Guns or Butter

by Bernstein, Irving;

  President Kennedy had launched the quest in 1961, had persevered in the face of defeat, and had made significant gains in 1963. For this he deserves important recognition. But the assassination left much to be done. One may note that the passage of ESEA and the Higher Education Act represented President Johnson’s final discharge of the Kennedy legacy. Henceforth whatever he did was his, was exclusively part of his Great Society.

  Wayne Morse, as Keppel pointed out, was “magnificent.” His management of two very important, very controversial, and very complex bills in the Senate may have been without match in the history of that venerable body. He was a master of legislative management.

  Finally, Francis Keppel, who, like his favorite President, John Kennedy, was noted for intelligence, detachment, grace, civility, and dry wit, brought his formidable knowledge of the American educational system, including its weaknesses, to bear in creating the Gardner task force, drafting the legislation, and, most important, resolving the politically critical religious controversy.9

  8

  Selma and the Voting Rights Act

  SELMA rested on the west bank of the Alabama River, which flowed south to Mobile on the Gulf of Mexico. Highway 80 crossed the river by the Edmund Pettus Bridge, named for the town’s most prominent historic figure, a Confederate general. The road led east 54 miles to Montgomery, the capital of Alabama.

  Selma had been founded in 1817 in the rich Black Belt of Dallas County. Before the Civil War the town flourished as the center of a slave-based cotton economy, surrounded by large plantations with columned white mansions, their grounds graced by magnolias dripping with Spanish moss. Selma shipped the cotton down river to Mobile. The town did not fall to Union forces until the closing days of the war and Reconstruction seems to have treated it gently. Nor did General Pettus allow the Ku Klux Klan to operate locally because of his contempt for the low social status of its members.

  Time hardly moved in Selma. The relations between the races, except for the abolition of slavery, barely changed over a century and a half. By 1960 the population was 29,000, slightly more than half black. Everything was segregated: jobs, housing, government, police, firemen, churches, schools, buses, hotels and restaurants, the library, playgrounds, swimming pool, public toilets, and drinking fountains. In 1965 median family income for whites was $5,150, for blacks $1,393. In Dallas County median school years completed for both races was 9, for blacks 5.8. The streets were paved in white neighborhoods; dirt roads turned to mud when it rained in black ones. Even the Times-Journal segregated the white and the black news.

  While virtually all whites there wanted segregation, they split into two schools. One, led by Sheriff Jim Clark, did not hesitate to use violence. “A heavy-set lawman with a sizable temper and paunch,” Stephen L. Longenecker wrote, “[Clark] fit the northern stereotype of a southern sheriff. … He wore a military-style outfit with a gold-braided officer’s cap, and he dangled a billy club and an electric cattle prod from his belt.” In addition to his paid deputies, Clark had volunteer posses of poor whites—mounted, water, and on foot. They were available to put down civil rights demonstrations anywhere in Alabama. His strongest supporter was Circuit Judge James Hare. The judge fancied himself an amateur anthropologist. Selma’s blacks, he insisted, were of low intelligence because they descended mainly from the inferior Ibo tribe of Nigeria and had no Berber blood.

  The other segregationist faction preferred order to violence. The new mayor, Joe T. Smitherman, spoke for them. He thought the town was decaying economically and hoped to persuade northern firms to locate in Selma. Scenes of black people being beaten by local police shown on national television would hardly help. Distrustful of Clark, the mayor named Wilson Baker director of public safety, supervising both the police and fire departments. The trouble was that Baker never learned how to control Clark. Baker was a professional lawman and had taught police science at the University of Alabama. He wanted to preserve segregation as long as possible without turning to force.

