American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  King and the SCLC leadership, after a two-day strategy review, decided to put desegregation first. Direct action in department stores and lunch counters, they calculated, could bring concrete results and at the same time focus intensified pressure on the White House. For their next target they chose Birmingham.

  Birmingham. For blacks, this city, the industrial center of the South, was the American Johannesburg, the most segregated metropolis in the country, the self-styled “magic city” that was really the “tragic city.” The white power structure consisted of three mutually reinforcing elements: the business and industrial elites who ran the Birmingham economy; the political elites who maintained the racial status quo, ranging from Governor George C. Wallace in Montgomery to the “magic city’s” Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor; and the Ku Klux Klan and other racist groups that abounded in the city and its outskirts. To challenge this structure SCLC had in Birmingham one of its strongest affiliates, headed by one of its most militant leaders, Fred Shuttlesworth. SCLC’s strategy was to throw its resources into mass demonstrations and store boycotts, with the hope of splitting the business elite from the political leaders. SCLC saw the campaign as a drama, progressing act by act until it reached the crisis, followed by the denouement when white power would be forced to yield.

  By March 1963, SCLC people were moving into the streets. After a few skirmishes Connor won a state court injunction barring King and his companions from leading more protests. He would violate the order, King asserted at a spirited mass meeting, even though the movement had run out of funds and he was needed to raise bail money. On Good Friday the jeans-clad King and Abernathy and fifty others marched downtown in a glare of publicity. When the two walked up to the burly Connor and knelt in prayer, police grabbed them by the back of their shirts, threw them into paddy wagons, then seized the others. King was held incommunicado in a dark cell with no mattress or blanket until, at Coretta King’s request, John Kennedy interceded and conditions improved.

  Soon the prisoner was busy scribbling on scraps of paper and in the margins of a newspaper. He was responding to a letter in that newspaper by white Alabama clergy condemning his tactics and timing. In biting sentences King laid down his creed: “We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.… We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. … I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.… If our white brothers dismiss as ‘rabble-rousers’ and ‘outside agitators’ those of us who employ nonviolent direct action and if they refuse to support our nonviolent efforts, millions of Negroes will, out of frustration and despair, seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies—a development that would inevitably lead to a frightening racial nightmare.” This became the “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” the most cogent and moving justification of civil disobedience since Thoreau’s essay.

  Marching to Birmingham’s city hall, wave after wave of men and women were mauled by police dogs, hurled against walls and pavements by fire hoses that shot out water with cannonlike force, jammed into jails that soon were overflowing. But when King and Abernathy were released, the crusade began to flag. As a last resort to revive media attention, black leaders dispatched battalions of children—some as young as six—who marched with songs and shouts of “We want freedom,” endured dogs and fire hoses, and rode off in school buses to jail cheering and singing. With the passing days the police became rougher, as young blacks on the sidelines hurled the usual street missiles.

  Black activists fought the battle of the media along with the battle in the streets. They had long experienced not only the conservative bias of many southern newspapers but also the tendency of the southern media to play down or even ignore demonstrations taking place in front of their own offices. “We don’t want to fan the flames,” an editor explained. But the activists needed to break through middle-class white apathy. Thus it was all the more crucial to arouse the national media, which reached not only a mass audience but to some degree brought the news of southern conflict into southern homes.

  Just as SCLC leaders hoped, Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses galvanized the nation’s conscience, including the leaders’ in Washington. Fearing a violent uprising, the White House sent in mediators. This interposition, combined with efforts of local white moderates to negotiate a compromise, touched off a raging dispute among the black leadership. When King agreed to a temporary halt in the protests, Shuttlesworth, who had been hospitalized with a severe fire-hose injury, rounded on the pastor. He shouted that President Kennedy “doesn’t live down here, and I live down here.… Tell him King can’t call it off.”

  King pleaded for unity. “I’ll be damned if you’ll have it like this,” Shuttlesworth cried. “You’re mister big, but you’re going to be mister S-H-I-T.” Then he walked out.

  Yet both the blacks’ militance and their moderation were working. The business leaders, threatened by the paralyzing boycott and damning publicity, agreed to desegregation demands, though city officials remained intransigent. The vaunted white power structure was not so shatterproof after all. Still, the blacks’ victory was a mixed one, with continuing divisions among their leadership, recriminations from George Wallace and others of the white old guard, a Ku Klux Klan rally in a local park, the bombing of the home of King’s brother, and more rioting. Bull Connor had clearly lost, however, as the electrifying drama of Birmingham, conveyed by extraordinary television coverage, projected his snarling, biting police dogs to the nation and the world.

