Washington Slowly Moves
Federal acquiescence in denying African Americans their rights began to diminish as southern resistance to desegregation hardened. The widespread criticism abroad of the oppression of African Americans caused concern in the Eisenhower administration about its impact on support for the country in its contest with the Soviet Union, particularly in Africa and Asia. More importantly, partisan calculations created a small opening for civil rights advocates. The Democratic retreat on civil rights after 1948 drew a sizable minority of African American voters toward the Republican Party, following the lead of Harlem Democratic congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., who in 1956 endorsed Eisenhower for reelection. Many Republicans had long supported civil rights on principle. Some, including Attorney General Herbert Brownell and two leading presidential hopefuls, Vice President Richard M. Nixon and California senator William Knowland, saw an opportunity to use civil rights legislation to win over more black voters.
In the past, the southern Democrats who controlled the Senate had blocked all efforts at civil rights legislation. However, when in 1956 Eisenhower asked Congress to give the federal government greater power to ensure that blacks had the right to vote, Senate majority leader Lyndon B. Johnson, a Texas Democrat, decided that to fulfill his ambition to be president he would need northern liberal support, which in turn meant distancing himself from die-hard segregationists. A complex legislative battle ensued in which Johnson worked to weaken the proposed civil rights bill sufficiently to get enough votes to overcome a southern filibuster. The resulting bill was so meager that it had little practical impact. Still, it was a symbolic step away from the presidential and congressional hands-off stance toward African American freedom when on September 9, 1957, Eisenhower signed the first federal civil rights act to be passed since 1875.
Just days later, Eisenhower found himself forced to go further. In response to a federal court order, the Little Rock, Arkansas, school board had come up with a plan for very gradual desegregation. For the first year, nine black students were to be admitted to the previously all-white Central High School. A new high school in a more affluent part of the city was to remain all-white, so that few whites with wealth or power would be personally affected by the change, a pattern that became common in both the North and the South once schools began desegregating. Just prior to the start of the school year, Governor Orval Faubus, a onetime moderate who had decided to use racism to bolster his political position, announced that Little Rock schools could not be peacefully integrated. Faubus sent National Guard troops to Central High, where they blocked black students from entering. He then defied a federal court order that the school integration begin right away, and, when faced with a second court order, withdrew the Guard, leaving scant protection for the nine black students when they finally were allowed to enter Central High. Huge crowds of white segregationists surrounded the school, with local police barely able to maintain control.
Eisenhower had no desire to use federal force to impose school desegregation. But the images reproduced worldwide of mobs threatening children because of the color of their skin and Faubus’s open defiance of the federal courts forced him to act. As events in Little Rock seemed on the verge of spinning totally out of control, the president sent in eleven hundred Army troops and took control of the Arkansas National Guard, using them for the rest of the school year to protect the Central High students. (The following year, Faubus closed all the Little Rock high schools, circumventing the desegregation order in another way.)
The slowly changing mood in Washington about civil rights contributed to breaking a deadlock over another issue, the admission of new states to the Union. Since the end of World War II, there had been growing movements for statehood in the territories of Alaska and Hawaii and for allowing residents of the District of Columbia to vote in presidential elections. These were understood, by supporters and opponents, as civil rights issues, including by Harry Truman, who came out in support of all three steps. But Hawaiian statehood was blocked by southern Democrats, led by Lyndon Johnson, uncomfortable with the territory’s racially mixed population and the possibility that it might elect an Asian American to Congress, and worried that its representatives might line up against Senate rules that allowed civil rights legislation to be filibustered to death. Further complicating the situation, since the Republicans dominated Hawaiian politics, congressional Democrats insisted on linking Hawaiian statehood with statehood for Alaska, where their party dominated, even though Alaska had a much smaller population.
Eisenhower had come out in principle for statehood for both territories in 1952, but he did not want to grant it to Alaska until the federal government had assurances that it would retain control over large blocks of land that it wanted for military purposes. By the late 1950s, satisfied with land use arrangements, Eisenhower dropped his resistance to Alaskan statehood. Meanwhile, with the passage of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, southern concerns over filibuster rules diminished, and Johnson, having repositioned himself on civil rights issues, abandoned his opposition to Hawaiian statehood. After much maneuvering, Congress passed legislation that gave both territories statehood in 1959, the first new states since 1912. (It would be several more years until Washington, D.C., residents could vote for president.)
