A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  In a few hours Meredith and the federal marshals, led by their brave and humorous chief, James McShane, arrived on the campus in Oxford. While Meredith went off to a dormitory, Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and the federal officials waited in the Lyceum, an imposing ante-bellum building which housed the university’s administrative offices. As the sun set, a crowd, without challenge from the state police, began to collect menacingly around the Lyceum: first, “2-4-1-3, we hate Ken-ne-dy”; then a rising growl of taunts and curses—“Kill the nigger-loving bastards”; then, as it grew dark, bottles and bricks. For an hour and a half the marshals, though a number were hurt and bleeding, stood impassively under the attack. But after a time, as the mob, now numbering 2500, began to surge toward the Lyceum, the order was given to respond by tear gas.

  In Washington the President, unaware of the troubles in Oxford, had gone on the air to say that Meredith was safely on the campus and explain why the federal government had massed its power to put him there. “If this country,” he said; “should ever reach the point where any man or group of men by force or threat of force could long defy the commands of our court and our Constitution, then no law would stand free from doubt, no judge would be sure of his writ, and no citizen would be safe from his neighbors.” He concluded with a direct appeal to the students of the university: “The honor of your University and State are in the balance. I am certain that the great majority of the students will uphold that honor.”

  In Oxford students jeered. A tall figure moved through the crowd with military stride. A student asked where he was from. General Walker replied, “I come from Dallas, Texas.” Other outsiders joined the mob, some with shotguns and rifles. At the Lyceum the marshals were running out of tear gas. As Katzenbach heard the sounds of shots through the confederate howls, he concluded that the time had come to call in the troops. In Washington the President issued the order. A federalized National Guard unit under the command of a cousin of William Faulkner’s was summoned from Oxford, while regular units began to move by helicopter from Memphis. Robert Kennedy in Washington asked Edwin Guthman in Oxford how things were going. “Pretty rough,” Guthman replied. “This place is sort of like the Alamo.” “Well,” Bobby said, “you know what happened to those guys.” The battle raged on until the troops arrived. Hundreds were wounded, including more than a third of the marshals; two men, one a French reporter, were killed. The President stayed in his office at the other end of the telephone until dawn.

  The next morning James Meredith appeared before the registrar in the Lyceum and was duly inducted into the University of Mississippi. A fellow student shouted, “Was it worth two lives, nigger?” For weeks troops stayed on campus, for months marshals accompanied Meredith to classes, reprisals were attempted against his family; but with heroic tenacity he pursued his chosen course. “Having his father’s house shot at,” Robert Kennedy said in January 1963, “still not accepted by his fellow students, having had 400 or 500 soldiers around and having marshals—well, I, at least, found college tough enough without having all that.” Some of the faculty, led by the undaunted historian James W. Silver,* gave Meredith support. But it was a long lonely time until he graduated in August 1963.

  Yet he had established the principle; and President Kennedy’s action had a profound effect around the world, most of all in Africa. As the delegate from Upper Volta put it in the UN General Assembly, segregation unquestionably existed in the United States, but “what is important is that the Government of the United States did not make an institution of this. It does not praise the policy. On the contrary, it energetically fights it. For one small Negro to go to school, it threatens governors and judges with prison . . . it sends troops to occupy the University of Mississippi.” Three weeks after Oxford, Sekou Touré and Ben Bella were prepared to deny refueling facilities to Soviet planes bound for Cuba during the missile crisis.

  Though some American Negroes felt Kennedy might have acted sooner and did not much like his television appeal to Mississippians to honor their traditions, this was quickly forgotten in the memory of the dispatch of the Army and the admission of Meredith. In the fall elections the Democrats won more Negro votes than ever. Then on November 20 Kennedy finally issued the executive order on housing. While limited to housing owned or directly insured by the federal government and thus covering only 15 per cent of savings and loans residential mortgage holdings, it still marked a new step toward equal opportunity.

  In the middle of 1963, when the Louis Harris polling organization asked Negroes who had done most for Negro rights, the first three in the judgment of the rank and file were the NAACP, Martin Luther King, Jr., and President Kennedy.

  XXXVI

  The Negro Revolution

  IN THE WINTER OF 1962–63 the civil rights leaders, more bent than ever on legislation, watched the success of the President’s strategy with understandable frustration. Martin Luther King, Jr., sorrowfully described 1962 as “the year that civil rights was displaced as the dominant issue in domestic politics. . . . The issue no longer commanded the conscience of the nation.” He attributed this to the readiness to accept token victories as evidence of genuine progress. “In fairness,” he added, “it must be said that this Administration has outstripped all previous ones in the breadth of its civil-rights activities. Yet the movement, instead of breaking out into the open plains of progress, remains constricted and confined. A sweeping revolutionary force is pressed into a narrow tunnel.”

