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Shortly before one o’clock, the meeting adjourned for lunch, which was served cafeteria-style in a kitchen down the hall and was, as the Reverend Dr. Borders said, “on the house.” Each person carried his own loaded tray into a nearby dining room. We had our choice of barbecued ribs or fried chicken. I took the ribs, and they were delicious. One of the last people to come into the dining room was a delegate from West Virginia, a large, very black man who had read his report, full of notable achievements, in a deep, unexcited voice. He stopped in the doorway, tray in hand, looked around at the others, already at table, and meekly inquired, “May colored folks eat here?” Then, smiling broadly, he marched in and sat down.
After lunch, most of the people went outside and stood in the sunshine on the church steps, smoking avidly. I made my way from one group to another, chatting with some and listening to what they had to say. Marshall was scheduled to go to Birmingham, Alabama, on the 29th to plead Miss Autherine Lucy’s right to be admitted to the University of Alabama, and he was saying that, frankly, he wasn’t looking forward at all to showing himself in that hostile territory. Somebody jokingly urged him to think how much good his becoming a martyr might do the cause, from the long view. “That’s too long a view!” Marshall protested. Wilkins laughed and recalled how in the old days when they were sitting around trying to figure out how the organization was going to raise enough money to stay in existence, Walter White used to look speculatively at Marshall and Wilkins and say, “Now, if one of you heroes would just get lynched, I could arrange the finest speaking tour you ever saw.”
Presently, I joined a group that was discussing the Montgomery bus boycott. This and the Miss Lucy matter, as might have been expected, were major topics of conversation among the N.A.A.C.P. people that weekend. It was on December 1st that a weary middle-aged Negro seamstress in Montgomery, riding home from work on the bus, refused to get up and give her seat to a white man and was promptly arrested. The bus boycott with which the Negro community responded was in its eleventh week at the time of the meeting. I got the impression from the people I talked to that this passive-resistance movement—with its Gandhian patience, acceptance of physical discomfort, and religious professions of love and tolerance toward the oppressors while refusing to submit to oppression—had taken the N.A.A.C.P. almost as much by surprise as it had the white citizens of Montgomery. The N.A.A.C.P. leaders, many of them lawyers accustomed to working through formal court processes, appeared to me to not know quite what to make of it even while taking pride in the spirit it revealed.
I went down the steps and joined some delegates standing on the sidewalk. They were talking about something the Arkansas delegate had said that morning—that the governors of several Southern states were claiming that most Negroes really didn’t want to go to school with whites but preferred to stay among their own kind. One delegate remarked that Senator Eastland, of Mississippi, was fond of saying how happy the “good niggras of Mississippi” would be to have things stay just as they are. A short, serious-looking man, who had been listening to the others in silence, said, “That reminds me of the joke about the good niggra who got put on the radio in Mississippi. The white man drove down to this poor sharecropper’s shack and told him he was gonna put him on the radio. ‘Put me on the radio, boss? Whaffor?’ the sharecropper asks. And the white man says, ‘Gonna put you on the radio, Sam, because you’re a mighty good niggra for a niggra, and we gonna give you a chance to tell the whole world how fine we treat you-all in Mississippi.’ So the two of them drive up to the radio station and they go on in. ‘Now, there’s the microphone, Sam. Jest talk on into it,’ says the white man. ‘This the microphone, boss?’ ‘That’s right, Sam.’ ‘And when I talk, people can hear me?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Outside of Mississippi? All over the world?’ ‘Sure ’nuff, Sam. Jest go ahead and tell ’em.’ So Sam went up to the microphone, took hold of it with both hands, and called, ‘Help!’ ”
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As it happened, the first state scheduled to report when the delegates went back into session after lunch was Mississippi, which was represented by an attorney, wearing slacks, a sports jacket, a bow tie, and horn-rimmed glasses. He had an earnest manner, his stance was square, his gestures simple. He looked as if not too long ago he might have been wearing jeans and doing heavy work. He said that his report on what progress his state was making toward desegregation could be summed up in one word: “None.” In fact, he went on, the state officials and legislators, spurred on by the Citizens Councils—a segregationist movement that originated in Mississippi and spread out from there through the South—were devoting most of their energies and their best thinking to making progress in the other direction. “The Mississippi legislature has been meeting since the first Tuesday in January, and they have yet to get around to anything besides ways of strengthening every form of segregation,” he said, and, permitting himself the luxury of a modest comment, added, “After they get that taken care of, they’ll probably take a couple of weeks to settle the minor affairs of state business.” Reading from a sheet of paper, he went over the bills that, he said, the legislature had introduced so far—an act requiring separate waiting rooms for persons travelling on common carriers within the state and forbidding any person to enter a waiting room other than the one marked for his race; an act requiring separate toilet facilities in these waiting rooms; an act conferring upon any person, firm, or corporation engaged in any public business, profession, or trade the right to choose and select the customers, patrons, and clients of such business, and the further right to refuse to sell or render a service to any person, and providing a penalty for any person who refuses to vacate a public place when ordered to do so by