Tomorrow-Land (8 page)

What made Moses' adversarial reaction to legitimate civil rights critiques so difficult to understand was that it contradicted other projects he was undertaking while preparing the Fair. While being pilloried in the press for the lack of diversity among his staff, just ten miles away on the long-abandoned Jamaica Race Track in Jamaica, Queens—then the third-largest African-American neighborhood in the five boroughs—Moses was putting the finishing touches on Rochdale Village, the largest integrated housing complex in the world. “One of my babies,” he referred to it fondly.

Moses had earmarked the defunct Race Track in the center of Queens for redevelopment by the mid-1950s. From the start, the site had one huge advantage, according to the Master Builder: It had “no people to move.” Rochdale Village was conceived as an affordable integrated cooperative for New Yorkers, and to bring it to fruition, Moses teamed with his old ally, Abraham Kazan, the president of the United Housing Foundation.

The pair was the oddest of political couples. Kazan was an idealistic labor leader whose radical left-wing politics, somewhere between anarchism and socialism, were reflective of his humble Ukrainian origins. Yet, he and Moses had collaborated on several successful housing cooperatives since 1950. They also had a genuine and abiding admiration for one another. Moses, never one to bestow praise lightly, deemed Kazan a “working genius,” while Kazan admired the Master Builder for his loyalty. “If you got Moses to be on your side,” a Kazan associate recalled, “you knew that you didn't need anything more than a handshake to know that Moses would be with you through thick and thin.”

Still, due to Rochdale Village's biracial makeup, banks and builders shied away. That didn't stop Moses, who with his usual single-minded focus, steered the project to fruition by personally lobbying financiers and Governor Rockefeller for funding. “Rochdale Village owes its existence to Robert Moses,” Kazan later said.

In December 1963, just four months before the opening day of the World's Fair, Moses unveiled Rochdale Village and its fourteen-story buildings (twenty in total) with 5,800 apartments. Soon Rochdale Village's population was 80 percent white (the vast majority Jewish) and 20 percent African American. Quick to show off his vision of what integrated housing could and should look like, Moses planned bus tours from the World's Fair to the site for international and domestic politicians and VIPs.

In 1966 the
New York Times
would rave about Moses' handiwork in a piece titled
When Black and White Live Together.
While Congress debated “opening housing laws” aimed at ending the kind of discriminatory housing practiced in northern cities such as Chicago—a discussion that threatened to rip the Democratic Party apart—Rochdale Village could legitimately be held up as an example of what integrated housing could achieve. Despite his conservative racial beliefs—and unwillingness to challenge the hiring policies of New York's unions—Moses led the way for publicly financed integrated housing, proving that if nothing else, he was a man whose work was often ahead of his time.

8.

We preach freedom around the world, and we mean it . . . but are we to say to the world . . . that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettoes, no master race except with respect to Negroes?

—President John F. Kennedy, June 11, 1963

 

If I die, it will be in a good cause. I've been fighting for America just as much as the soldiers in Vietnam.

—Medgar Evers

 

By the end of 1962, President John F. Kennedy had reason to celebrate. Although the 1964 presidential election was more than a year away, he was riding high in the polls, leading potential Republican rivals by thirty points or more. After the dark days of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy was contemplating ways to reduce Cold War tensions by having the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and the United States sign a treaty limiting nuclear testing. Ever the cautious and pragmatic politician, domestically he moved to solidify his position with one hostile constituency, the business community, even as he kept a friendly one, African Americans, at arm's length.

The country was enjoying a buoyant economy with low unemployment and nearly nonexistent inflation, but Wall Street was distrustful of Kennedy. After his appearance at the ground-breaking ceremony for the World's Fair's US Federal Pavilion at Flushing Meadow Park, the president gave a speech to the Economic Club of New York at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, where he pledged a significant cut in federal and corporate taxes to spur the economy to even greater heights.

Introducing pro-business tax reform one year prior to his reelection bid was a politically astute move. Meanwhile, although Kennedy had pledged his support for civil rights during the 1960 presidential election—as did his Republican opponent, Vice President Richard M.
Nixon—he moved slowly on the issue once in office. On the campaign trail, Kennedy had promised to sign an executive order ending segregation in federally subsidized housing with “a stroke of a pen.” But he had waited until November 1962 to issue the order—and only after civil rights activists had mailed dozens of pens to the White House reminding him of his pledge—and even then it was a watered-down version, which left many of his supporters disappointed. “He had at this point, I think, a terrible ambivalence about civil rights,” said historian and Kennedy advisor Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.

