DR: The segregation that existed in housing and elsewhere—was that only in the South? What about the nation’s capital? What about the North?
TB: There was segregation everywhere. There were segregation laws in the South, but there were segregation policies everywhere. America’s neighborhoods were segregated as a result. We like to tell ourselves that it’s all the result of private decisions, but it’s Federal Housing Administration loans, it’s bank loans, it’s government policy, city after city, in decisions that determine where the highways go, where the public housing is built, and those patterns. We’re still living with decisions that were made at every level of government in every region of the country a long time ago.
DR: King came up with a theory that his supporters should use nonviolent response. Why was that so novel? Where did he get that idea from?
TB: At the beginning, I thought it was from Jesus. After all, that’s what Jesus says: “Turn the other cheek, resist not evil.” The cross is the ultimate symbol of nonviolence.
DR: Was King influenced by Mahatma Gandhi?
TB: He was influenced by Gandhi, but then he went over to India in 1959 to study the Gandhians and came back saying, “They fast all the time. We can never do that in America. Those Indians haven’t eaten barbecue.” Jawaharlal Nehru, the preeminent nonviolent Gandhian, is building nuclear bombs in India, and other Gandhians are fighting over whether they should step on insects, or do this, that, or the other.
He said, “We need our own nonviolence in the United States for black people, because we’re a tiny minority and the only thing we have is our faith and our commitment to democratic principles.” Then he said, “Most Americans think nonviolence is exotic and strange, but American democracy is built on votes, and a vote is nothing but a piece of nonviolence. So if you believe in democracy, you believe in nonviolence, whether you know it or not.”
DR: Was nonviolence a very popular approach at the time?
TB: No. It was not popular. First of all, it was scary, because it meant you’re willing to accept violence.
But King said, after the Freedom Rides of 1961, “If you look at the basis of American democracy after the Revolution, it was self-government—Madison said all our political experiments rest on the capacity of mankind for self-government—and public trust. Without virtue in the people, no form of government can secure liberty.”
King said, “Nobody exemplifies that better than a disciplined Freedom Rider looking at somebody who’s about to hit him in the face, and saying, ‘We may not make a connection, but our children will, because of what we’re doing here today.’ ”
King thought that this kind of nonviolence was the essence of patriotism in the American tradition from the Revolution forward, and that our successes are the advances of nonviolence to make votes count, and that we take them too much for granted and get seduced into measuring democracy by lapses into violence.
DR: At the time all this was going on, King was a rising leader in the African American community. Who were the established leaders? What did they think of him? Did they think he was somebody they didn’t have to pay attention to? At what point did they realize that he was one of them?
TB: Some of them never realized he was. Black critics said they were like crabs in a barrel, some of these leaders—that when there’s not a lot of prestige and money to go around, you squabble over it harder.
Freedom Riders outside a burning bus, May 14, 1961.
Thurgood Marshall called King “a man on a boy’s errand” who didn’t understand the law. Roy Wilkins of the NAACP thought that King was trying to steal his members. Whitney Young Jr. of the National Urban League admired King, but his constituency and business were so different. And James Farmer Jr. thought that King was stealing his thunder in nonviolence, because Farmer was more of an overt Gandhian, whereas King was saying, “I respect Gandhi, but we have to develop our own form of nonviolence.” [Farmer was a main organizer of the Freedom Rides of 1961, in which activists defied segregation on interstate buses.]
So there were a lot of different factions. Then there were these students whom King supported and said had made these breakthroughs, but they resented him later because he got all the publicity. They felt that they were the shock troops and they were always going to jail, but the reporters only wanted to talk to Martin Luther King Jr. And that made some of those students revolt against him.
DR: There was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Who headed that?
TB: John Lewis headed it for a while. Marion Barry headed it for a while. Stokely Carmichael took it over from John Lewis in the summer of 1966 and instantly launched Black Power. But by that time, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee was no longer students, not so nonviolent, didn’t coordinate much, and wasn’t much of a committee. Stokely became kind of a shooting star.
DR: Going back to 1960 and the presidential election that year—King is put in jail in Atlanta. Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon doesn’t call him or call Coretta Scott King, but John F. Kennedy does. Why and how did that call occur, and why was Robert Kennedy upset about it?
TB: Robert Kennedy was upset about it because he thought that the staff aides, Harris Wofford and Sargent Shriver, who tricked Jack Kennedy into making this quick courtesy call from the Chicago airport, had lost the election. The Kennedy campaign was utterly dependent on the solid South of segregationist Democrats. If Kennedy associated himself with a black leader, Democrats feared that Nixon was going to make inroads in the South. So Bobby Kennedy was furious.
Then, typically, he felt guilty about being furious. Kennedy wondered how in the world a court of law could put King on the chain gang, for four months, for not getting his driver’s license transferred from Alabama to Georgia quickly enough. When Kennedy’s aides told him, “Democrats run everything down there, they can do whatever they want,” he felt bad and called the judge. So Robert Kennedy’s education on race went round and round.
