By exploiting the events in Tonkin Gulf, Johnson could break the back of that Goldwater issue. All he needed to do was to wrap himself in the flag and ask Congress to give him a free hand to deal with the North Vietnamese pirates. To this end he called the congressional leaders to the White House and asked them for a resolution authorizing him to deal decisively with such challenges. What he wanted, he said, was a joint resolution similar to the ones Congress had given Eisenhower to oppose Communist threats in Formosa in 1955 and the Middle East in 1957. Bill Bundy had already drafted a version for him. The President asked Senator Fulbright, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and an old Johnson friend, to be the resolution’s floor manager. To his subsequent sorrow, Fulbright agreed.
The cold war was still frigid in 1964; few men on the Hill were ready to urge a soft answer to Communist wrath. But there was one: Wayne Morse of Oregon. On the night after the second Tonkin Gulf incident Morse had a call from someone in the Pentagon. The caller had heard that the senator was going to fight the President’s resolution. He suggested that the senator ask two questions. First, he should insist upon seeing the Maddox’s log; it would show that the destroyer had been much closer to the shore than civilians realized. Second, he should demand to know the ship’s mission; it had been far from innocent.
The next morning Morse studied the wording of the resolution and concluded that it was unconstitutional. Only Congress could declare war, he pointed out to Fulbright. This measure would give blanket approval to the waging of war by the chief executive with no war declaration. Fulbright reminded him of the Formosa and Middle East resolutions. Morse said they had been unconstitutional, too, but they had been more justifiable than this one. The crises which inspired them had been subject to quick solutions. Not so this one; the struggle in Vietnam seemed interminable, and this open-ended license would allow the President to intervene any time he saw fit. The wording was far too general, Morse said. He implored Fulbright to hold hearings. Impossible, said Fulbright; this was an emergency. Morse denied it, and he was right; but Fulbright had decided to ask for instant passage, making the issue one of senatorial patriotism. That isolated Morse and Ernest Gruening of Alaska, the only colleague to side with him. The measure passed the House 414 to 0, after just forty minutes of discussion. The Senate took longer—eight hours of debate—but that, as one observer later commented, was “less time than the Senate usually took to amend a fisheries bill.”
There were few critical comments at the time. The move was seen as a logical extension of a line of thought reaching back to the decision, after Munich, never again to appease aggressors, relying instead on collective security. If we and SEATO’s other signatories came to South Vietnam’s rescue now, the reasoning went, they would help us if California found itself threatened by Ho Chi Minh, or by Ho and Mao. Dean Rusk flatly stated that to do less would put the United States in “mortal danger.” Later there were hoots at this, but there was no derision at the time. The Rusk position was that of practically all public men in both parties; among the senators who voted for the resolution were Eugene McCarthy, George McGovern, Birch Bayh, Albert Gore, Jacob K. Javits, John Sherman Cooper, Frank Carlson, George D. Aiken, and Frank Church. The New York Times commented: “The nation’s united confidence in the Chief Executive is vital.” The Washington Post said: “President Johnson has earned the gratitude of the free world.” Lou Harris reported that whereas 58 percent of the nation had been critical of Johnson’s handling of the war in July, 72 percent now approved. Harris wrote: “In a single stroke Mr. Johnson has turned his greatest political vulnerability in foreign policy into one of his strongest assets.” Even Walter Lippmann approved, believing that the President was telling the country that bombing would be the outer limit of American involvement in Vietnam, that he would never send troops. The friends of the administration, which in 1964 meant most of the nation, were jubilant. It was much later that Morse’s prophetic words were recalled:
I believe that history will record that we have made a great mistake in subverting and circumventing the Constitution of the United States… by means of this resolution. As I argued earlier today at great length, we are in effect giving the President… warmaking powers in the absence of a declaration of war. I believe that to be a historic mistake.
Johnson signed the document the day it was passed, August 7. Eight months later he told a group of visitors with a grin, “For all I know our Navy was shooting at whales out there.”