  Ralph Smeltzer, a minister of the Church of the Brethren, spent several years in Selma out of public view trying to establish a dialogue between the races. He searched in vain for whites who would be willing to talk privately to blacks. Smeltzer did turn up two white men who strongly opposed segregation. Father Maurice Ouellet supervised the Catholic St. Elizabeth’s Mission, which provided schools and a hospital for blacks. The dominant fundamentalist Baptist preachers, who equated Romanism with Satan, refused even to speak to him. His archbishop moved him out of town to another post in 1965. Art and Muriel Lewis, who were Jewish, also spoke out against segregation. He had been a businessman in Florida and they had retired to Selma. They were subjected to abuse and harassment and Muriel was convinced that this was the cause of Art’s fatal heart attack.

  Despite the Fifteenth Amendment and a voting rights campaign waged by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1963–64, almost all the black citizens of Dallas County, Alabama, were denied the right to vote. In 1961 the county had a voting-age population of 29,515, 14,400 whites and 15,115 blacks. The number of blacks registered was 156—1 percent. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach explained, “The history of Negro voting rights in Dallas County, Ala., of which Selma is the seat… in three words: ‘intimidation,’ ‘discouragement,’ and ‘delay.’ ” The Department of Justice had fired off a battery of suits, four against intimidation alone, all still dragging their way through the courts. Few people in the North knew about it, but Selma was a national disgrace.1

  In the winter of 1964–65 the mood of Martin Luther King, Jr., changed from exaltation to despair. In October 1964, while in the hospital in Atlanta overcoming exhaustion, he learned that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. At 35 he was the youngest person ever to win it. “This was not simply a personal award,” David J. Garrow wrote, “but the most significant international endorsement possible of the civil rights struggle.” It meant that he could never retreat to a quiet life. “More than anything else, the prize made the cross loom larger.”

  A big King party—immediate family, parents, close friends, and colleagues from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference—left New York for Europe on December 4. Outwardly the voyage was an immense triumph. On December 6 in London King preached to thousands in St. Paul’s Cathedral and had many meetings with Anglican church leaders, Indian dignitaries, and spokesmen for the peace movement. Oslo was the capstone. He received the prize at a magnificent ceremony at Oslo University on December 10 in the presence of the Nobel officials and the royal family. The next day he delivered his address on the theme of nonviolence in domestic civil rights demonstrations and in international disarmament. The party moved on to Stockholm where King preached a sermon at the cathedral and was received by Gunnar and Alva Myrdal, he the author of the pathbreaking study of racism in the U.S., An American Dilemma, and she to become herself a winner of the Nobel Prize. Returning to New York, King was given a hero’s welcome. Governor Nelson Rockefeller loaned his private jet to the King family for the flight to Washington where President Johnson offered his congratulations.

  But all was not well. His close friend and leading assistant, Ralph Abernathy, backed by his wife, was extremely jealous of the acclaim King had received and demanded equal recognition. In the hotel in Oslo two members of the party, including King’s brother, were picked up in the lobby naked chasing two women who were almost as sparely clad. Far more important, King was very depressed to learn that he had become a prime target of the FBI.

  The Bureau had been bugging his rooms and tapping his phone conversations and had acquired much damaging information. Stanley Levison, one of his closest advisers and personal friends, had been involved with the finances of the Communist party. More telling, the FBI tapes revealed that King had an insatiable sexual appetite. Constantly on the road and often propositioned by attractive women, he indulged himself freely. This was common knowledge in the civil rights movement. When a friend warned him to take care, King said,
“I’m away from home twenty-five to twentyseven days a month. Fucking’s a form of anxiety reduction.” The FBI machines faithfully recorded these often athletic events.

  J. Edgar Hoover had set out to destroy King. He hated blacks and considered King the worst of the lot. On November 18, 1964, at a press conference with women journalists the director called him “the most notorious liar” in the U.S. and added, off the record, that he was “one of the lowest characters in the country.” King replied politely that Hoover must be “under extreme pressure.” He offered to meet with the director. This made news headlines.