  Birmingham projected into the White House. The President told a group of civil rights liberals that a newspaper picture that morning of a police dog attacking a black woman had made him “sick.” John Kennedy was going through his own crisis of conscience during the spring of 1963. At the start of the year he had decided once again not to seek major civil rights legislation, for the usual reasons—it would not pass, it would alienate southern Democratic leaders, it would hurt the rest of his program. He had begun to move from this position by the end of February, when he submitted proposals to strengthen desegregation programs and to buttress voting rights, and told Congress flatly that racial discrimination was not only economically costly: “Above all, it is wrong.” Black leaders were disappointed by the slimness of the program, however, and even more by the President’s failure to push even these proposals. He himself believed the Administration was “sincere,” King said, but he floated what he called the “cynical view” that it wanted the votes of both sides and was “paralyzed by the conflicting needs of each.” The Administration did indeed seemed paralyzed on civil rights legislation.

  But events—and those who made them—were in the saddle. The SCLC’s “street leaders” and their jailings by Bull Connor brought tempers North and South to a fever heat. In New York, Robert Kennedy met with a group of blacks gathered by the novelist James Baldwin, including the singers Lena Home and Harry Belafonte, the brilliant social psychologist Kenneth B. Clark, and Jerome Smith, a freedom rider who held a CORE record for beatings and jailings. Smith drew Kennedy’s attention at the start by saying he was “nauseated” at being in the same room with him, that he was not sure how long he would stay nonviolent, that he would “Never! Never! Never!” fight for his country. The artists joined in with their own castigations. The Attorney General vainly tried to turn the subject to Clark’s facts and figures, but “none of us wanted to hear figures and percentages and all that stuff’ in the light of Birmingham, Lena Home said.

  “It was all emotion, hysteria—they stood up and orated—t
hey cursed— some of them wept and left the room,” Kennedy told Arthur Schlesinger despairingly. In three hours of confrontation neither side believed it had communicated with the other. And yet the blacks in their outrage had. Kennedy “resented the experience,” Schlesinger wrote later, “but it pierced him all the same. His tormentors made no sense; but in a way they made all sense.”

  The tormentors of the centrists, the activists on both sides, were still in the saddle. Armed with a federal district court ruling, young blacks planned to renew their effort to register at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa. Alabama governor Wallace, having sworn at his inaugural that he would “draw the line in the dust” and stand and fight for “Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!” and having resolved that he would never again be “out-nigguhed” following an earlier electoral defeat, prepared to defy the feds publicly while dealing with them privately. John and Robert Kennedy, still haunted by Meredith and Oxford, were ready to let Wallace have his day in the sun if he would then let the blacks register. So after further posturing and fire-breathing, Wallace positioned himself for the best television shots at the registration building door and read his proclamation denouncing the feds, while Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach confronted him. Then both retired; the blacks proceeded to their dormitories and later quietly registered. No one blocked the door.

  The day was June 11, 1963. That evening, after anxious hours, the President addressed the nation on radio and television. The nation faced a moral crisis, he said.

  “The Negro baby born in America today, regardless of the section of the Nation in which he is born, has about one-half as much chance of completing a high school as a white baby born in the same place on the same day, one-third as much chance of completing college, one-third as much chance of becoming a professional man, twice as much chance of becoming unemployed.…

  “The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.…

  “We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it, and we cherish our freedom here at home, but are we to say to the world, and much more importantly, to each other that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes … ?”

  Eight days later the President asked Congress for measures to ban the segregation of public facilities, give the Attorney General authority to initiate proceedings against the segregation of schools, expand educational and training programs, grant a permanent statutory basis for his Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity. While Kennedy renewed the voting rights recommendations he had urged in February, the heart of the June 1963 proposals lay in their antisegregation provisions. Still divided themselves over whether desegregation or voting rights was the better strategy, black leaders were disappointed that the President did not ask for more—but grimly determined that he would at least get what he asked.

  As the engines of delay and deadlock were wheeled into action on the Hill, the Council on United Civil Rights Leadership, a coalition of the “Big Six”—the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young of the Urban League, Martin Luther King, James Farmer of CORE, SNCC executive secretary James Forman (rotating with SNCC’s chair, John Lewis), and Dorothy Height of the National Council of Negro Women—debated how to put pressure on Congress. At an earlier leadership meeting, it was recalled, the revered labor leader A. Philip Randolph had proposed that the Big Six organize a massive march on Washington; after all, Randolph’s mere threat to invade the capital back in 1941 had pushed FDR into banning discrimination in war industries. The leaders seized on a “march for jobs and freedom” that would unify all factions of the movement.

  They conferred with the President, who was cool to the idea, fearing that it would give members of Congress an easy way out by charging intimidation. It was, he suggested, ill-timed.

  “It may seem ill-timed,” King said. “Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed.” The leaders resolved to go ahead.

  August 28, 1963, the Mall, Washington, D.C. A quarter of a million people, black and white together, gathered in the summer heat at the Washington Monument and then surged forth to the Lincoln Memorial. They had come on buses and trains, many from the Deep South. Large contingents represented white religious faiths and, despite lack of backing by the AFL-CIO, many labor unions. Haunting freedom songs—“We Shall Overcome” sung by Joan Baez, “Oh, Freedom!” by Odetta—blended with speeches by the civil rights leadership. SNCC’s John Lewis pierced the uplifting mood by denouncing the inadequacy of conventional liberalism and Kennedy’s legislative program to complete “the unfinished revolution of 1776.”

