A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  Nothing gave Robert Kennedy and Marshall greater distress than their sense of the constitutional impotence of the national government in face of what the Attorney General called “the heartless, organized mistreatment of our fellow Americans who are Negroes.” They well understood the fury of Negroes and civil rights workers who, after watching local authorities humiliate, beat and even murder their comrades, unavailingly demanded instant and massive retaliation by Washington. “While federal authority appears powerless to take effective steps,” as Marshall put it, “the gulf between Negroes and whites everywhere is widened, and the chances of racial conflict increased. At the least the generation of students which sees this happen are to some extent losing faith in their government, with consequences for the future that cannot be foreseen.”

  And not just students, though this was important: loss of faith in government by the Negroes themselves was the overhanging threat. Whites who looked only at the things in American life which had changed in a generation drew one conclusion; Negroes who looked only at the things which were the same drew another. However impressive—however truly unprecedented—the achievements of the Kennedy administration between 1961 and 1963, terrible facts remained. Seven and a half years after the school desegregation decision, fewer than 13,000 Negro children in the South were attending school with white children, and more than 2000 southern school districts were still wholly segregated, while the spread of de facto segregation (defined by James Baldwin as meaning “that Negroes are segregated but nobody did it”) was actually reducing integration in northern schools. The right to vote?—still smothered in litigation and constitutional hair-splitting. Employment?—Negroes, still the last to be hired and the first to be fired, had an unemployment rate two and a half times that of whites. Housing?—still hopeless. The federal government?—still subsidizing discrimination through a wide range of federal programs, and still incapable, short of major outrages like Meredith at Oxford, of protecting Negroes in the exercise of their constitutional rights in the South. The Emancipation Proclamation?—a hundred years gone, and the Negro still in bondage.

  3. THE RAGE WITHIN

  And more and more Negroes perceived these facts at a time when the sit-in demonstrators and the freedom riders and James Meredith, Roy Wilkins and A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr., had given them a new pride in themselves and a new sense of the power of direct action. The southern penchant for mass jailing had been particularly helpful. “Words cannot express,” King wrote, “the exultation felt by the individual as he finds himself, with hundreds of his fellows, behind prison bars for a cause he knows is just.” The hoarded anger of generations, so long starved by despair, was now fed by hope.

  The whites wondered why, when the Negroes had come so far, they pushed so hard. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’,” replied King. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has always meant ‘Never.’” They could wait no longer: each year rotted away more of the Negro future. Boys and girls whose lives had been crippled by ten could not be easily redeemed at twenty. As John Howard Griffin, the white man who had disguised himself as a Negro and rendered an appalled report to his fellow white men in the book Black Like Me, asked, why should the Negro “allow his children to go on being dwarfed and deprived . . . so that the whites can indulge themselves in their prejudices for a little longer?”

  Martin Luther King, Jr., had called 1961 “a year of the victory of the non-violent method: though blood flowed, not one drop was drawn by a Negro from his adversary.” How long could this last? Negro militants were impatient not only of Kennedy and his strategy of executive action but of Roy Wilkins and his strategy of law, soon perhaps of King himself and his strategy of non-violence. Professor Kenneth Clark, a Negro psychologist at the City College of New York, told an interviewer in April 1963 that in 1961 he had been sure the American race problem would be resolved by the Negro’s confidence that he was simply seeking his rights as an American citizen; now he anticipated a “total rejection of the American pattern as being incorrigibly hypocritical and corrupt and therefore unworkable in terms of a meaningful change in the status of the Negro.” The rise in these years of the Muslims in the steaming black ghettos of the North, where Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X preached the ineradicable evil of the white man, contained chilling portents for the future. Early in 1963 a book by Robert F. Williams called Negroes with Guns argued that armed force in self-defense was the only way to combat the double standard of southern law enforcement. Williams, who fled the United States for Cuba, engaged in anti-American diatribes over the Havana radio. A new generation of extremists, leapfrogging over the sedate Moscow faith of the American Communist Party, were approaching a quasi-Maoist belief in the virtues of violence.

