by Jon Meacham
His commitment to the cause after Dallas forms one of the great chapters of personal transformation and of political courage in the history of the presidency—one akin to Lincoln’s move from tolerance of slavery in 1861 to emancipation in 1862–63. “I’ve never felt freer in my life,” LBJ remarked in January 1964. In the story of Johnson and civil rights we can see the difference a singular president can make when the circumstances are right—and when the voices of protest are steady and brave.
He had begun this journey as vice president. He was stirred by the fact of his national election, even if he were the understudy on the ticket. “I wasn’t a crusader,” LBJ recalled of his days on Capitol Hill. “I represented a southern state, and if I got out too far ahead of my voters they’d have sent me right back to Johnson City where I couldn’t have done anything for anybody, white or Negro.” John Kennedy’s death had changed everything. “Now I represent the whole country, and I can do what the whole country thinks is right,” Johnson said. “Or ought to.”
As he prepared for his first major speech as president, an address to Congress on Wednesday, November 27, 1963, Johnson received a piece of advice from Whitney Young of the National Urban League. “Let me make a quick suggestion,” Young told Johnson. “I think you’ve just got to…point out that…with the death of President Kennedy…that hate anywhere that goes unchecked doesn’t stop just for the week. And the killing at Birmingham [the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing]—the people feel that they can react with violence when they dissent.”
Johnson agreed. “I dictated a whole page on hate—hate international—hate domestically—and just say that this hate that produces inequality, this hate that produces poverty, that’s why we’ve got to have a tax bill—the hate that produces injustice—that’s why we’ve got to have a civil rights bill,” he told Young. “It’s a cancer that just eats out our national existence.”
Three years before, right-wing demonstrators in Dallas had spit at Lady Bird Johnson on a day when protestors had greeted the Johnsons with placards reading TEXAS TRAITOR. JUDAS JOHNSON: TURNCOAT TEXAN. LET’S BEAT JUDAS. In October 1963 a similar crowd had attacked Adlai Stevenson, the ambassador to the United Nations, also spitting on him, striking him on the head with a sign, and denouncing him with cries of “TRAITOR!” One protestor shouted: “Kennedy will get his reward in hell. Stevenson is going to die. His heart will stop, stop, stop. And he will burn, burn, burn.” Pulling away from the chaos in his car, cleaning the spit from his face, Stevenson murmured, “Are these human beings or animals?”
In his November 1963 appearance before the Congress, Johnson said: “John Kennedy’s death commands what his life conveyed—that America must move forward. Let us turn away from the fanatics of the far left and the far right, from the apostles of bitterness and bigotry, from those defiant of law, and those who pour venom into our Nation’s bloodstream.”
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In the South in particular—as ever—national characteristics were magnified to the point of absurdity during the Cold War. Race—also as ever—was the flashpoint. “We know that if we protest we will be called ‘bad niggers,’ ” the novelist Richard Wright wrote in his 1941 book Twelve Million Black Voices. “The Lords of the Land will preach the doctrine of ‘white supremacy’ to the poor whites who are eager to form mobs. In the midst of general hysteria they will seize one of us—it does not matter who, the innocent or guilty—and, as a token, a naked and bleeding body will be dragged through the dusty streets.” Such hysteria was fomented, Wright noted, by appeals to poor whites for whom color was everything since they had nothing else.
In 1948, when Hubert H. Humphrey, then the mayor of Minneapolis, called on the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia to “get out of the shadow of states’ rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights,” supporters of Strom Thurmond and his segregationist worldview marched out of the convention, went south, and met at Birmingham to form the Dixiecrat ticket. Worried about Communists and civil rights—President Truman had integrated the military the same month of the Dixiecrat rebellion—the disaffected began to carry Confederate battle flags to rallies, seeking to link their cause with the Lost one. After the school-integration rulings of 1954 and 1955, defiance grew. IMPEACH EARL WARREN signs appeared across the South. Georgia incorporated the battle emblem into its flag in 1956. South Carolina hoisted the Confederate colors over its capitol in 1962 as part of the centennial commemoration of the war. And George Wallace ordered the flag to be flown above the state capitol dome on the day Attorney General Robert Kennedy called on him in Montgomery.
In her memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou recalled a childhood spent in the universe of the rural Jim Crow South. She and her brother, who were three and four, had been put on a train to travel—alone—from Long Beach, California, to Stamps, Arkansas, where their grandmother ran a country store. One evening, Angelou recalled hearing the hoofbeats of the sheriff’s horse in the yard. “His twang,” she wrote, “jogged in the brittle air.” He warned of a planned Klan night ride. Angelou’s uncle Willie, the sheriff said, “ ‘better lay low tonight.’ ” A black man had apparently “ ‘messed with a white lady today. Some of the boys’ll be coming over here later.’ ”
Listening from the side of the store, Angelou reflected on the Klansmen. “The ‘boys’? Those cement faces and eyes of hate that burned the clothes off you if they happened to see you lounging on the main street downtown on Saturday. Boys? It seemed youth had never happened to them. Boys? No, rather men who were covered with graves’ dust and age without beauty or learning. The ugliness and rottenness of old abominations.”
