Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  He had stayed on that side in the years since 1949, voting against FEPC and anti-poll tax legislation as well as against legislation to outlaw discrimination in unions, voting for legislation that would have allowed draftees to serve in segregated Army units—voting on the side of the South not only in 1949 but in 1950 and 1951 and ’52 and ’53 and ’54 and ’55. And in 1955, having won the majority leadership with southern support, he used the Leader’s power to crush the hopes of Senate liberals for a change in Rule 22 and to turn back liberal attempts to ban segregation in armed forces reserve units. His empathy and tenderness for people oppressed simply because their skins were dark, strong though it was in his makeup, was not as strong as his need for power. The compassion, genuine though it was, had always—always, without exception—proven to be expendable. That had been true throughout his life before he got to the Senate—and it was true after he got to the Senate. The Longoria affair had been proof of the compassion—and of its expendability. The next seven years had been further proof. By the end of 1955, Lyndon Johnson had held positions of public authority—State NYA Director, Congressman, Senator—for twenty years, and for twenty years the record had been consistent. Whenever compassion and ambition had been in conflict, the former had vanished from the landscape of Lyndon Johnson’s career. For it to become a permanent element of that landscape, it would have to be compatible with the ambition: compassion and ambition would both have to be pointing in the same direction. When the year 1955 came to an end, that had not yet occurred, and once again ambition had won.

  Now, in 1956, it won again.

  33

  Footsteps

  LYNDON JOHNSON HAD DETERMINED, down on his ranch during his heart attack summer of 1955, that the surest path to the presidency was to win the Democratic nomination for that job in 1956: then, even if Eisenhower decided to run again and that nomination therefore became worthless, he would, as the party’s last standard-bearer, be the front-runner to win its nod in 1960, when Eisenhower would not be running. Almost ridiculously long as were the odds against his winning the nomination—favored (in the most favorable poll) by a meagre 3 percent of the country’s rank-and-file Democrats, and by exactly twenty-nine out of 1,944 county chairmen outside the South—he had therefore spent the autumn of 1955 grabbing for the prize, flying across the country to rustle up financial support, forcing Adlai Stevenson into the primaries, accepting both the chairmanship and the favorite-son nomination of the Texas delegation, trying to blunt at least somewhat the knife edge of liberal antipathy toward him by passing the Social Security Bill.

  Despite his overtures to liberals, however, the base of his support—the sine qua non of his candidacy—was the South: his strategy was to arrive at the Democratic Convention in August with most of that region’s 324 votes; to add to that base some western support; to keep Stevenson from winning on an early ballot; and then, with the convention deadlocked, to become its compromise choice. And for the South, of course, one issue loomed above all others.

  THAT ISSUE WAS LIKE A WOUND IN 1956, a wound that, as the year went by, gaped wider and wider, red and raw, across the bland face of peaceful, prosperous 1950s America.

  Nineteen fifty-six had hardly begun when the scars of the Emmett Till case were abruptly ripped open anew—when the two murderers decided to tell the world their story.

  They did so because, having been acquitted of Till’s murder, they could not be tried again for the same crime—and because of greed. A journalist, William Bradford Huie, offered them four thousand dollars for their story, and Roy Bryant and Big Milam were broke and needed money, and in the Mississippi Delta four thousand dollars was a lot of money. And, they did so for applause. They were sure that if they told the world the whole story, explained the good reason they had had for executing the visitor from Chicago, people—not “nigger lovers” from the North, perhaps, but plenty of people—would understand, and approve. As Huie said in his article, published in the January 24, 1956, edition of the national magazine Look, Bryant and Milam “don’t feel they have anything to hide”; rather, they felt they had something to boast about.

  Their original intention, Milam explained to Huie, was to “just whip” the boy “and scare some sense into him”—that had to be done, of course; “when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman,” stern measures had to be taken. But young Till had not been scared, Milam said. “We never were able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison he was hopeless.” Even after they drove him to the toolhouse, and beat him on the head with their pistols, he refused to be scared, Milam said. So, of course, he and his half brother Roy had no choice. “What else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a nigger in my life…. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids…. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we’ve got some rights.” That was the reason, he said, that he had told Till, “I’m going to make an example of you.” That was the reason he and Bryant took the youth to the cotton gin, forced him to load the exhaust fan onto the truck, and then drove him to the bank of the Tallahatchie. That was the reason he shot him in the head.

