by Larry Tye
Instead, Bobby from the first focused on beefing up his Civil Rights Division, eventually adding two hundred young, committed lawyers who did their best to cajole Southern registrars into opening their voter rolls to blacks. When that didn’t work, which was most of the time, they sued under the weak-kneed laws passed in 1954 and 1960 that required them to prove that literacy tests, poll taxes, and other barriers disproportionately harmed specific Negroes. That effort was further stymied by FBI investigators who balked at collecting that proof, local election officials who were masters at disenfranchising even those blacks who managed to register, and federal district judges who said no often enough that lengthy appeals generally were needed to win. Bobby’s fact finders turned up shocking evidence of obstructionism in places like Macon County, Alabama. Illiterate whites didn’t have to recognize the word “registration” to get enrolled. Not so blacks, who were barred from signing up despite being able to write out long sections of the U.S. Constitution. Federal judge Frank Johnson, a trailblazer, ordered sixty-four Negroes enrolled and said that in the future, the standard applied to blacks would be the one used for the least-qualified whites. Yet even that hard-fought victory signified the difficulty of applying these incremental wins on a broader scale. Forty-six lawsuits filed by the department from 1961 to 1963 gave the vote to 37,146 Negroes—but did not cover 511,212 others in the same counties who would not be allowed to exercise the right guaranteed them by the Constitution they were memorizing. “The right to vote is the easiest of all rights to grant,” Bobby had assured his audience at the University of Georgia, but defiant registrars across the South were proving cagier than the attorney general and his brigade of voting rights lawyers.
Integrating public schools wasn’t any easier. In 1954 the Supreme Court, in its Brown v. Board of Education ruling, struck down state laws that set up separate schools for black and white students. Six years later the apartheid-like system remained, with just 0.162 percent of black children in the eleven Deep South states attending integrated schools. Bobby was of two minds. He found “deplorable” and “inexplicable” the resistance to even token integration, but the specter of Little Rock made the idea of using federal force even less acceptable. Caution kept him from fully testing whatever limited powers the law granted him. His intrepid attorneys, once again, did what they could—negotiating behind the scenes to enforce voluntary desegregation rulings, suing on behalf of children of black soldiers, and staging what Bobby’s defenders called guerrilla strikes, even as civil rights groups called for all-out war. Why not use his bully pulpit to actively encourage integration? they asked. What about cutting off federal funds to districts that were resisting federal orders? The symbolism of his calls to free Rev. King from prison might have sufficed in the heat of an election, but now he needed to show more substance and a deeper commitment. Remember, King and other civil rights leaders told the politically canny attorney general, it wasn’t just white Southerners who had helped his brother squeak into the White House, but also Negro voters in toss-up states from South Carolina to New Jersey.
Bobby demonstrated how far he could have gone in Prince Edward County, Virginia. School officials there responded to a 1959 order to integrate by dismantling the entire public education system and replacing it with a private one to educate white children, with substantial subsidies from the state and county. Black children were on their own, which for many meant no schooling at all. Finally Bobby got angry and creative. In the spring of 1961 he asked the court to reopen the county’s public schools, halt tuition subsidies to white students, and punish all of Virginia by cutting off federal education funds. It was the muscular approach that civil rights advocates had been seeking and that Bobby had said he wasn’t authorized to undertake. He wouldn’t stop there. Seeing that the legal appeals were taking years, in 1963 he rallied teachers from across the country to construct a network of private schools for the county’s fifteen hundred black children. JFK had told reporters there were only four places on the planet where children couldn’t attend school: North Korea, North Vietnam, Cambodia, and Prince Edward County. It took until 1964 for the Supreme Court to rectify that. In the meantime, Bobby had shown the difference he could make when he got incensed enough and dared to try.*1