Sitting In
On February 1, 1960, four freshmen from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College (A&T), a black college, went into a Woolworth’s variety store in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina, bought a few items, sat down at the lunch counter, which like such food places throughout the South was restricted to white customers, and asked to be served. Refused, they stayed on their stools until the store closed. The next day, twenty-nine neatly dressed students returned to sit at the counter. The day after, sixty-three showed up. The day after that, so many demonstrators came, including three white students from a local women’s college, that the “sit-in” spread from Woolworth’s to another store down the street. Soon hundreds of students were demonstrating, led by the A&T football team, which pushed through a crowd of white counterdemonstrators waving Confederate flags. When asked who they thought they were, members of the football team replied, “We the Union army.”
To most Americans, the sit-in seemed to come out of the blue. Since Little Rock, civil rights issues had largely disappeared from the headlines. Both the legal movement toward school desegregation and the mass mobilization of black protestors had stalled. But small-scale, local civil rights activity had continued, and the infrastructure to support it kept developing.
In Tuskegee, Alabama, the black community boycotted white-owned businesses to protest the state legislature’s gerrymandering of the city’s boundaries to exclude most black voters. In New York, a network of NAACP members, leftists, academics, and ministers organized protests by black and Puerto Rican parents over the lack of racial integration and the poor quality of education in the public schools. Nationally, the Catholic bishops, pressed by Pope Pius XII, issued a 1958 pastoral letter, “Discrimination and the Christian Conscience,” which denounced racial discrimination and embraced interracialism, a step of symbolic importance and some practical impact.
The SCLC, though it failed to spark mass protests, worked with other groups, like the pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation, to proselytize nonviolent confrontational action. King’s book Stride Toward Freedom helped spread the idea. Veteran activists like Bayard Rustin, Glenn Smiley, and James Lawson held workshops to teach Gandhian methods. Nonviolent direct action did not have deep roots in the southern black tradition (though it did resonate with widely shared Christian ideas about redemptive suffering and loving one’s enemies). Southern African Americans, especially in rural areas, lived in a world where violence was common and gun ownership widespread. Even many advocates of nonviolent protest accepted the need for self-defense. Armed supporters guarded King’s home during the Montgomery boycott and the home of Daisy Bates, the head of the Little R
ock NAACP, during the school desegregation crisis. Robert Williams, the head of the NAACP chapter in Monroe, North Carolina, who organized a successful armed repulsion of a Ku Klux Klan attack on the home of another NAACP leader, went further in 1959 when he said publicly that the time had come for African Americans to “meet violence with violence.” The NAACP suspended Williams, but he won considerable support among civil rights activists. The sit-downs brought nonviolent action again to the fore.
The Greensboro protests built on past actions. Civil rights activists, many associated with NAACP Youth Councils, held over a dozen sit-ins between 1957 and 1960 at segregated public places in Oklahoma, Kansas, North Carolina, and Florida, though they did not receive national notice. Sitting down had earlier roots in the labor movement, which had made wide use of sit-down strikes in the 1930s and some of whose members had adapted the tactic to protest segregated facilities near northern factories during the 1940s.
Nonetheless, Greensboro represented something new, as the escalating protests quickly gained national publicity and set off a wave of sit-ins in other southern cities. Within a week, sit-ins took place in Durham, Winston-Salem, and Charlotte. From there they spread to Virginia, Tennessee, Florida, South Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi. Students played a key role in the explosion, as the growth of higher education among southern blacks created a new base for civil rights activism. Within two months, sit-downs had occurred in scores of cities. In some, like Nashville and Atlanta, they took place on a massive scale as part of well-organized campaigns for desegregation and better economic and educational opportunities for African Americans. Altogether, some fifty thousand to seventy thousand African Americans took part in the protest wave as it spread across the South.
Sit-in demonstrators suffered brutal assaults from white segregationists and thousands of arrests, but they remained undeterred and nonviolent. In the upper South, they began winning some victories, as local authorities and business owners, seeing their cities disrupted and profits reduced by black boycotts and frightened whites staying away, began desegregating lunch counters and other public facilities. In the Deep South, segregation remained firmly entrenched.
The sit-ins invigorated the civil rights movement. In the spring of 1960, leaders of the student protests, brought together by veteran civil rights activist Ella Baker, formed the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The young SNCC activists, mostly black and mostly southern, embraced a Christian vision of creating a beloved community in the course of fighting for racial equality. Meanwhile, SCLC and CORE grew rapidly as a result of their support for the student movement, as civil rights again became a national issue.
At the 1960 political party conventions, King, Roy Wilkins from the NAACP, and veteran labor and civil rights leader A. Philip Randolph led large demonstrations in support of civil rights. (The Democratic convention had 250 African American delegates.) Both parties adopted strong civil rights planks in their platforms, with the Republican position, pushed forward by New York governor Nelson Rockefeller, notable for its support for the sit-ins. The embrace of civil rights, after a decade when both national parties—especially the Democrats—tried to distance themselves from the issue, may have partially stemmed from the quickening pace of protest in the South. Probably more important, though, were polls that showed that black voters did not have a strong preference for one party or the other, making them an attractive bloc that could and ultimately did decide the outcome of the race in a number of key states.
