Before the Storm (42 page)

The night after that May 3 broadcast Lippmann was mocked by Bull Connor's fire hoses.

Within the space of a week, the
New York Times
published a harrowing profile of the black separatists led in Harlem by the fearsome and brilliant Malcolm
X, and
Life
published photos of Nation of Islam members learning how to strangle police dogs. In Missouri, when thousands of Catholic parochial school students were denied the same bus service as public school students by the state legislature on First Amendment grounds, their parents transferred them into the public schools to so clog them that the schools would have to shut down. In the St. Louis suburb of Florissant, five hundred children and parents were pressing their grievances the same way they saw Negroes doing in Birmingham: they marched on the schools singing civil rights anthems. “I am here as a taxpayer,” declared one mother. “An irate, angry and broke taxpayer.” (In his broadcast, Lippmann had dismissed the festering problem of parochial school parents' anger at being denied federal funding as “not beyond the wit of man.”)

From far afield May 8 came news of the slaughter at the order of Vietnam's Catholic President Diem of seven men protesting for religious liberty on Buddha's birthday. On May 10, the same day as the Birmingham settlement-cum-riot, the far right returned to the news when Tom Kuchel stood up in the Senate to declare that 10 percent of the letters coming into his office—six thousand a month—were “fright mail,” mostly centering on two astonishing, and astonishingly widespread, rumors: that Chinese commandos were training in Mexico for an invasion of the United States through San Diego; and that 100,000 UN troops—16,000 of them “African Negro troops, who are cannibals ” [sic]—were secretly rehearsing in the Georgia swamps under the command of a Russian colonel for a UN martial-law takeover of the United States.

The latter rumor, which spread like wildfire after it showed up in the newsletter of Representative James Utt of California's Orange County, spoke volumes about the psychological paradoxes of running a democracy in a Cold War. In America citizens are charged with making their own sense of the world around them. But they were refused the information to do so by Cold War secrecy. So they did what they could with the facts available. Secret armies trained in out-of-the-way forests
did
try to take over countries; we had tried it at the Bay of Pigs. The United Nations, founded in 1945 with nine Asian and three African members,
did
now house a majority Afro-Asian bloc that was voting more often with the Soviets than with the United States. And seventeen Free World nations had indeed sent six hundred officers (four from Liberia, many more from South Vietnam) to participate in field exercises at the Army's Special Warfare Center at Fort Stewart, Georgia, to study “counterinsurgency” —the romantic Kennedy-era military doctrine that held that grassroots Communist advances must be met not through the deployment of superior force but with cleverness and surprise, by soldiers living off the land in tactical alliance with the native populace. To folks in nearby Claxton, Georgia, though, in the nerve-wracking wake of the civil rights uprising in nearby Albany, it just
looked like a lot of darkies were running around in the woods. Imaginations took flight. Scary things were happening every day. Who could say things wouldn't get scarier? How could people explain a world that seemed to be falling apart?

In Boston, school board members were wondering the same thing. On May 22, at the height of Birmingham's fires, a community group aligned with the NAACP, Citizens for Boston Public Schools, released a report claiming that the city's schools were segregated. The group thought its case clear enough: of the thirteen city schools with student bodies over 90 percent black, eleven were housed in buildings over fifty years old (the other two were over twenty-five years old). In the white-majority schools, the average per pupil funding was $350; in black schools it was as low as $228.98.

But school administrators absorbed the allegation of racial bias with bafflement. Boston was still a city lived largely at the level of the parish and the precinct. Its school committee, elected at large in citywide elections, was a patronage organization more than an educational one; its members, and the ethnic communities they represented, got what they got by following the age-old rules of big-city politics. No one needed to be a racist—though many were—to install a racist school system. Boston's black population, which increased 342 percent between 1940 and 1970 while the city's white population drained off by a third to the suburbs, was represented by a Republican shadow organization living off table scraps and relying for its survival on low voter turnout. The power brokers in the black community were traditionally scions of middle-class families resentful of the new poor Southern migrants giving them a bad name and dragging down their schools. They were in no position to muscle requisitions for better schools even if they had the inclination to cause trouble in the first place. But with the postwar migration, a new black political class was coming up—educated, aggressive, and idealistic children of Martin Luther King, in a city run by Boss Curley's rules. What to them was a crusade for justice looked to others like merely jumping the queue.

