*Jackson’s Robert E. Lee Hotel posted a sign on the front door: “Closed in Despair—Civil Rights Bill Unconstitutional.” As a private club, the management invited the entire Mississippi legislature to board without charge during a special session called to convert the state school system into segregated clubs, which proved impractical.
*With clear trepidation, Robert Moses told a July 5 news conference that the dispatch of summer workers into the McComb region resolved a long-deferred choice between ignoring the Negroes there or “sharing their terror with them.”
*When Twine recovered enough to try again, tensely divided observers watched him take a seat in the Palms restaurant. Managers tried to compromise by bringing Twine his order in a sack for takeout, whereupon several of the Negro cooks threw down their aprons and stalked off the job, one saying, “That ain’t no trash out there.”
†Later that July, Galimore died in an automobile crash near the Bears’ summer training camp.
*A waterlogged notice found in a jeans pocket helped identify Charles Moore as one of several hundred students expelled on May 20 for protesting social restrictions at no-nonsense Alcorn A&M. Killers seized him on his way home.
*“…girls with dank blond hair, parading in dirty blue jeans; college boys in sweat shirts and Beatle haircuts; shaggy and unkempt intellectuals; bearded Negro men and chanting Negro women.”
†“It was a gathering of the utterly comfortable, come together to protest that they should be having it better…angry even in victory.”
*“The Georgia delegation,” recalled a Cleveland paper, “for many years was headed by the first Negro national committeeman in either party, Henry Lincoln Johnson.”
*The Bureau’s sole initiative in the case was to cull from private records the victim’s confessions to social workers that he liked to fight, skip school, and “get high on whiskey”—a portrait that contrasted sharply with Jet magazine’s eulogy for “Little Jimmy,” as a “quiet youth” who worked in a neighborhood store and volunteered for summer school.
*Noting that Washington, D.C., was then the only major city with a nonwhite majority, White projected that by 1990—“almost tomorrow in the eyes of history—these trends, if unchanged, will give America a civilization in which seven of her ten largest cities (all except New York, Los Angeles and Houston) will have Negro majorities; and the civilization in this country will be one of metropolitan clusters with Negroes congested in turmoil in the central cities and whites defending their ramparts in the suburbs…. Something has got to give.”
*“I have Jack Valenti, who nobody knows, and Bill Moyers, and Walter [Jenkins],” Johnson said privately. “That’s my team here. The rest of them are their people.”
*Johnson knew that Kennedy did not like the front-runner and eventual nominee, Senator Hubert Humphrey, because he had run against John Kennedy in the presidential primaries of 1960. Also, Johnson’s advisers warned that advance notice would give disappointed contenders time to rally against any choice.
*Three decades later, the prevailing judgment of historian Stanley Karnow and others held that the Tuesday attack never happened.
†Newsweek: “The U.S. ships blazed out salvo after salvo of shells. Torpedoes whipped by, some only 100 feet from the destroyers’ beams. A [North Vietnamese] PT boat burst into flames and sank. More U.S. jets swooped in….For more than three hours the battle continued in the turbulent seas. Another PT boat exploded….” Life: “There was now plenty for the radar-directed guns to shoot at. The Maddox and the Joy were throwing everything they had.”
*During World War II, the Court overturned the federal conviction of a Georgia sheriff named Claude Screws, who methodically had beaten to death a handcuffed Negro prisoner in his custody, on the ground that his deed, while “a shocking and revolting episode in law enforcement,” lacked a distinct, provable motive that applied to federal rather than state crime.
*“In this course of human events, it has become necessary for the Negro people to break away from the customs which have made it very difficult for the Negro to get his God-given rights. We, as citizens of Mississippi, do hereby state….”
*This plank protested evacuations set for October 22, when the Atomic Energy Commission detonated a 5-kiloton underground device near Hattiesburg. Stronger than expected blast effects lifted the surface of the earth ten inches and rolled detectable tremors as far away as Finland. Shortly after this first—and last—nuclear test east of the Mississippi, New York’s Port Authority abandoned plans to clear ground for a new airport with visionary applications of atomic force.
*Playboy interviewer Alex Haley—whose book subject, Malcolm X, remained overseas—sweetened the magazine’s offer with his own admiration. If King would sit for an interview, Haley promised to donate his entire writing fee to SCLC.
*“The motivation of King, of course, is well known to yourself,” Wilkins told Johnson. “You know some of the forces behind him.”
