American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  For southern black leaders, turning to Washington looked more promising as the long Eisenhower Administration ground to an end in January 1961. They had been pleased by John Kennedy’s call to Coretta King after her husband’s jailing, by the nominee’s acceptance of the strong party platform shaped by liberal Democrats, by the campaigner’s fine promises about civil rights. But they were disappointed by JFK’s selection of Johnson as running mate, and even more by his early presidential actions and inactions. As a student of revolution, King was appalled by the Bay of Pigs. It reflected, he thought, a failure by Kennedy and the nation to “understand the meaning of the revolution taking place in the world,” which resulted in the loss of any “real moral voice to speak to the conscience of humanity.” When King met with the President for the first time in the White House, in spring 1961, his moralizing tone put JFK off—moral sentiment generally tended to make Kennedy uncomfortable—but King, for his part, was even more put off by the President’s plan to delay legislative action on civil rights.

  For the acid test of Kennedy’s leadership, as black leaders saw it, was his willingness to push, lever, bargain—move in some way, any way—a strong civil rights bill through Congress. But for Kennedy, southern power in Congress was a racist command post. With their chairmanships of key congressional committees, their mastery of the fine art of parliamentary delay, their formidable weapon-in-reserve of the Senate filibuster, the Southerners held a barricade not only against civil rights measures but against his whole legislative program. He argued, as Presidents had before him, that his economic and social measures—minimum-wage boosts, housing and education programs, and the like—would benefit blacks even more than whites. The President, moreover, had an alternative strategy. He insisted to King that the people he had put in charge of civil rights policy— notably his brother Robert as Attorney General—and the executive actions he could take in certain spheres against discrimination enabled him to strengthen civil rights with simple strokes of the pen. And blacks had long heard this kind of talk too.

  If this first White House meeting between Kennedy and King brought something of a standoff, it also reflected in both of them the kinds of moral dilemmas Myrdal had described. King, an old negotiator himself, could hardly ignore the President’s need to conciliate Congress. Even “Daddy” King had been a compromiser in his own way; the son could remember his father’s saying, after the call to Coretta, that he was switching from Nixon to Kennedy despite JFK’s Catholicism: “But I’ll take a Catholic or the Devil himself if he’ll wipe the tears from my daughter-in-law’s eyes.” And Kennedy had to respect King’s position. The President was caught at this point, Arthur Schlesinger wrote later, in a “terrible ambivalence about civil rights.” He was certain that his executive strategy was the only possible one, but he recognized the injustice of the delay—and liberal Republicans were only too happy to remind him of this publicly. Still, with the southern fortress intact, he was determined to hold off on sending a major civil rights program to the Hill.

  So once more blacks were being told: “Wait.”

  Marching as to War

  Some would not wait. Early in May 1961 thirteen activists, about half of them white, boarded two buses in Washington, D.C., and headed south. As the Supreme Court had just outlawed segregated bus terminals, James Farmer and other CORE leaders now hoped that “putting the movement on wheels,” and refusing to bail out of jail, would rivet the nation’s attention and force Washington to carry out the law. The thirteen bus riders planned to traverse every Deep South state and end in New Orleans. They eluded violence until Rock Hill, South Carolina, where seminary student and SNCC organizer John Lewis, along with a white former navy commander now turned pacifist, Albert Bigelow, were set upon by white toughs as they entered the waiting rooms.

  The doughty thirteen bused on through Georgia and across the border into Alabama. There, in Anniston, a roaring mob with iron bars attacked one of the Greyhound buses, smashed windows and slashed tires, and forced it to a stop outside of town. A fire bomb was thrown into the bus, which erupted in a blazing inferno. Gasping and choking, the protesters barely escaped before the bus exploded. When the second bus pulled into Anniston an hour later, whites charged in, beat up the freedom riders, and made blacks sit apart from whites as the bus drove on to Birmingham.

  There a bigger mob awaited the riders. “As we entered the white waiting room and approached the lunch counter,” veteran CORE activist Jim Peck related, he and a black youth “were grabbed bodily and pushed toward the alleyway.” The whites attacked with fists and pipes. When Peck regained consciousness, blood was flowing down his face. “I tried to stop the flow with a handkerchief but it soon became soaked.” “Everybody who got off the bus was clubbed, kicked or beaten,” wrote an FBI informant in the Klan. “When people looked up, I couldn’t see their faces for blood.” He observed several FBI men making movies of the beatings. No Klansman was arrested.

  Across the South, blacks were watching transfixed. From Nashville SNCC students made their way toward Birmingham despite fears of death that they did not hide from one another. Arrested at the Birmingham bus terminal, held for a day in “protective custody” and then “deported” a hundred miles to the Tennessee border, they made their way back, only to be bloodied by the mob.

  The Kennedy brothers followed these happenings with dismay. Violence was a dire threat to their strategy of compromise and delay. Preparing at this juncture for his meeting with Khrushchev, the President said abruptly to an aide about the riders, “Tell them to call it off! Stop them!” Said the aide, “I don’t think anybody’s going to stop them right now.” He was right.

