Listening In (23 page)

After a night of grim violence in Birmingham, JFK’s closest advisors gathered to keep events from spiraling further out of control. With the specter of a full-blown riot coming, they negotiate throughout the day with Martin Luther King, Jr., who is essential to maintaining calm, notwithstanding the fact that he was the target of a bomb the night before. Despite some mutual suspicion, King’s team and JFK’s work together to defuse the situation, and their official statements, written in collaboration, preserve a modicum of calm.

RFK:
Now, have you got what happened last night? You want to hear a few things?

JFK:
OK.

RFK:
I guess shortly before twelve, maybe eleven-thirty, they had this explosion that took place, I guess first at Martin Luther King’s brother’s house, Reverend King, and virtually demolished his house, so that he was very fortunate to escape. About thirty minutes later, an explosion took place four miles away at a motel where Martin Luther King stays, and badly damaged it. Immediately, at both places, crowds gathered. And then the crowds got angry, but the police said the sheriff’s office were able to have the situation reasonably under control. There was some brick throwing, and the crowd was unfriendly, but by two or so in the morning, they had the situation reasonably under control.

At that time, the governor moved two or three hundred of these special deputies. And the newsmen, Claude Sitton and others, heard the police tell them to put their guns back in the cars, that they didn’t need them, but they got out anyway and they started shoving people around, sticking their guns into people, and hitting them with billies, and then the crowd became more [unclear] riots and brickthrowing. All of this lasted for the next three or four hours, and almost got out of hand. A number of the policemen were badly hurt, and I guess a number of the Negroes were badly hurt. And it was very close to becoming complete chaos.

During the course of it, a couple of buildings were set on fire and it appears that a Negro was responsible for that. When the fire department came to put the fire out, a number of Negroes gathered and started throwing rocks and stones and all kinds of things, and wouldn’t let them put the fire out. And then another building caught on fire, and the fire department then refused to come back because they said it was so difficult. The result is, I guess, both buildings burned down.

The crowds dispersed as of about daylight this morning, five or six. And all of the police, all of the sheriff’s office were up, around, and active. The leaders of the Negroes feel that the sheriff’s office and the police handled themselves reasonably well. They do have very bitter complaints about the people who were sent in by the governor. The sheriff said that he didn’t think that those who were responsible for the violence as far as the Negroes were concerned were those who were associated with Martin Luther King, but they were the criminal element of Birmingham, and the individuals who never liked the police. Today everybody on both sides, the police department side and to a considerable extent the Negroes, were all worked up about it. The Negro Reverend Walker, whose wife got hit by the butt of a rifle, she had headaches all day, he said that the Negroes, when dark comes tonight, that they’re going to start going after the policemen, headhunting, and try to shoot to kill the policemen. He said it’s completely out of hand.

Martin Luther King is coming back, I guess he is probably in Birmingham at the present time. He is going to have a rally or meeting at five in which he is going to ask all the Negroes to go back home and stay home tonight and stay off the streets, and that violence has no role to play in this. And that they should pray for what they did last night, causing disorder. He’ll have some effect on those that attend, the rest, it’s questionable. On the other side, they’ve got, I suppose, six or seven hundred policemen now, with the ones that they’ve deputized, the ones the governor sent in, the police that are there anyway in the sheriff’s office. So they’re going to have the city pretty well patrolled. They’re going to be careful, be on top of the situation.

On the other side, the Negroes who are tough and mean and have guns, who have been bitter for a long period of time, who are worked up about this, and figure one of the best services they can perform is to shoot some of them. So if you have an incident, and the incident, another bombing for instance, or something like that, or a fire, and it attracted large numbers of Negroes, the situation might very well get out of hand. The sheriff’s office said that he thought that if they had the same kind of situation as last night, that they probably wouldn’t be able to control them because of the feeling of the policemen, etc.

Now we have, as far as sending the troops in, we discussed it for a long period of time, and of course there are the obvious drawbacks. We don’t have the clear-cut situation that we’ve had in the other situations where we sent either marshals or troops in. We don’t have the situation getting completely out of hand as it did in Montgomery a year ago with the Freedom Riders. In addition to protecting the riders traveling through the state, and then you sent your personal emissary down, John Siegenthaler,
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and then he was beaten, after the governor had given you assurances he would maintain law and order. We had an excuse, really, sending marshals in at that time. We had certainly as far as Oxford.

We don’t have the same kind of situation at the present time. The governor has indicated publicly that he is going to maintain law and order. The group that has gotten out of hand has not been the white people, it’s been the Negroes, by and large. So to work up a proclamation, which you’d give us, the basis of which to send troops in, at this time, is far more difficult. The argument for sending troops in and taking some forceful action is what’s going to happen in the future. You’re going to have these kinds of incidents, the governor has virtually taken over the city. You’re going to have his people around sticking bayonets in people, and hitting people with clubs and guns, et cetera. You’re going to have rallies all over the country calling upon the President to take some forceful action, and why aren’t you protecting the rights of the people in Birmingham? And we feel that based on the success that they had in Birmingham, and the feeling of the Negroes generally, and the reports that we get from other cities, not just in the South, but this could trigger off a good deal of violence around the country now. The Negroes saying that they have been abused for all these years, and they are going to have to start following the ideas of the Black Muslims, not go along with the white people.