***
In the summer of 1963 Eliot Janeway, the syndicated economic columnist, speculated about what might happen if black and white workmen found themselves competing for the same jobs. He suggested that the white workers might become resentful of the civil rights movement, and he gave the reaction a name: “backlash.” During the winter after Dallas “backlash” acquired a political meaning. Specifically, it was applied to racist support for the presidential primary campaigns of Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama. After displays of strength in Indiana (where he won 30 percent of the vote on May 5) and in Maryland (43 percent on May 19), Wallace’s national following dwindled. His popularity seemed to suffer from the dignified demeanor of most blacks, who were still turning their cheek to injustice. In July Wallace quit the race. Yet even as he withdrew, blacks in New York were making history by declining to turn a cheek. As a consequence, headlines began conveying news which was bound to stimulate backlash.
On July 16, the day the Republican presidential candidate accepted his party’s nomination in San Francisco, a Manhattan janitor was hosing the sidewalk outside a building of luxury apartments at 215 East Seventy-sixth Street, near the edge of Harlem. Noticing three Negro youths lounging across the street, he impulsively turned the hose on them. That was unwise. To the boys the hose was reminiscent of Bull Connor and Birmingham. Infuriated, they attacked the janitor, holding trash can lids as shields and hurling missiles. A bottle hit him; he fled. One of the boys, James Powell, fifteen, went after him with a knife. At this point an off-duty police lieutenant, Thomas R. Gilligan, arrived on the scene. Gilligan drew his pistol and ordered Powell to drop the knife. Instead the boy lunged at the lieutenant, slashing his right forearm. Gilligan discharged one warning shot and then fired for keeps, killing him instantly.
Young Powell’s death aroused all Harlem. For three days the Negroes’ rage smoldered. On the third evening, a Saturday, CORE held a protest rally on West 123rd Street. Goaded by an impassioned speaker, a black mob marched to the nearby 29th Precinct station and demanded Gilligan’s immediate suspension. When it wasn’t forthcoming they rioted, throwing bottles and debris at the policemen. The riot spread and continued for five nights. Dying down there, it then broke out in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, and when the violence subsided in Brooklyn it erupted in Rochester, New York, three hundred miles away. On Sunday, August 2, Jersey City blew. Paterson and Elizabeth were next, then Dixmoor, a Chicago suburb, and finally Philadelphia. Hundreds had been injured, and nearly a thousand arrested. A thousand stores were damaged; losses were placed at several million dollars.
The FBI declared that there was no pattern to the riots, that they were “a senseless attack on all constituted authority, without purpose or objective.” The report continued: “While in the cities racial tensions were a contributing factor, none of the… occurrences was a ‘race riot’ in the accepted meaning of the phrase.” Essentially chaotic, the disorders were nevertheless far from lacking form and significance. Until 1964 whites had always been the aggressors in major American interracial disturbances, of which there had been thirty-three since the turn of the century. Now the situation was reversed; the initiative had passed to the blacks. The race riots of the 1960s shared other characteristics. They came in the summer, in ghettos marked by an absence of contact between the slum population and those who made the key decisions concerning it, and they were sparked by hostility between the Negroes and white policemen.
“Watch out,” said Negro Congressman Ada
m Clayton Powell, often a shrewder man than his critics, black or white, knew. The “black revolution,” as he called it, would, he said, have two phases. The first was southern and concerned with “middle-class matters”: sitting on buses and at lunch counters, using public toilets, going to the same schools as whites—issues of status. The second phase was northern. It was just beginning, and it was going to be very different, he said. Powell called it “proletarian,” and he predicted that it would be “rough.” Northern Negroes had always had the rights their counterparts in the South sought. Their concern was what Powell called the “gut issue of who gets the money.” They were in a mutinous mood, and they were not moved by Martin Luther King’s appeals for nonviolence. Their war cry was: “Burn, baby, burn!”