There was no doubt about the attorney general’s legal authority to advise the president on federal judicial appointments. The only uncertainty was who Bobby would listen to—those urging him to use the appointments to affirm his opposition to segregation, or Southern senators who saw it as their historic prerogative to weigh in and saw segregation as part of Southern culture. He vowed to do the right thing and expressed shock when some of the appointees turned out to be unabashed racists. Harold Cox was the most salient example. “We sat on my couch in my own office….I said that the great reservation that I had was the question whether he’d enforce the law and whether he’d live up to the Constitution and the laws, and the interpretation of the Constitution by the Supreme Court,” Bobby said in explaining why he named Cox as a federal district judge in Mississippi in 1961. “He assured me that he would.” That, and the fact that neither the FBI nor the American Bar Association raised red flags, were enough for the attorney general. But flags were being raised. After Cox was nominated but before he was confirmed, NAACP boss Roy Wilkins wired the White House to say that “for 986,000 Negro Mississippians Judge Cox will be another strand in their barbed wire fence, another cross over their weary shoulders and another rock in the road up which their young people must struggled.” Even more telling, if Bobby really had wanted to know, was the fact that Cox was the college roommate and enthusiastic choice of Senate Judiciary Committee chairman James Eastland, the archsegregationist from Mississippi. “Tell your brother,” Eastland reportedly told Bobby, “that if he will give me Harold Cox I will give him the nigger [meaning Thurgood Marshall, a black judge JFK wanted to appoint to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals].” Eastland got Cox, and not long after, he gave the Kennedys Marshall, who would eventually be promoted to the Supreme Court.*2 As for Cox, he proved to be as bad as Wilkins feared. In clarifying from the bench why he planned to reject the Justice Department’s request to register Negro voters, Cox referred to the would-be voters as “a bunch of niggers.” Who, he demanded to know, “is telling these people they can get in line and push people around, acting like a bunch of chimpanzees?”
The Kennedys almost made history in 1962 by naming Circuit Judge William Hastie as the first black Supreme Court justice. “It would mean so much overseas and abroad that we had a Negro on the Supreme Court. It could do all kinds of good for the country, as well as the fact that he was qualified,” Bobby later explained. But he said that idea died both because Chief Justice Warren was “violently opposed,” arguing that Hastie was “not a liberal,” and because “a lot of people in the White House were opposed to having a Negro.”
Bobby’s overall record on judgeships was as mixed as the rest of his civil rights agenda. Cox and four others of the twenty-five federal district judges he named in the Deep South proved to be nightmares for civil rights attorneys and their clients, although eight of his appointees were committed integrationists. When he left office, the South still had no Negroes on the federal circuit court, none on the district court, and none as jury commissioners or U.S. marshals. “A Negro involved in a federal court action in the South could go from the beginning of the case to the end without seeing any black faces unless they were in the court audience, or he happens to notice the man sweeping the floor,” concluded the Southern Regional Council, a respected civil rights group. Bobby did, however, appoint ten Negroes to judgeships in the North. And, outraged at how few black faces he saw in his own Justice Department, he increased the number of black attorneys from six to sixty.
This attorney general was on a learning curve and so, unfortunately, was his chief adviser on civil rights, Burke Marshall. The thirty-eight-year-old Marshall’s lack of background on race issues was part of what made him attractive to Byron W
hite, the deputy attorney general who recommended him. That paper-thin record meant that Southern senators had no justification for holding up Marshall’s nomination the way they would have the more logical choice for the posting, Harris Wofford. Wofford, whom Bobby had bawled out during the 1960 campaign for his role in getting JFK to call Martin Luther King’s wife, was too much of an agitator on an issue the attorney general didn’t yet think worthy of agitating. Picking Marshall over Wofford in 1961 was, Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach said, “an effort to signal that while the administration was committed to civil rights, miracles should not be expected.” Marshall’s job interview became famous in the Kennedy world because he and Bobby were both so shy that neither said anything, and each man incorrectly assumed he hadn’t clicked with the other. He would ultimately become the most trusted of Bobby’s assistants, and perhaps the most effective head ever of the Civil Rights Division, although less so in these early years when Bobby needed prodding more than patience. “It would be comforting to think the Kennedys had a plan,” said Katzenbach. “They simply did not. There were ideas, but the sum total of them did not add up to much—certainly not enough to satisfy the growing demands of black leaders like Martin Luther King.”