The chair of the school committee, Louise Day Hicks, a prim and proper lace-curtain Irish Catholic, a juvenile court lawyer who had run on a platform to take politics out of the school committee, responded respectfully to the complaints, immediately meeting with the petitioners and promising to do what she could to right the wrong. For three weeks the two sides talked. The stumbling block was language. The NAACP wanted a simple admission that de facto segregation existed in Boston's schools. The school committee reacted as if to the Versailles Treaty's requirement that the Germans acknowledge sole responsibility for World War I. Talks broke down. Both sides agreed to try one more meeting before giving up. The date was set for June 11.

Three hundred NAACP members and sympathizers were turned away from the packed hearing room. Rather than return home to tune into the President's historic civil rights speech, they stood out in the rain and sang “We Shall Overcome.” Inside, the parties spoke past one another. “I know the word ‘demand' is a word that is disliked by many public officials,” the NAACP education committee chair told school committee members, “but I am afraid that it is too late for pleading, begging, requesting, or even reasoning.” Superintendent Gillis, aghast at the charge that Boston, which had been legally integrated in 1855, had anything to do with Birmingham, was indignant: “The Boston public school districts are determined by school population in relation to building capacities, distances between homes and schools, and unusual traffic patterns. They aren't bound by ethnic or religious factors.” (He did not consider how those “traffic patterns”—blacks shunted by racist real estate practices into bursting ghettos—had come about.

Over seven hours of hard negotiation on the fifteenth, the school committee either accepted or agreed to study almost every one of the NAACP's fourteen demands, including new training for teachers, guidance programs, class-size reductions, new textbooks, and less racially biased intelligence tests. But the school committee rejected the one demand the activists considered nonnegotiable: “an immediate public acknowledgment of the existence of de facto segregation in the Boston Public School System.” It was a stalemate that even mediation by Governor Endicott Peabody couldn't break. On June 18, the day before Kennedy introduced the text of his civil rights bill to Congress, an estimated 8,260 students boycotted Boston public schools. The revolution had gone north. So had the counterrevolution. “Our schools and our public officials preach obedience to the law,” cried Louise Day Hicks, “yet here we have our Negro children being encouraged to flaunt the law!”

Flaunting the law was not, it arrived, the sole province of civil rights militants. Earlier the Supreme Court had handed down its ruling on
Abington Township
v.
Schempp,
outlawing Bible reading in schools. Carl Sanders, running for the Georgia governorship, had promised he would “not only go to jail, but give up my life” fighting for school prayer. More and more Americans, in fact, were beginning to look at politics as Martin Luther King did—and as Barry Goldwater, Michael Harrington, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, and Betty Friedan did—as a theater of morality, of absolutes. “You're either for us or you're against us,” a right-wing Orange County electronics executive told
Time.
“There's no middle ground anymore.” Even moderates were becoming militant; they militated against extremism. “The mediator needs to become a gladiator,” University of California president Clark Kerr said in a Harvard lecture published as an influential book,
The Uses of the University,
for “when
the extremists get in control ... the ‘delicate balance of interests' becomes an actual war.”

 

Reporters on the civil rights beat hardly noticed Boston. It was drowned out by two straight days of history conspiring to change places with Shakespeare. The President spoke of peace with our mortal enemy; George Wallace offered his body against the forces of the federal government; Jackson, Mississippi, and half a dozen other cities rioted; around the world, newspapers ran a photograph of an elderly Vietnamese monk setting himself aflame to protest the policies of his U.S.-sponsored government—and far from public view, in a seedy jail in Sunflower County, Mississippi, the local sheriff was asserting his power over the body of a sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer, who was in jail for trying to register to vote. “You bitch, we gon' make you wish you was dead,” the officer grunted, before ordering two other black inmates to take turns beating her senseless with a blackjack.
This
was the archetype of the struggle for civil rights. Boston didn't fit the script. When civil rights protests broke out in the North, they were treated as sympathy strikes for Birmingham—the implication being that blacks could not have grievances to press anywhere else. That the same day of the President's speech, June II, 650 picketers shut down construction on an annex to Harlem Hospital to protest segregated unions, immediately after which nervous Philadelphia officials negotiated for a handful of Negro plumbers to work a school construction site that was being picketed by civil rights protesters, then looked on in horror as white workers attacked the protesters—this the media tended to disregard.