Although no one knew it at the time, 1964 marked the beginning of a cycle which would devastate the northern cities within three years. In addition to the tumult in New York there were scattered disorders that summer in New Jersey, Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Augustine, Florida. Race was becoming the country’s overriding domestic issue. In northern schools it was the year of the boycott; black parents in New York and Cleveland, dissatisfied with the treatment of their children, kept them at home. Malcolm X formed the Black Nationalist Party in 1964. The consciences of the North had at last been aroused by the injustices in the South. That spring Mrs. Malcolm Peabody, the seventy-two-year-old mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was arrested for participating in the St. Augustine protests, and the declaration of a mistrial in the Medgar Evers murder case, which only a few years earlier would have been accepted passively by Negroes, stimulated recruitment for the most important civil rights program of the year, the Mississippi “Freedom Summer” of 1964.
The immediate importance of the events in Mississippi lay in their impact on the ghettoed blacks in the North. Until 1940, some 75 percent of American Negroes had lived in the South. The long emigration of southern Negroes northward and the coming of age of the children born in their new homes had created a new, militant generation of blacks. Washington, D.C., and Newark now had Negro majorities, and Cleveland, Baltimore, St. Louis, and Detroit were more than one-third Negro. The black birth rate—approximately 40 percent higher than that of whites—had replaced immigration as the U.S. population’s expansional factor. The urban slums of the North were swarming with black youths. More than half the country’s Negroes were now below the age of twenty-two, and great masses of them lacked parental supervision. Fully 30 percent of the black families in big cities were headed by women who lacked husbands; in New York City alone there were 100,000 illegitimate Negro children in 1964. The revolution in communications meant that TV news programs provided this volatile audience with vivid reports of civil rights developments in the South. “Amid all the sad statistics poured forth about the ghettoes,” the Economist of London reminded its European readers, “it is worth remembering that… some 88 per cent of black American families have television sets.”
The Freedom Summer was sponsored by the Council of Federated Organizations (CFO), principally SNCC and CORE. None of the participants expected a graceful reception from white Mississippians. Memories of James Meredith and Medgar Evers were still fresh, and the red-necks and wool-hats of the South were known to be resentful over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Introduced by John Kennedy and shepherded through Congress by Lyndon Johnson, it extended the bans against discrimination into many new areas. CFO cast its recruiting nets on the campuses of northern colleges and universities, chiefly among white students whose consciences were troubled by injustices to Negroes. A thousand of them volunteered to participate in a drive to register as many voters as possible among Mississippi’s 900,000 blacks. They were trained in Oxford, Ohio. On June 19 the first group of 200 left for the South, and on June 21 they reached Jackson.
Almost immediately—it was the following day—three of them were reported missing. They were Michael H. Schwerner, twenty-four, of Brooklyn; Andrew Goodman, twenty, of New York, and James E. Chaney, twenty-one, of Meridian, Mississippi. Schwerner and Goodman were white; Chaney was black. The three were traveling in a 1964 Ford station wagon, and they had been arrested for speeding in Neshoba County, in east central Mississippi. Sheriff Lawrence Rainey and his deputy, Cecil Price, said the youths had disappeared after paying a fine in Philadelphia, the county seat. The station wagon was found the next day fifteen miles northeast of Philadelphia. It had been burned.
The FBI, local law officers, and Navy men stationed in Mississippi conducted a massive search for the missing youths. Rivers and creeks were dragged; helicopters and a photoreconnaissance jet hovered overhead. At the request of the President, Allen Dulles flew down to confer with Governor Paul B. Johnson Jr. A considerable part of the state’s white population believed that the three were in Cuba or, as one report had it, in a Chicago bar, drinking beer and laughing at the baffled lawmen looking for them. The prevailing opinion in white Mississippi was that the searchers had no expectation of finding the youths. They were there, the story went, to win Negro votes for President Johnson in the North.
