Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  But if Moses and the political elite inside the World’s Fair thought that the day’s troubles were over, James L. Farmer Jr. had other ideas. Although the national CORE chairman only planned his “counterdemonstration” as a last-minute rebuttal to the stall-in, he had managed to put together a contingent of highly motivated veteran activists, including Bayard Rustin, the co-organizer of the March of Washington. Earlier that morning Farmer had gathered his troops at Community Church on East 35th Street and reiterated that their demonstration had clear and precise goals—unlike the stall-in. Their mission, he would say throughout the day, was to illustrate “the contrast between the glittering world of fantasy and the real world of brutality, bigotry and poverty.” They then traveled down to Penn Station—the magnificent neoclassical building that would by year’s end be torn down in an act of architectural vandalism—and boarded the 8:43 a.m. Long Island Rail Road for Flushing Meadow.

  Debarking the train, Farmer strode up to the Fair’s gate, where he and his group encountered members of Moses’ Pinkerton private police force. The guards readily spotted the nationally known Farmer—hard to miss with his barrel-chested frame and linebacker build. Prepared for any contingency, the CORE leader already had advance troops inside the Fair equipped with walkie-talkies to scope out the scene.

  As Farmer stood at the gate, one of his young troops listened in on the Pinkertons’ wavelength, overhearing the Fair’s official plan: Farmer would be stopped at the gate, and thus unable to lead a demonstration. Such a calculated move seemed to have Moses’ fingerprints all over it. But improvising on the fly, the young activist imitated a guard and barked into the walkie-talkie. “Correction! There are new orders. Let Farmer and his group come in. Repeat. Do let them come in. That is all.” Just like that, Farmer, with his group in tow, entered the Fairgrounds. Whatever happened next at the World’s Fair, one thing was certain: The fate of CORE as a national civil rights organization hung in the balance.

  Born in Texas in 1920, Farmer was the grandson of a slave. His father, James L. Farmer Sr. was a preacher and professor who taught literature in three ancient languages—Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek—and was reportedly the first black man in Texas to earn a PhD. Following in his father’s footsteps, Farmer earned a degree in theology from Howard University. With his deep baritone and intellectual mind, he was well-suited for preaching but in 1942 cofounded CORE, an interracial civil rights group. It was during his college years—he began his undergraduate studies at age fourteen—that he first encountered Gandhi’s philosophy of nonviolent protest, which CORE would help make a hallmark of the civil rights movement.

  After working as a journalist for a time, Farmer labored to integrate the public school system in the South. In February 1960, when four black college students sat at a whites-only lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, they turned to CORE for support. A year later Farmer became CORE’s national director, and that summer he pushed for the first Freedom Rides to desegregate the South’s public transportation system. After angry white mobs assaulted the riders again and again, Robert Kennedy suggested CORE postpone their protests so that both sides could “cool off.” “We have been cooling off for 350 years,” Farmer told Kennedy. The Freedom Rides continued.

  Now, three years later, he was defying the Northern liberal establishment again. He and Rustin headed to the Louisiana and Mississippi pavilions, where they joined other protesters. Farmer brandished a three-foot-long electric cattle prod—to inform Fairgoers that it was a weapon of choice of the Louisiana police to use on black activists. Unfortunately for Farmer, the pavilion was empty, one of several that weren’t ready for opening day. Heading over to the New York City Pavilion, Farmer and Rustin sat in the doorway, blocking entry. It didn’t take long for the Pinkertons to find Farmer and politely ask him to move. When he refused, the guard in charge tried pleading with the civil rights leader.

  “Mr. Farmer, you know you’re blocking entrance to the building,” the guard said. “Won’t you please move over.”

  Farmer still refused.

  “Mr. Farmer, Robert Moses, who is in charge of the World’s Fair, does not want you arrested,” the Pinkerton informed him. “We don’t want to arrest you. So please move. Your picketing is all right and quite legal, but blocking the entrance is illegal.” While Moses might have advocated behind the scenes to throw the book at the would-be stall-inners, when it came to the politically connected Farmer—who had sat in the White House opposite presidents—he used kid gloves.

  Ordinary Fairgoers had mixed feelings about the protesters that ranged from hate to sympathy. One mother grew annoyed with her six-year-old girl as they passed in front of the New York State Pavilion because the youngster walked around the prone protestors. “When I say step on them,” the mother reprimanded the child, “step on them.” One older woman was moved by what she saw. “There’s a part of me that feels like joining them,” she said. A Pakistani couple who viewed the display of civil disobedience were aghast. “I think we should move on. I do not like to look at this.”

  Still refusing to move, Farmer was asked by one Pinkerton guard if he would speak to him privately. Again he reiterated how Moses did not want to have the civil rights leader arrested. When Farmer defiantly reclaimed his spot in front of the entrance, the Pinkertons had little choice but to arrest him. It took three guards to carry the heavy Farmer away. “Gee, Mr. Farmer,” one of them said as they lifted him to the paddy wagon, “you got to lose some weight.” Even Farmer got a laugh out of that.