Kennedy and Marshall got their baptism of fire in Alabama. It came in the wake of the Supreme Court’s December 1960 ruling outlawing segregation in interstate travel, whether it was aboard a bus or train or waiting in the terminal. Like the 1954 ruling on school desegregation, this one was greeted with delight by civil rights groups but would meet with bitter resistance in the real world of the segregated South. That spring a group of activists, black and white, decided to test their new rights by taking buses across the South in ways that directly challenged the old norms. Interracial pairs sat in adjoining seats while at least one black sat up front, in an area from which they were historically banished. When they got to the station, the black barrier-breakers used whites-only bathrooms and lunch counters. Everyone planned to end up in New Orleans on May 17, 1961, the seventh anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education. They called themselves Freedom Riders, and the first fourteen of what would eventually be more than four hundred made it through Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia with what would later look like only minor skirmishes. The real trouble came when they divided into two groups, one on a Trailways bus, the other on archcompetitor Greyhound, and rolled into Alabama.
In Anniston, a city of 33,000 midway between Atlanta and Birmingham, a caravan of angry whites caught up with the Greyhound bus on May 14 and hurled a Molotov cocktail through the window. The rioters used clubs and iron bars to batter the riders as they scrambled out of the burning vehicle. While the injured Greyhound passengers made their way to the hospital*3 the Trailways bus rolled into the station, where a hostile boarding party waited. Eight white toughs, their shirtsleeves rolled up to display their biceps, snarled, “Niggers, get back. You ain’t up North. You’re in Alabama, and niggers ain’t nothin’ here.” They backed up their words by raining blows on the blacks sitting up front. One white Freedom Rider who protested was battered into semiconsciousness as a second was lifted over two seats and deposited in the aisle. Simeon Booker, who was covering the ride for the black journal Jet, pretended to read a newspaper but actually was bearing witness through a small hole. “A policeman boarded,” he said, “grinned at the white thugs, and mumbled, ‘Don’t worry about any lawsuits. I ain’t seen a thing.’ ” When the riders finally got to Birmingham, that city’s police were conspicuously missing even though their headquarters was just two blocks from the terminal. For what everyone later learned was a prearranged fifteen minutes, forty white thugs waiting in the loading bay assaulted the activists with baseball bats, blackjacks, and bicycle chains. James Peck, who had been hauled over the seats in Anniston, was attacked again so savagely that it took fifty stitches to close his head wound. Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, Birmingham’s police commissioner, said he couldn’t prevent the violence because too many of his men were on leave for Mother’s Day. FBI agents were on hand, having been tipped off by a Ku Klux Klan informant, but all they did was take pictures and issue a report. None lifted a finger to prevent the ambush.
Bobby later said he “never knew they were traveling down there…before the bus was burned in Anniston.” But he had to have known. Two months earlier, James Farmer of the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the organizers, had sent him the itinerary. In case he missed that, the next month Booker told Bobby he was joining the ride. “His buoyant response—‘I wish I could go with you!’—had surprised me,” the reporter recounted. “I told Kennedy the Riders might need protection at some point, and he said to call him if trouble arose.”
Now Bobby had no choice but to act, sending in as a troubleshooter John Seigenthaler, his aide from Tennessee. It was an impossible mission. JFK made it clear to Bobby and Seigenthaler that he wanted the marchers to “call it off,” which they hadn’t been willing to do earlier that week when they were brutally beaten and certainly wouldn’t on the say-so of a thirty-three-year-old ex-journalist, no matter whom he was representing nor how pronounced his Southern drawl. Bobby, meanwhile, offered Seigenthaler his encouragement but no federal protection for the protesters or for him. In the minds of both Kennedys, the rides couldn’t be taking place at a less opportune moment—a month after their botched Bay of Pigs invasion and weeks before JFK’s summit meeting with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, who already was gloating over America’s racial strife. Seigenthaler met the beaten and bruised activists in the departure lounge of the Birmingham airport, where, after several bomb threats, they joined him on a flight to New Orleans. Once there, he’d barely laid his head on a hotel pillow when he got a call from Burke Marshall saying that ten replacement riders had shown up in Birmingham determined to make the trip to the state capital of Montgomery.