But the fact of the matter is that Daddy King [Martin Luther King Sr.] and most of his generation were all Republicans in 1960. This was the party of Lincoln. Black people voted Republican. Democrats had been the party of solid South segregation for a hundred years. It was a different world than the one we live in.
DR: Kennedy wins the election in 1960. Does he say, “I want to propose civil rights legislation right away”?
TB: He said he wanted to change some of the federal laws and regulatory practices that fostered segregation in housing. The FHA would not approve any integration in FHA-supported housing development.
Kennedy promised that he could change that with the stroke of a pen. Two years later, civil rights activists mailed him thousands of pens, saying, “Here’s a pen. Sign.”
It was easy to say he was going to do it, but he was always nervous about what the effect was going to be in the South. He didn’t think he could get reelected if he lost any more southern states.
DR: The March on Washington occurred in August of 1963. Why did John Kennedy not speak at it? Was it controversial to have the march? What was the big fear about it?
TB: The march occurred after those kids that I mentioned marched in Birmingham in May of ’63. Because that event broke emotional resistance, demonstrations spread. There were seven hundred demonstrations in a hundred-something cities within the next few weeks. It was that firestorm that made King call a march on Washington.
Kennedy was not ready to introduce legislation, and the standing presumption was that a black march for freedom in the nation’s capital in 1963 would inevitably produce a bloodbath. The Pentagon stationed paratroopers all around Washington. Public employees were sent home. The city canceled liquor sales. Hospitals stockpiled plasma. Major League Baseball canceled two Washington Senators baseball games, the day of the march and also the day after, in advance, because they assumed we would be cleaning up from violent disorder.
So it was a terrifying event. No aide would recommend that the president go to s
uch an event if that’s what people were expecting.
One reason that it has such a sunny reputation now, the March on Washington—“ ‘I have a dream,’ this is nice, who could be against that?”—was the stark relief from what people publicly expected.
DR: King was the final major speaker there. Why was he last?
TB: Nobody wanted to go after him. With good reason.
He was a really accomplished speaker. He was great at reading an audience, a skill he used at the march, because the famous parts of his speech were extemporaneous. They weren’t what he wrote. He went off on a riff like a good jazz musician, which is what Baptist preachers were.
A lot of people think that he stayed up all night and wrote a really great speech, but he discarded his written text in the middle of delivering it and went off on two or three of his familiar riffs: “With this faith.” “Let freedom ring.” “I have a dream.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivers his “I Have a Dream” speech at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington, August 28, 1963.
DR: That speech was one that he had given before. White people had not heard it, but many black people who were there had heard it before, is that right?
TB: Black people in the audience probably hadn’t heard it, but those who traveled with him had heard it. Crowds had heard it in Chicago and Detroit not that long before, or at least themes from it. Riffs—we call them riffs.
DR: After the march, the leaders went to the White House. What did President Kennedy say to Dr. King?
TB: He said, “I have a dream.” Kennedy recognized a good line. He kind of teased him.
DR: Did the speech instantly become famous? Did it make the front page of the New York Times and the Washington Post the next day?
TB: The press reaction mostly was astonishment that there wasn’t any bloodbath. The Washington Post didn’t have many stories at all. The New York Times had seven stories on the front page about what a phenomenon the march was, but it didn’t isolate the speech initially as a great thing, in part because it was so late, they probably had their deadlines coming up and wrote other stuff.
DR: J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, didn’t seem to like King. How did he persuade President Kennedy and Robert Kennedy to let him wiretap him?
TB: That is still a historical conundrum. I wish more historians were writing about it.
Hoover asked Bobby Kennedy to wiretap King in the summer of ’63, right after Birmingham, when all the demonstrations were going on. Kennedy turned him down. After that, King gave the “I Have a Dream” speech and the administration submitted its civil rights bill, with King as a prime supporter, so they kind of married each other in politics. Yet Kennedy approved the wiretap afterwards, in the fall of 1963. He was under tremendous pressure.
It’s one of the great wrestling matches in American history, why he approved that. Bobby Kennedy knew he was handing his rear end to J. Edgar Hoover by putting his signature on that document. Hoover would have that secret over him for the rest of his life.
DR: Did John Kennedy get the results of the wiretaps? Did he ever talk to King about it?
TB: He didn’t talk to King about the wiretaps. He wouldn’t have disclosed that he had them.
But even before the wiretaps, Kennedy felt so exposed politically when he had to submit that civil rights bill in the summer of ’63 after Birmingham and all those demonstrations. JFK said, “We can’t fight all these fires one by one. We’ve got to put a bill out there to stop them.”
He had King to the White House in June of 1963 because he felt that he needed to control him. He took him out into the Rose Garden for privacy, astonishing King.
In seemed to King that President Kennedy thought Hoover was bugging the Oval Office. Kennedy took him outside to escape it and whispered, “They’re after you. If they shoot you down, they’ll shoot me down too. We have to be really careful. You’ve got to get rid of some of your supporters because they’re Communists.”
