Listening In (25 page)

The local police, the sheriff’s office, and the police department, by two in the morning had brought them pretty much under control. Then the governor sent his people in, and his people were game wardens with armbands, and alcohol and tax people with armbands, and tough [unclear]. They had carbines and they got out of their cars with clubs with these guns, and the local police asked them to get back, go away, that they had the situation under control, and that they would kill somebody, and they said that’s what they were here for. So then they started clubbing people, beating them, and then the situation got completely out of control for the next three hours. And it was finally brought under control about six Sunday morning.

Well, the Negro [unclear] felt that they had been betrayed, and all day Sunday, they indicated quite clearly that that night you were going to have a real war in Birmingham. A number of them were armed. They had knives, they had guns, and that they were going after these people with the armbands. And they felt that the governor had come in, taken over the city, and that there was no solution as far as they were concerned.

The President then made the determination to send the troops into Alabama, and that they would be available to be used in Birmingham if it was felt to be necessary, and he also went on television that night just before Martin Luther King came back and made a speech to the Negroes. That changed the whole complexion of the situation, because Martin Luther King told these people to calm down and stay at home, that the federal government was interested and was going to be active in the situation to protect them. The fact that we moved the troops into Alabama calmed the Negro community down, so there weren’t any incidents because I don’t think there’s any question that if that step hadn’t been taken that night, that the Negro community would have gotten out of hand, and you would have had a tough fight between the governor’s people and the Negro community.

We think that the agreement will be kept that was made. And there are problems, such as yesterday the school board suspending the thousand students that participated in the demonstrations. The Negro lawyer’s going to bring a lawsuit, which we may or may not enter also, to try to enjoin the school board from suspending the students. That will have to be worked out, but at least it would appear that the agreement that was made will be kept at least at the present time. We are optimistic about it. We’re not out of the woods as yet, but I think we feel that we have a good chance of having that kept.

The lessons that we’ve learned from it are, first, the importance of having some biracial committee in a community. Each one of these local communities, and in the state, the Negroes and the whites talking to one another so that they can air their grievances. One of the great problems as far as the Negroes we found in the last two and a half years is, that they feel there is no solution for what they want to accomplish, that nobody will talk to them. And in community after community, we find that to be so, that they don’t have, the Negroes feel that they have grievances, that there is no place for them to go. Then they want to demonstrate and they can’t get a license to demonstrate. And so that they want to walk down the street, and they’re not given a license, and therefore they’re put in jail. That exercises the other Negroes, they don’t have any place to go, they don’t have any place to complain, and they can’t picket about it because then they’re put in jail. So they feel a sense of frustration, and that’s what’s growing up in the South and really in the Northern cities.

The second thing that we learned, and which I’d like to take up with you today, is when Burke met with these business leaders in Birmingham and talked to them about hiring Negroes, they looked at the government agencies and said, “Well, why should we hire Negroes? You don’t hire Negroes.” And we looked at the situation in Birmingham, and found that it’s really a disgraceful situation as far as the government departments are concerned, that we really had done a very poor job.

The VA had done well and there were a number of Negroes who were employed by the post office. But by and large, they were of very low grade. There weren’t any Negroes that held any positions that anybody could see them, except perhaps somebody to sweep the floor or something like that. Otherwise, they weren’t being used as clerks or out front in positions of importance in any of these offices. And so we felt that something needed to be done to remedy that, and that you could do it quickly. I talked to a number of you about the situation in your own department, and John Macy
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did a great deal about pulling it all together, and I think we helped the situation down there. But sorry, Mr. President, I’d like to have maybe Mr. Macy give a report as to what the situation was in Birmingham, and what it is in some of these other major cities, and what’s been done about it in Birmingham.

MEETING WITH CIVIL RIGHTS LEADERS, AUGUST 28, 1963

On what may have been the most historic day of the Civil Rights Movement, in the immediate aftermath of the “I have a dream” speech just delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr., the leaders of the March on Washington were invited to the White House. They were greeted by a president who was obviously moved by the speech he had watched on television and, more to the point, had a detailed political plan for pushing forward the legislation they wanted. The tapes continue from these excerpts to reveal him going through the membership of the entire Congress, with great specificity, to help the leaders of the movement understand how high the mountain was that they were trying to climb. A. Philip Randolph had first called for a march on Washington in the summer of 1940; at last his moment had come, even if a new generation was required to put his vision into law. In these excerpts, the leaders exult in their momentary triumph, and gird for battle in the fall. Vice President Lyndon Johnson, who often felt excluded from the inner councils of the Kennedy administration, here speaks movingly about what can and cannot be achieved by a president working to advance civil rights.

