An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  Earlier in 1962, Kennedy had made a comparably weak push for a bill to end the arbitrary state literacy tests that were routinely used to disenfranchise blacks in the South. He supported an effort by the Senate’s Democratic leader, Mike Mansfield, to make the completion of a sixth-grade education presumptive proof of literacy. But the effort ended in two humiliating failures to break a southern filibuster.

  Still, Kennedy had taken important symbolic steps on civil rights. At the beginning of his term, he had approved the adoption of new regulations barring discrimination by users of federal lands, as a way of pressuring George Preston Marshall, the defiantly segregationist owner of the Washington Redskins football team, to hire a black player in time for the 1962 NFL season. (The Redskins were about to move into a new stadium, built and owned by the federal government on land under jurisdiction of the National Park Service, making them subject to the new rules.)

  The president was also deeply concerned that segregation was giving the United States an international black eye—and the Soviet Union a handy propaganda tool—and never more so than with regard to the embarrassing discrimination faced by diplomats from the newly independent African nations. Restaurants and motels along U.S. Route 40 in Maryland, part of the principal highway between New York and Washington, had refused to serve—and, in at least one case, had manhandled—African ambassadors traveling to and from the United Nations in Manhattan. So Kennedy ordered top State Department officials to wage a campaign to end the discrimination. But the president often seemed as irked by the diplomats as by the recalcitrant restaurateurs. “Tell these ambassadors I wouldn’t think of driving from New York to Washington,” he snapped to his chief of protocol, Angier Biddle Duke. “Tell them to fly!”

  * * *

  THE KENNEDY ADMINISTRATION COULD not avoid all substantive action on civil rights, if only because it had inherited several pending legal cases from the Eisenhower administration. The first test came in 1961, in New Orleans, where Louisiana school officials had been resisting the court-ordered integration of two public schools for a year. After efforts at negotiation failed, the Justice Department—headed by the president’s brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy—resolved to file contempt charges against the state superintendent of education, who had been withholding federal funds as a means of keeping the two schools from functioning. The superintendent quickly backed down.

  Yet another case loomed in Prince Edward County, Virginia. In response to the Brown decision, many Virginia school districts had opted simply to close some schools rather than accede to integration. In 1959, a federal court had ruled that this practice was unconstitutional, so Prince Edward County reacted by dismantling its school system altogether, creating a private “academy” and leaving blacks with no education whatever. On May 8, 1961, again after voluntary negotiations failed, the Justice Department filed suit to reopen the schools, enraging Virginia politicians, chief among them the state’s powerful Democratic senator, Harry F. Byrd.

  Bob Kennedy insisted that his department was merely “maintaining the orders of the courts,” and “doing nothing more nor less,” as he put it in a speech at the just-integrated University of Georgia that same week. The attorney general’s ringing tone conveyed a greater sense of urgency—and outrage. Referring to the Prince Edward County case, he vowed, “I say to you that if the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act. We will not stand by or be aloof. We will move.” He mentioned his support for “the 1954 decision,” as he referred to Brown, but added, “My belief does not matter. It is the law. Some of you may believe the decision was wrong. That does not matter. It is the law.”

  But none of the new president’s symbolic moves—and none of the imperatives of pending legal cases—could compete for practical impact with the actions of a determined group of travelers who had decided in that spring of 1961 to take matters into their own hands. Following in the tradition of King’s bus boycott, and the widespread student sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South, this latest wave of protesters dubbed themselves “Freedom Riders.” The rides were the brainchild of James Farmer, who wanted to draw attention to his lesser-known civil rights organization, the Congress of Racial Equality. On May 4, 1961, a delegation of black and white riders piled onto Greyhound and Trailways buses in Washington, D.C., bound for New Orleans to test southern enforcement of a December 1960 Supreme Court ruling banning discrimination in facilities used in interstate transportation. CORE’s press release announcing the rides had gone astray in the Justice Department, and the first the president and his administration learned of the rides was on Sunday, May 14—Mother’s Day, as it happened—when a group of Freedom Riders were set upon outside Anniston, Alabama, by a mob of fifty cars full of white men carrying clubs and lead pipes, who firebombed their bus. The six riders on board were beaten, before escaping in cars driven by local blacks. Later, a second group was beaten upon its arrival in Birmingham. The president was livid, both because he was considering meeting Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna the following month (and the Soviet Union delighted in using such incidents to embarrass the United States), and because he had known nothing about the intrepid riders.