  The lawyers who had been so proud to defend Bryant and Milam were also quoted in Huie’s article. They had advised their clients to cooperate with the journalist because they, too, felt that people would understand if only the reasons were explained. And, being men of higher education and broader outlook than their clients, they had an additional reason: they felt that the case should be publicized as widely as possible because it would make clear to the rest of America the futility of trying to impose desegregation on the South. Milam was not a pleasant person, one of the lawyers admitted to Huie: “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion in Europe; he likes to kill folks.” But, the lawyer explained, there was a need for men like Milam and Bryant: to “keep the niggahs in line.” And the country should understand, he said, that the “niggahs” were going to be kept in line. “There ain’t gonna be no integration,” he told Huie. “There ain’t gonna be no nigger votin’. And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it, the better. If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie River won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown into it.” Publication of the true facts of the case would be valuable, therefore, to “put the North and the NAACP and the niggers on notice”; it might even force the repeal of school integration, “just like Prohibition.” And the “true facts” did indeed reach audiences not accustomed to seeing how parts of the South kept blacks in line, because after Look, with a circulation of three million, published Huie’s article, it was excerpted in Reader’s Digest, with a circulation of eleven million—much of which was in the North’s largely white suburbs.

  THEN, STILL EARLY IN 1956, the wound was widened. In February, the Supreme Court ordered the University of Alabama to admit its first black student—and with that order, white fury spilled over. The Till atrocity and the Mississippi voter-registration murders had been violence by individuals. The Alabama incident escalated abruptly into violence by mob.

  The would-be student was twenty-six-year-old Autherine Juanita Lucy. Quiet and shy, the young woman had been brought up on her father’s farm in backcountry Alabama, her home an unpainted frame shack and her high school another unpainted frame shack, but she wanted to be a librarian, and had put herself through a small Negro college. She applied to the graduate program in library science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, but was not accepted because of her race. With the help of the NAACP, she sued for admittance, on the grounds that Alabama had established no institution, separate or not, in which blacks could obtain a library degree, and now, in February, her suit was granted, and the university’s trustees complied, although, to avoid contaminating the oth
erwise all-white student body, she was barred from dormitories and dining halls so that the other students would not be forced to live or eat with her.

  That restriction did not satisfy some students. For two days, Autherine Lucy went to classes, passing burning crosses on campus, amid what she was to call “hateful stares,” and then, on February 6, came the “day I’ll never want to live through again.”

  Ms. Lucy went from class to class in a dean’s car that day, “chased from one building to another,” a reporter wrote, “as though she was an animal pursued by a pack of hounds.” At each building there was a mob, made up not only of students but of rednecks from the countryside and hard-bitten factory workers from the industrial plants near Tuscaloosa, and the mobs threw eggs and stones, smashing the car’s windows, as they shouted, “Kill her! Kill her!” “There was murder in the air,” the reporter wrote, but state highway patrolmen on the scene made no move to protect her, or to arrest any of the stone-throwers, reportedly on orders from Governor James (Big Jim) Folsom. As the mob grew larger and more menacing, university officials asked for city fire engines to be sent, so that fire hoses could be used if necessary, but no engines appeared. Finally, the mob trapped her in a building, and she had to stay there (“I could still hear the crowd outside”) until, after a very long time, the police arrived. The disturbances spread from the campus to downtown Tuscaloosa; when the rioters spotted cars driven by Negroes, they blocked their paths, smashed their windows, and climbed on their roofs and stomped dents in them. The university’s trustees reacted by suspending not the rioters but her, “for her own safety”: had they not done so, they said, there was the possibility of a lynching. “God knows I didn’t intend to cause all this violence,” she said. “I merely wanted an education.”

  Going back to court, the NAACP charged that university trustees had conspired with the rioters, and a federal judge ordered the university to lift the suspension—whereupon the trustees expelled her permanently (for, they said, falsely accusing them of conspiracy). Promising to “keep fighting until I get an education,” she moved to the Birmingham home of her brother-in-law, Ulysses Moore, where men with rifles guarded the porch (“I’m not going to have her snatched from my care as they did the Till boy,” Moore said). But the phone rang constantly with callers saying, “We’re coming after you,” or “We’ll get you this time,” and she was unable to put from her mind the enraged faces that had pressed against the windows of the dean’s car. “All I could do then was pray, and I thought, ‘Am I going to die?’” Rioters whom the NAACP had named in its suit sued her for defamation, asking four million dollars. She flew to New York where Thurgood Marshall, glancing with evident concern at her tense, hollow-eyed face, told reporters at LaGuardia Airport, “She left Alabama because at this stage she’s taken as much as a human being can take….” A reporter asked if Miss Lucy had in effect lost the fight despite the court verdicts. “You and other American citizens have lost,” Marshall replied. As the reporters pressed around her, she said to Marshall, “Please get me out of here.” Then he drove her away, not to his office but to a doctor, who ordered her to take a long rest.