  Nor did there seem much they could do about it. In January 1963, when the attempt to amend Senate Rule 22—the rule which facilitated filibusters—failed, as it had many times before, the civil rights leaders, after trying unsuccessfully to enlist Vice-President Johnson’s aid, sat down to discuss strategy in Joseph Rauh’s office. Someone suggested that they put out a statement condemning the President. Roy Wilkins replied that he had recently spoken to a Negro group in North Carolina. “I attacked John Kennedy for ten minutes,” he said, “and everyone sat on their hands. Then I said a few favorable words about the things he had done, and they clapped and clapped.”

  1. NEW DIRECTIONS IN LEGISLATION

  However, the President, recognizing the discontent and perceiving a need for new action if he were to preserve his control, had decided to seek legislation himself. On February 28, 1963, he sent a message to Congress setting forth in moving detail the national shame of inequality not only in voting and education but in employment and public accommodations. Racial discrimination, he said, hampered our economic growth and our world leadership; it increased the costs of public welfare, crime, delinquency and disorder; it marred the atmosphere of a united and classless society. “Above all, it is wrong.” But, after this eloquent start, the actual legislative recommendations disappointed the civil rights leaders—piecemeal improvements in existing voting legislation, technical assistance to school districts voluntarily seeking to desegregate, an extension of the life of the Civil Rights Commission.

  The Commission itself, though warmly praised in the President’s message, shared this disappointment. It felt that the time was approaching to attack the broad problem of which the housing order had been a symbol: that is, the extent to which federal programs and activities themselves supported the structure of segregation. In August 1961 Roy Wilkins, as chairman of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, had given Kennedy a memorandum pointing out that federal grants to the eleven southern states amounted in 1960 to over a billion dollars and constituted from 10 to 22 per cent of all funds expended by state and local government in these states; yet, so long as there was no means of assuring the non-discriminatory use of these grants, federal money became a fund for the preservation of segregation. Now the Commission noted that in 1962 Mississippi had received over $650 million from the national government in a variety of forms—grants, federal programs, defense and construction contracts, civil and military payrolls, social security payments, veterans’ benefits. Its members were particularly indignant over a $2
million grant by the Federal Aviation Agency to build a jet airport at Jackson, Mississippi, complete with segregated restaurants and restrooms.

  At the same time the Commission was in a wrangle with the Department of Justice on the question whether it should be permitted to hold hearings in Mississippi. The Commission felt that drawing national attention to terror might to some degree deter it. But the Department feared that the hearings would stir local trouble and prejudice its own complicated litigations, especially those arising from the Oxford affair. Accordingly the Attorney General on three occasions asked the Commission to delay its Mississippi hearings. Though in March the President said in a press conference he thought that the Commission should “go ahead and hold . . . any hearing that they feel advances their cause or meets their responsibility,” the Attorney General still sought postponement until it would be clear that the hearings would not coincide with a possible jury trial of the criminal contempt charges against Governor Barnett.

  But the Commission’s statutory existence was running out, and by March it seemed too late to prepare for hearings. When the Commissioners met in Indianapolis at the end of the month, they were in a state of considerable irritation. “A great many very bad things were happening in Mississippi,” one of its members, Dean Erwin Griswold of the Harvard Law School, told an interviewer, “and the government was not doing anything appreciable about it. People were being shot at, the home of one of our state advisory committee members was bombed, another member had been jailed, and so on.” The members therefore took the unusual step of preparing an interim report. It began by describing the defiance of the Constitution in Mississippi:

  Citizens of the United States have been shot, set upon by vicious dogs, beaten, and otherwise terrorized because they sought to vote. Since October, students have been fired upon, ministers have been assaulted . . . children, at the brink of starvation, have been deprived of assistance by the callous and discriminatory acts of Mississippi officials administering Federal funds.

  Given this situation, the Commission (including its southern members) concluded unanimously that “only further steps by the Federal Government can arrest the subversion of the Constitution in Mississippi.” In particular, it proposed that the President strengthen the administration’s efforts to provide federal protection for the citizens in the exercise of their constitutional rights; that he “consider seriously” the desirability of legislation to “assure that Federal funds contributed by citizens of all States not be made available to any State which continues to refuse to abide by the Constitution,” and further that he “explore” his legal authority as chief executive “to withhold Federal funds from the State of Mississippi until the State of Mississippi demonstrates its compliance with the Constitution.”

  In a few days, Dr. Hannah, as chairman of the Commission, and Berl Bernhard, as director, presented the document to the President. Kennedy asked whether the report was unanimous and whether the Commission was adamant about putting it out. Assured on both points, he said he thought the part about cutting off funds was “subject to misunderstanding. I am not sure it is constructive. . . . I know some of the agencies have been dragging [their feet], I am doing everything I can to see that they get in line. Your Commission doesn’t understand I can’t do it alone. The Commission report would be better directed at the Congress. That is where the trouble is—appropriations, etc. As the report reads now, you make it appear that I have the power to do all these things, and I don’t. Such power might be dangerous. Even if it existed, it would not be understood.” Bernhard said that he gathered the President would prefer that the Commission not publish the report. “That is correct,” Kennedy said. “It will make a lot of people mad up there and may make my own efforts more difficult.” After some going over of the statistics, he finally said, “I still don’t like it. If the Commissioners have made up their mind, I presume they will issue the report anyway. I think they are off track on this one, but I wouldn’t try to suppress it. That would be wrong—couldn’t do it anyway. It is independent, has a right to be heard, but I do wish you could get them to reconsider.”