  The situation was all the worse because it soon became known that Birmingham police officers, under the command of the city’s racist public safety commissioner, Theophilus Eugene “Bull” Connor, had given the white mob a half-hour grace period to beat up the arriving riders before belatedly showing up at the bus terminal after the damage was done. Now the riders who were not already hospitalized found themselves trapped by an angry crowd at the Birmingham airport, where they were trying to catch a plane to New Orleans. Attorney General Kennedy sent a top aide, a courtly former journalist from Tennessee named John Seigenthaler, as the president’s personal emissary to rescue them. Alabama’s governor, John Patterson, whose support the Kennedys had courted assiduously in the 1960 campaign and with whom they had worked to maintain good relations despite his segregationist views, at first agreed to provide protection for the riders. But then he changed his mind and went incommunicado for days.

  Such drama was the last thing the administration needed or wanted, and the president asked his top civil rights adviser to get CORE to stop the rides. But another contingent of riders set out from Nashville, and by Friday, May 19, the situation grew still more explosive as police arrested some of the would-be riders and took others into protective custody. Seigenthaler received assurances from Governor Patterson, who at last agreed to meet with him, that Alabama had “the means, ability and the will to keep the peace.”

  Based on that promise, twenty-one riders now boarded a bus in Birmingham on Saturday, May 20, bound for New Orleans. The riders made it only as far as the state capital at Montgomery before being attacked by a crowd of a thousand angry whites at the terminal there—where, despite warnings from the FBI and the state highway patrol that the buses would be arriving, no local police were on hand. “My heart was in my throat,” Seigenthaler would recall. “I knew, suddenly, betrayal.” Stopping his rental car, he tried to help a young white woman rider who was being chased by the mob. “I grabbed her by the wrist, over the hood of the car, had her right at the door and she put her hands up on the door jamb and said, ‘Mister, I don’t want you to get hurt. I’m non-violent. I’m trained to take this. Please don’t get hurt. We’ll be fine.’ And I said, ‘Get your ass in the car, sister!’ And at that moment, they wheeled me around and they hit me with a pipe.” Seigenthaler was beaten unconscious and left on the pavement for twenty-five minutes before the police finally took him to a hospital.

  The attorney general was outraged and sent some four hundred federal marshals, under the command of his deputy, Byron White, to stand by at Maxwell Air Force Base outside Montgomery.

  The next day, Sunday, May 21, Martin Luther King arrived in town for a mass meeting at the city’s First Baptist Church, only to find himself and fifteen hundred black congregants surrounded by an angry mo
b outside. President Kennedy sent in the marshals to control the menacing crowd, and as the situation escalated, considered calling in Army units. But before that could happen, Governor Patterson declared martial law and sent in the Alabama National Guard, which dismissed the marshals and dispersed the crowd. When the guard at first refused to let the crowd inside the church leave—ostensibly for their own protection—a frantic King called the attorney general, saying he had been betrayed. “You shouldn’t have withdrawn the marshals,” he said. “Patterson’s National Guard won’t protect us.” In a tired, even tone, Bob Kennedy told him, “Now, Reverend, don’t tell me that. You know just as well as I do that if it hadn’t been for the United States marshals, you’d be dead as Kelsey’s nuts right now.”