  At the urging of Katzenbach, a meeting took place at the end of November. King brought along Abernathy, Andrew Young, and Walter Fauntroy; C. D. DeLoach sat beside Hoover. King spoke of his high regard for the FBI and Hoover rambled on about the bureau’s civil rights activities in the South. The affair was wholly ceremonial; no one broached the real issues. On November 24 the director sharpened his attack in a speech in Chicago, referring to “pressure groups” which were led by “Communists and moral degenerates.” There were leaks to journalists and churchmen.

  In mid-November assistant FBI director William C. Sullivan instructed the lab to compile a tape of “highlights” of King’s sexual adventures collected over the preceding ten months. Sullivan then added an anonymous letter. An agent took the tape and letter to Miami and mailed the package to King at SCLC headquarters in Atlanta. The staff assumed that it was a recording of one of his speeches and saved it for Coretta, his wife, who collected them. She picked it up after New Year’s and played it. As Garrow wrote, she was “surprised and shocked” and immediately turned it over to her husband.

  The letter was both insulting and threatening. “I will not dignify your name with either a Mr. or a Reverend or a Dr. … You are a complete fraud and a great liability to all of us Negroes. … You … turned out to be … a dissolute, abnormal moral imbecile. … King you are done.

  “King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what this is. You have just 34 days. … There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

  King immediately called his advisers—Abernathy, Young, Joseph Lowery, and Chicago lawyer Chauncey Eskridge—together to listen to the tape. They concluded that it had come from the FBI and that the invitation to suicide in 34 days had expired on Christmas Day.

  King became despondent and seemed to lose his bearings. But on January 8 he and his advisers in a meeting at the Park Sheraton in New York decided that he must confront the FBI. Agents tracked them to the hotel and bugged the room. King seems not to have been up to another meeting himself with Hoover or even DeLoach. Young and Abernathy, therefore, met with the latter. Young said he had heard that the FBI was interested in Communists, SCLC’s finances, and King’s personal life. DeLoach said that the Bureau was not at liberty to discuss Communists and that the agency had no interest in the organization’s finances or its leader’s private activities. As Young reported to King, “There wasn’t any honest conversation.” The leaks continued.

  King remained extremely depressed. It was in this mood that he launched the campaign for voter registration in Selma.2

  Selma’s blacks had hoped that the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 would bring improvement, but they were bitterly disappointed. Modest attempts to enter the white section of a movie theater and to be served in a drive-in restaurant led Judge Hare to issue an injunction forbidding 15 named organizations and 50 individuals to hold meetings of more than three people. The Holiday Inn, linked to a national chain, quietly rented rooms to blacks and then, doubtless under local pressure, became all-white again. When Smitherman became mayor in October, Smeltzer urged him to meet secretly with black leaders, but he refused. The SNCC’s voter registration drive was almost totally ineffective. Only 353 Negroes, 2.1 percent of eligible black voters, were enrolled in Dallas County. As King pointed out, “It would take about 103 years to register the adult Negroes.” The Dallas County Board of Registrars was open for business only two days a month and the members had a taste for long lunch hours. On a good day they processed 15 applications, including rejections.

  When King was at the White House in December, the President pointed out to him that the poverty program would help blacks and urged that they seek leadership roles. But, King countered, there was still a serious voting rights problem in the South. Later he recalled Johnson’s reply: “Martin, you’re right about that. I’m going to do it eventually, but I can’t get a voting rights bill through in this session of Congress.” He needed southern votes for other Great Society programs and 1965 was just not the right year. Though he did not say so, King disagreed.

  In late 1964 SCLC representatives were in Selma making connections with local black leaders, and the Reverend James Bevel, based in Montgomery, was put in charge of the Alabama voting project. King held a meeting of about 100 SCLC officials, local people, and SNCC leaders in Montgomery, which adopted a plan to attack segregation in Alabama, starting with a voting rights campaign in Selma. Large numbers of blacks would appear at the courthouse on registration days and King would make widely publicized appearances in defiance of the Hare injunction. He would be put in jail. The Birmingham experience in 1963 was the example. Just as Selma-born Bull Connor’s police brutality had aroused the nation and the world two years before, Jim Clark’s force would behave the same way with the same results.