PRESIDENT KENNEDY AND VICE PRESIDENT LYNDON B. JOHNSON MEET WITH ORGANIZERS OF “THE MARCH ON WASHINGTON FOR JOBS AND FREEDOM” IN THE OVAL OFFICE, WHITE HOUSE, WASHINGTON, DC, AUGUST 28, 1963

Willard Wirtz, secretary of labor; Floyd McKissick, national chairman of Congress of Racial Equality (CORE); Mathew Ahmann, executive director of the National Catholic Conference for Interracial Justice; Whitney M. Young, Jr., president of the National Urban League; Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; John Lewis, representative for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); Rabbi Joachim Prinz, president of the American Jewish Congress; Reverend Eugene Carson Blake, president of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA (NCC); A. Philip Randolph, president of the Negro American Labor Council (NALC); President Kennedy; Vice President Johnson; Walter P. Reuther, president of United Auto Workers (UAW); Roy Wilkins, executive secretary of the NAACP.

ROY WILKINS:
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You gave us your blessings. We think it changed the character of the protests. It was one of the prime factors in turning it into an orderly protest to help our government rather than a protest against our government. I think you’ll agree that was psychologically important. And the mood and attitude of the people there today pleased all of us, without exception.

[break]

WALTER REUTHER:
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The other thing that I think will come out of this, as I said today in my speech, after we get the legislation, that only means we’ve got a set of tools to work with. It doesn’t mean that automatically this problem is resolved. What we have to do is to develop a broad coalition of men of goodwill in every community, where we’ve got to implement this program. And I think that this is what this march has done. It has brought into being an active, functioning coalition around this central question of equality of opportunity and first-class citizenship. And I think if we reflect this by practical work in each community, we can mobilize the community, we can mobilize the men of goodwill, and we can search for answers in the light of reason by rational, responsible action. Because if we fail, then the vacuum that we create, through our failure, is going to be filled by the apostles of hatred. And reason is going to yield to riot. Brotherhood is going to yield to bitterness and bloodshed. So I think that this is really a more significant aspect of what we’re doing. We have put together the kind of coalition that can be meaningful at the community level, across this country, after we get the legislation, and it can be effective in mobilizing support for the legislation.

JFK:
Very fine, but let me just say a word about the legislation. There’s one thing that I, on this question of education. We have this juvenile program, as you know, in New York, and a lot, and the attorney general was out in Chicago on it the other day and was shocked by some of the crowding of the class, the leaving [?] of the school, the fact that the best teachers … and there’s no visiting by the teachers in their homes. And they won’t study, and the children won’t study unless [unclear] regardless of what their color or their income level is. Now, isn’t it possible for the Negro community to take the lead in committing major emphasis upon the responsibility of these families, even if they’re split and all the rest of the problems they have, on educating their children? Now, in my opinion, the Jewish community, which suffered a good deal under discrimination, and what a great effort they made, which I think has made their role influential, was in education, education of their children. And therefore they’ve been able to establish a pretty strong position for themselves.

[break]

A. PHILIP RANDOLPH:
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Mr. President, from the description you have made of the state of affairs of the House and Senate, it’s obvious that it’s going to take nothing less than a crusade to win approval for civil rights measures. And if it is going to be a crusade, I think that nobody can lead this crusade but you. I think that the people have got to be appealed to over the heads of the congressmen and senators.

[break]

JFK:
Here’s the vice president, he would like to say something before we …

LBJ:
[unclear] … this president has issued the strongest executive orders in housing, employment, armed services, that any administration has ever issued. He’s made the strongest recommendations to Congress, so far, [unclear]. Now he had more conferences in this room over here, where Medgar Evers
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used to hang out, [unclear]. He’s had [unclear], he’s had lawyers, has had business societies, councils, all others, the attorney general, the vice president, the President, [unclear] with them to get behind this legislation. I think he’s demonstrated in his television appearances and other public statements that he’s a champion in the cause of human rights, as a moral commitment because that’s what’s right, regardless of the political effect it may have.

Now there’s one thing the President can do, he can plead and lead and persuade and even threaten Congress, but he can’t run the Congress. Franklin Roosevelt at the height of his popularity in ’37 lost his court plan overwhelmingly, and he only lost two states in the ’36 election. I came here during that period. And this President can’t get those sixty votes, if he turned this White House upside down, and he preached on the television an hour every day, it will just drive some of those men stronger into [unclear]. Maybe the men at this table can do it. But things are going to be pretty hard, because those men have agreements, working language.