  And now in April 1963 in Birmingham, Alabama, a new crisis was developing. Under the leadership of Martin Luther King, Jr., the Negroes of Birmingham were launching a great campaign to end discrimination in shops, restaurants and employment. But sit-ins and marches were producing sharp retaliation. When King called for a protest march on Good Friday, April 12, Police Commissioner Eugene Connor obtained an injunction, harassed the marchers with police dogs and arrested King and other leaders. A new and more moderate city administration was about to take office, and the Attorney General three times counseled the Birmingham leaders not to force issues while Bull Connor was still in charge. But the movement by now had a momentum of its own. King told Robert Kennedy that the Negroes had waited one-hundred years and could wait no longer. The demonstrations increased. So did the arrests. On May 2 about 500 Negroes, many of them high school students and younger, were hauled off to jail, some in school buses. The next day more students paraded. This time white bystanders threw bricks and bottles. The police turned fire hoses on the marchers, and Bull Connor released his growling police dogs. On Saturday, May 4, newspapers across the United States and around the world ran a shocking photograph of a police dog lunging at a Negro woman.

  That morning the President received an Americans for Democratic Action group. They pressed him hard on civil rights. He said that the picture had made him “sick,” but that at this point there was nothing he could constitutionally do. He regretted the fact that the Birmingham demonstrators had not waited for the new city administration to take over. Then he added, “I am not asking for patience. I can well understand why the Negroes of Birmingham are tired of being asked to be patient.”

  Burke Marshall flew to Birmingham the same day in an effort to compose the situation. Finding total separation between the white and Negro communities, he worked in quiet talks to open up channels of communication. Meanwhile, the President, McNamara and Dillon tried to persuade business leaders with branches in Birmingham to use their influence toward mediation. Washington meanwhile refrained from public comment lest it undercut Marshall’s effort. On May 10 an agreement was reached. But Governor George C. Wallace quickly announced that he would not be a party to any “compromise on the issues of segregation.” The next night white patriots bombed houses and hotels in the Negro district. Rioting continued until dawn.

  Martin Luther King’s younger brother, whose house had been bombed, said, “We’re not mad at anyone. We’re saying, ‘Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.’” The mayor of Birmingham, about to retire from office, observed of the Attorney General, “I hope that every drop of blood that’s spilled he tastes in his throat, and I hope he chokes on it.” As for King, “This nigger has got the blessing of the Attorney General and the White House.” In Washington President Kennedy sent federal troops into Alabama and prepared to federalize the state’s National Guard.

  The events in Birmingham abruptly transformed the mood of the nation. Churchmen, whose piety had studiously overlooked what John Quincy Adams had called the foul stain on the American conscience, idealistic students, recently preoccupied with disarming the United States and leaving the Soviet Union the great nuclear power in the world, ord
inary citizens, complacent in their assumptions of virtue, were for a season jerked into guilt and responsibility. Bull Connor’s police dogs accused the conscience of white America in terms which could not longer be ignored. But the awakening was so belated that it could hardly claim moral credit. Adam Clayton Powell, the urbane and cynical Negro Congressman from Harlem, stated it with precision from Paris in May: all of a sudden in Birmingham the white man had come face to face with the fact that his numerical superiority and naked power could no longer contain the black mass. “He has seen little children stand up against dogs, pistol-packing policemen and pressure hose, and they kept on coming, wave after wave. So the white man is afraid. He is afraid of his own conscience. . . . Now is the time to keep him on the run.”