  Some Alabama whites crowed that the riot had “worked,” and in fact, by their definition, it had: it had restored segregation at the university. The trustees had expelled Miss Lucy “because the mob forced them to,” said one student leader who was on her side. “The mob won.” In addition, the South’s indignation at the Supreme Court’s interference in its affairs “woke people up like nothing else did,” a spokesman for the White Citizens Councils said. Tens of thousands of new members joined; wrote a reporter at one huge Council rally, “They filed in the coliseum doors in long lines, millionaires mingling with farmers, as many women as men, all with eager looks on their faces like people going to a Billy Graham revival.” There was no longer, said John Bartlow Martin, any doubt “that the South … has found in the Citizens Councils a flag to rally round. The Deep South was solid once more.”

  Yet it was not only in the South, not only among conservatives and racists, that the Autherine Lucy episode had stirred, and solidified, deep emotions. The death of her modest dream of being a librarian, like the death of Emmett Till, might on the surface have seemed like a victory for injustice, like simply another defeat for Martin Luther King’s “great cause.” But these victories were Pyrrhic, for in both cases, an entire nation had been reading about the injustice, had seen it all, stark and clear. Into the hearts of those willing to have their hearts opened had been brought home, with new vividness, the cruelty and inhumanity with which black Americans were treated in the South. These two episodes had hardened, among men and women of good will, a desire that, at last, something be done on behalf of these long-downtrodden people.

  DRAMATIC AND SIGNIFICANT as were the Till and Lucy encounters, trumpet calls to rally Americans behind the banner of justice, they were not the most significant on the southern civil rights front of 1956. Justice marched that year not to a trumpet call but to a drumbeat—a soft, undramatic, but unfaltering drumbeat, that instead of fading away like a trumpet call went on all that year, month after month. It was a drumbeat of footsteps on pavement—the footsteps of maids and washerwomen and cooks, of garbagemen and yardmen and janitors. For, month after month, all through 1956, the Montgomery Bus Boycott went on.

  “Come the first rainy day and the Negroes will be back on the buses,” Montgomery’s Mayor, W. A. Gayle, had predicted, shortly after the boycott began in December, 1955. He could hardly be blamed for his confidence. “To a largely uneducated people … [t]he loss of what was for many their most important modern convenience—cheap bus transportation—left them with staggering problems of logistics and morale,” Taylor Branch has written. Their jobs might be five or six miles from their homes. Drivers in a hastily organized car pool, using cars loaned by blacks, took black workers to and from their jobs, but there were never enough cars, and many had no choice but to walk. Others had the choice but chose to walk anyway, preferring to “demonstrate with their feet” their determination to end the indignities and humiliation of bus segregation. Passing an elderly lady hobbling slowly and painfully home after her day’s work, a car pool driver offered her a lift. Refusing, she explained: “I’m not walking for myself. I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.” There had been black bus boycotts before in other southern cities, but they had all ended quickly—perhaps the longest had been one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, that lasted two weeks—as their participants gave up and admitted defeat. But the Montgomery boycott didn’t end. Rain came indeed, and cold, and, as the seasons changed, the heat of an Alabama summer, and Montgomery’s blacks kept walking.

  One reason they kept walking was their leader, that twenty-six-year-old preacher only recently come to Montgomery.

  The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the generation of new, better-educated, more confident black leaders who were beginning to appear in the South—one with unusual political sophistication. Hardly had he become minister of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when he announced a goal: “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter.” Registered—and knowledgeable. Weekly forums discussed election issues; a political action committee was formed.

  At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; “That’s where I’m needed,” he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. “I just happened to be there,” he was to say. “There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change. That time has come in Montgomery, and I have nothing to do with it.” But at the boy-cotters’ nightly mass meetings, he echoed Douglass the Lion, who had said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”; said Martin Luther King: “Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to ke
ep you there.” And he went beyond Douglass to espouse a doctrine of passive, non-violent resistance. “Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness,” King said. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding…. This is a nonviolent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces.” King’s phrases were ringing, rhythmic, unforgettable; as the young preacher left the pulpit each evening, men and women who had walked for miles that day reached out their hands to touch him, and the next morning walked again. When, in January, 1956, Montgomery’s white leaders arrested King for a minor traffic violation, thinking thus to break the boycott, he was very afraid. As he sat in the back seat of a police cruiser, his mind was so filled with thoughts of lynchings—crossing a bridge, he feared that a mob was waiting for him on the other side; he could not stop thinking about the river below—that when he finally saw the jail, he was overwhelmed by happiness that he was not going to be killed or mutilated. But even as he was entering the jail, carloads of Negroes were racing toward it, and the jailer hastily released him on his own recognizance. So many people attended that night’s mass meeting in order to get a glimpse of him that it was announced that a second meeting would be held at another church, and when that was filled, a third meeting was announced, and then a fourth—seven meetings, packed with men and women who just wanted to see for themselves that the Reverend King was all right. And when he went home after the last meeting, he was accompanied by a group of young men who had decided they would guard him from then on whenever he left his house; he was too precious to lose.