  The standoff had infuriated both John and Robert Kennedy, and it left a bitter legacy. Neither man would ever talk to Governor Patterson again. Some months later, when organizers at the Aspen Institute in Colorado asked James Farmer of CORE, who had been leading a seminar there, to change his schedule to stay an extra day to attend a speech by the attorney general, the word came back from Bob Kennedy, “If that son of a bitch Farmer is going to be there, I’m not coming,” Farmer would recall. “That was the attitude the Kennedys had from the Freedom Rides on.”

  Indeed, the defining attitude of the Kennedy brothers in this period was that the federal government’s police powers in matters of local law enforcement were severely limited—and its ability to protect independent actors such as the Freedom Riders correspondingly weak. They believed they were doing the best they could. “What we did was to outline what our authority was and we went to the maximum of what we felt we could do constitutionally,” Bob Kennedy would recall. “You could argue, during that period of time it would have been much better not to have this system of government—you know, not to have a democracy. I think, at any time, you can say that it would be much better if we could have sent people—large numbers, perhaps … to protect” demonstrators. “But I think that it comes back to haunt you at a later time. I think that these matters should be decided over a long range of history, not on a temporary basis or under the stress of a particular crisis.”

  Overnight, the Freedom Rides had pushed racial integration to the top of the national agenda and had pushed John Kennedy himself to the breaking point. In the midst of the crisis, during a meeting with members of a newly created advisory council for the Peace Corps, his signature international assistance initiative, Harry Belafonte, the singer and civil rights activist, expressed admiration for Kennedy’s position on civil rights but asked if the president “could say something a little more about the Freedom Riders.” Another council member, Eugene Rostow, the dean of the Yale Law School, chimed in, saying, “There is a need now for moral leadership.” After the group left, the president summoned an aide and exploded, “What in the world does he think I should do? Doesn’t he know I’ve done more for civil rights than any president in American history?”

  Arguably, Kennedy had. But soon enough, events would prove once again just how much more there was to do—how much more that only a new law could do.

  * * *

  SIXTEEN MONTHS AFTER THE Freedom Rides, in the fall of 1962, the Kennedys faced a new civil rights crisis when the federal courts ordered the admission of James Meredith, a young Air Force veteran, as the first black student in the history of the University of Mississippi. Meredith had taken his first step toward integrating Ole Miss on the day of John Kennedy’s inauguration. Furious that the new president had not directly mentioned civil rights in his inaugural address, despite the pledges of the Democratic platform, he mailed a letter asking for an application for admission, in hopes of putting pressure on the Kennedy administration. After a long legal battle, backed by the NAACP, Justice Hugo Black of the Supreme Court, an Alabama native and onetime member of the Ku Klux Klan, finally ordered Meredith’s admission on September 10, 1962, for that fall semester. Robert Kennedy promptly began negotiations with Mississippi’s governor, Ross Barnett, to secure Meredith’s peaceful admission. Barnett was more communicative than Alabama’s John Patterson but no more cooperative, twice blocking Meredith’s attempts to register.

  “It’s best for him not to go to Ole Miss,” Barnett told the attorney general.

  “But he likes Ole Miss,” Bob Kennedy insisted.

  At last, on September 27, the attorney general believed he had worked out a staged arrangement in which Meredith, escorted by federal marshals, would arrive on campus and Barnett himself would stand in the way until forced to move aside by U.S. marshals at gunpoint. But the deal foundered on the question of just how many guns would have to be drawn. (Barnett wanted to look helpless in the face of federal firepower.) Kennedy ordered his aides and Meredith to turn around and withdraw.

  All along, John Kennedy had followed his brother’s actions, determined to avoid a confrontation of the kind that had forced Dwight Eisenhower to send federal troops to Little Rock in 1957 to enforce the desegregation of Central High School. But as Barnett continued to delay, tempers rose and would-be defenders of Mississippi’s honor trickled into Oxford from all over, armed and ready. Finally, on Saturday, September 29, the president decided that he himself should talk to Barnett for the first time.