*In Adickes v. S. H. Kress & Co. (1970), Justice John Harlan delivered the prevailing opinion that lower federal courts had erred in summarily dismissing the Adickes complaint, and remanded the case to Mississippi for further proceedings, which Adickes chose not to pursue.
*Johnson had put Humphrey’s challenge succinctly to Walter Reuther on August 17: “You better talk to Hubert Humphrey, because I’m telling you that he’s got no future in this party at all if this big war comes off here, and the South walks out, and we all get in a hell of a mess.”
*Johnson had sent a plane to fetch the Steinbecks from their home on Long Island. The novelist had developed a private bond with the President since volunteering to design for him an aura of personal folklore, which he defined as a “vernacular of the spirit…. Lincoln breathed it, Kennedy exuded it…. LBJ exudes little of it, although I think he would like to.”
*“…The times require leadership about which there is no doubt and a voice that men of all parties, sections, and color can follow. I have learned after trying very hard that I am not that voice or that leader. Therefore….”
†Johnson referred to President Woodrow Wilson, who suffered a debilitating stroke in 1920, toward the end of his second term.
*Johnson reached one of the three before the commotion on the convention floor that night. “You’re a patriot,” he told Doug Wynn of Greenville, a family friend. “…This is history and you’ll always be proud of this.” Within days, the President would be asking the Justice Department to protect the nonwalkouts from Klan death threats on their return to Mississippi.
*“These letters…have not been appreciated,” wrote Judge H. C. Echols, who added his criticism of FBI methods: “Personally I thought your agents had no right to give Mr. Guest a birthday cake….”
*In the Times, Orthodox Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik rejected talk of kinship with “any other faith community as ‘brethren’”: “Rabbi Says Faiths Are Not Related.”
*Moore’s volunteers for Mississippi came disproportionately out of the New York FBI office, where agents wished to escape the notoriously clumsy supervision of Assistant Director John “Cement Head” Malone.
*“Now the Black Muslims say they’re supportive, they’re looking out for each other,” Barnette said in a 1965 interview. “But when Ronald Stokes was killed, no support was given…. His child had to live in the home of my aunt, who is a Christian, for one year. Not a Muslim from Boston came to visit that child….”
†In its closing intercept, the FBI recorded a phone notice from an unknown foreign cleric who pronounced Malcolm an orthodox Muslim qualified to “spread Islam among the Afro-Americans.”
*Lawyers for the station submitted transcripts of the McComb broadcasts as evidence of fair (or reformed) racial coverage, in rebuttal of the FCC license challenge prepared in March of 1964 by researchers from the National Council of Churches. The case would consume the balance of the decade. Judge Warren Burger—in his last decision before becoming U.S. Chief Justice—revoked WLBT’s license in a landmark 196
9 decision that established procedural rights for consumers and minorities in broadcast license awards. Ownership of the former WLBT-TV devolved to a consortium that included NAACP chairman Aaron Henry.
*One of every ten American students lived in California, which became the country’s most populous state in 1964. Nationally, the first baby boom cohort left high school that year in numbers bulging one million more than in 1963.
*“I don’t want you sneaking around down any back alleys and signing any niggers,” Yankees president George Weiss instructed scouts into the 1960s.
*His 61 percent of the national vote exceeded Roosevelt’s record of 60.8 percent in 1936, as well as Richard Nixon’s future mark of 60.7 percent (1972), for the remainder of the twentieth century.
*“Their defense is always that it must have come from somebody in your office,” Katzenbach wryly stated in a 1969 oral history. “…You get back thirty seconds later: they made a complete full field investigation [and] it was not leaked by anybody in the FBI. [laughter] And they had positive evidence that it was not. But of course they run that whole operation there.”
*“The added touch of the group photograph was just so nice of you,” Carey wrote Hoover in 1959. In 1960: “I cannot tell you how pleased I was to note that both Houses of Congress joined in voting you a full pay, whenever you may retire.”
*In 1970, after King’s death, Time published Hoover’s tough-guy account of the 1964 meeting: “I said, ‘Mr. King’—I never called him reverend—‘stop right there. You’re lying.’”
*Eskridge promptly wrote NAACP lawyer Jack Greenberg on King’s behalf: “Will you help relieve his mind of this pressing problem?”
*“I remember the conversation well,” added Moyers, “because you had just arrived at the Ranch at midnight, your time, and called me. I was having dinner at a restaurant and talked from a phone booth. I felt you were doing the right and honorable thing….”