  Birmingham was more than a bloodletting; it posed a crisis of strategy for both the Kennedy Administration and the civil rights movement. In Washington the Attorney General, coping with the crisis on an hour-to-hour basis, urged Alabama governor John Patterson to give the riders safe passage across the state, helped arrange bus transportation to Montgomery for the beleaguered activists, conferred with black leaders, and after repeated rebuffs from Patterson and others, dispatched five hundred marshals under Byron White’s command to the Alabama capital. The Kennedy effort to avoid bloodshed was clearly not working. But neither was Martin Luther King’s, as he watched civil rights activists encounter the kind of violence he abhorred. Still, when a mass meeting was quickly called at Ralph Abernathy’s church in Montgomery, King flew in to speak in support of the freedom riders.

  Even a Baptist church was no sanctuary. As King conferred in the church basement with Farmer, Abernathy, and others, a mob gathered outside. King and Robert Kennedy talked by phone: King wanted the Attorney General to protect the church and the riders; Kennedy urged King to stop the freedom rides to allow a cooling-off period. When King relayed this message to the group, Farmer said, “Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years.” Upstairs at the mass meeting people emboldened themselves with spirited singing while rocks smashed through the stained-glass windows, showering people in the pews with glass. The mob appeared about to break down the doors when U.S. marshals dispersed them with tear gas.

  Early next morning, after nightlong negotiations among Robert Kennedy, the local National Guard general, and black leaders, the beleaguered churchgoers were driven home in army trucks. A few days later two busloads of freedom riders, escorted by National Guardsmen and highway patrolmen, drove to Jackson, Mississippi. People in Jackson gaped as National Guardsmen led the protesters into the bus station and local police first opened doors for them, then arrested them. The riders served almost two months in grim state pens, where defiant singing of freedom songs helped pull them through. During the summer hundreds of SNCC activists descended on the Jackson bus station and promptly joined their brothers and sisters in jail. They later agreed that prison had served as their training ground, steeling their commitment to a necessary but unpredictable struggle.

  Even as the mob’s stones smashed through the windows o
f Abernathy’s church in Montgomery, conflict of a different sort had divided some of the black leaders conferring in the church basement. King was acting less as a leader than as a mediator who dealt on the phone with Robert Kennedy and other authorities. Farmer and Abernathy and an embattled student leader, Diane Nash, put steady pressure on King against compromise or cooling off. Later, when the young riders left for Jackson and King refused to accompany them because he was on probation, a young protester said, “We’re all on probation. That doesn’t stop us. We’re in a war.” But King had to deal with the Kennedys. The night that Abernathy and the other freedom riders arrived in Jackson and were promptly arrested, King telephoned the Attorney General. Kennedy wanted to get the protesters out of jail; King said they would stay in.

  “It’s a matter of conscience and morality,” the young pastor told the young Attorney General over the phone. “They must use their lives and their bodies to right a wrong.”

  “Their staying in jail,” Kennedy replied, would not have “the slightest effect” on him.

  “Perhaps it would help if students came down here by the hundreds,” King said, “by the hundreds of thousands.”

  Kennedy bristled. “Do as you wish,” he said, “but don’t make statements that sound like a threat. That’s not the way to deal with us.”

  There was an awkward pause. Then King tried again.

  “It’s difficult to understand the position of oppressed people. Ours is a way out—creative, moral and nonviolent. It is not tied to black supremacy or Communism but to the plight of the oppressed. It can save the soul of America. You must understand that we’ve made no gains without pressure and I hope that pressure will always be moral, legal and peaceful.”

  “But the problem won’t be settled in Jackson, Mississippi,” Kennedy said, “but by strong federal action.”

  He was hopeful, King said, “but I am different than my father. I feel the need of being free now!”

  If the people in jail didn’t want to stay, Kennedy said, “we can get them out.”

  “They’ll stay.”

  The dispute among black leaders about strategy carried over into the next great phase of the movement, in Albany, the hub of rural southwestern Georgia. Once again taking the lead, SNCC organizers moved into the city in the fall of 1961, forged a coalition of local college students and older residents, and launched waves of nonviolent protests to integrate the bus station and other public places. Soon hundreds of blacks were languishing in jail, sometimes dozens in cells designed for six. When the campaign sagged, local leaders—over the objections of some SNCC leaders who wished to keep this a local people’s movement—implored King to “just speak for us one night.” King had not planned to become involved in Albany, but he went; once there he had not planned to stay, but his arrival and speeches incited a huge and emotional response, a march downtown headed by King, and his arrest along with that of many others. Both his incarceration and his subsequent bail-out sparked fervent demonstrations.

  Spiritually the “Albany Movement” was a triumph, as an unprecedented expression of black cultural power. It was the “singing movement,” as protesters of all ages poured out their souls in freedom songs melded with old slave spirituals. Singing was the language of protest—especially for the illiterate—the vital tool to build solidarity, sustain morale, instill courage, and deepen commitment. “We Shall Overcome,” led by an Albany State student activist, Bernice Reagon, became the movement’s anthem, sung at the end of every big meeting—all standing, crossing arms and holding hands, gently swaying back and forth, singing so powerfully that, SNCC’s Charles Sherrod remembered, “nobody knew what kept the top of the church on its four walls.”

