In New York, King emerged at the Americana with a formal lecture on nonviolence for two thousand members of the American Jewish Committee. He tried to combat the popular impression that demonstrators claimed license to break laws in pursuit of “benefits exclusively for the Negro.” The civil rights movement came from a larger heritage stretching back through the suffragettes and the Boston Tea Party, he said, and had contributed new civic interactions of broad application, such as the teach-in. Distinguishing between nonviolence and classical civil disobedience, King argued that the former aimed not to defy but to fulfill the Constitution. He pictured democracy itself as a political form of nonviolence, merged and refined in history’s slow rise from primitive conquest toward the established vote. “It is an axiom of nonviolent action and democracy that when any group struggles properly and justly to achieve its own rights, it enlarges the rights of all,” King asserted. “This element is what makes both democracy and nonviolent action self-renewing and creative.”
These were difficult subjects. The speech left enigmatic notice on back pages in New York—“Dr. King Examines Rights and Laws: Says Negro Knows That He Is Part of ‘Larger Society’”—as he flew home to Atlanta. Beneath the wave of optimism set loose May 21, when Senator Philip Hart of Michigan filed a cloture petition on voting rights, he preached a haunted sermon on grief. “Disappointment is a hallmark of our mortal life,” King observed that Sunday, May 23. He communed with his Ebenezer congregation about wounds beyond reach, sketching the bleakness of people gone cold. “They are too detached to be selfish, and too lifeless to be unselfish,” he warned. “Their hands are even unresponsive to the touch of a charming baby.” He touched bottom, then cornered despair first by repeating his text from Jeremiah with special emphasis: “This is my grief, and I must bear it.” Never avoid shame or failure, he counseled, but “put it in the center of your mind and dare—stare daringly at it.” From there they could “turn this liability into an asset” by harnessing the energy of pain and reproach. “Never forget, my friends,” King told them, “almost anything that happens to us may be woven into the purposes of God.” His voice gathered rhythm and strength. As in another trademark sermon, on intractable evil, he listed treasured figures of history who bounced from suffering and penance to glory. “I’ve been to the mountaintop now,” he cried, in words he would repeat for posterity in Memphis. “God allowed me to live these years. It doesn’t matter now. Whatever happens now doesn’t matter, because I’ve seen the promised land.” He relived a decade in the movement, ending with his march into Montgomery from Selma “to stand right at the place where Jefferson Davis stood and say that the old cradle of the Confederacy is now rocking, and Dixie will one day have a heart, because we are moving now.”
On Tuesday, exactly two months after the speech King recalled, a cloture tally of 70–30 in the Senate formally ended the Southern blockade against consideration of the voting rights bill. That night, heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali knocked out favored Sonny Liston in the second minute of their rematch at an old hockey rink in Lewiston, Maine. Some in the meager crowd of three thousand had not yet taken their seats. Many others saw no blows and shouted, “Fake! Fake! Fake!” Stupefied sports journalists divided over a clash of iconic images that turned color and violence inside out—the glistening Ali waving a glove over the prostrate Liston, fallen from a “phantom punch,” while “strategy adviser” Stepin Fetchit rejoiced in Ali’s corner. Ringside delirium gave lunatic weight to the fabled actor’s prediction that Ali would become a national hero, certainly for reporters still blinking from his ambush of their pre-fight banter about “Uncle Tom” humor. “Uncle Tom was not an inferior Negro,” Fetchit had corrected, snapping from the “slow-witted darky” character of his Hollywood films since 1927. “He was a white man’s child. His real name was MacPherson and he lived near Harriet Beecher Stowe. Tom was the first of the Negro social reformers and integrationists. The inferior Negro was Sambo.”