  Years later, the CORE leader recalled that unlike in his Southern campaigns, he and his fellow activists weren’t breaking a “bad law” at the World’s Fair—blocking entrance to a building was, after all, hardly a misappropriate use of the legal code. But Farmer noted they were purposefully violating it “in order to bring the spotlight of public attention on other evils in New York such as employment discrimination, housing discrimination, and de facto segregation in the schools,” which was, contrary to what Farmer or anyone else claimed, exactly what Brooklyn CORE’s proposed stall-in meant to do, only on a far grander scale.

  However, the Brooklyn group was unable to pull it off. The hundreds of cars promised by fellow activists from outside New York City never arrived. Most were scared off by the court injunction obtained by Queens District Attorney Frank D. O’Connor against Brooklyn CORE for threatening the stall-in; many were afraid that the radical chapter lacked the funds to bail them out if they were arrested.

  Arriving in the afternoon at the 110th Precinct in Elmhurst, Queens, where the arrested teenage activists from the subway protests were being held, Brooklyn CORE chairman Isaiah Brunson told reporters that despite the stall-in’s failure, there would be other protests in the future. “We are not stopping here,” he said, “and there will be no peace in New York City until Mayor Wagner meets our demands.” It was bold talk but only talk; within a few days Brunson, troubled by his inability to stage the stall-in, went into hiding.

  Brooklyn CORE and its allies were in disarray. Arnold Goldwag was arrested at the Willet Points subway station just outside the Fair on a court-issued bench warrant (he had never bothered to appear in court to answer charges stemming from his arrest at the Downstate Medical Center). Herbert Callender of Bronx CORE appeared at the Elmhurst precinct, insisting he speak with the arrested activists, and was promptly arrested himself. Reverend Galamison appeared there, too, disappointingly telling reporters that he never doubted Brunson’s “sincerity” but that the twenty-two-year-old auto mechanic “is no Bayard Rustin.”

  Back at the World’s Fair, as Farmer, Rustin, and their group were being hauled away, other activists—many of them white college students—had fanned out through the Fairgrounds. A group of fifty protesters targeted the Florida Pavilion, where they squared off with police. One attempted to scale the building’s 110-foot orange tower as Governor C. Farris Bryant spoke with reporters inside. The protesters were arrested,
including the would-be tower-climber, who required a quartet of officers to restrain him as he screamed and kicked, booting one policeman square in the face.

  Some protesters carried signs and marched silently; others tapped their feet along with the music of the opening parade; still others took breaks from their picketing to do some sightseeing. “I’ve been running off to see something whenever I get relieved on the line,” said one New York CORE member before heading to the GM Pavilion. Another Maryland activist took a break from picketing his home state’s pavilion to see the Ford show. “I think it’s an interesting Fair,” he said. “I hope I will be able to come back.”

  The parade ended at the Singer Bowl, the newly constructed ten-thousand-seat open-air stadium where the Fair’s VIPs and international dignitaries had gathered for the invitation-only opening ceremony. Sitting on the stage, underneath a blue-and-orange canopy, were former president Harry S. Truman, Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Mayor Wagner, and Moses. They were joined by the United Nation’s Dr. Ralph J. Bunche and UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, eight state governors, eleven congressmen, and twenty-three ambassadors. As the audience took to their seats, doing their best to protect themselves from the rain, speakers took to the podium, decorated with the presidential seal, in anticipation of President Johnson’s arrival.

  It didn’t take long before they began lavishing Moses with praise. Messages were read from former presidents Herbert H. Hoover and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had awarded the Fair to New York nearly four years earlier. President Truman joked that there “is only one Moses and it’s not the one in the Bible.” Governor Rockefeller lauded his most infamous employee—“the fabulous Bob Moses has done it again,” he said. Mayor Wagner poignantly predicted the Fair’s opening day represented a historic event, a before-and-after moment that would grow in importance over time. “Today,” he noted, “we may be marking the end of one era and the beginning of another.” The mayor had no idea of just how right he was.

  Moses stood at the podium, hatless despite the chill and wearing his customary suit and tie and a thin raincoat. While obviously pleased with the accolades and verbal wreaths being laid at his feet, he acknowledged the silent shadow that hung over the Fair, lamenting the fact that President John F. Kennedy—who had been assassinated exactly five months before—wasn’t “here to give [the Fair] his blessing.” It was, uncharacteristically, a gracious note to strike, and one that Robert Kennedy expressed his thanks for in a handwritten note weeks later.

  Representing the family of nations that were participating in the Fair was Indira Gandhi, the daughter of Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. As Gandhi, who in two years would be elected prime minister, spoke, Johnson’s military green presidential helicopter swirled overhead, creating a commotion and bringing her time at the podium to an end. (The new president’s handlers had made sure to fly directly from the airport just in case the stall-in clogged the highways.) Emerging from the helicopter as the band played “Hail to the Chief,” Johnson was surrounded by Secret Service. The events in Dallas were fresh in everyone’s mind, nor was it lost on political insiders that President William McKinley had been assassinated at the 1901 Buffalo Fair.