  No one assailed the moral confusion and shame of white America more effectively than the Negro writer James Baldwin. In a long piece for the New Yorker in November 1962 called “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” later published in the book The Fire Next Time, Baldwin evoked with penetrating power the fate of the Negro in white society—the past

  of rope, fire, torture, castration, infanticide, rape; death and humiliation; fear by day and night, fear as deep as the marrow of the bone; doubt that he was worthy of life, since everyone around him denied it; sorrow for his women, for his kinfolk, for his children, who needed his protection, and whom he could not protect; rage, hatred and murder, hatred for white men so deep that it often turned against him and his own, and made all love, all trust, all joy impossible;

  and the present of wine-stained and urine-splashed hallways, knife and pistol fights, clanging ambulance bells, helplessness and terror. “For the horrors of the American Negro’s life,” Baldwin said, “there has been almost no language.” Neither civilized reason nor Christian love had persuaded the whites to treat Negroes with decency. The power of the white world was a criminal power; “the Negro’s experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live.” Only the fear of retaliation could deter the white man, protect the Negro’s dignity and assert his individuality: as Ellison’s hero had said, you strike out with your fists, you curse, and you swear to make them recognize you.

  Baldwin described meetings with Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X; while rejecting their racism, he unwillingly acknowledged their appeal. “Things are as bad as the Muslims say they are—in fact, they are worse, and the Muslims do not help matters—but there is no reason that black men should be expected to be more patient, more forbearing, more farseeing than whites; indeed, quite the contrary.” The real reason that non-violence was considered a virtue in Negroes was that white men did not want their lives, their self-image or their property threatened. And in the end, Baldwin argued, the white man could save himself, end the joylessness and self-mistrust of his existence, recover the capacity to renew himself at the fountain of his own life, only if he accepted the unconditional freedom of the Negro: “The price of the liberation of the white people is the liberation of the blacks—the total liberation, in the cities, in the towns, before the law, and in the mind.” He concluded in the words of an old spiritual: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!

  Baldwin was a small, darting man of brilliant articulateness as well as, when he wished, of great charm. His own life had not perhaps been so entirely desperate, externally at least, as his writings sometimes suggested. White society had discerned his gifts early enough to make him in his teens editor of the literary magazine at a high school for bright children in New York City (a predecessor was Paddy Chayefsky, an associate, Richard Avedon) and to turn him into a best-selling author while not very much older. But this was all irrelevant; indeed, Baldwin’s own opportunities made him the more sensitive to the fate of his brothers who had never had a chance. He drew into himself the agony he saw around him and charged it with the force of an electric and passionate personality. He had come to the White House for the dinner for the Nobel Prize winners in the spring of 1962. Afterward, when he and others came back to my house, Baldwin suddenly turned on Joseph Rauh, presumably because Rauh was a white leader in the civil rights fight. It was evident that Baldwin could not abide white liberals. In the New Yorker piece he referred to their “incredible, abysmal and really cowardly obtuseness,” and he seemed to regard them as worse than southern bigots, who at least were honest enough to admit that they, like all white men (by definition), hated the Negro. Now he baited Rauh as if to goad him by sarcasm and insult into confessing that his concern for civil rights was a cover for prejudice. Rauh equably fielded Baldwin’s taunts and kept asking him what he would have the government do. Baldwin, who showed little interest in public policy, finally muttered something about bringing Negroes into the FBI.

  Then in May 1963 the Attorney General, whose concern for civil rights had steadily deepened as his duties had confronted him with the horror of Negro inequality, sought to extend his contacts with Negro intellectuals. Accordingly he invited Baldwin to breakfast with him in Washington. Baldwin’s plane was late; Robert Kennedy had an early engagement; and their talk was cut short. But the meeting was cordial. The Attorney General had asked Baldwin what specific steps the government could take and proposed that they resume the conversation the next day in New York where Baldwin might bring along knowledgeable people with concrete suggestions. The next day Baldwin and a number of Negro writers and show people—Professor Kenneth Clark, Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte and others—met Robert Kennedy in his New York apartment.