National tempests blended on Wednesday, May 26. McGeorge Bundy returned from the Dominican Republic to Washington, where John Tower of Texas led an outcry for a federal investigation of the sporting “nadir” in Lewiston, charging that the “use of citizen-owned television airways keeps boxing alive in its present highly questionable form.” Tower cast one of only two Republican votes that day against final Senate passage of the voting rights bill. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, before casting the other, eulogized the Senate as the “final resting place of the Constitution and the rule of law, for it is here that they will have been buried with shovels of emotion under piles of expediency, in the year of our Lord, 1965.” Defeated Southern Democrats foresaw a “federal dictatorship” over the vote process to cement the economic impoverishment of “garden variety” white people that their leader, Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, pronounced already inevitable from the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Ironically, Russell was one of the few national figures to speak publicly for Muhammad Ali after his conversion to a black Islamic sect, commending his “unpopular” stand against racial integration. The New York Times, on the other hand, crusaded for civil rights but disdained both the Lewiston fight and Ali himself* with two front-page stories marshaling disgust—“Clay-Liston Fight Arouses Wide Demand for Inquiry”—and a tart editorial hoping the “brief and gentle Clay-Liston encounter” would end “a sport as sick as this one.”
With Senate passage of the voting bill, President Johnson publicly gave thanks “on behalf of a heartened nation.” He urged swift concurrence in the House, and none doubted the power of his words. Johnson’s domestic program commanded “such wide appeal that powerful voices of criticism are virtually nonexistent,” and his mastery of political rumblings over Vietnam and the Dominican Republic “only makes Congress seem another pygmy at his feet,” Times correspondent Tom Wicker wrote that week in a summary essay. For an era of great change, with world stability and even political language in flux, Wicker portrayed Johnson as a colossus of national strength. “Lyndon Johnson, in fact, may be the best John Wayne part ever written,” he observed. “[He] seems 20 feet tall—when he really measures no more than 10.”
CHAPTER 18
Leaps of Faith
May 27–July 2, 1965
MASSIVE transitions loomed for summer. Nearly three thousand Southern school districts turned from defensive stall in the federal courts to stampede the sleepiest bureaucracy in Washington. They questioned exactly how to obtain from the U.S. Office of Education a letter certifying each district’s compliance with the desegregation provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as required to be eligible for future appropriations under the giant new education program. “We believe we are entitled to official written guidelines and criteria,” one superintendent asserted. Late in April, when Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel issued such rules, lawyers from some of the most resistant areas brazenly declared their districts desegregated already. (Technically, they laid claim to federal money pending their reserved argument that separate schools were the product of “natural” rather than official causes.) These were Wallace people—“screaming and hollering revolution and defiance,” confided Governor Carl Sanders, who admitted that they held a strong base in his own state of Georgia.
Sanders privately described his desperate struggle to “put a muzzle on Mr. Wallace…to keep this whole section of the country from just following some idiotic leadership.” Moderate segregationists would tolerate racially mixed classes in planned stages, he told President Johnson in May, but they could not survive politically if they must integrate the teachers, too. “You know and I know that I couldn’t do that with a shotgun,” he groaned. Sanders, looking instead to integrate some faculty meetings in a few years, said schools would self-destruct before letting the first Negro teacher preside over a classroom of white students. Johnson commiserated effusively. “I know what you’ve got to do, and God, I just, my heart bleeds for you,” he told Sanders, opining that every human being yearned to do right. “But wantin�
�� to do what’s right and doing what’s right’s two different things,” said the President, “and sometimes it’s a long hill to climb in between.” Johnson sidestepped the pressure by rejoicing over the recent delivery to Sanders of a mounted deer head from a hunting trip at the LBJ Ranch, but Sanders called back five days later to seek relaxed terms of compliance for the new school year looming ahead. “I’ve got my back to the wall, I’m in the corner, and my hands are up,” he told Johnson. “I’m just asking for mercy…. We’re not asking for delay or any suspension of the rules.”