  If the final test for blacks was political impact, however, Albany was a disaster. The city’s astute police chief, Laurie Pritchett, systematically and “nonviolently” herded protesters into city and nearby county jails, determined to avoid incidents that could cause an explosion of national outrage. King, in and out of jail, was caught between compromisers in the movement, who accepted poor deals with the city, and militants, who deemed King too conciliatory, too passive, but also too interfering in their local efforts. At one point, enraged by the kicking of a pregnant woman while she was taking food to protesters in a jail thirty-five miles from the city, Albany blacks went on a rampage, flinging bottles and stones at the Albany police. King, grieving over this violation of nonviolence, canceled a scheduled march and, in the spirit of Gandhi, declared a day of penance. But “Pritchett’s jails,” wrote historian Carl Brauer, “had proven to be stronger than the endurance of Albany’s black people.”

  It was becoming dramatically clear that progress in civil rights depended less on the first-cadre white political leadership in Washington, important though that was, than on the second-cadre black leadership in Atlanta and Montgomery, and even more on the third-cadre leadership of students, older black women, and white protesters from the North. Then, in the fall of 1962, a single black student showed that one man could make a crucial difference.

  Inspired by JFK’s inaugural address, James Meredith the next day had applied for admission to the whites-only University of Mississippi at Oxford. “Nobody handpicked me,” he said later; he felt a “Divine Responsibility” to break white supremacy, starting with Ole Miss. He would not evade the issue through a “sneak registration” in Jackson. Governor Ross Barnett of Mississippi was equally adamant. He himself would go to jail, he said at one point, before he would let “that boy,” backed by the “Communist” NAACP, get into Ole Miss. After Barnett’s endless stalling in the face of a federal circuit court’s order to the university to admit, Justice Hugo Black handed down an enforcing order from the Supreme Court, while Barnett roared defiance and white hatred mounted in Oxford.

  The episodes that followed burned into the nation’s memory: the President dispatching federal marshals to the Oxford area—rednecks and Citizens’ Council militants advancing into the area by the truckload—the President’s telephone appeal to Barnett to carry out the court orders—the governor’s public defiance even while he privately discussed deals with the Kennedys—the President federalizing the Mississippi National Guard— the marshals moving onto the campus, five hundred strong—the gathering crowd becoming increasingly hostile, while Meredith waited in a dormitory—the mob surging into the line of marshals behind a barrage of rocks and bottles and, soon, bullets, while the marshals tried to protect themselves by firing canisters of tear gas—the beleaguered marshals’ request that the Army be sent and then the agonizingly slow arrival of the troops— the two bystanders killed, the scores of marshals wounded, the hundreds of rioters taken into custody—finally, the registration of the indomitable Meredith at daybreak, on a campus reeking of smoke and hatred.

  During the ten days leading to this night of violence, Robert Kennedy had been in repeated telephone contact with Barnett. Each had done his share of feinting, bluffing, dealing. They agreed on a “sneak registration” (which Barnett shortly repudiated); Kennedy for a time pulled back a federal convoy, to avert violence and save the governor from political “embarrassment.” He had also instructed the marshals in their remarkable self-restraint. The Kennedys operated amid intense pressures, ranging from Third World reactions to those of southern Democrats on the Hill, while Barnett had more leeway. Both sides wished above all to avoid violence; both got it. The Oxford crisis shocked the Kennedys. With all the good communications and give-and-take, how could it end in bloodshed? “We lacked,” an aide said, “a sense of Southern history”—a sense of the power of rooted ideology and historic extremism. At Oxford, Arthur Schlesinger wrote later, the Kennedys began to understand “how profoundly the republic had been trapped by its history.” The Kennedys were trapped too by their own history, above all by the notion that the give-and-take of brokerage politics would work amid the polarized politics of reaction and revolution. Hence it was not surprising that, when Robert Kennedy and his associates conducted a review of thei
r handling of the situation, they appeared mainly concerned about their operational failures, as though they could outmaneuver history through tactical methods rather than through a transformation of their own moral attitudes and political strategy.

  Black leaders had even more reason than the White House to reassess the lessons of Ole Miss and the earlier struggles. For them registering one man at the university was only a start; they viewed the Kennedy’s efforts as, at worst, manipulation of blacks as pawns, mere tokenism at best. Even moderates like King felt depressed after Oxford. The Kennedy Administration was better on civil rights than its predecessors, he granted, but it was helping to constrict a movement that should be “breaking out into the open plains of progress.” A “sweeping revolutionary force,” he said, was being “pressed into a narrow tunnel.”

  But even if only a tunnel, a tunnel to where? Black leaders disagreed not only over means—nonviolent direct action appealing to the liberal conscience against more conventional pressure on the federal government— but also over goals. Should across-the-board civil rights policies be the top priority, or was it better to concentrate on voting rights as the crucial first step to all other rights? A conflict simmered inside SNCC between advocates of more civil disobedience against desegregation and those who held that racism would not be overcome until blacks had political power, which meant vote power. The direct-actionists suspected that the voting registration strategy was merely a White House device to enlarge the black constituency for the next election.