Kennedy was all too aware of the bloc of Southern Democratic senators who were militantly opposed to any substantive civil rights measures. The last thing he wanted going into the 1964 campaign was to incite rebellion within his own party. Besides, at the time, Kennedy's advisors told him he could afford to be prudent: One aide stated that African Americans were “pretty much at peace,” and while civil rights could be explosive on a local level and were not necessarily relegated to the South—as Robert Moses' problems in New York showed—the issue ranked extraordinarily low in national polls.

In fact, civil rights was so low on the president's domestic agenda that he neglected to even mention the topic during his State of the Union address in January 1963. Louis Martin, a Chicago newspaper publisher, Democratic National Committee member, and one of Kennedy's closest African-American advisors, summed up how many civil rights leaders felt about Kennedy. “The fact is, the President cares more about Germany than about Negroes, he thinks it's more important,” Martin complained.

Some civil rights leaders were even considering making new alliances with liberal Republicans such as New York's Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller, Senator Jacob K. Javitz, and Senator Keating—all strong supporters of civil rights, the World's Fair, and Moses. Rockefeller was already sharpening his attacks on Kennedy, as he prepared another run for the White House in 1964. During a February 1963 speech celebrating President Lincoln's birthday, the governor criticized Kennedy for appointing segregationist judges to Southern benches.

Kennedy was infuriated. “Rockefeller gets away with murder. What's he doing for Negroes in New York?” he grilled a
Time
journalist who knew the Republican governor during an informal White House dinner the next night. However, the placid political climate would erupt into a national crisis and force his hand. The trouble had begun in earnest in September 1962, when the Fifth Circuit Court of the United States of Appeals ruled that James Meredith, an African-American Air Force veteran, was allowed to register at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. Meredith had first attempted to enroll in January—after being inspired by President Kennedy's inaugural speech. Despite the court order, it took federal agents, national guardsmen, and high-level negotiations between Mississippi's racist Democratic governor Ross Barnett, Robert Kennedy, and President Kennedy himself to get Meredith enrolled at “Ole Miss” the following month.

The president seemed as shocked by the turn of events as anyone else. He asked Martin, point blank, where young blacks were getting these new ideas from. Martin quickly shot back, “From you! You're lifting the horizons of Negroes.” The notion certainly wasn't what Kennedy was hearing from his white advisors, and from a purely political viewpoint, he was anxious to put the civil rights issue—and any talk of a civil rights bill—on the backburner. “We go up [to Congress] with that and they'll piss all over us,” he complained to aides.

With the election of Alabama governor George C. Wallace that same month, Kennedy's race problems were about to boil over. As a circuit judge, Wallace had been something of a moderate Democrat, at least by Southern standards. However, after the Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education
ruling—and more importantly, after his losing bid to become governor in 1958—Wallace reinvented himself as a hard-line segregationist, running a race-baiting campaign with the backing of the Ku Klux Klan. At his inaugural address in front of the Alabama state capitol building in January 1963, Wallace took an unequivocal stance in support of the Southern way of life. “I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation
now,
segregation
tomorrow,
segregation
forever!
” The fact that Governor Wallace
stood in the exact spot where a century earlier Jefferson Davis was sworn in as the president of the doomed Confederacy was probably not lost on the adoring Dixie crowd.

Wallace was the anti-Kennedy: short, pugnacious (a onetime boxer), and a skilled orator who knew how to work up a crowd; a lawyer who hailed from rural Alabama and who walked and talked like one of his “good ol' boy” constituents. He had served in the Air Force in World War II, flying bombing missions over Japan for General Curtis LeMay—the same trigger-happy general who thought Kennedy had sold out America's interest by negotiating with Khrushchev during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
*
To Northern Democratic politicians like Kennedy (or to unabashed urbanites like Moses) Wallace and his racist demagoguery were an embarrassment. But without Southern Democrats like Wallace (and the voters they represented) a Northern Democrat like Kennedy couldn't get elected to the White House, which is why the civil rights struggle in early 1963—one year before the Fair's debut—was not a priority for the chief executive.

And leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. knew it. King complained that 1962 was “the year that civil rights was displaced as the dominant issue in domestic politics. . . . The issue no longer commanded the conscience of the nation.” What's more, King and others knew that to move their cause to the forefront of America's consciousness, something needed to happen, something dubbed Project C. The C stood for Connor, as in Eugene “Bull” Connor, the Commissioner of Public Safety in Birmingham, Alabama, who embodied “the dark spirit of Birmingham, the hellish side of Birmingham,” according to one native Alabaman.

