A Thousand Days

by Arthur M. Schlesinger

  After describing the events of the day at Tuscaloosa, the President expressed the hope that every American would examine his conscience. The nation, he said, was founded “on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened.” It ought to be possible, he said,

  for American students of any color to attend any public institution without having to be backed up by troops. It ought to be possible for American consumers of any color to receive equal service in places of public accommodation, such as hotels and restaurants and theaters and retail stores, without being forced to resort to demonstrations in the street, and it ought to be possible for American citizens of any color to register and to vote in a free election without interference or fear of reprisal. . . . In short, every American ought to have the right to be treated as he would wish to be treated, as one would wish his children to be treated.

  But this is not the case.

  In burning language he set forth the plight of the American Negro. If the Negro could not enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, “then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?” We said to the world and to each other that we were the land of the free; did all we mean was that it was a land of the free except for the Negroes? “that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race except with respect to Negroes?”

  This was, he said, “a moral issue”—“as old as the scriptures and . . . as clear as the American Constitution.” The time had come for the nation to fulfill its promise. The fires of frustration and discord were burning in every city where legal remedies were not at hand. The moral crisis could not be quieted by token talk or moves; it could not be left to demonstrations in the streets. “A great change is at hand, and our task, our obligation, is to make that revolution, that change, peaceful and constructive for all.” Next week, he said, he would ask Congress to make the commitment it has not yet fully made in this century—the commitment to the proposition “that race has no place in American life or law.”

  It was a magnificent speech in a week of magnificent speeches. Some criticized Kennedy for not having given it earlier. But the timing was a vindication of his approach to mass education. He had prepared the ground for that speech ever since he became President. His actions, his remarks, the concern for Negro rights and scorn for racism implicit in his personality and bearing—all had subtly entered and transformed national expectations and attitudes. He had quietly created an atmosphere where change, when it came, would seem no longer an upheaval but the inexorable unfolding of the promise of American life. Yet he did not call for change in advance of the moment. If he had made his June speech in February, it would have attracted as little attention as his civil rights message that month. But Birmingham and the Negroes themselves had given him the nation’s ear.

  May and June 1963 were exciting months for an historian. One had seen no such surge of spontaneous mass democracy in the United States since the organization of labor in the heavy industries in the spring and summer of 1937. Characteristically each revolution began with direct local action—one with sit-downs, the others with sit-ins. In each case, ordinary people took things into their own hands, generated their own leaders, asserted their own rights and outstripped not only the government but their own organizations (and, thus far, fewer people had been killed in the Negro than in the labor revolution). Franklin Roosevelt’s first response to the labor revolution had been to pronounce a curse on both their houses. Kennedy now responded to the Negro revolution by seeking to assume its leadership.

  The night of Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers of Mississippi, James Meredith’s friend and counselor, a brave, gentle and responsible man, was murdered by a white killer in front of his house in Jackson. A week later the President invited his wife, children and brother-in-law, Charles Evers, who was taking Medgar’s place as director of the Mississippi NAACP, to the White House. They were an exceptionally attractive family. When they left, I said to the President, “What a terrible business.” He said sadly, “Yes. I don’t understand the South. I’m coming to believe that Thaddeus-Stevens was right. I had always been taught to regard him as a man of vicious bias. But, when I see this sort of thing, I begin to wonder how else you can treat them.” Robert Kennedy attended Medgar Evers’s funeral in Arlington Cemetery and, giving Charles Evers his telephone numbers at the office and at home, said to call any time, day or night, if Negroes were being harassed or intimidated. (Charles Evers said later, “Whenever I had the need to call him, I’ve never found it too late or too early.”)

  The President had already begun to mobilize leaders of opinion in a succession of meetings, first with governors and then with hotel, restaurant and theater owners, labor leaders, religious leaders, educators, lawyers, women and with the Business Council. They sat on the gilt chairs in the East Room of the White House while the President, the Vice-President and the Attorney General sought in their various styles to explain the urgency of the situation and seek their support in meeting the problem—the President controlled and terse, the Vice-President evangelical and often very moving, the Attorney General blunt and passionate. These meetings were highly successful, or most of them were. The White House staff noted with a certain bitterness that the one group which did not rise when the President entered the room—of which, indeed, only two of its members rose when asking the President questions after the speech—consisted of the leaders of American business.