  Around midafternoon Martin Luther King stood beneath the brooding face of Abraham Lincoln. Inspired by the sea of upturned black and white faces, he left his carefully crafted text and in rippling cadences and rich colors, he painted his vibrant dream of racial justice. Repeatedly invoking his phrase, “I have a dream,” responding to the people in rhythm with him, he implored that freedom ring from the hilltops of New Hampshire, the mountains of New York and Pennsylvania, and even more, from Georgia’s Stone Mountain. “Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee. Let freedom ring from every hill and mole hill of Mississippi. From every mountain top, let freedom ring.

  “When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and from every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last!’ ”

  A euphoric group of blacks, save for Coretta King, who to her distress was left to repair to her hotel room, met with the President following the rally. Having first opposed the march and then cooperated with it—to the point, some militants charged, of cooptation—Kennedy now shared in the moment of relief and triumph. He was “bubbling over with the success of the event,” Wilkins recalled. But out on the Mall some blacks remained skeptical and even cynical. Listening to King, young activist Anne Moody had told herself that back in Mississippi they had never had time to sleep, much less dream. An angry black man had shouted: “Fuck that dream, Martin. Now, goddamit, NOW!”

  It was a luminous moment in a season of death and despair. The very evening of Kennedy’s June television address, NAACP leader Medgar Evers had been shot down as he returned to his home in Mississippi; later the President consoled the Evers family in the White House. By the end of the summer nearly 14,000 persons had been arrested in seventy-five cities in the South alone. Two weeks after the March, on a Sunday morning, a dynamite bomb exploded in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, a center of the spring crusade, killing four black girls as they were donning their choir robes.

  During some of the tense days of school and university integration a few Americans North and South had dreamt their own special dream—that the President of the United States would walk hand in hand with two small black children toward a schoolhouse door, or that John F. Kennedy rather than a subordinate federal official would stand up to a southern governor at a university registration place. Even if the Secret Service had approved this risky act, JFK would never have favored such a melodramatic gesture. But in the increasingly polarized atmosphere of fall 1963 he was willing to venture into politically hostile land. This was Texas, some of whose cities harbored not only extreme racists but fanatical rightists, anti-Castro Cubans, Puerto Rican nationalists, black militants, violent leftists. Dallas, a center of Texas politics and finance, was also a center of hatred. There Lyndon B. Johnson himself had been beset by a hostile crowd during the 1960 campaign; there Adlai Stevenson had been spat upon earlier this very fall. Stevenson had been shown handbills screaming WANTED FOR TREASON under a photograph of Kennedy.<
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  The President would journey to Texas not to confront Southerners over civil rights but to seek common ground. So in San Antonio he would visit the new Aero-Space Medical Health Center and greet crowds of Mexican-Americans. In Houston he would talk to Latin American citizens about the Alliance for Progress. In Fort Worth he would discuss his defense program, which not coincidentally had brought huge contracts to General Dynamics and other corporations located in Texas. In Dallas at the Trade Mart he intended to describe the Administration’s pro-business policies to Texas business leaders. In all these places he would seek to recognize his congressional and other supporters, placate rival factions in the Texas Democracy, raise money for his own reelection campaign. Told by a southern friend that he was about to enter a hornet’s nest, Kennedy said drily, “Well, that’ll add interest.”

  And so San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, in lovely weather before exuberant crowds. Then Dallas, the cavalcade, the open presidential limousine, the sharp turn left where the Texas School Book Depository overlooked Dealey Plaza, the unerring bullets …

  The searing, the exalting events of the twentieth century had left millions of Americans with memories of just where they had been, what they had been doing, when they heard the news—of Lindbergh’s arrival in Paris, of Roosevelt’s bank holiday, of Pearl Harbor, of Hiroshima or the war’s end. But nothing so riveted the memory as the horrifying news from Dallas. (This author was teaching a class in American government in a basement room of the First Congregational Church of Williamstown, Massachusetts, when a student came to the door with an early report of Kennedy’s wounding; the class continued in a half-daze, then broke up in shocked incredulity when someone burst in with the wrenching second report.) The earlier unforgettable events had been understandable, they had made some sense. Kennedy’s death seemed inexplicable, senseless. Daniel Patrick Moynihan said to an interviewer: “You know the French author Camus—he said the world was absurd. A Christian couldn’t think that, but the utter senselessness, the meaninglessness … We all of us know down here that politics is a tough game. And I don’t think there’s any point in being Irish if you don’t know that the world is going to break your heart eventually.… Mary McGrory said to me that we’ll never laugh again. And I said, ‘Heavens. We’ll laugh again. It’s just that we’ll never be young again.’ ” Searching for meaning, people looked for a conspiracy, villains, motives.