Between You and Me

by Mike Wallace

  Nine carefully selected Negro students were enrolled for the fall semester, and on September 2, the night before the new semester was scheduled to start, Faubus made his move. Citing “evidence of disorder and threats of violence,” he called out the Arkansas National Guard to prevent the black youngsters from entering the school. His action contravened a federal court order, and far worse, it fomented the smoldering resentments that had been building up in Little Rock.

  Emboldened by their governor’s act of defiance, angry segregationists converged on the school, where they jeered and cursed at the black students and any other Negroes who happened to be in the vicinity.

  For the better part of a month, the “Little Rock crisis” (as it came to

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  be called) made headlines around the country and much of the world. Although President Eisenhower was reluctant to intervene, the escalating violence and rioting eventually forced his hand, and on September 25 he dispatched one thousand paratroopers to Little Rock to enforce the desegregation order.

  Throughout the crisis, Orval Faubus was generally portrayed in the national press as a cynical opportunist. It was often pointed out that until recently, he had leaned toward a pro-integration position, and the prevailing view was that he had exploited the school controversy to save his own political hide. In a cover story on the governor, Time magazine characterized him as “a sophisticated hillbilly.” We gave Faubus an opportunity to speak for himself on national television, and he took us up on it. So at the height of the disruptions, just a few days before Ike sent in the troops from the 101st Airborne Division, Yates and I and a camera crew flew to Little Rock.

  In the course of our interview at the governor’s mansion, I had ample opportunity to form my own impressions of Faubus; he didn’t strike me as a rabid segregationist or any other kind of firebrand. His answers to most of my questions were measured and restrained, and in every other respect, he came across as a voice of moderation.

  W A L L A C E : Governor, what’s your opinion of the crowds of white adults who gather outside Central High School each weekday morning? They curse at any Negro who happens to pass by. They call Negroes animals. And almost to a man, they say Governor Faubus has done the right thing. What do you think of these people?

  F A U B U S : Well, malice, envy, hate is deplorable in any place or in any circumstance. But as President Eisenhower has said himself, “You can’t change the hearts of people by law. . . .” So

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  why should we be so impatient as to want to force it? Because force begets force, hate begets hate, malice begets malice. . . .

  W A L L A C E : Governor, we, of course, all know that the Supreme Court has ruled that there must be integration. You have said that you respect that ruling. Tell me this: Personally, do you favor Negro and white children sitting together in classrooms?

  F A U B U S : I have never expressed any personal opinion as to the matter.

  W A L L A C E : Why not?

  F A U B U S : I feel that it is best not to.

  W A L L A C E : Why?

  F A U B U S : I am the governor of a state, pledged to uphold its laws, to keep the peace and order and also the laws of the nation. My personal views are not relevant to the problem.

  W A L L A C E : You will make no further statement than that?

  F A U B U S : No.

  That was one of the rare occasions in those days when an interview I did was on the cutting edge of a major news event, and I remember how pleased I was the next day when The New York Times ran a front-page story on the exchange with the embattled governor.

  As for the noncommittal posture he displayed in our interview, that was typical of Faubus, who, throughout the crisis, shrewdly played his cards close to the vest. If his main goal was to hold on to his job, then the strategy worked. Faubus was reelected in 1958, and he was still running the show in Little Rock in the summer of 1960 when I paid him another visit. I was crisscrossing the country that summer on an extended election-year assignment for the Westinghouse broadcasting chain, and when I made a stop in Little Rock, Faubus

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  gave me a cordial welcome. Altogether, he served six straight two-year terms as governor, a winning streak that came to an end when he was upset in the 1966 Democratic primary.

  Orval Faubus must have truly enjoyed being governor of Arkansas, because in the years that followed, he made three futile attempts to get the job back. He ran and lost in 1970, and again in 1974, and once more in 1986. Faubus’s campaign for governor in ’86

  was his last hurrah, and the man who defeated him that year was an ambitious politician on the rise named Bill Clinton.

  M a rt i n L u t h e r K i n g , J r .

  I N 1 9 5 4 , T H E Y E A R T H E Supreme Court handed down its landmark decision on school desegregation, a young black minister arrived in Montgomery, Alabama, to commence his mission as pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He was only twenty-five years old and had just recently completed his studies at Boston University for a Ph.D. in systematic theology. Even then Martin Luther King, Jr., viewed his ministry as part of a larger crusade for racial justice and equality. But he had no way of knowing how soon he would be propelled into action as a leader of that cause.

  The incident that was destined to change his life and alter the course of Americanracial history occurred onDecember 1, 1955, when a department store seamstress named Rosa Parks boarded a City Lines bus in Montgomery and took a seat. As the bus continued on its route, more white passengers got on, and in keeping with the local Jim Crow law, they had first claim onthe seats. So whenthe driver ordered Mrs. Parks to stand up and she refused, she was arrested.

