Tomorrow-Land (10 page)

But while the Brooklyn chapter of CORE considered Lomax's idea to obstruct the World's Fair, King and the venerable A. Phillip Randolph, the Oakland-based union leader and civil rights activist, announced their own idea: They wanted to sponsor a “March on Washington for Freedom and Jobs.” Now that President Kennedy's civil rights legislation had been introduced to Congress, King and Randolph wanted to hold a massive rally right in the heart of the nation's capital—the largest biracial plea for racial unity in American history. The idea was close to Randolph's heart; he had first proposed it to President Franklin D. Roosevelt back in 1941 but called the march off after Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 desegregating “the defense industries or government because of race, creed, color or national origin.”

All the major civil rights groups backed the march; even the militant Brooklyn chapter of CORE proudly supported such a broad appeal for civil rights. The Kennedys, however, were less than enthusiastic about the idea. The president feared that such an event would endanger his civil
rights bill in the Senate, where the usual cast of racist Dixiecrats like Senators Russell and Thurmond and their ilk were prepared to kill the legislation by any means necessary.

At a meeting at the White House on June 22, 1963, with the “Big Four,” Kennedy was blunt. “It seemed to me a great mistake to announce a march on Washington before the bill was even in committee,” he told the group. “We want success in Congress, 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 a point of a gun.' ”

The group's elder statesman, Wilkins of the NAACP, agreed with the president. He thought the timing was dangerous. Wilkins, the urbane New Yorker who lived in the upper-middle-class African-American neighborhood of St. Albans, Queens, was cautious and practical—much more like Kennedy than King. He had long been suspicious of King's nonviolent techniques and his fame. Both men and the organizations they headed were diametrically opposed within the civil rights movement: King's SCLC was Southern, Christian, and dedicated to the principles of spiritual nonviolence, utilizing Gandhi's notion of
satyagraha
—“truth force” or “soul force”—to bring about racial equality; while Wilkins's NAACP was Northern, secular, and dedicated to chipping away at discrimination with lawsuit after lawsuit, one legislative victory at a time. But King had a response for both Kennedy and Wilkins. “I have never engaged in any direct action movement which did not seem ill-timed,” he told them.

Realizing that the march was inevitable, Kennedy threw his administration's weight behind the event. “The march has been taken over by the government,” complained Malcolm X, who referred to it as the “Farce on Washington,” though he would travel to the capital to witness the historic event for himself. “This is government controlled.”

Indeed it was. Robert Kennedy's Justice Department managed most of the logistics, the date and time (a Wednesday afternoon, when many potential protesters would be at work), and site (the Lincoln Memorial). Not only was the latter historically appropriate, it would keep the crowds
away from DC's commercial centers—easing the fears of shopkeepers and business owners who worried about a riot. The memorial was also surrounded by water on three sides, making it easier to control the crowd should things turn violent. Major League Baseball wasn't taking any chances: The league cancelled two Washington Senators' games. The capital was on lockdown.

The government also paid for the sound system that the march's many speakers and performers would use. Few of the civil rights leaders—if any at all—knew that Jerry Bruno, one of the Kennedys' top Secret Service agents, would sit behind the statue of President Lincoln with a kill switch, ready to silence the speakers in deus ex machina fashion should any orator get carried away.

On the morning of August 28, 1963, a sweltering, muggy day, more than a quarter million people flooded into the nation's capital. The protesters, who had come from all over the country, marched peacefully along the Mall, while inside the White House Kennedy and his advisors discussed another vexing problem that was taking up more and more of the president's time: Vietnam. As they considered their policy options, they could hear the protesters as the march got under way. Kennedy halted his meeting so he and his advisors could watch on television, just as millions of Americans at home did (the major networks had preempted their regular programming). And like the rest of America, Kennedy was amazed as King stood before the Lincoln Memorial to deliver the keynote address and proclaim his “dream.”

King made reference to the nation's history, its Declaration of Independence, President Lincoln, and the Emancipation Proclamation, summing up in one speech the colossal contradictions of an America that proudly proclaimed itself the global leader of peace and democracy—a country that was busy organizing a World's Fair in New York City based on the notion of peace through understanding; a country that had less than two decades earlier destroyed Hitler's
Wehrmacht,
liberated a ravaged European continent, and now opposed the threat of global Communism in faraway lands like Vietnam. Yet this same country had never come to terms with its own tortured racial history, which was
still being written in the blood of new victims on a regular basis in the North and South alike; a history that everyone involved—from King, the marchers, and the Kennedys to the KKK and their protectors down South to the racists who disgraced the halls of the US Senate—knew would claim more innocent lives in the weeks and months to come.