*To buttress the contention that the recent elections excluded Negro voters illegally, King recited the 1870 statute that readmitted Mississippi to the Union on condition that Negro residents of age be allowed to vote freely unless they were “convicts or insane.”
*On the Nobel trip, King called for the removal of foreign troops from the Congo and for the imposition of international economic sanctions on South Africa. The South African government, meanwhile, was resisting the introduction of television for fear that Western programming would undermine apartheid society.
*“Malcolm Favors a Mau Mau in U.S.,” headlined the Times, which observed that he had reportedly “renounced black racism and had embraced the brotherhood of man, but his words yesterday bristled with militancy.” News coverage readily embraced Malcolm’s sensational—yet traditional—assumption that brotherhood and militancy are at odds.
*Atlanta had recently canceled its annual goodwill dinner for Georgia legislators because Mayor Ivan Allen could not prevail upon the Commerce Club, which he served as president, to relax its segregation rules for the first Negro state senator.
*Sister of Professor William Dinkins, the church malfeasance expert during the pulpit wars of Rev. L. L. Anderson at Selma’s Tabernacle Baptist Church.
*“Segregation was not an issue, because everybody was a segregationist,” Smitherman recalled. “…I tried to make a deal with” black leaders to pave their streets if they would oppose King’s campaign. “…We did what we thought was a good job trying to defuse it and keep him out of here.”
*The new Minority Leader, Gerald Ford, survived his first legislative test after defeating incumbent Charles Halleck in the Republican caucus.
*The litigation method was failing, Doar advised the Justice Department from Selma, although it had been “tried harder here than anywhere else in the South.”
†Andrew Young remembered hearing King tease Abernathy about his consuming desire to give the really big speech—saying Abernathy needed first to become president of something, then suggesting he form the National Association for the Advancement of Eating Chicken. King led guffawing preachers as they “cracked on Ralph” with ridiculous ideas for his organization.
*“We are faced here with a seriously deteriorating situation characterized by political turmoil, irresponsibility, and division…. We are likely soon to face…installation of a hostile government which will ask us to leave…. There is a comparatively short time fuse…we are presently on a losing track….”
*Cooper v. Pate would result in a mixed decision. Cooper won the right to attend Muslim services and receive some religious mail. Illinois won the right to keep him segregated from non-Muslim prisoners.
*Unknown to King and his managers, the new in-house accountant they relied upon to contest this audit was an FBI informant, James Harrison. Bureau officials, needing to preserve their only live source planted inside SCLC, overlooked his minor embezzlement of SCLC funds, and Harrison, as revealed by historian David Garrow, would remain until 1971 a paid informant of modest use to the FBI.
*A Washington Post essay that week featured youth charges that King “tries to solve racial problems in a ‘hit-and-run’ fashion…too often settles for tokenism…goes to jail but doesn’t stay very long…is too inflexible….”
*“We are on the brink of a decision,” declared editors of the Selma Times-Journal, “as important a decision as ever faced the citizens of this or any city.”
*Before his death decades later, while still insisting that Malcolm deserved punishment for defying Elijah Muhammad, Captain Joseph conceded that Malcolm had nothing to do with setting the fire. “I know he didn’t,” Joseph declared. “I’ll say that much.”
*FBI headquarters was preparing for distribution among intelligence agencies the next day a jaundiced interpretation of recent wiretaps: “The naked boldness of King’s egotism is vividly reflected in his pronouncements about the movement needing a leader (obviously King himself).” Director Hoover wrote on the report, “Also to Watson,” meaning that a copy should go to the new White House security aide, Marvin Watson.
*In an influential essay that recognized him as an original thinker of the age, journalist I. F. Stone passed along as revelation that Malcolm had been “shocked when former secretaries of Elijah Muhammad filed paternity suits against the prophet.”
*After criminal appeals, those convicted had entered nine different California prisons on March 8, 1965, the day after Selma’s “Bloody Sunday” march. Judge David Coleman suspended all jail time on William X Rogers, who remained in a wheelchair, and on Monroe X Jones for his “recent behavior and attitude.” Jones, who shot Officer Tomlinson during the incident, had left the Muslims.
*Thirteen state election laws of 1966 would carve the Delta’s Second Congressional District into three majority white districts, submerge the looming black vote in redrawn local boundaries, and substitute strategically placed “at large” races for district school boards and county representatives.
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