  On January 2 King delivered a fiery address to a crowd of 700, including state and local lawmen and reporters, at the Brown Chapel of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in Selma. “Today,” he declared, “marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama. … We must be ready to march; we must be willing to go to jail by the thousands. … Give us the ballot!” There was no police intervention. Wilson Baker had kept Jim Clark’s men away from Brown Chapel.

  On January 14 King was again in Selma. He announced that he would lead a march to the courthouse on registration day, Monday, January 18, and that he would test the antebellum Hotel Albert by trying to become its first black guest.

  On Monday morning King headed about 400 blacks who, at Baker’s suggestion, walked in groups of three or four, from the chapel to the courthouse. There was quite a welcoming committee: Baker, Clark, about 80 media people, as well as George Lincoln Rockwell of the American Nazi Party, and Jimmy George Robinson of the National States Rights Party. Clark herded the marchers into a roped-off area in the alley behind the building and gave them numbered cards ostensibly for registration. But he admitted only 40 whites. The blacks stood in the bitter cold all day.

  There was no incident or violence. Similarly, the manager of the Albert simply registered King and ten members of his party. Robinson had followed King into the lobby and hit him with his fist on the temple and tried to kick him in the groin. Baker immediately seized Robinson, put him under arrest, and tossed him into a police car.

  On Tuesday morning the marchers repeated their walk, this time stopping at the front door of the courthouse in order to avoid the alley. Clark immediately arrested them. Amelia Boynton was a dignified lady, a dedicated civil rights activist, and a registered voter, present, as the law required, to vouch for the applicants. She did not walk as fast as Clark liked. He grabbed her by the collar and shoved her stumbling half a block to the sheriff’s car in full view of the press. He took in a total of 67 people. But the NAACP Legal Defense Fund had them out of jail before supper. SCLC was pleased that Clark had bitten the bait; Baker, however, was appalled.

  On Wednesday morning three successive waves of about 50 marchers walked to the front entrance. Clark, boiling, was waiting for them. He ordered the first group, led by John Lewis of SNCC, into the alley. They refused. “You are an agitator,” he said to Lewis, “and that is the lowest form of humanity. If you do not disperse in one minute … as I have directed you, you will be under arrest for unlawful assemb
ly.” He ticked off the seconds. No one moved. He put them in the county jail in city hall. He treated the second wave the same way. When the third arrived, Baker told them to line up by another entrance so as not to obstruct the sidewalk. Clark demanded that Baker arrest them and he refused. Clark grabbed a bullhorn, gave the crowd a minute to disperse, and then arrested them himself.

  On Friday afternoon Selma’s black school teachers, led by the Reverend Frederick D. Reese and the teachers’ association president, A. J. Durgan, joined the demonstration on their own initiative. SCLC staffers said, “Brother, we got a move-ment goin’ on in Selma!” The teachers were dressed in their Sunday best, had toothbrushes in their pockets, and assumed they would be out of jail by the time school opened on Monday. In pairs, 100 teachers marched to the courthouse after classes ended on Friday. Clark, his posses, and the media were waiting for them. Reese said they only wanted to walk by the closed registration office. Clark, trembling with anger, would not let them enter the building. Reese led them away.

  On Saturday, on the motion of the Justice Department, District Judge David Thomas vacated the Hare injunction. He ordered an end to intimidation and harassment of citizens of Dallas County legitimately attempting to register to vote. But white Selma was in no mood to bend to the will of any judge.

  The next week the blacks resumed their daily marches. On Monday Clark shoved Mrs. Annie Lee Cooper. A sturdy woman, she hit him in the face and, as he staggered, slugged him twice more, knocking him to his knees. The deputies wrestled her to the ground, Clark jumped on her, and he hit her in the head with his baton. The next morning the New York Times had a picture of Clark sitting on Mrs. Cooper on its front page. Governor Wallace sent Colonel Al Lingo and his feared Alabama State Police into Selma.