  “Well now, here’s my problem,” the president told the governor. “I don’t know Mr. Meredith, and I didn’t put him in the university, but on the other hand, under the Constitution, I have to carry out the order and I don’t want to do it in any way that causes difficulty to you or anyone else. But I’ve got to do it.” President Kennedy instructed Barnett to work out a new plan with the attorney general. Minutes later, on the phone with Bob Kennedy, Barnett came up with another theatrical idea: Meredith could register in Jackson while Barnett would remain in Oxford and pretend he had been fooled. The attorney general rejected that idea out of hand, so the president got back on the phone with Barnett and, in a complete about-face, now embraced the Jackson plan. But that deal, too, fell apart within hours—after Governor Barnett showed up at a raucous Ole Miss football game shouting “I love Mississippi!” and, emboldened by the fierce emotions of the crowd, telephoned the attorney general to say the Jackson idea was out.

  “Why that goddamned son of bitch!” President Kennedy exploded. He now had no choice but to sign the legal papers that would allow the dispatch of federal troops to Mississippi if needed. The next day, Sunday, the attorney general once again thought he had reached an agreement with Barnett—this time by threatening to release the White House’s tape recordings of their earlier discussions, which would show that Barnett had been plotting cooperation all along.

  From there, the situation quickly deteriorated, as Meredith made his way onto the campus, backed by three hundred federal marshals—a motley crew of Treasury agents, border patrolmen, and prison guards under the command of Nicholas Katzenbach, who had succeeded Byron White as deputy attorney general and had been dispatched with a team from the Justice Department only hours before. A mob of a thousand students and angry local residents was gathered, held back by state troopers.

  Even as the president prepared to go on national television at 10 p.m. Washington time, to announce Meredith’s arrival in Oxford, the state troopers suddenly withdrew. It would never be clear just who gave the order. But the result was that President Kennedy told the country that the Constitution obliged him to “implement the orders of the court with whatever means are necessary,” without knowing that a riot was already under way. The crowd charged the Lyceum, the university’s main administration building, with rocks, bottles, and rifle and shotgun fire, mistakenly thinking Meredith was inside. (He was actually in a dormitory.) Two people were killed in the melee, and more than a third of the marshals—160 men—were wounded, twenty-eight of them by gunfire.

  The president now ordered regular Army units to deploy from Memphis to Oxford on the double. But it took them agonizing hours to get there as the riot continued. “Where’s the Army?” Kennedy fairly screamed throug
h the telephone at his secretary of the Army, Cyrus Vance, while another aide in the Oval Office wondered if the troops could “take a cab from the airport.” At one point, an infuriated president mused about the Army, “They always give you their bullshit about their instant reaction and their split-second timing, but it never works out. No wonder it’s so hard to win a war.”

  The White House kept in touch with the team in Oxford through a pay phone that Katzenbach had commandeered with a single dime, ordering the operator to keep an open line to Washington. At the height of the battle, Bob Kennedy asked his press spokesman Ed Guthman, who was in Oxford with Katzenbach, “How’s it going?” and Guthman replied, “Pretty rough. It’s getting like the Alamo.” After a pause, the attorney general responded, “Well, you know what happened to those guys, don’t you?”

  But Katzenbach’s ragtag army survived, and by Monday morning, October 1, twenty-three thousand soldiers were stationed around Oxford, and Meredith attended his first class on campus—in colonial American history. With the crisis over, James McShane, the wry and battle-hardened chief of the U.S. Marshals Service, who had once been a New York City police officer and a bodyguard and driver for John Kennedy in his Senate days, felt liberated enough to taunt Governor Barnett by asking, “Meredith is in, and now do you know who No. 2 is going to be?”

  “No, who?” the governor replied.

  “Sonny Liston!” McShane announced, referring to the malevolent, mobbed-up black boxer who had just unseated the popular black heavyweight champion, Floyd Patterson, the week before.