  On June 19 the President sent his civil rights bill to the Hill. In addition to his February proposals, he now called for equal accommodations in public facilities, the grant of authority to the Attorney General to initiate school desegregation suits, new programs to assure fair employment, including support of a Fair Employment Practices Commission (though the FEPC as such was not in the administration bill), the establishment of a Community Relations Service, and a provision authorizing the federal government to withhold funds for programs or activities in which discrimination occurred. These recommendations did not produce universal satisfaction. The Vice-President had doubts about sending up any civil rights bill at this time, at least until the appropriations were passed. The civil rights leaders, on the other hand, while acknowledging that this was the most comprehensive civil rights bill ever to receive serious consideration from the Congress, wanted a more sweeping public accommodations section, immediate first-step school desegregation everywhere, federal registrars to enroll Negro voters, authorization to the Attorney General to bring suit in all situations where people were denied constitutional rights because of race or color and FEPC in the administration bill.

  But even the administration bill had no assurance of an easy passage. We were first beginning to hear this summer about the phenomenon of the ‘white backlash.’ John Bartlow Martin, back on leave from the Dominican Republic, spent a few days in his home in a Chicago suburb. He returned to Washington depressed over the anxiety and even rancor expressed by his neighbors about the pace of integration. James Lanigan, who had been active in New York politics before going to New Delhi with Chester Bowles, brought back a similar report from New York. Politicians, especially those in touch with Polish-American and Irish-American communities, were pessimistic. They described widespread panic in traditional Democratic districts over the prospective inundation of their neighborhoods and schools by Negroes; some thought that civil rights might very well lose the election for Kennedy in 1964. The Louis Harris poll reported in the autumn that the civil rights issue had already turned some 4.5 million white voters against the administration. In the South, of course, bitterness toward the Kennedys reached new heights of virulence. Samuel Lubell, sampling a working class precinct in Birmingham which had given Kennedy a clear majority in 1960, found only one Kennedy supporter left. Others said, “He’s cramming the nigg
er down our throats” or, “If he’s re-elected it will be the end of America.”

  The President never had any illusions about the political advantages of equal rights. But he saw no alternative to leading the fight in order to prevent the final isolation of the Negro leadership and the embitterment of the Negro people. Every day that summer new and ominous tendencies seemed to appear in the colored masses. In a week when Negroes threw eggs at Martin Luther King, Jr., in Harlem and a Negro meeting in Chicago booed not only Mayor Richard Daley but even James Meredith, the President observed gloomily that the progress since Birmingham had been made possible by the awakening of the middle-class white conscience and the belated rallying to the civil rights cause; now the mindless radicalism of the Negro militants might well drive this new middle-class support away and postpone the hope of progress.

  5. WE SHALL OVERCOME

  Civil rights filled his mind, even in the summer of the test ban treaty. On June 22, the day before he left on his European trip, he invited the civil rights leaders to a meeting in the Cabinet Room to discuss the tactics of the bill now before the Congress. It was the best meeting I attended in my years in the White House.

  The President began with a crisp account of the parliamentary situation. If the bill was to pass, he said, it had to reach out beyond the traditional civil rights groups. Senators in the states west of the Mississippi and east of California would tend to be for the bill but against the invocation of cloture to stop a filibuster. This, he said, was on grounds “not at all related to civil rights. They see what has happened to the small states in the House of Representatives, and they believe that unlimited speech is the only protection for small states in the Congress. They remember the use that Borah and Norris made of the filibuster. This is a weapon they are unwilling to surrender.” He concluded by saying that, for reasons he well understood, Negro patience was at an end and that substantial progress had to come in 1963.

  The civil rights group had been talking about a peaceful march on Washington, like the one A. Philip Randolph had proposed to Franklin Roosevelt twenty years earlier. Whitney Young of the Urban League now said that the President’s comments about demonstrations in the streets were being interpreted to mean he was against the march on Washington. “We want success in Congress,” Kennedy replied, “not just a big show at the Capitol. Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us. I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say, ‘Yes, I’m for the bill, but I’m damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’ It seemed to me a great mistake to announce a march on Washington before the bill was even in committee. The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation—and this may give some members of Congress an out.”

  A. Philip Randolph, speaking with the quiet dignity which touched Kennedy as it had touched Roosevelt before him, discussed the attempt to shift the civil rights drive from the streets to the courts. “The Negroes are already in the streets,” Randolph said. “It is very likely impossible to get them off. If they are bound to be in the streets in any case, is it not better that they be led by organizations dedicated to civil rights and disciplined by struggle rather than to leave them to other leaders who care neither about civil rights nor about non-violence? If the civil rights leadership were to call the Negroes off the streets, it is problematic whether they would come.”