A dedicated racist and segregationist, Connor would drive around in a white tank—a heavily armored police car—to instill fear in Birmingham's black populace. Under his tyrannical rule, the Ku Klux Klan had a free hand to intimidate, assault, and murder blacks. In 1961, when the first wave of Freedom Riders made it to Birmingham, their bus was surrounded by local Klansman. Connor made sure the cross-burners
had a solid fifteen minutes to beat the riders before his police arrived to break up the melee. His reactionary take on civil rights was hardly out of the mainstream; like FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, Connor thought that the civil rights movement was a Communist plot. But King and his colleagues knew that they could use the Birmingham boss's racism to turn popular opinion against the South. “[Connor] believed that he would be the state's most popular politician if he treated the black violently, bloodily, and sternly,” said Wyatt Walker, a King aide, who helped plan the Project C campaign. “We knew that the psyche of the white redneck was such that he would inevitably do something to help our cause.”

Walker's plan was simple enough: The SCLC would organize a boycott of Birmingham's downtown business district in hopes of desegregating the whites-only establishments. In April 1963 the first protesters marched, but Connor stayed his hand. Then, on May 3, the SCLC began sending hundreds of youths, mostly teenagers from local high schools, on a peaceful march to the downtown area. As the kids marched and chanted “We Shall Overcome,” Connor let his police loose. They went on a rampage, assaulting the protesters with nightsticks while trained K-9 unit German shepherds mauled them and the local fire department unleashed high-velocity water cannons, powerful enough to strip bark off trees. It was a savage attack, orchestrated and perpetuated by local authorities, upon hundreds of youths who only wanted their right to frequent Birmingham's business district; and, as King and his aides had hoped, the bloodbath was captured by television cameras. The images of Connor's police dogs ripping into unarmed young marchers showed the country—and the world—a side of the United States that most Americans didn't want to acknowledge.

They certainly weren't images that helped Moses or the World's Fair any. Exhibitors from non-Western nations no doubt struggled to reconcile “the land of the free and home of the brave” that sought to contain Soviet Communism, even at the risk of a nuclear holocaust, in order to remake the world over in its own image, with a country where police attacked children without remorse. America's enemies were taking note, too. “We have the impression that American authorities both
cannot and do not wish to stop outrages by racists,” crowed Radio Moscow.

By now even the civic leaders of Birmingham had had enough of Connor and his terrorist tactics; just weeks after the launch of Project C, the city's business leaders decided to desegregate Birmingham's shopping district. However, for some African Americans it was a case of too little, too late; peaceful disobedience had run its course. The sight of defenseless children being mowed down by power-hoses, attacked by baton-swinging police, and mangled by German shepherds was the final straw. Hundreds of indignant blacks rioted, attacking police and white Birmingham pedestrians with glass bottles and rocks, while others torched the whites-only businesses that civil rights leaders wanted desegregated.

To separatists like Malcolm X, the rejection of King's Gandhian nonviolent principles by Birmingham blacks was exactly what he was hoping for. “The lesson of Birmingham,” the militant Nation of Islam preacher said, “is that the Negroes have lost their fear of the white man's reprisals and will react with violence, if provoked. This could happen anywhere in the country today.”

It was becoming apparent to the Kennedys that they didn't have a handle on what was happening on the streets of black America. If the president and his advisors hadn't noticed Louis E. Lomax's 1962 book,
The Negro Revolt,
the president, at least, took notice of novelist James Baldwin's lengthy
New Yorker
essay “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” The following year it was turned into a best-selling book,
The Fire Next Time,
and landed Baldwin on the cover of
Time,
just as all hell was breaking loose in Birmingham.

For a time the mainstream media considered Baldwin the voice of black America, and anyone who wanted to understand black America read him. This included Moses, who sent copies of the book to a dozen friends. Moses, however, had a different take than the president. “A strange, bitter, disturbing and essentially pathetic diatribe, one of those hoarse, out of the depths hymns of hate,” he wrote to his close friend Samuel “Judge” Rosenman, a former speechwriter for Franklin
Roosevelt—he coined the term “New Deal”—and now a member of the World's Fair's Executive Committee, who agreed.

Robert F. Kennedy was impressed enough with Baldwin that after meeting him at a Washington, DC, event he invited the thirty-eight-year-old Harlem native to his family's Park Avenue South apartment in Manhattan and asked him to bring other black intellectuals to discuss the problems of northern ghettos. On May 21 Baldwin brought actress Lena Horne, crooner/activist Harry Belafonte, playwright Lorraine Hansberry, and young Freedom Rider Jerome Smith, who, after suffering beatings by Alabama police, wasn't the least bit intimidated by the attorney general. “I want to vomit being in the same room with you,” he told the president's younger brother.

Kennedy, growing defensive and angry, mentioned how his Irish immigrant great-grandfather came to America with nothing and how his grandfather faced discrimination back in Boston; now his brother was the leader of the Free World. The comparison between the plight of the American Irish and black Americans enraged Baldwin. “Your family has been here for three generations and your brother's on top,” the novelist retorted. “My family has been here a lot longer than that, and we're on the bottom. That's the heart of the problem, Mr. Kennedy.”