Kennedy named some, and King said he was astonished. He kept saying, “What’s the evidence? I love these people. They’re volunteers. They don’t work for me.” He said, “I don’t believe in shunning people.”
They went round and round. King went home and put this case before his aides, Harry Belafonte, and a bunch of others. Some of them said, “This is how a witch hunt starts.” Some of them said, “Is this the price of the civil rights bill?” It’s that kind of politics going on behind the scenes.
DR: Kennedy is assassinated a few months later, in November of ’63. Lyndon Johnson becomes president. He pushes Kennedy’s legislation through. Why did a southern senator, a senator from Texas, who had been so close to the segregationists in the Senate, push civil rights legislation, and how did he get that through?
TB: For one thing, the death of President Kennedy had a cathartic effect on the whole country. People thought hatred and division had something to do with it, and the civil rights bill was about addressing and trying to overcome hatred, so that helped.
But Johnson doesn’t get enough credit for his inner drive, and what he really wanted to do as president, and where he came from in life. To me, the biggest proof of that is that within a month of passing the Voting Rights Act, he passed the Immigration and Nationality Act of ’65, which opened legal immigration to the whole world that had been previously excluded.
He said, “Never again will freedom’s gate be shadowed by the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.” I think he was speaking from his heart there, and he risked a lot for the civil rights legislation.
DR: The Voting Rights Act came about in part, I assume, because of the 1965 marches in Selma and other places. Can you describe what the Selma march was about and why voting rights had not really spread to the South? How many black voters were there in some of the southern states and southern congressional districts?
TB: Practically none. The march from Selma to Montgomery went through Lowndes County. No black person was known to have tried to register to vote there in the entire twentieth century into 1965, even though Lowndes County was 70 percent black. It was almost medieval.
The Fifteenth Amendment said everybody should have the right to vote, that it should not be abridged on account of race, but we had turned a blind eye to that for a century. It took these marches to wake people up to that fact. In a way, this was the crescendo of a movement that had been building for a long time.
The events of Bloody Sunday—March 7, 1965, when the marchers were attacked, those famous pictures of John Lewis being beaten on the bridge—occurred on a Sunday morning, and it was not until that night that footage of it made television. In those days you had to take your film, run to an airport, get on a prop plane, fly to New York, get the film developed, take it in, and figure out how to put it on the air. It went on that night.
King sent out a telegram that same night, Sunday night, saying to all of his contacts in the church mostly, “Come to Selma.” He didn’t say, “Discuss this at your next meeting,” or “Vote for a new candidate,” or “Ask Congress to do something.” He said, “Please come to Selma to march with me on Tuesday from the same spot where these people were beaten.”
On Tuesday, there were a thousand people—nuns and priests and everybody, from all over the country—who figured out, before Expedia, how to get there in less than thirty-six hours. It was a stunning mobilization.
DR: During the march, he gets to the end of the bridge and the troopers say, “Go ahead.” Why did he turn around?
TB: That’s one of the great studies in politics. The federal court had ordered him not to march until they could hold a hearing on whose fault it was that there had been beatings in the first place. John Doar, an assistant attorney general trusted by the civil rights leaders, went down and told Dr. King, “You’ve never defied the federal courts. You can’t afford to do it now because it’ll throw us against you.”
King was negotiating at the same time with members of Congress about whether th
ey would introduce a voting rights bill. He’s secretly negotiating also with Alabama governor George Wallace’s people about what they’re going to do, thinking that they may be laying a trap by asking him to march and defy the federal court order and then get out into Lowndes County where the Ku Klux Klan is very strong. Nobody thought they would march more than five miles.
He was battered by some people saying, “This is a breakthrough. We can march right through there. You’re a coward if you don’t march,” and by other people saying, “You’re a fool if you do.” It was a very, very critical moment.
In that moment, Dr. King decided to put his faith in the promise of the federal government to deliver a voting rights act. He said, “We are half-marching. We’re keeping the movement going, but we’re turning around. Let’s go back to the church. We’re not willing to defy this federal order.”
As Johnson later told him, “It’s the best thing that ever happened in American history. You mobilized that public opinion that allowed me to go before the joint session of Congress and propose the voting rights bill. That’s the way it’s supposed to work: active citizens and responsive government.”
DR: King won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. Was he surprised? And was it controversial in the United States at the time that he won?
President Lyndon B. Johnson hands Dr. King the pen he used to sign the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
TB: It was controversial to J. Edgar Hoover, who said that he was the most notorious liar in the country, and that they really had to drag the bottom of the barrel for that prize.
But of course, Hoover was a unique person. He thought that he should get the Nobel Peace Prize.
It was a surprise, but it went over pretty well. It marked a turning point for King, because he had been trying to build the influence of his movement. He gets to a pinnacle in Oslo, and Andy Young says, “We’re going to celebrate this for ten years. We’ve finally gotten an antisegregation bill through, and you’ve got the Nobel Prize.”
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