Opposing forces whipsawed Commissioner Keppel over the status of the earliest thousand plans submitted to the Office of Education. “Virtually all place the burden of initiating change not on the school boards, the practitioners of segregation, but on their victims,” objected NAACP leader Roy Wilkins in mid-May, “the Negro parents and pupils who must bear the financial costs involved and must request and obtain transfer from Negro to white schools.” Wilkins called the “freedom of choice” plans a cruel fraud that invited persecution of volunteer families. School boards, on the other hand, complained of nitpicking by federal officials. Lawmakers who had defied the Brown decision and filibustered the civil rights bills now denounced the obstruction of laggard bureaucrats. “It is most disturbing to me,” wrote Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina, “that the tireless efforts of Cabarrus County to comply with the Commissioner’s order are still frustrated.” With enormous consequences in the balance, including possible inoculation against future lawsuits, politicians and school representatives jammed the Office of Education. Pandemonium reigned over makeshift files bulging from cabinets across desks and down along the floor. A handful of legal consultants reinforced the overwhelmed civil servants—mostly second-career school administrators, who normally compiled educational abstracts—and the compliance unit spilled into an office barracks called Temporary S, one of the last surviving emergency structures built near the Capitol for World War II.
Across the Mall, officials finalized parallel campaigns no less daunting. Justice Department lawyers prepared for wholesale redeployment after the voting rights bill, and President Johnson tantalized the president of Howard University, James Nabrit, about hosting a major pronouncement on economic justice issues beyond the end of segregation. Johnson swore Nabrit to silence on pain of cancellation, forbidding even contingency plans to reprint the commencement programs or warn Rev. Walter Fauntroy that a last-minute speaker might displace him. Nabrit nearly burst with anticipation, as no historically Negro college had conferred an honorary degree upon a sitting U.S. President. Mortified, he could only plead ignorance about the purpose of Secret Service agents who scoured his campus on the last day in May.
At Justice, lawyers addressed intergovernmental disputes over the mechanics of superseding local voter registrars across the South. Who would undertake the unwelcome temporary duty, and where would they live? FBI officials resisted assignments to protect recruits, as did the U.S. Marshals Service. Postal authorities objected to a “fortress” concept of rural post offices as registration sites. Representatives from the Civil Service Commission wanted first to test the “easy” voting districts untouched yet by violence, but others insisted on demonstration projects to break the toughest resistance. Negro registrars, while accepted in principle, were tacitly forbidden, and managers worked diligently to prevent human-interest publicity about the pioneer bureaucrats.
Beyond deployment of the registrar corps, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department looked to shift its enormous litigation drive from voting rights to school desegregation. The guiding strategy, announced in advance by Attorney General Katzenbach, was that democratization in both these areas needed the coordinated pressure of law and politics. (“The courts acting alone have failed,” appellate judges themselves candidly emphasized in a marathon school case.) Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act newly authorized the Justice Department to initiate school desegregation lawsuits, complementing the administrative mandate under Title VI for nondiscriminatory use of federal funds across the board, from schools and hospitals to defense plants.
Katzenbach held back a remnant of the thirty front-line civil rights lawyers for the routine trauma of exceptional events. In Panola County, Mississippi, on June 2, exhorted by Fannie Lou Hamer, seventy Negroes tried to walk the first picket line since the 1930s for improvement of local farm wages ($3 gross per day), and were summarily evicted from privately owned sharecroppers’ shacks by prison work gangs, under a local injunction soon to be tested in federal court. That same night, violence struck Bogalusa, Louisiana, where the Justice Department was seeking Title I relief against six holdout restaurants that refused to serve Negroes, and where John Doar, head of the Civil Rights Division, had negotiated for police tolerance of peaceful demonstrations to integrate the city park, public library, and several businesses. Bushwhackers pulled alongside the patrol car of the first two minority officers hired (for police duties restricted to fellow Negroes), and killed Deputy Sheriff O’Neal Moore. Deputy Creed Rogers, surviving shotgun wounds, sent out a radio description that led to the arrest of Klansman Ray McElveen within the hour.