“And so,” King said, looking out at the biracial ocean of humanity gathered around the Mall's reflecting pool, “even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. . . . I have a dream today!” Back at the White House, President Kennedy, who knew a thing or two about speechmaking, was suitably impressed as he watched on television from his living quarters. “He's damned good,” the president said, turning to his advisors. “Damned good!”

For that day at least, the country seemed united; maybe “Peace Through Understanding” was possible after all. But just in case, the Kennedys had more than 2,500 national guardsman and 4,000 members of the US Army stationed in the capital to supplement DC's police department. The Justice Department also had 14,000 members of the 82nd Airborne on standby in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. But the March on Washington transpired without incident.

The civil rights movement had now gone mainstream. The march attracted a dozen celebrity-activists who wanted to fight the good fight, from gospel singer Odetta, jazz vocalist Mahalia Jackson, and crooner Harry Belafonte to movie stars like Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, and the enigmatic Marlon Brando, who carried a cattle prod to show people the kind of weapons Southern police used against African Americans.

There was also a crop of younger folksingers, who were far more influential with the white collegiate members of the crowd. Peter, Paul and Mary sang their No. 1 hit “Blowin' in the Wind.” Joan Baez, the
stunning ebony-haired beauty with an angelic voice, who was both the darling of the folk music set and its political conscience, had brought along her moody poet-singer boyfriend Bob Dylan, who was creating a body of work that was steadily rewriting the rules of American folk music. Not that Baez had an easy time convincing Dylan, who was suspicious of politics and political movements, to perform. “I had to use Brando's cattle prod to get him up there up, practically,” she joked. “But he did it. It wasn't really his thing, but he did it.”

When it was his turn at the microphone, Dylan sang a new song, “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” that referenced the death of Medgar Evers, and a duet with Baez on his own “Blowin' in the Wind” (from his second album,
The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan,
released that spring). Although the young activists in the folk music scene had already begun referring to Dylan as the “voice of his generation,” not everyone at the march was impressed: Lancaster, Belafonte, and Heston all “stood up to stretch and chat” among themselves as he sang. “I preferred to see Odetta up there,” said African-American comedian and activist Dick Gregory, who put his hands over his ears during Dylan's set.

Despite the generational differences, by any measure it was a triumphant day for the forces of progress in the country. Something was indeed changing in America. To the tens of thousands who participated in the momentous event, and to the millions who watched on television at home, it certainly seemed that way. But not to Dylan. Looking in the distance at the Capitol, where segregationist senators went about their normal business in an attempt to ignore the March, Dylan wasn't optimistic about the future at all. “Think they're listening?” he asked before answering his own question. “No, they ain't listening at all.”

10.

Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song

I'll sing it so softly, it'll do no one wrong.

On Birmingham Sunday the blood ran like wine

And the choir kept singing of Freedom.

—“Birmingham Sunday” by Richard Fariña

 

Two weeks after the March on Washington, the nation and the world were reminded why Birmingham, Alabama, had earned the nickname “Bombingham.” Since 1945 some fifty bombings had occurred in the city, each targeting the homes or gathering places of civil rights activists. Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth, one of the founders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had his home destroyed and his church attacked on multiple occasions. No one was ever caught or prosecuted for the crimes.

That was life in Birmingham; if you were black, you never knew what might happen. “From the time I was very small, I remember the sound of bombs exploding across the street, our house shaking,” recalled Angela Davis, the author and Black Power activist, years later. “I remember my father having to have guns at his disposal at all times because of the fact that at any moment . . . we might expect to be attacked.” Davis recalled how Birmingham's Commissioner of Public Safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, might be heard on the radio announcing, “Niggers have moved into a white neighborhood; we better expect some bloodshed tonight.” Added Davis: “And sure enough there would be bloodshed.”

Connor was so volatile, his power so absolute, even some of his fellow segregationists feared him. “I didn't trust the man . . . he was unpredictable,” admitted former Alabama governor James Paterson. “Frankly, I was a bit afraid of him.” When Paterson ran for governor in 1958, he did so without Connor's endorsement, so in order to win he ran
to the right
of his opponent, George C. Wallace, bragging to voters how, as the state's attorney general, he got the NAACP kicked out of Alabama. It would
be the last time that anyone outflanked Wallace on the segregation issue. With men like that in charge, the black citizens of the Yellowhammer State had good reason to fear for their lives.