Politicians noticed. Some remembered the news from April of the supposedly liberal California municipality—Berkeley—that had voted down a law banning discrimination in home rentals and sales, and the whispers from Michigan that the reason George Romney had won the governorship was that union members were angry at Democrat-backed antidiscrimination laws. An economist named Ted Humes began polling three cities with large Polish-American populations to test the hypothesis that urban white ethnics were leaning toward Goldwater in increasing numbers; in Pittsburgh, he learned, one beauty shop owner in a blue-collar, iron-clad Democratic neighborhood had secured one thousand signatures on her Goldwater for President petition. U.S. News editor David Lawrence reported on whites terrified of “reverse discrimination” : acting under “the President's order to advance Negro employees without regard to Civil Service procedures,” Lawrence said, a post office was goosing blacks 400 places up the promotion register. Stewart Alsop traveled with pollster Oliver Quayle and interviewed some five hundred Northern whites on race issues. They concluded that there was “a political goldmine” for
“a politician willing to exploit” the fears that Lawrence observed. Soon Clif White recruited Ted Humes for the National Draft Goldwater Committee. His campaign plan, after all, ranked “Conservatism revival” and “dedicated supporters” far below “civil rights” as Goldwater's political assets.

On June 25 a remarkable memo had begun circulating in Republican circles. Its writer, Peter H. Clayton, had been executive director of Citizens for Eisenhower-Nixon, a moderate redoubt. “As late as mid-March, I firmly held the view that Governor Nelson Rockefeller would be the Republican nominee,” he wrote. “I was equally certain that a Kennedy-Johnson ticket would be overwhelmingly re-elected in 1964.” But travels in twenty-four different states had convinced him that only Goldwater would win. The “dramatic change in the past 90 days has not involved anything good that Senator Goldwater has said or done,” he explained. It was, simply, that the electorate now identified John F. Kennedy with
extremism.
“The abandonment of peaceful, hopeful striving for social justice,” he said, “the hostility of the new Negro militancy,” which “has seemingly spread like wildfire from the South to the entire country ... seemingly undeterred by the antagonisms which these actions create”—these were associated in voters' minds with the White House. Citizens “seem to be looking for an alternative to Kennedy, a clear-cut alternative. As of this writing, that alternative is Senator Goldwater ... he has apparently chosen a course of speaking understandingly for the aspirations of the minorities while reiterating the convictions that local problems must be solved locally. This course might elect him.” Goldwater was, in other words, a candidate for voters in Boston as much as those in Birmingham—catering to white voters who were against the idea of federal civil rights legislation but at the same time desperate to receive assurances that this didn't make them bad people.

Clayton's hunch was being confirmed. Goldwater was receiving so much mail against Kennedy's civil rights bill that Kitchel complained of being “snowed under.” In Pete O‘Donnell's Texas, disenchanted Democrats by the hundreds were renouncing their party affiliation in mass rallies and joining the Republicans as if receiving Christ. Word was that some Southern congressmen were considering joining them. On May 20, in Montgomery County, Maryland—a wealthy D.C. suburb—a Goldwater rally brought out fifteen hundred. On May 24 O'Donnell urged it was time to move the National Draft Goldwater Committee to Washington. On May 25 South Carolina GOP county chairmen unanimously reconstituted themselves as the state's Draft Goldwater Committee. Clif White laid plans to move the Draft Goldwater Committee's Independence Day rally to Uline Arena, which held thousands more than Federal Hall. The
Washington Star's
political correspondent David Broder reported of the attendees at a Republican workshop in Pennsylvania the weekend after
Kennedy announced his civil rights legislation, “A surprising number—considering the scarcity of strong conservatives in the group—indicated a willingness, if not an eagerness, to see the nomination go to Senator Goldwater.”
Time
put Goldwater on its cover. Columnists Evans and Novak called the Goldwater boom “the closest thing to a spontaneous mass movement in modern American politics.” White canceled Uline Arena and booked the much larger D.C. Armory.