  In the Negro group was also Jerome Smith, a young freedom rider who had recently been savagely beaten in the South. Smith opened the meeting by saying, as the Attorney General understood it, that being in the same room with Robert Kennedy made him feel like vomiting. What Smith was apparently trying to say was that he felt like vomiting to have to plead before the Attorney General for the rights to which he was entitled as an American, but it came through to Kennedy, who had been fighting hard himself for these rights, as a gratuitous expression of personal contempt. The Attorney General showed his resentment; the group rallied around the freedom rider; and from this already low point the conversation went rapidly down hill.

  Jerome Smith added that, so long as Negroes were treated this way, he felt no moral obligation to fight for the United States in war. The group applauded this sentiment. Some spoke of sending arms into the South. Baldwin said that the only reason the government had put federal troops in Alabama was because a white man had been stabbed. Burke Marshall, who was present, said that he had consulted with Dr. King about the use of federal troops; the group laughed at him. When Robert Kennedy, recalling his talk with Baldwin the day before, tried to seek their ideas about civil rights policy, they showed no interest. Baldwin was evidently not even aware that the President had given a civil rights message in February. “They didn’t know anything,” Bobby said to me later. “They don’t know what the laws are—they don’t know what the facts are—they don’t know what we’ve been doing or what we’re trying to do. You couldn’t talk to them as you can to Roy Wilkins or Martin Luther King. They didn’t want to talk that way. It was all emotion, hysteria. They stood up and orated. They cursed. Some of them wept and walked out of the room.” What shocked him most was that, when the meeting broke up after three hours of non-communication, a representative of King’s who was present drew the Attorney General aside and said, “I just want to say that Dr. King deeply appreciates the way you handled the Birmingham affair.” Kennedy said, “You watched these people attack me over Birmingham for forty minutes, and you didn’t say a word. There’s no point in your saying this to me now.” A Negro singer who had often come for dinner at Hickory Hill similarly approached Kennedy and said, “Of course you have done more for civil rights than any other Attorney General.” Kennedy said, “Why do you say this to me? Why didn’t you say this to the others?” “I couldn’t say this to the others,” came the reply. “It would affect my relationsh
ip with them. If I were to defend you, they would conclude I had gone over to the other side.”

  As for Baldwin, he felt that Kennedy was just unable to understand the sense of urgency of the Negro people—and this once again confirmed his thesis about the white man. Kenneth Clark, more thoughtfully, said later, “The fact that Bobby Kennedy sat through such an ordeal for three hours proves he is among the best the white power structure has to offer. There were no villains in that room—only the past of our society.”

  4. THE PRESIDENT IN COMMAND

  On May 18, speaking at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, the President glanced at the recent events in Birmingham. “No one can deny the complexity of the problems involved in assuring to all of our citizens their full rights as Americans,” he said. “But no one can gainsay the fact that the determination to secure these rights is in the highest traditions of American freedom.” His remark appeared to acknowledge that the revolution was overflowing its banks and to give non-violent resistance presidential sanction. In any case, the momentum after Birmingham now seemed irresistible. In Nashville, Tennessee, in Raleigh and Greensboro, North Carolina, in Cambridge, Maryland, Albany, Georgia, Selma, Alabama, Negroes marched, prayed, sat in for their rights. During the summer 14,000 demonstrators were arrested in the states of the old Confederacy.

  Then on May 21 a federal district judge ruled that the University of Alabama must admit two Negroes to its summer session in June. “I am the embodiment of the sovereignty of this state,” Governor George Wallace replied, “and I will be present to bar the entrance of any Negro who attempts to enroll.” It looked as if Alabama were going to follow Mississippi down the road of nullification. On June 12 the President instructed Governor Wallace not to try to stop the integration of the university at Tuscaloosa. But on the next morning Wallace personally blocked the entry of the Negro students and federal marshals into the administration building. The President promptly federalized part of the Alabama National Guard. Then when Guardsmen arrived on the campus, Wallace judiciously retreated. That afternoon the students were registered. In the evening—it was the day after the American University speech—Kennedy went on television to discuss civil rights.