. The most memorable moment came when Martin Luther King spoke at the Lincoln Memorial:
“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up, live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice… will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“Dream some more!” cried his delighted listeners. Yet there were other Americans who were not delighted. Ward leaders in the great ethnic neighborhoods of the northern cities, keystones in the Democratic coalition Roosevelt had built, were stirring angrily. The Poles, the Irish, and the Italians, all of whom had given Kennedy wide margins in the election three years earlier, had struggled up from the bottom without the help of the government. Negroes, they argued, should do the same. They pointed out that congressmen who urged integration had withdrawn their own children from Washington classrooms and put them in private schools, and that a California study reportedly showed that outspoken liberals privately opposed Negroes in their schools and neighborhoods. A Lou Harris survey revealed that the administration’s handling of the race issue had alienated over four million Democrats. In the South, naturally, the deterioration was greatest. “K.O. the Kennedys” was a political slogan in Mississippi. The governor of moderate North Carolina said that if an election were held then, Kennedy would lose it, and in Birmingham a Lubell poll found only one white voter who had supported Kennedy and didn’t regret it.
The tragic fact is that this was a reaction to what had been, on the whole, exemplary black behavior. White Americans who were offended by the rhetoric of Martin Luther King and who thought James Meredith uppity were in for a shock. The same Negroes they regarded as upstarts were being called Uncle Toms by some black audiences. In Harlem young Negroes threw eggs at King, and in Chicago they booed Meredith. Their new heroes were Muslim leaders Jeremiah X, Malcolm X, and Elijah Mohammed, who preached the innate wickedness of the white race and dismissed nonviolence as folly. “The day of nonviolent resistance is over,” Malcolm X told them. “If they have the Ku Klux Klan nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent. If they make the White Citizens’ Councils nonviolent, I’ll be nonviolent. But as long as you’ve got somebody else not being nonviolent, I don’t want anybody coming to me talking any nonviolent talk.”
The first administration figure to encounter the new blacks was Robert Kennedy. He was impressed by a James Baldwin article in the New Yorker in which Baldwin wrote of the Negro’s past of:
…rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible.
Baldwin believed that “the price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks,” and he quoted a Negro spiritual: “God gave Noah the rainbow sign: No more water, the fire next time!”
The comedian Dick Gregory suggested to Burke Marshall that the attorney general ought to meet Baldwin. Marshall passed the recommendation along, and the two men had breakfast together at Hickory Hill. Their talk was brief but amiable, and Kennedy proposed that they continue it in New York the next day in his father’s Manhattan apartment. Burke Marshall would be with him. They wanted opinions about what the government should be doing, and they hoped that other blacks would join them. Baldwin said he would bring Kenneth B. Clark, the psychologist; Lorraine Hansberry, the writer; Lena Home, Harry Belafonte, and Jerome Smith, a twenty-four-year-old CORE chairman who had been beaten and jailed during the freedom rides. Kennedy expected a serious discussion, the kind of talks he had had with Roy Wilkins and Martin Luther King. The first thing he got was a tirade from Smith, who said that being in the same room with Bob Kennedy made him feel
like vomiting. From then on the meeting deteriorated.
Kennedy tried to explain what the government had done and was doing, and what its new bill would do. They didn’t care. Baldwin didn’t even know that a presidential civil rights message was before Congress. He said that the only reason the President had acted in Alabama was that a white man had been stabbed, and when Marshall protested that he had consulted Martin Luther King, they burst into laughter. This went on for three hours. Bob said afterward, “It was all emotion, hysteria. They stood up and orated. They cursed. Some of them wept and walked out of the room.” Toward the end of it a young black said that he would not fight for the United States, and when Bob asked how he could say such a thing the youth repeated it.
The irony was that Bob’s reason for coming to New York was to confer with several chain store executives over ways to end Jim Crow in their southern stores. That didn’t impress the angry blacks either, and another attorney general might have become disenchanted with them. This one was different. He was resentful at the time; back in Washington, repeating the remark about refusing to defend the country, he added wonderingly, “Imagine anyone saying that.” But later in the week he said thoughtfully, “I guess if I were in his shoes, if I’d gone through what he’s gone through, I might feel differently about this country.” It was the beginning of his real conversion to the movement, the realization that a rage that deep must have profound origins, and that if nothing was done about it the consequence would in fact be a fire next time.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 147