the owner or any employee thereof; an act to abolish common-law marriages (“I think the purpose of that bill may be to prevent the children of such unions from suing for their rights,” he said. “Aside from that, I don’t understand it”); an act making it a felony to hold, or cause to be conducted, athletic contests open to the public wherein Negroes or persons of Mongoloid descent participate with white persons; an act making it unlawful to solicit, advocate, urge, or encourage disobedience to any law of the State of Mississippi or nonconformance to the established traditions, customs, and usages of the State of Mississippi; an act to extend the laws of libel, defamation, and slander so as to prohibit the libelling, slandering, and defaming of states, counties, cities, communities, their inhabitants, their institutions, and their government (“The Jackson newspaper thinks a couple of these bills may be going a little too far”); an act (“Now, this one may deserve careful study”) to safeguard for the citizens of the State of Mississippi the rights, privileges, and immunities granted them by the Constitution and laws thereof, to make criminal any violation thereof, and to create a civil-rights section to protect such rights (“I can’t understand why they’ve brought out such a bill,” he said. “It seems to me,” he went on hopefully, “to offer a strong weapon with which to attack the other segregation laws.” “Not a chance,” Wilkins assured him. “That’s a bill against the N.A.A.C.P. The civil rights that bill protects are the very opposite of what are called civil rights elsewhere”); an act to establish special requirements for out-of-state attorneys (“That’s the Thurgood law,” somebody in the audience said jocularly); and several other acts. Some of them, the Mississippi delegate said, had already passed both houses and most of the rest were expected to pass shortly. Although the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was illegal in interstate travel facilities, Mississippi police were continuing to enforce it, he reported. They would arrest a Negro who went through the wrong door in a waiting room and fine him twenty-five dollars. However, if the Negro asked for a trial, an action that would require the court to file a written record of its judgment, the case against him would be dismissed. “So,” he said apologetically, “we haven’t been able to test in the law courts what they are doing.”
“Don’t worry about the test,” somebody in t
he audience said. “If they dismiss the case, that’s progress in Mississippi, man!” Other delegates laughingly concurred.
There followed reports from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Like Mississippi, these states were apparently prepared to go to any lengths to defy or circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling that segregation has no rightful place in American public schools. Among other things, the reports brought out that Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia have made plans to abandon their public-school systems altogether, rather than tolerate Negro and white children in the same classrooms. Georgia has passed a law that would make any school board permitting a non-segregated school to be set up within its jurisdiction guilty of a felony. Prince Edward County, Virginia, evidently guarding against the possibility that a court might order a local school board to desegregate, has refused to approve a yearly school budget and is supplying operating funds on a month-to-month basis. In Georgia, the State Attorney General has filed a suit against the Valdosta School Board, which had implied that it wants to study the situation. The suit seeks, in effect, as one of the N.A.A.C.P. delegates said, “to prevent the school board from even thinking about possibly studying desegregation.” Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina have passed so-called placement statutes, which give local school boards the power to assign students to schools, ostensibly on the basis of categories other than race—such as health, intelligence, and social adaptability. In the eight recalcitrant states, defiance of the Supreme Court ruling comes not just from the mob but from the highest governing officials. The legislatures of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina in solemn session have passed interposition, or nullification, resolutions, which declare that the Supreme Court’s ruling violates their sovereignty. As Marshall put it, “They don’t mean go slow. They mean don’t go.”
A Kentucky delegate raised a question that interested me: What attitude should be taken toward a school district that had declared that in the interests of gradual and orderly change it planned to abolish segregation in only one school grade at a time? It would start with the first grade next fall; the year after that, as these children were promoted there would be two mixed grades, then three, and so on until 1968, when the whole school system would be on a nonsegregated basis. The reasoning behind this was that such a significant alteration in social attitudes can be effective only if instituted at the earliest possible age, when the child’s nature is pliant and unformed. To my ears, the argument had a certain plausibility, but the group rejected the plan. They thought this pace was rather slower than what the Supreme Court meant by “all deliberate speed.” And they doubted whether the school board was reasoning in good faith. “In Tennessee, the state colleges have reasoned in just the opposite way,” Carter pointed out. “There they said they would start at the graduate level and work down a year at a time. Obviously, they said, only the most mature person can be expected to adjust to so great a social change as this. Both of these arguments seem dreamed up mainly for the purpose of procrastination.”
When it came to the eight intransigent states—Mississippi and the rest—there was considerable discussion, but all that it added up to was, I think, aptly summarized by the dapper, bald attorney from Texas who was keeping the minutes. After some time, he stood up and said, “I don’t know whether I’m keeping good notes on this. All I can make out of what I’ve got down here is ‘Let’s sue!’ ”
“Those are good notes,” Marshall assured him, with a smile.