In a way, Angelou was just as furious about the sheriff’s condescension, the blithe evil of warning the innocent to “lay low.” “If on Judgment Day I were summoned by St. Peter to give testimony to the used-to-be sheriff’s act of kindness, I would be unable to say anything in his behalf,” she wrote. “His confidence that my uncle and every other Black man who heard of the Klan’s coming ride would scurry under their houses to hide in chicken droppings was too humiliating to hear.”
Yet her uncle hid. What choice did he have? Angelou, her brother and her grandmother covered him in potatoes and vegetables inside the store’s storage bins. The night passed without incident—the Klansmen did not call—but if they had, Angelou wrote, “they would have surely found Uncle Willie and just as surely lynched him.”
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Robert Penn Warren had come from the world Angelou was describing. A native of Guthrie, Kentucky, who had been educated at Vanderbilt University and was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Warren began his academic career at Louisiana State University and at what was then known as Southwestern, a university in Memphis, before moving north to Yale. In the wake of the school-integration decisions, Warren—novelist, poet, critic, professor—accepted an assignment from Life magazine to travel from Connecticut to his native South, where enraged white Southerners were carrying signs that read KEEP OUR SCHOOLS WHITE. A Southern-born friend of Warren’s in New York told him: “I’m glad it’s you going, and not me.”
He knew what she meant. He didn’t really want to do it, but he knew he had to. Bearing witness, seeking to understand, confronting past and present in their complexity and pain: It was all part of what Warren had called “the awful responsibility of Time” in his 1946 novel All the King’s Men. The result of Warren’s journey was his 1956 book Segregation: The Inner Conflict in the South. Warren, who had written sympathetically of segregation in a 1930 essay he now repudiated, sought out the voices of African Americans and white supremacists, of ministers and teachers, of businessmen and farmers.
In the South there was suspicion of “the New York press,” with one resident of the Old Confederacy telling Warren: “Well, by God, it’s just a fact, it’s not in them not to load the dice in a news story!”
There was a tragic sense that full reconciliation was impossible. “You hear some white men say they know Negroes,” a black teacher in Louisiana told Warren. “Understand Negroes. But it’s not true. No white man ever born ever understood what a Negro is thinking. What he’s feeling.” And there was the making of common cause with neo-Nazis and anti-Semites. One segregationist mused to Warren about Gerald L. K. Smith, the prominent white nationalist. “Lord, that man’s mailing list would be worth a million dollars!”
A few years later, on the occasion of the centennial of Fort Sumter, Warren wrote a small book, The Legacy of the Civil War. In it he posited that the war had given the South the “Great Alibi” and the North a “Treasury of Virtue.” The Great Alibi “explains, condones, and transmutes everything.” Evil became good; the inexcusable explicable, pardonable. “Even now, any common lyncher becomes a defender of the Southern tradition, and any rabble-rouser the gallant leader of a thin gray line of heroes, his hat on saberpoint to provide reference by which to hold formation in the charge,” Warren wrote. “Even if the Southerner prays to feel different, he may still feel that to change his attitude would be a treachery—to that City of the Soul which the historical Confederacy became, to blood spilled in hopeless valor, to the dead fathers, and even to the self. He is trapped in history.”
Did the Southern “man who, in the relative safety of mob anonymity, stands howling vituperation at a little Negro girl being conducted into a school building,” Warren asked, “ever consider the possibility that whatever degree of dignity and success a Negro achieves actually enriches, in the end, the life of the white man and enlarges his own worth as a human being?”
The answer was no. The Southerner who stood howling, or who voted for those who instigated and benefitted from that howling, was being governed by a fear that, having lost the war of 1861–65, he was now being asked to suffer yet another defeat—the loss of a way of life in which whites were supreme.
To Warren, though, there was also fault among the victors. “The Treasury of Virtue, which is the psychological heritage left to the North by the Civil War, may not be as comic or vicious as the Great Alibi, but it is equally unlovely,” he wrote. “It may even be, in the end, equally corrosive of national, and personal, integrity. If the Southerner, with his Great Alibi, feels trapped by history, the Northerner, with his Treasury of Virtue, feels redeemed by history, automatically redeemed. He has in his pocket, not a Papal indulgence peddled by some wandering pardoner of the Middle Ages, but an indulgence, a plenary indulgence, for all sins past, present, and future, freely given by the hand of history.”
The sins of the North, past and present, had been paid off from the Treasury of Virtue. “In the happy contemplation of the Treasury of Virtue it is forgotten that the Republican platform of 1860 pledged protection to the institution of slavery where it existed, and that the Republicans were ready, in 1861, to guarantee slavery in the South, as bait for a return to the Union,” Warren wrote. “It is forgotten that racism and Abolitionism might, and often did, go hand in hand.” After Appomattox, Warren argued, the North fell victim to self-righteousness. “The crusaders themselves, back from the wars, seemed to feel that they had finished the work of virtue,” he wrote. “Their efforts had, indeed, been almost superhuman, but they themselves were, after all, human.”