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  In response, King and other local Negroes organized a boycott of city buses. In the past, such attempts to challenge the status quo in Montgomery had failed due to weak leadership. But the city’s black community now had a strong new voice and presence to rally around.

  King’s church soon became the command post for the protest action, and in his first television interview, the young pastor made it clear that the boycott’s primary goal was to force a change in the bus line’s seating policy “to a first-come, first-serve basis . . . with no reserved seats for any race.”

  The boycott held firm and lasted for nearly a year, during which time King’s moral strength and resolve were frequently put to the test. The worst moment came when his home was bombed; he wasn’t there at the time, but his wife and infant daughter narrowly escaped death. A few weeks after that, King and other boycott leaders were arrested on charges of interfering with the normal flow of free enterprise. In the meantime, the battle was also being fought on the legal front, and that part of the struggle went all the way to the U.S.

  Supreme Court. Its decision—handed down in November 1956—

  was an unequivocal victory for the boycott and the young minister who had led it.

  King emerged from the long confrontation as a hero to his people, and understandably so. Most historians agree that more than any other single event (even more than the Supreme Court’s school decision), the Montgomery bus boycott spawned the civil rights movement. King was at the forefront of that movement as it spread across the South, and by the time I interviewed him in early 1961, he and his forces were assailing the citadels of segregation with sit-in demonstrations, freedom rides, and other forms of protest.

  My own career had gone through a notable change. When our first year at ABC came to an end in the spring of 1958, Philip Morris de-

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  cided The Mike Wallace Interview was more trouble than it was worth.

  In addition, the network brass’s former ardent enthusiasm for our program had cooled considerably. It was obvious that we were on our last legs at
ABC, so Ted Yates and I and the rest of our original Night Beat team decided to return to the less stressful confines of a local station in New York. We didn’t go back to Channel 5; our new home was the small and independent Channel 13, which would later become the New York City station in the Public Broadcasting System. That was where I interviewed Martin Luther King, Jr., in February 1961 and asked him about some of the tactics he endorsed in the battle to overcome segregation.

  W A L L A C E : Dr. King, do you feel that there is no feeling among some Negro leaders that the methods of sit-ins and economic boycotts, which you and your group employ, have perhaps alienated many southern moderates who were formerly more sympathetic to your cause?

  K I N G : Well, I am sure there are some Negroes who feel this. I don’t think it’s a majority opinion. I think there are some few—

  W A L L A C E : Some older, more conservative groups, perhaps?

  K I N G : Well, there are some few, yes. But I don’t think this would be the majority. I think the vast majority of Negroes and Negro leaders feel that they are good.

  I then quoted from an article of his that had appeared in a recent issue of The Nation, in which he charged that “the intolerably slow pace of civil rights is due at least as much to the limits which the federal government has imposed on its own action as it is to the action of segregationist opposition.” He went on to write that “leadership and

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  determination . . . have been lacking in recent years,” and I pressed him on that.

  W A L L A C E : Are you pointing the finger at President Eisenhower on that score, Dr. King?

  K I N G : Well, honesty impels me to say that I don’t think Mr.

  Eisenhower gave the leadership that the problem demanded. . . . I don’t think he’s a man of ill will, but I don’t think he ever understood the depths and dimensions of this problem. And I am convinced that if he had taken a strong forthright stand, many of the problems and the tensions that we face in the South today would be nonexistent.

  Eisenhower was no longer president. John F. Kennedy had been inaugurated just three weeks before our interview, and King expressed confidence that the new president would be an active supporter of the civil rights movement. (He did add, however, “I hope I’m not engaging in superficial optimism.”) We discussed the enormous difficulty of getting a tough anti-segregation law through Congress, and I suggested that without such legislation, Kennedy could not be an effective leader on the issue.

  W A L L A C E : What specifically can he do? You have said “the president could give segregation its death blow through the stroke of a pen.” What can Kennedy do?

  K I N G : The president has the power—with a stroke of the pen, as I said—to end many of these conditions in housing, in employment, and in hospital and health areas. These are some of the things he could end almost overnight with a stroke of the pen. And we must never forget that the Emancipation Procla-

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  mation was an executive order, as well as ending segregation in the army, and there are many, many areas where the president can end segregation in this way.

  W A L L A C E : You’ve even talked about a secretary of integration.

  K I N G : Yes.

  W A L L A C E : Did you make that suggestion seriously?

  K I N G : I certainly did. I think this is vital. I think this is necessary. . . .