Bull Connor arrested those riders, and he thought he rid himself of the problem by loading them into cars in the middle of the night and depositing them across the state line in Tennessee. But a third group took their place, and this time Bobby wouldn’t take no for an answer from Alabama authorities. John Patterson, who had done more than any other governor in the South to put JFK in the White House, now ducked calls not just from the attorney general but from the president, telling his aides to say he had gone fishing. Seigenthaler, who’d flown back to Alabama, finally managed a face-to-face meeting with the governor, who vented his spleen for thirty minutes on “everybody and everything from the Supreme Court to me, but was heaviest on Bob Kennedy.” Patterson declared himself “sick of these spineless people that I supported not standing up,” added Seigenthaler, and warned that “if federal marshals come in to Alabama, there’ll be blood in the streets.” Then the governor reluctantly agreed to ensure the safety of the Freedom Riders.
The next challenge was to find someone at Greyhound willing to take the protesters to Montgomery. The scheduled driver told reporters, “I only have one life to give and I’m not going to give it to CORE or the NAACP.” Bobby got on the phone to George Cruit, a bus company superintendent, and made clear the stakes: “I think you should—had better be getting in touch with Mr. Greyhound….I am—the Government is—going to be very much upset if this group does not get to continue their trip.” His insistence produced a driver, but Cruit would get his revenge. He had taped the conversation, and critics in Alabama and elsewhere misread Bobby’s statement that “we have gone to a lot of trouble to see that they get to [make] this trip” as proof that the attorney general had helped orchestrate the Freedom Rides.
The crisis of the moment involved the riders themselves. State troopers escorted them with cruisers and helicopters to the city limits of Montgomery, where city police were supposed to take over. But Montgomery officials identified with the segregationists, not the integrationists, and like their counterparts in Birmingham, they stayed away from the bus terminal just long enough for the mob to convey its vicious message. Angry whites descended
from every direction—some as young as fifteen, most wielding baseball bats, iron pipes, chains, or bottles, and all seeming to scream at once, “Get them niggers!” John Doar, the Justice Department attorney who had been leading Bobby’s push for voting rights, watched in horror from a building high above the terminal, providing a blow-by-blow to colleagues back in Washington: “A bunch of men led by a guy with a bleeding face are beating them. There are no cops. It’s terrible. It’s terrible.” FBI agents again snapped pictures and did nothing. Seigenthaler drove up in time to see a young white girl being pummeled over the head with a pocketbook by a “little fat woman who looked like Nikita Khrushchev’s wife,” while a skinny kid who looked about fifteen “was facing her and dancing backwards like a boxer and smacking her in the face.” Seigenthaler tried to intervene, telling the rabble, “Get back, get back. I’m a federal man.” That earned him a crack over his left ear so hard it landed him in the hospital with a concussion. Bobby called to ask, “How do you feel?” Seigenthaler: “I’ve got a small headache….Let me give you some advice….Never run for Governor of Alabama. You couldn’t get elected.” Told that federal marshals were on the way to restore order, Seigenthaler said, “I hate that. It’s sort of like an invasion.” Kennedy: “Sooner or later something had to happen. This is what triggered it.”
Bobby’s wrath was provoked only partly by events on the ground, which were spiraling beyond the beatings at the terminal. Even more important, given the way his brain worked, things had gotten personal. He always knew he’d have to ratchet up his enforcement of civil rights, but as always it was experiences rather than abstractions that pushed him into the fray. His friend Seigenthaler was lying in the hospital, lucky to be alive. Patience and caution now gave way to resolve and rage. Jack was at his weekend retreat in Virginia, content to let Bobby take control along with any heat. Bobby had just thrown out the first ball at the annual FBI softball game when news of the riots reached him. He raced to the Justice Department in blue denim slacks and shirtsleeves, still wearing a baseball cap, and began issuing the orders for which activists had been pleading. He mobilized a force of four hundred U.S. marshals, border patrolmen, prison guards, and revenue agents, some of whom had trained for riot duty. He asked a federal judge in Montgomery to restrain the KKK and National States’ Rights Party from interfering with the riders, later expanding the request to include Bull Connor and three other police officials whom he blamed for the mayhem in Birmingham and Montgomery. And he ordered more FBI agents into the area to investigate the riots.