On Sunday, September 15, 1963, the world at large would understand. That morning was a busy one at the 16th Street Baptist Church, the same church where back in May, hundreds of children had begun their peaceful march to downtown Birmingham only to be met by Connor's police dogs and fire hoses. It wasn't any ordinary Sunday: The annual Youth Day services were to begin promptly at eleven. The black children of Birmingham were very much on everyone's mind; the state's schools had been desegregated by federal order just a week before. Inside the church four hundred people, including some eighty children, were preparing to take part in that celebration after months of struggle. The theme of the day's sermon was “The Love That Forgives.”

No one got to hear it. At 10:22 a.m. as four young girls—fourteen-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, and Carole Robertson and eleven-year-old Denise McNair—were changing into their finest Sunday clothes for the occasion, a dozen sticks of dynamite planted by KKK terrorists ripped a hole in the eastern side of the church, exploding the stone staircase, killing all four girls and injuring another twenty-two people. From out of the dust and rubble staggered an elderly man, holding a shoe that had belonged to his granddaughter, the rest of her bloodied body buried among the ruins. The blast had blown out the windows of cars parked blocks away. Soon a crowd of two thousand gathered at the destroyed church, where only one stained-glass window remained—depicting Christ surrounded by a group of small children.

The horror and rage boiled over into a riot, as the black citizens of Birmingham fought with the city's racist police, bombarding them with rocks and bottles. Governor Wallace, who only a week earlier had said that what was needed to stop desegregation was “a few first-class funerals” and got what he had asked for, called in the National Guard. Before the day was over, more young blacks would die: Johnny Robinson, age sixteen, was shot in the back after running away from a police officer; and Virgil Ware, a thirteen-year-old heading to his suburban home with
his brother, was shot twice by Larry Joe Sims, a sixteen-year-old white Eagle Scout who was returning with a friend from a segregationist rally. Neither assassin would ever face jail time.

“When an American city is ruled by the police dog, the high-pressure fire hose, the shotgun and the bomb, then it no longer can be considered a city ruled by law,” declared a
New York Times
editorial. “The massacre of innocents in a church” and the murder of Robinson “were bestial acts,” the editorial continued. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Birmingham before nightfall and sent a telegram to President Kennedy predicting “the worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen” unless federal troops intervened. Kennedy, while decrying the murders, refused. The black citizens of Birmingham were on their own; and in at least one neighborhood, where one of the little girls had lived, they took matters into their own hands. “In my neighborhood all the men organized themselves into an armed patrol,” Davis said. “They had to take their guns and patrol our community every night because they did not want that to happen again.”

The following week the nation expressed its rage. More than ten thousand people gathered at a Washington, DC, rally where Bayard Rustin, deputy director of the recent March on Washington, called for a nonviolent “uprising” in a hundred American cities. James L. Farmer Jr. of CORE, who had sat in the Oval Office with the Kennedys, now told the angry crowd that if the administration didn't double its civil rights efforts, it “will be replaced.” At the rally, members of the Brooklyn Chapter of CORE were seen carrying signs calling on President Kennedy to fire FBI director J. Edgar Hoover for his refusal to prosecute racial murders in the South.

There were similar rallies and demonstrations all over the country that day: Boston and Philadelphia; Houston, Texas, and Shreveport, Louisiana; Des Moines, Iowa, and Fort Wayne, Indiana; Lexington, Kentucky, and Kansas City, Missouri; as well as Milwaukee, Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Portland, Oregon. But perhaps the most astonishing event of the day took place in Birmingham, where two white pastors participated in the funeral services of the two black teenagers who had been murdered in the chaotic aftermath of the church bombings.

In New York City, where the racial tensions of the summer of '63 threatened to boil over into a dramatic stall-in on the highways to Robert Moses' World's Fair, thousands of people demonstrated, showing Moses, Mayor Wagner, and Governor Rockefeller that the battle for civil rights was far from just a Southern problem: In the Bronx, a thousand people, including eight children who carried coffins for Birmingham's dead children, marched to the borough's courthouse; in Queens, 2,500 people gathered at St. Alban's Memorial Park; and in Brooklyn, 4,500 New Yorkers from eighteen different churches marched to Brownsville's Betsy Head Memorial Playground—transformed by Moses into a magnificent public pool in 1937. Now Moses' handiwork had become a gathering place for citizens who had had enough of the empty promises of their leaders in New York and Washington. No doubt, it had never occurred to Moses that one of his parks or his pools could become a stage for the “professional integrationists” that he often ridiculed. However, it was a sign of the times and one that would have serious repercussions for the World's Fair.