  Another subject on King’s mind that evening was the recent marriage of Sammy Davis, Jr., to the Swedish actress May Britt. Our viewers didn’t hear his concerns about that, because he and I talked about it only off-camera. He was intrigued by the high-profile inter-racial marriage, if more than a little apprehensive about how it would be exploited by “our enemies.” It was, after all, no secret that one of the segregationists’ favorite assertions (often expressed in rants of apocalyptic frenzy) was that integration would inevitably lead to miscegenation—or “mongrelization,” as Eldon Edwards chose to phrase it. Yet I had the distinct feeling that for all his misgivings, King was personally impressed by Davis’s boldness and success at romanc-ing such a glamorous blonde.

  In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr., was already a deeply revered figure. When I introduced him on our broadcast, I noted that as a moral leader, he had been compared to Gandhi and Thoreau and even to Christ. The crowning achievements of his crusade were still to come. In 1963 he and his fellow demonstrators resisted Bull Connor’s police dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham, Alabama, and at the march on Washington later that summer, King delivered his famous

  “I Have a Dream” speech. His critical role in those two events provided much of the impetus that persuaded President Kennedy and

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  his successor, Lyndon Johnson, to embrace a full-scale commitment to legislation banning segregation in all public facilities, and in 1964

  the sweeping Civil Rights Act was passed. That was also the year King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The following year he led an extensive campaign to get Negro voters registered, and Congress responded to that with another strong civil rights measure, the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  Although he was then at the height of his prestige, King and his followers would soon be moving into waters more troubled and treacherous than those they had been navigating. Over the past decade, the civil rights demonstrators had concentrated their fire on the walls of legal segregation that stretched across the South. But with the passage of the two anti-segregation bills by Congress, those walls came tumbling down. So in 1966, King shifted his battleground to communities in the North where social and economic structures were built on the rock of de facto segregation, separation of the races by custom and covert manipulation rather than by law. The primary targets of this new offensive were jobs and housing, and those areas of dispute were far more complex and elusive than the lunch counters and bus terminals and other public places that had been the sites of the protests in the South.

  Along with the geography, the racial climate had also changed considerably. In the summers of 1965 and ’66, riots broke out in the black ghettos of several northern cities. One effect of all that mayhem was to disenchant many white Americans who had been sympathetic to the civil rights movement. To make matters even more difficult, King’s authority within his own sphere was being challenged by younger and more militant black activists. They approved of his commitment to action, but they had become impatient with the nonviolent methods he so firmly espoused.

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  The leader of the new militancy was a young radical named Stokely Carmichael, chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). To many white Americans, the shrill demand of Carmichael and his cohorts for what they called “black power” was nothing less than a call to arms, a summons to incite angry Negroes to commit more acts of violence. The predictable response to that perceived threat was to strengthen the bonds of white resistance all across America.

  It was against this volatile background that King took his campaign for integrated housing to the town of Cicero, a working-class suburb of Chicago. Four decades earlier, Cicero had acquired a certain notoriety as the home of Mob king Al Capone and the center of his bootlegging operation. The town’s reputation received another setback in the summer of 1966, when an unruly crowd of white residents greeted King’s demonstration with bricks and bottles, along with racist taunts and catcalls.

  I had gone to work for CBS in 1963, and for most of the next three years, I anchored the Morning News there. From my anchor desk, I reported regularly on King’s activities and other developments in the fight to overcome segregation. In 1966, I left that post to cover civil rights stories in the field, and one of my first major assignments was as correspondent on a CBS Reports documentary that we called

  “Black Power, White Backlash.”

  In putting together t
hat hour-long report on the turbulent changes in the civil rights movement, I interviewed numerous participants and observers, both black and white, and one of them inevitably was King, who was still engaged in the open-housing drive in Cicero and other white neighborhoods in the Chicago area. When my camera crew and I arrived at his motel at the agreed-upon hour for our morning interview, in response to my knock, he opened the

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  door to his room slightly and stuck out his head. He explained that he had overslept. He asked us to wait a few minutes while he got dressed.

  In our interview, I brought up a speech King had recently given in which he reaffirmed his commitment to nonviolence: “I would like for all of us to believe in nonviolence,” he declared. “But I’m here to say tonight that if every Negro in the United States turns against nonviolence, I’m going to stand up as a lone voice and say, ‘This is the wrong way!’ ”

  In his conversation with me, he elaborated on that point.

  K I N G : I will never change in my basic idea that nonviolence is the most potent weapon available to the Negro in his struggle for freedom and justice. I think for the Negro to turn to violence would be both impractical and immoral.

  W A L L A C E : There’s an increasingly vocal minority who disagree totally with your tactics, Dr. King.

  K I N G : There’s no doubt about that. I will agree that there is a group in the Negro community advocating violence now. I happen to feel that this group represents a numerical minority. Surveys have revealed this. The vast majority of Negroes still feel that the best way to deal with the dilemma that we face in this country is through nonviolent resistance. . . . An d I contend that the cry of “black power” is at bottom a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we’ve got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro has worsened over the last few years.