  Addressing the crowd, President Johnson spoke of the dual paths that stood before the world, “abundance or annihilation—development or desolation,” and characterized the World’s Fair as “the promised land of Mr. Moses,” borrowing poet Ogden Nash’s phrase. The president and the VIPs then moved to the US Federal Pavilion, where Johnson dedicated the Charles Luckman–designed modernist structure that his predecessor had taken such a personal interest in (and the planning for which had elicited so many complaints from Moses). One set of protesters sat down on the rain-soaked grass on either end of the building while the president declared, “Peace is not only possible in our generation but I predict it is coming much nearer.”

  What Johnson didn’t know was that the protests were already under way while he was speaking to the VIP crowd inside the Singer Bowl; during his first speech a few hundred protesters, mostly college students, carried signs and shouted “Jim Crow Must Go!” whenever they heard his Texas twang broadcast over the Fair’s PA system. Now the demonstrators, held at bay by a throng of police, shouted “Jim Crow Must Go!” and “Freedom Now!” directly at the president, often drowning out his amplified voice. Three of the college activists sat on the shoulders of their peers and held up signs that were visible not only to Johnson, but for the entire crowd of politicians to see. A World’s Fair Is a Luxury but a Fair World Is a Necessity read one; See New York’s Worse Fair—Segregated Schools for Negroes, Puerto Ricans and Rats read another.

  For Moses and Wagner, this might have been worse than an actual stall-in. They could do nothing but sit and watch helplessly as scores of college students drowned out Johnson, who was making one of his very first public speeches since an assassin’s bullet had made him the thirty-sixth President of the United States.

  Another group that arrived from nearby Queens College, where Louis E. Lomax had first floated the idea of the stall-in the year before, reinforced the activists who had arrived with Farmer. Queens was a politically active campus with a CORE chapter, including a twenty-year-old activist named Andrew Goodman, who arrived in time to continue on the “official” CORE protest after Farmer and Rustin had been carried off.

  Ignoring the rowdy crowd that was shouting him down as if he were some local City Council speaker as best he could, Johnson laid the groundwork for a vision of what by the following month he would call “the Great Society”: an America in which “no man need be poor” and where “no man is handicapped by the color of his skin or the nature of his belief.” When the college students heard this, they laughed out loud, openly mocking President Johnson for all to see. The crowd—including Moses, Wagner, ambassadors, congressmen, governors, and foreign dignitaries—was horrified at this generational display of disrespect.

  The activists looked every bit the part of young collegiate rebels: Some wore jeans and collared shirts, affecting the plebeian look that would make Pete Seeger proud; others affected longish hair a la the Beatles. The most rebellious—and hip—among them were decked out in suede jackets and jeans, their angry eyes hidden by shades—a look that Bob Dylan would soon make famous. Some, perhaps less image-conscious, looked earnest in their black horn-rimmed glasses and pleated skirts.

  The new president, who was congenitally sensitive to public embarrassment, could only mask his outrage. Lacking the polished grace and wit of his predecessor or the respect of the Free World commanded by Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander of WWII, or even Truman’s down-home, tell-it-like-it-is charm, Johnson seemed remarkably un-presidential. Hailing from humble origins, Johnson desperately wanted to win the White House on his own and emerge from the slain Kennedy’s shadow. He wanted to prove to all the naysayers—the Eastern establishment that never accepted him, the Northern liberals who were horrified that this rough ’n’ ready Texan was now the keeper of the Camelot flame—that he, Lyndon Baines Johnson, Landslide Lyndon, as the local reporters dubbed him after the extremely narrow (and stolen) election of 1948 that sent him to the US Senate, was indeed a liberal New Dealer at heart. He would muster all his Machiavellian strategies to accomplish what Kennedy and every other president had failed at: He would sign the most far-reaching piece of civil rights legislation into law.

  Yet, here he was, in working-class Queens, province of labor union workers, immigrants, and blacks—natural Democratic voters—and he was being embarrassed and ridiculed by nearly two hundred socially engaged college students, who also should have been his natural constituents. And they were doing it to him at the World’s Fair in front of the national and international press; members of the political elite, and one of his potential Republican rivals for the White House—Nelson Rockefeller.

  Attempting to reclaim the moment by addressing the students’ concerns, Johnson told them that American freedo
m was an act-in-progress: “We do not try to mask our national problems. We do not try to disguise our imperfections or cover up our failures. No other nation in history has done so much to correct its flaws.” He was met with more contemptuous laughter from the activists. Johnson had been looking forward to the New York trip to open the World’s Fair—it was one of the most nonpartisan acts a president could perform—and they made a laughingstock out of him.

  “I felt sorry for them,” he said the next day after returning to Washington, where the White House press corps questioned him about his teenage torturers. Sounding like the disapproving father of the nation’s wayward youth, Johnson said that their disruption of his speech served “no good purpose . . . of promoting the cause they profess to support.” New York Senator Jacob K. Javitz, a Republican, was so horrified by the demonstrators that he apologized personally to the president. The mayor apologized publicly, saying that “as the city in which this took place, we must be ashamed.” But of all the officials who witnessed the public humiliation of a president, only Police Commissioner Murphy seemed to grasp the real significance of the historical event. He noted that the Fair’s opening day was “a day in which the President came to the world of fantasy and encountered the world of fact, a day millions will never forget.”