  The President agreed that the demonstrations in the streets had brought results; they had made the executive branch act faster and were now forcing Congress to entertain legislation which a few weeks before would have had no chance. “This is true. But now we are in a new phase, the legislative phase, and results are essential. The wrong kind of demonstration at the wrong time will give those fellows a chance to say that they have to prove their courage by voting against us. To get the votes we need we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which will lead to violence, and, second, give Congress a fair chance to work its will.”

  The Vice-President then remarked that many people had wrong ideas about the way Congress made up its mind. “Not many votes are converted in the corridors. Most fellows vote for what they think is right and for what they think their states want. We have about 50 votes for us in the Senate and about 23 against us. What counts is the 26 or so votes which remain. To get those votes we have to be careful not to do anything which would give those who are privately opposed a public excuse to appear as martyrs. We have to sell the program in twelve crucial states—and we have less than twelve weeks.”

  James Farmer of CORE said, “We understand your political problem in getting the legislation through, and we want to help in that as best we can. But the civil rights forces have their problems too. We would be in a difficult if not untenable position if we called the street demonstrations off and then were defeated in the legislative battle. The result would be that frustration would grow into violence and would demand new leadership.”

  “It is not a matter of either/or,” Martin Luther King, Jr., now said, “but of both/and. Take the question of the march on Washington. This could serve as a means through which people with legitimate discontents could channel their grievances under disciplined, non-violent leadership. It could also serve as a means of dramatizing the issue and mobilizing support in parts of the country which don’t know the problems at first hand. I think it will serve a purpose. It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed.” The President interjected wryly, “Including the Attorney General.”

  Someone brought up the question of police brutality. The President said sardonically, “I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor.” For a moment, there was an audible intake of breath around the cabinet table. “After all,” Kennedy went on, “he has done more for civil rights than almost anybody else.” He continued: “This is a very serious fight. The Vice-President and I know what it will mean if we fail. I have just seen a new poll—national approval of the administration has fallen from 60 to 47 per cent. We’re in this up to the neck. The worst trouble of all would be to lose the fight in the Congress. We’ll have enough troubles if we win; but, if we win, we can deal with those. A good many programs I care about may go down the drain as a result of this—we may all go down the drain as a result of this—so we are putting a lot on the line. What is important is that we preserve confidence in the good faith of each other. I have my problems with the Congress; you have yours with your own groups. We will undoubtedly disagree from time to time on tactics. But the important thing is to keep in touch.”

  In a few moments he excused himself to go to a meeting on his European trip. “What seems terribly important,” he said as he left, “is to get, and keep, as many Negro children as possible in schools this fall. It is too late to get equality for their parents, but we can still get it for the children—if they go to school, and take advantage of what educational opportunity is open to them. I urge you to get every Negro family to do this at whatever sacrifice.”

  As the meeting broke up, Roy Wilkins, who, I believe, was the Negro leader whose intelligence and integrity the President particularly respected, whispered to me his sympathy for the President in view of the pressures playing on him, the choices he had to make, the demands on his time and energy. One was impressed by Wilkins’s understanding as against the usual view held by petitioners, whether civil rights leaders, businessmen, liberals or foreign statesmen, who generally felt that the President should subordinate everything else to their own preoccupations. Martin Luther King, Jr., on the other hand, gave newspapermen after the meeting the impression that the President had asked the group to call off demonstrations and that he had boldly refused—a posture calculated to improve his standing among Negroes but only tenuously related to what had happened.

  The conference with the President did persuade the civil rights leaders that they should not lay siege to Capitol Hill. Instead, Bayard Rustin, the organizer of the March, made plans for a ma
ss demonstration in front of the Lincoln Memorial. When asked about the march at a press conference in mid-July, Kennedy, noting that the participants intended “a peaceful assembly calling for a redress of grievances” and that it was “not a march on the Capitol,” said, “I think that’s in the great tradition.” A. Philip Randolph outlined the tradition in a moving speech in Washington two days before the March. The event was “an outcry for justice, for freedom.” It would serve “as a witness of commitment on the part of Negroes all over America, as well as our white brothers and sisters, in a great moral protest against racial bias.” There was no way, he concluded, to stem such demonstrations until Negroes had acquired “the same things that white citizens possess—all their rights. They want no reservations.”

  A few days before the March the President expressed some concern that it might not be large enough. The leaders had committed themselves to producing 100,000 people. If it fell materially short of this, Kennedy remarked, it might persuade some members of Congress that the demand for action on civil rights was greatly exaggerated. He need not have worried. On August 28, nearly a quarter of a million people, black and white, came to Washington. They arrived by plane and bus and automobile and foot from almost every state in the union. The concern and mutual consideration of the marchers invested everything they did with an immense and lovely dignity. Nothing marred the beauty of the day.