If they feel, on the other hand, that the federal government is their friend, and is intervening for them, is going to work for them, this could head some of that off. I think that’s the strongest argument for doing something, the fact that we’re going to have more difficulties down in Birmingham. It won’t perhaps be as clear-cut, as it is at the present time, about sending somebody in, because they’re going to be smaller incidents, and perhaps be more difficult to hang our hat as to why we should send it in.

Now, I do want to suggest an alternative or a possibility. What we could perhaps do in this case. It’s got some disadvantages and some advantages. It’s sort of a halfway step, of landing these three or four hundred troops in Birmingham, and just saying that they are going to stand by. Put a statement out by you that you’re greatly concerned—maintenance of law and order, the rights of people, et cetera. That these troops will stay in Birmingham and we’ll make a determination as time goes by as to whether they should be used, and whether you’re going to issue a proclamation to move them into the city. The second alternative to that would be to move them to Fort McClellan.

UNIDENTIFIED:
About thirty miles away.

RFK:
Thirty miles away. And have it get out that you sent four or five hundred troops in there, and that perhaps that more will go in tomorrow morning.

JFK:
The problem really isn’t the maintenance of law and order, as you said, is it, because it might be that if we send the troops into Birmingham or McClellan, there would be no disturbances, because there was sort of a repression of the city.

RFK:
That’s right.

JFK:
Then they might tear up that paper agreement they made. Therefore, you’d have the Negroes knocked out again without getting the agreement, and then we wouldn’t have any reason to go in there.

RFK:
The committee that made the agreement, that backed up the agreement, is meeting right now. And it’s going to be suggested to them by one of their leaders that they make their names public. To say that they made this agreement and that they come out publicly for it. Maintenance of law and order, and say that we are going to live up to it. So let it be spread throughout the city. Now these are the people that really control Birmingham—the wealthy, the important.

JFK:
They’ve been able to keep that agreement quiet, I don’t know how.

RFK:
The names, you mean? Yeah.

JFK:
Yeah. What is King? I mean, King has said that we should issue a statement.

RFK:
Now as part of sending the troops in to some other place. The preference would be, the first thing we’d do, we’d announce that Burke Marshall
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is going back. The second thing is probably you would get out that you already have a general in Birmingham. And that’s already landed there, and that’s making this available. And that Burke Marshall is going back, and that you are watching the situation. And the third step is the fact that you are sending these troops in, and they’ll be landing in another hour and some more will come in tonight. And then …

JFK:
Let’s see, under that strategy, I would issue some sort of statement from here which would be asking the Negroes to stay off the streets, and so on, and then asking the agreement
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which was made be implemented, and so … Then Burke Marshall will be going back, then we put the troops in at the airport. How far is the airport?

UNIDENTIFIED:
It’s five miles from the center of town, Mr. President.

JFK:
The general, let’s say you began to have trouble during the evening. Once we announce that the troops had arrived, the governor would probably issue a statement saying that he had complete …

RFK:
Well, then, I think you’d probably have to nationalize the Guard, too. So he
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doesn’t take over the Guard.

JFK:
He would announce that he has control of the city. So it really is just a question, we have to have two things. First, we have to have law and order, and therefore the Negroes not to be running around the city. And then secondly, we have to get this arrangement working. We can’t just have the Negroes not running around the city, and then have the agreement blow up because … if the agreement blows up, the other remedy we have under that condition then is to send legislation up to the Congress this week as our response to that action happening. Say there’s this case, unless there’s a means of getting relief, we have to provide legislation. We may have to do that anyways, but at least that would be our public response to the, if that agreement blows up.

BURKE MARSHALL:
If that agreement blows up, the Negroes will be …

JFK:
Uncontrollable.

MARSHALL:
And I think not only in Birmingham.

JFK:
The only thing is, supposing we put our troops in there and then these whites then say, “Well, now we are going to withdraw from the agreement.” Or do you think they would?

MARSHALL:
I can’t tell what they’d do. I think, Mr. President, the governor and the outgoing city government are doing everything they can to make that agreement blow up, the basic reason the situation is so difficult. I shouldn’t wonder but what these highway patrol are deliberately being awfully tough to provoke incidents, on the theory that the more incidents they can provoke, the more [unclear] in the city and the more scared everyone gets, including the white businessmen.

JFK:
Do we have any idea what the white businessmen would think if we put troops in there?

UNIDENTIFIED:
They would not like it.

JFK:
They wouldn’t like it?

MARSHALL:
No. I’m quite sure.

JFK:
You haven’t talked to any of them today, have you?

MARSHALL:
No. You see, their whole desire is to prevent that. They want Birmingham to look like Atlanta, and they want it to solve its own problems. So their desire is to prevent that. So they wouldn’t like that. And they might rather have that than have a racial war down there, but those are the alternatives, and they understand them clearly as they did last week. They made concessions to the Negroes because they’d rather make concessions than have a great deal of racial disturbances. So again, if the alternatives were clear to them, maybe they wouldn’t mind. But the immediate reaction of sending troops in there would be very bad, I’m sure. As the attorney general says, I think in the case of Montgomery, in the case of Oxford, a great many people in the South who are white really thought we had to do what we did. And I don’t think a great many white people in the South would think we’d have to send troops into Birmingham.

JFK:
One of the reasons is because none of the papers, you have morning and noon, the timing is different. You have morning and afternoon papers. One of the casualties [?] is, this has a lot of Oxford in it, doesn’t it?