The two presidential nominees, Nixon and Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, both had records as moderate supporters of civil rights. Though Nixon had done more to promote federal action, Kennedy outmaneuvered him during the campaign with a rapid response to the jailing of King. In mid-October, King was arrested for taking part in a student sit-in at an Atlanta department store lunch counter, refusing bail as part of a new movement tactic. The mayor, eager to avoid more demonstrations, got the protestors released without bail, but a judge then sent King to do four months’ hard labor in state prison for violating his probation from a previous citation for driving without a valid license. (King recently had moved to Atlanta but was still using his Alabama license.) Kennedy’s aides convinced the candidate to call the jailed minister’s distressed, pregnant wife to express his concern. Later, Kennedy’s brother and campaign manager, Robert, called the judge who had jailed King and urged him to release him on bail, which he did. The Kennedys’ involvement in the case led King’s father, a prominent minister in his own right, to switch his endorsement from Nixon to Kennedy and helped win over black voters.
Though in 1960 civil rights played a role in presidential politics for the first time since 1948, other issues loomed much larger in the race. Even among African American voters, the poor state of the economy, which had been in recession for the prior year, probably had more to do with the two-to-one support they gave to Kennedy over Nixon than civil rights did, on which there was little disagreement between the candidates. Still, given the incredibly close margin between the candidates—Kennedy won the popular vote by 112,000 votes, three-tenths of one percent of the total cast—the strong black support for the Democrats created a potential opening for civil rights advocates. But as the 1960s began, it still remained unclear if the momentum toward greater racial equality would continue or, like the push in the late 1940s, peter out in the face of white southern resistance and national political indifference.
CHAPTER 7
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“Hour of Maximum Danger”
At his inauguration, John F. Kennedy made two gestures toward recognizing the intensifying struggle for black rights. First, he had Marian Anderson sing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” In 1939, the Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to allow the great black singer to hold a concert in the capital’s Constitution Hall. In response, the Roosevelt administration had arranged for her to sing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, which won much goodwill from African Americans. Now Kennedy reprised the symbolism by having Anderson open his swearing-in ceremony. Second, Kennedy included in his inaugural address a sentence stating opposition to “the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world,” which could have been read—if one wanted to—as an endorsement of civil rights.
In the context of Kennedy’s whole inaugural address, the human rights reference more strongly resonated with the struggle against communism. Kennedy’s speech, one of the best-known political addresses of the twentieth century, almost entirely concerned itself with international affairs. Kennedy shared the widespread belief, among liberals and conservatives, that the greatest challenges the country faced lay not at home but abroad.
Kennedy’s priorities did not greatly differ from Eisenhower’s. Both men saw national security as their greatest responsibility. But Kennedy thought his predecessor had been asleep at the wheel. Campaigning as much against Eisenhower as Nixon, Kennedy promised to “Get America Moving Again.” His inaugural address called for a remobilization of American society to fight the Cold War, even as he pledged openness to joining with the country’s adversaries to seek global security and peace.
Early in his speech, Kennedy, the youngest man ever elected president, took a dig at his predecessor, who had been born in 1890, almost three decades before Kennedy’s own birth in 1917: “Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans—born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.” In language reminiscent of NSC-68, Kennedy declared that “we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and success of liberty.” While calling for the Cold War to be waged as total war, Kennedy recognized its costs and dangers; neither bloc could “take comfort from our present course—both sides overburdened by the
cost of modern weapons, both rightly alarmed by the steady spread of the deadly atom, yet both racing to alter that uncertain balance of terror that stays the hand of mankind’s final war.”
The new president embraced the challenge of walking on the edge of apocalypse, seeing it in heroic, spiritual terms. “In the long history of the world,” he told the crowd, gathered on a frigid day, “only a few generations have been granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger. I do not shrink from this responsibility—I welcome it. . . . The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it.” If there lay danger ahead, there also lay hope for America and the American Century, but triumph would require subsuming the individual to the national purpose: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”
From a distance, Kennedy’s assertion that in 1961 freedom was “in its hour of maximum danger”—greater than during World War II, greater than during Korea—seems strange and self-aggrandizing. As the 1960s began, the world did face the frightening possibility of nuclear war, and the United States confronted serious challenges in its relationship with the Soviet bloc and in the developing world. But Eisenhower had ended the war in Korea and managed to avoid other military engagements even as he pursued a tough stand toward the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s hyperbolic rhetoric, much admired at the time, revealed the extent to which he and many other Cold War liberals derived their sense of personal and political purpose from the struggle to create an anticommunist world order.
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