Meanwhile the rest of the CFO volunteers were encountering other difficulties. In the Mississippi Delta their meetings with local blacks were bombed by the KAF—the Klan Air Force: private planes which soared overhead and dropped sachels of explosives. After several Negro homes had been demolished in McComb, in southwestern Mississippi, several white men were arrested; with them the arresting officers found four high-powered rifles, several carbines and pistols, fifteen dynamite bombs, a five-gallon can of explosive powder, a case of hand grenades, and several thousand rounds of ammunition.
CFO volunteers who distributed handbills in Belzoni, Mississippi, were arrested, charged with “criminal syndicalism,” and held in the town jail. A dynamite charge tore out a wall in the home of the mayor of Natchez, who had promised blacks equal protection under the law. A circuit judge denounced men who burned churches, and a cross was burned on his lawn. As the summer waned the leaders of the Freedom Summer movement drew up a list of their casualties. Eighty of the volunteers had been beaten. Three had been wounded by gunfire in thirty-five shootings. Over a thousand had been arrested. Thirty-seven Negro churches and thirty-one homes had been burned or bombed. In addition there were several unsolved murders of blacks which were believed to be attributable to hostility toward the civil rights movement.
***
Robert Kennedy told the NAACP that the federal government could not undertake preventive police action in the state; it was impractical and probably unconstitutional. J. Edgar Hoover went further. Arriving in Jackson, he deplored what he called an “overemphasis” on civil rights and said his men “most certainly” would not provide the volunteers with protection. At the suggestion of Allen Dulles, however, the President sent more FBI agents to the state. Lights burned all night on the top two floors of a new office building in Jackson, the bureau’s Mississippi headquarters. Governor Johnson appealed for public assistance in the search for the three missing civil rights workers. Predictably, that call was unheeded, but the FBI’s offer of nearly $30,000 in reward money brought information from two informers. With it, agents rented excavation equipment and dug into a newly erected earthen dam on a farm some six miles southwest of Philadelphia. They found the bodies of the missing three near the base of the 25-foot-high red clay dam and at the center of its 250-foot length. They had been shot to death, and Chaney, the black, had been beaten savagely before being murdered.
On December 4 the FBI arrested twenty-one Neshoba County men, including Sheriff Rainey and Deputy Price. Price was accused of arresting the three youths and turning them over to a lynch mob, which he then joined. Most of the men were Klansmen, and one was the local Klan leader. Civil rights leaders doubted that any of them would be convicted, and for a while it certainly seemed unlikely. Governor Johnson and Mississippi Attorney General Joe Patterson announced that the state would not prefer charges; in their opinion the evidence was inadequate. A federal grand jury in
Meridian, Mississippi, did hand down indictments against eighteen of the men, charging them with violating an obscure 1870 statute by conspiring to violate the constitutional rights of the slain men, but the U.S. District Judge was W. Harold Cox, who had helped delay due process in the James Meredith case. On one recent occasion Cox had compared black voter applicants to chimpanzees. He was not expected to give the defendants any trouble.
In the beginning he didn’t. In February 1965 he dismissed the felony indictments against the accused, reducing the charges to misdemeanors. For a time it even appeared that the sheriff, his deputy, and a Philadelphia justice of the peace might be awarded damages against the government by a local jury. To reporters it seemed that the defendants were widely regarded as heroes. Confederate flags were displayed outside the federal building; one huge one was run up each morning at the barbershop directly across the street. Television and wire service cameramen were mauled by resentful bystanders. Although the U.S. Supreme Court reversed Judge Cox, ruling that the accused men must stand trial on the conspiracy charges brought by the Justice Department, most observers believed that the case was as good as dead. Certainly the accused thought so. Freed on bond during the trial, they were plainly enjoying their local fame. A battery of twelve defense lawyers called 114 witnesses, most of them to provide alibis or to attest to good character. One lawyer called the informers “traitors.” The jury of seven women and five men was all white; eighteen Negro veniremen had been eliminated by defense challenges.
The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972 Page 153