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At six, the meeting adjourned for two hours, to give a drafting committee, which included Marshall, time to embody the delegates’ conclusions in a formal statement. Most of the others drove down to the Negro Y.M.C.A. for dinner. I decided that I would take a walk, to get some exercise and give myself a chance to think things over. In many ways, the meeting had not been at all what I had expected. I had anticipated more speculation, more oratory, more emotional outbursts. Certainly I had been unprepared for the orderliness—indeed, the ordinariness—of the procedure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find deep gloom at the turn events had taken in the last year, and demands for an agonizing reappraisal of the N.A.A.C.P.’s position, or even to hear at least some delegates, frustrated beyond endurance, call for violence or other direct action. But the concreteness, the calm, the serene feeling of assurance that the law would eventually prevail—these I had definitely not expected. As for the humor, I had expected some, but of a different sort. Funny without being escapist, the humor I had heard here reminded me in many ways of Mauldin’s G.I.s in the front lines.
Mulling over these things, I walked perhaps a dozen blocks to where the white section of Atlanta begins. There I stopped in at a restaurant opposite the Municipal Auditorium and had a sandwich and a glass of beer. I was unable to get a cup of coffee. “Not much demand for coffee this hot weather,” the proprietor said. A thermometer outside the door read seventy-five degrees. In the park in front of the auditorium, the broom hedges were already in bloom, as was the pelargonium in rows along the side. The grass, on which a number of neatly dressed white children were playing, was deep green and lush. As I watched, the fountains were turned on in the park, spouting half a dozen lovely jets from the center of a large marble basin. The sky was pink now, and I started back. It was dark by the time I reached the church.
· · ·
“All right, listen to this statement Stewart’s going to read,” Marshall said when everyone had assembled again. “We’re going to debate it, amend it, do anything you want done to it, but we’re not getting out of here tonight till we’ve got something we’re agreed on.” Much of the document was handwritten, and Stewart stumbled over words as he read it aloud. It was, for the most part, an embodiment of the group’s findings as to the progress that had been made and the actions it intended to take where progress had been faltering or nonexistent. When Stewart finished, one of the group said he hoped someone was going to edit out the grammatical errors. “I don’t know whether they were in the writing or the reading,” Stewart said, and Marshall remarked, “I know at least one was in the reading.” A number of minor points were debated at some length, and a few changes made, but on the whole the delegates seemed satisfied with the presentation, and shortly after ten they voted their approval.
Now Wilkins, the executive secretary, walked forward and said that since he’d been keeping fairly quiet all day, perhaps he might say a few words in conclusion about the significance of what they were doing here. “I don’t want to sound over-heroic, but I have the impression that we who are so close to all this don’t comprehend its magnitude,” he said. “I don’t believe we understand the tremendous effect we are having on the nation. All these little decisions we worked out today are part of a social revolution that is taking place. The whole face of a third of America is changing—and what is achieved here in the South will also help to enhance the status of those who live outside this area and bring all of them closer to that condition we speak of so glibly in the phrase ‘first-class citizenship.’ ” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tall young Negro come into the room. He walked down the aisle, spoke a few words to Marshall, who was standing at one side of the room near the platform, and then sat down among the audience. I paid scant attention to him, because I was finding myself engrossed by Wilkins’ speech. I suppose his words sound oratorical as I’ve set them down here, but at that moment they sounded just right. I had got to concentrating on the specific details involved, and had forgotten that these people were engaged in making history. I was, therefore, startled to hear Marshall suddenly interrupt in a rough voice, “Never mind the philosophy, Roy!” Wilkins stopped, and Marshall said, “You don’t know the news I’ve just heard.”
Wilkins half turned to him and said, “Yes, I do, Thurgood. I didn’t want to say anything about it unless it was definite.” He looked back questioningly toward the tall young man, and the young man must have nodded back to him or made some o
ther sign. Then Wilkins said, “Dr. Brewer’s just had his head shot off.”
For a moment, people sat dumfounded, shocked into silence. But soon they began to blurt out questions: How? Why? Was it definitely Dr. Brewer? The young man stood up and said he didn’t have many details—all he knew was what a reporter had told him on the phone. And then someone asked if it had been a racial killing. “He’s been getting threats for weeks on the phone,” the young man said. “Ever since we started the petition to open the Columbus golf course to Negroes. I have, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to them.”
Wilkins said he would like to ask a minute’s prayer for Dr. Brewer. The delegates stood in silence until Wilkins said “Amen.” Then Marshall strode out of the hall. He looked angry. The others followed. And now the calmness and control they had shown all day disappeared. Fears and rumors flew among them as they stood in tense, excited groups on the church steps. Marshall stood off to one side, alone, staring into the darkness. The young man who had brought the news bolted down the steps to his car, to drive to Columbus, a hundred and twenty miles away, where the shooting had taken place; his wife and children were at home all by themselves. Somebody said, “He’d better get there in a hurry. There’s liable to be a race riot when the Negroes in Columbus find out what’s happened to Dr. Brewer.” A large, powerful looking man from Bessemer, Alabama, said a race riot had been threatening in his town for several weeks and might break out at any moment, perhaps even that night. “Everybody is armed there now—white and black both,” he said. And a woman standing near me, an N.A.A.C.P. official from Alabama, kept saying she was going to start carrying a gun herself, or get out of Alabama altogether.
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