The next morning, at a confidential June 3 briefing for Democratic leaders, President Johnson’s grim outlook on Vietnam moved Senator Russell Long of Louisiana to recommend that the United States “face up to the sixty-four-dollar question and bomb China.” Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield emphatically disagreed. Later that morning, following televised celebrations for the safe launch of the Gemini 4 space mission, the President challenged a delegation of corporate executives to create summer jobs that would get chronically unemployed teenagers “off the streets and behind the [work] bench.” He told the executives only partly in jest that St. Peter soon would ask “what you did with your affluence and what you did as a beneficiary of this great system of government.” Then, before a quick trip to Chicago, Johnson approved the last-minute draft of his intended agenda on race and released President Nabrit from secrecy into frenzied revision of the next day’s graduation ceremony in Washington.
Barriers to freedom were “tumbling down,” Johnson told the audience of five thousand at Howard University. “But freedom is not enough.” He foresaw a new and “more profound stage” of battle ahead—to seek “not just freedom but opportunity…not just equality as a right and a theory, but equality as a fact and as a result.” To frame a visionary future, Johnson confronted the past with sweeping metaphors from warfare and sports. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains, and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race,” declared the President, “and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
Johnson described the remaining handicap as a virulent form of the “inherited, gateless poverty” that stubbornly plagued segments of the whole population, including white families in largest number. Its heritage and prospects were distinct by race, he observed, “for Negro poverty is not white poverty.” Captured Africans had landed in the status of products imported for servitude, uniquely by contrast with the self-selected immigrant waves of other new Americans. The non-African arrivals endured hardships far short of chattel slavery or segregation, said Johnson, and none yet faced such ostracism by race and color. He called the distinctive racial animus “a feeling whose dark intensity is matched by no other prejudice in our society.”
The speech hushed the crowd. Some brash students trimmed their snickers, having expected the “White Father Texan” to claim tribute from a sea of dark faces for historic victories on their behalf. Instead, Johnson already had abandoned the safer political conceits—that the burden was fading naturally, or peculiar to the South, or manageable by a piece of law—to address what he called “the much grimmer story” of human result. He said most Negroes—the near and distant kin of the achieving graduates before him—remained among the “uprooted and the dispossessed,” shut in slums, “los
ing ground every day,” unskilled and poorly educated. “They still are another nation,” the President declared. Although he retreated at times to impersonal statistics on unemployment and income, his images closed relentlessly on damaged, unveiled faces. “They are anguishing to observe,” he said. “For the Negro they are a constant reminder of oppression. For the white they are a constant reminder of guilt.” He charged that “long years of degradation” had broken apart Negro families “on a massive scale,” with crippling effect on young children. “This, too, is not pleasant to look upon,” said Johnson.
Not since Lincoln’s second inaugural had a President confronted the weight of centuries so intimately. Like Lincoln, who lifted up the whole of “American Slavery” as the offense that “all knew” had caused the Civil War “somehow”—not limiting responsibility to Southern slavery, or Confederate treason—Johnson confessed a national legacy still fearfully submerged. Like Lincoln, who quoted Psalm 19 to postulate that four years of untold carnage still might not atone for unrequited crimes,* Johnson spoke of penance and resolve. Only an accidental misreading of his text broke the spell, when he pledged to seek specific remedies at a fall conference of experts featuring “Negro leaders of both races.” Howard students chuckled over a gaffe that evoked classical DuBois on split identity as well as contemporary jokes about bourgeois Negroes trying to be white. Johnson recovered quickly to extol “the glorious opportunity of this generation to end the one huge wrong of the American nation.” Like Lincoln, he embraced freedom in biblical cadence as a builder’s quest “to dissolve, as best we can, the antique enmities of the heart, which diminish the holder, divide the great democracy, and do wrong—great wrong—to the children of God.”
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