In the closing pages of Segregation, the earlier book, Warren mused about the path forward for both North and South. “We have to deal with the problem our historical moment proposes, the burden of our time,” he wrote. “We all live with a thousand unsolved problems of justice all the time….All we can do for posterity is to try to plug along in a way to make them think we—the old folks—did the best we could for justice, as we could understand it.”
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A noble, high-minded view. The reality on the ground in the America into which Warren was publishing his books, though, could be neither noble nor high-minded—or even mindful at all. “Nigguhs hate whites, and whites hate nigguhs,” George Corley Wallace once drawled. “Everybody knows that deep down.”
Born in 1919, a native of Barbour County, Alabama, Wallace had not always been a race-baiter. Just after World War II, as a young man, he’d expressed progressive thoughts. “You know, we just can’t keep the colored folks down like we been doin’ around here for years and years,” Wallace told a Sunday school teacher at his church. “We got to quit. We got to start treatin’ ’em right. They just like everybody else.” He veered between hard-line segregation and a (relatively) more moderate stance for the next decade or so. In 1948 he sought election as an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention with the slogan: “Unalterably opposed to nominating Harry S. Truman and the so-called Civil Rights Program.” Yet in 1958, in a race for governor against fellow Democrat John Patterson, Wallace denounced the Ku Klux Klan while Patterson ran right. Never again. “John Patterson out-nigguhed me,” Wallace was reputed to have remarked to a group of pols at Montgomery’s Jefferson Davis Hotel after he lost. “And boys, I’m not goin’ to be out-nigguhed again.” (Wallace denied this oft-repeated anecdote ever afterward.) “He used to be anything but a racist,” an old political associate recalled, “but with all his chattering, he managed to talk himself into it.”
Elected governor in 1962, Wallace was inaugurated at the state capitol on Monday, January 14, 1963, at the site where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as president of the Confederate States of America; Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, where Martin Luther King, Jr., had been pastor from 1954 to 1960, sat a block away. Speaking from what he proudly called “this Cradle of the Confederacy, this very Heart of the Great Anglo-Saxon Southland,” Wallace cried: “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny and I say…segregation now…segregation tomorrow…segregation forever.”
The crowd erupted. Wallace took a moment to wipe his nose in the winter cold, then plunged on. He knew what he was doing. “I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state,” Wallace said before the inaugural, “and I’m gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” Wallace brought something intriguing to the modern politics of fear in America: a visceral connection to his crowds, an appeal that confounded elites but which gave him a durable base. The cigar-chewing bantam figure with slicked-back hair (he privately admired Robert Kennedy’s tousled look) was “simply more alive than all the others,” a female journalist told the writer Marshall Frady. Alluding to a Wallace speech in New Hampshire, the woman continued: “You saw those people in that auditorium when he was speaking—you saw their eyes. He made those people feel something real for once in their lives. You can’t help but respond to him. Me—my heart was pounding. I couldn’t take my eyes off him, there were all those people screaming. You almost love him, though you know what a little gremlin he actually is.”
He provoked devotion and rage. Many adored him, revering him as a new savior; many others despaired of a future under his rule. Educated people in Alabama were said to be reading books about Nazi Germany, particularly William L. Shirer’s The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, searching for parallels. One woman whom Frady described as “a gentle, bespectacled, exquisitely civilized Montgomery dowager” could not contain herself: “I wish he were dead. I wish someone would kill him. He ought to die. He’s awful, terrible. I would kill him myself if I just had the chance—I would.”
In Wallace the Lost Cause found new relevance. In the months after his inauguration, the crisis came: A federal court ordered the integration of the University of Alabama. Wallace had pledged to stand in the schoolhouse door—as the popular phrase had it—to prevent just such a thing. He savored the hour, however hopeless it was. The very hopelessness of it all was in fact part of the appeal of defiance, for Southerners loved tragic stands against the inevitable. Wallace reminded Marshall Frady of William Faulkner’s Reverend Hightower
in Light in August, “whose gray head, as he sits by his window at dusk, is filled with the flash and roar of the old glorious doomed charges, the lifted sabers and bugles and grimy howling faces above gaunt, galloping horses.” It was more than sentiment about a distant past; it was tangible, present, unfolding.
So ran the line from the polemics of Edward Alfred Pollard to the politics of George Corley Wallace—a line connecting the Civil War to the Cold War, the 1860s to the 1960s, a distant America to the contemporary one. The federal government was the villain. States’ rights were the salvation of the Founders’ vision. White supremacy was to be protected by whatever means possible.
Yet Wallace failed. The Kennedy Justice Department enforced the court order, and the university was integrated. On the evening of the day federal officials compelled Wallace to stand aside, President Kennedy spoke to the nation. “Today,” the president said, “we are committed to a worldwide struggle to promote and protect the rights of all who wish to be free.”
Kennedy’s language was straightforward, his tone reasonable. “This is not a sectional issue,” he said. “Difficulties over segregation and discrimination exist in every city, in every State of the Union, producing in many cities a rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety. Nor is this a partisan issue….We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.”