  2. FEDERALISM AND FREEDOM

  The report of the Civil Rights Commission called attention to one tragic gap in the administration design: the difficulty of protecting individuals in the South in the assertion of their federal rights. For most of the time since Reconstruction this had hardly been a problem; the rights had not been fully defined by the courts, and in any case the southern Negro had not protested their denial. Neither condition prevailed now. Recent events had proved several things: the readiness of the courts to define the rights, the unalterable purpose of the Negro to claim them, the brutality with which some southern whites were determined to withhold them, and, most troubling of all, the evident intention of local police authority, especially in Alabama and Mississippi, to support those who would frustrate the law against those who would fulfill it.

  The last phenomenon confronted the Department of Justice with intricate problems of the relationship between national and local jurisdictions under the federal system. Robert Kennedy could send federal marshals to protect the freedom riders in Alabama in the spring of 1961 because the Interstate Commerce Act gave the national government clear responsibility to safeguard interstate travel. He could send federal marshals and the Army itself to Mississippi in the autumn of 1962 because state officials were defying federal court orders. But what could the Department do when defiance of the national government was less flagrant or the breakdown of local law enforcement less manifest? What could it do in particular with what Burke Marshall called the “double standard in the daily administration of law,” so deeply imbedded in southern folkways, so routine and so automatic, so pervasively affecting not only the citizens involved but the very concept of government held by the law enforcement officials? How could it prevent what Marshall called “official wholesale local interference with the exercise of federal constitutional rights?”*

  Shortly after Kennedy came into office, for example, a Negro Air Force captain in a southern city visited the house of a white major with whom he had served; the police, on the complaint of a neighbor, arrested them both for disturbing the peace. In Clinton, Louisiana, twelve Negroes who sent a wholly respectful letter to the mayor asking for the establishment of a biracial committee on community relations were arrested on the charge of intimidating public officials. In addition to cases of this sort there was the normal incidence of police brutality, falling more heavily on Negroes than on any other group in American society. When cases went to trial, it was always before white judges and all-white juries. Often Negroes could not obtain adequate counsel. Often bail was excessive. Yet the double standard, while in many cases “clearly beyond the very large limits of permissibility set by federal constitutional standards,” was presently, Marshall said, “almost outside the reach of federal action” except when individuals themselves fought state criminal convictions up to the Supreme Court.

  Though William Howard Taft’s coarse formula about “the regulation by Southern States of their domestic affairs” was extinct, the Department of Justice felt a responsibility to preserve an appropriate balance between national and state powers in the federal system. This feeling inclined it to question proposals that the national government be given authority to enjoin interference with constitutional protests against racial injustice. The feeling also, in the eyes of some critics, discouraged the Department from using to the hilt laws already on the books (though in the case of sections 332–334 of Title 10, United States Code, conferring on the President power in effect to invade a state whose constituted authorities failed to protect legal rights, the Department considered this a remedy for a major breakdown of civil order, like Birmingham, and not for a sporadic pattern of local police harassment). As for prosecutions of police abuses, the Department feared that, every time a southern grand jury refused to return an indictment requested by a federal attorney, it only invited further police brutality. The Departm
ent considered itself, in addition, as Deputy Attorney General Katzenbach put it, “ill-equipped to assume responsibility for the performance of ordinary police functions.” Attorneys from Justice recalled that, when the federal marshals went to Montgomery in 1961 to rescue the freedom riders, the chief of police asked sarcastically whether they intended to take over for the traffic cops and the fire department too.

  Yet the bitter problem remained. In too many civil rights cases the police themselves were perpetrators of crimes or protectors of criminals. Even when local authorities in the South met their minimum responsibilities for public order, they sometimes refused to give effect to the federal rights at issue, assuming that litigation would be so complex, burdensome and protracted that in the meantime, as Marshall put it, “the federal rights would atrophy.” Marshall did not think that the federal system interposed insuperable obstacles to the right to vote; this could be secured “with enough money, enough energy, enough lawyers, and enough months or years.” But the abuse of local police power and criminal processes for the purpose of frustrating federal court orders or the purpose of punishing those who agitated against the segregation system (and even those who, without agitation, quietly declined to abide by it) provided, he concluded, “a new test of the ability of the federal system” to meet its responsibilities. “Manipulation of state law for either purpose,” he said, “involves dangerous corruption of legal institutions. . . . How long will the inescapable dilemmas of the federal system continue to permit resistance to demands for direct federal controls over local police action?”