Thursday, May 2, 1963. D-Day, the activists had taken to calling it, as if it were the beginning of a carefully planned campaign instead of a desperate gamble; as if they were storming the Normandy beaches instead of filling the streets of Birmingham, Alabama, with children.
They waited until around one o’clock to begin. Then they came out of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in waves, almost a thousand of them, girls and boys, teenagers and grade-school kids, the youngest eight, seven, six years old, marching in defiance of the authorities’ orders. Down the church’s grand stone steps they went, past Kelly Ingram Park across the street, toward downtown, into the police lines, where the arrests began. A dozen; two dozen; so many the police had to bring in school buses to carry them all. By evening they’d taken six hundred children into custody. One day down, and Birmingham’s jails were already overflowing.
The protests started again on Friday afternoon, a column of sixty kids coming two by two out of the church; a thousand more still inside, waiting their turn. The first group marched a block, to the far edge of the park. There the police stopped them, not to arrest them—there was no point now that the jails were full—but to tell them they had to disperse. When they refused, the commanding officer nodded to the firemen lined up behind him and told them to turn on the hoses.
The first shock of water pushed most of the marchers back. But ten of the sixty held their ground, clasping hands and singing a single-word song—“Freedom”—while the spray soaked through them.1 In response the firemen increased the water pressure, until the stream from the hoses was so intense it could rip bricks out of mortar. For an instant the kids withstood that too. Then the blast struck one of them—a wisp of a girl—straight on, and flung her off her feet. As she hit the ground the firemen concentrated their hoses on her, spinning her backward, rolling her body along the pavement.
Meanwhile, more children were pouring out of the church, swinging around the other side of the park, where the hoses couldn’t reach them. To block their way the police rushed in the dogs: six German shepherds trained to attack on their handlers’ command, straining on their leashes as they lunged, snarled, and snapped at the marchers. The sight of them sent the kids reeling, some of them racing into the park, others stumbling back toward the church, still others trapped in the crowd. Down went three teenagers who hadn’t moved fast enough, their arms and legs torn open by the mauling dogs. And down went Jim Crow broken on the brutal streets of Birmingham.
Birmingham, 1963
MARTIN LUTHER KING knew the risks of mounting a major campaign in Birmingham. It was impossible not to know. Built as a steel town in the late 1800s, it had long been one of the most fiercely defended bastions of Jim Crow, the dark heart of one of the South’s most segregated states. For years the Ku Klux Klan had dominated the city government, its power granted by Birmingham’s elite, a collection of hard-nosed businessmen known as the Big Mules. Klan violence was endemic: the town was so violent its Black citizens grimly referred to it as Bombingham.
The terror was made possible by Birmingham’s longtime police commissioner, Eugene “Bull” Connor. Put into office by the Big Mules in 1937, Connor took it as his personal mission to maintain segregation with the full force of the law; he once threatened to arrest the first lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, when she tried to sit on the Black side of a Birmingham conference hall. And he was more than willing to look the other way when white supremacists took the defense of Jim Crow into their own hands, as they had in their bloody assault on the Freedom Riders in 1961. There was a joke African Americans sometimes told. A Black man in Chicago woke up one morning and told his wife that Jesus came to him in a dream and told him to go to Birmingham. “Did Jesus say He’d go with you?” his wife asked. “Well,” the husband replied, “He said He’d go as far as Memphis.”2
The situation was made even worse by state politics. In November 1962 Alabama voters elected forty-three-year-old George Wallace as their new governor. Born and raised in Alabama’s hardscrabble Black Belt, Wallace had started his political career as something of a populist, promising to address the obvious needs of the state’s poor whites. When he’d first run for governor in 1958, though, his opponent had swept past him by claiming that Wallace was soft on race. It was a mistake Wallace wouldn’t repeat. In his 1962 campaign he perfected a slashing assault on the civil rights movement, the liberals who supported it, and the federal government that, however reluctantly, had brought its weight to bear against the white South’s obstruction of justice. On inauguration day, January 14, 1963, he made clear that he’d govern precisely as he’d campaigned. “In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth,” he proclaimed in his inaugural address, “I draw the line in the dust and toss down the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say segregation now . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.” Afterward a supporter complained about the speech’s tenor. Wallace shrugged him off. “I started off talking about schools and highways and prisons and taxes—and I couldn’t make them listen,” he said. “Then I began talking about niggers—and they stomped the floor.”3
Of course King knew the danger. But he went to Birmingham anyway. In part it was a matter of pride. As a public figure he towered over the movement. On the ground it had swept past him in waves of protest he’d inspired but rarely joined. The harder the movement pushed, the more glaring the gap became. Behind his back some of SNCC’s most devoted activists had taken to calling him “De Lawd,” for what they saw as his tendency to preach about suffering he wasn’t willing to endure and his willingness to accept adulation he hadn’t earned. He felt the gap too, though not just because it wounded his pride. “This is the only way to be delivered from evil,” he told his congregation in early March 1963. “It can only be done when we allow the energy of God to be let loose in our souls.”4 In the end, King went to Birmingham because he’d been called to. The campaign’s demands were humble enough: SCLC wanted Birmingham to desegregate the downtown stores, to hire at least some African Americans to work in those stores, and to establish a biracial committee to discuss ending segregation in other areas. Its explicitly Gandhian tactics were far more aggressive. First there would be small-scale sit-ins, to be coordinated with a series of mass meetings aimed at building community support for the campaign. Once that support was secure, the demonstrations would grow and be coupled with a boycott of the offending businesses. Only then would the mass marches—and the mass arrests—begin. If all else failed, SCLC would bring in busloads of supporters from across the South, fill the jails to overflowing, attract mass publicity, and cripple the city government. Out of that paralysis concessions were sure to come.
The campaign started on April 3, 1963. Immediately it floundered. Few of Birmingham’s African Americans were willing to run the enormous risks that even the slightest protest would bring: arrest, possible beatings, perhaps death. For a week the campaign managed to mount a series of minor protests, none of them large enough to rouse the Black community, much less to threaten Birmingham’s power structure. Another such week and the campaign would collapse. So King tried to create a catalytic event. On Good Friday, April 12, he led a small march, violating a hastily secured court order banning demonstrations. Bull Connor had him arrested.
Instead of winning the campaign support, though, King’s jailing brought him a cascade of criticism. Many of the nation’s major newspapers—the Washington Post and New York Times foremost among them—dismissed his actions as ill-conceived: designed, the Post suggested, to promote his standing rather than to serve the cause of racial justice. But it was an article in the local paper that stung King most. A group of white ministers, moderate men, condemned his extremism, which they said incited hatred and violence. Sitting alone in his cell—Connor had put him into solitary confinement—King used the margins of the paper to scribble out his reply. The result was one of the movement’s most powerful testaments, the struggle’s justification by faith. “Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized an extremist . . . I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label,” he wrote. “Was not Jesus an extremist for love: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ Was not Amos an extremist for justice: ‘Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: ‘I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.’ Was not Martin Luther an extremist: ‘Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.’”5
King spent nine days in jail, long enough for the campaign to galvanize around him. But it didn’t. For several days after his release the numbers of people attending the movement’s mass meeting were dispiritingly small, too few to mount the next march, scheduled—in defiance of yet another court order—for May 2. And the national press, so critical to the movement’s momentum, was losing interest in the protests. That’s when one of King’s most militant advisers, the electric James Bevel, proposed an extraordinarily dangerous step. Clearly Birmingham’s adults were too scared to march, he said. But their children weren’t. They had as much stake in the civil rights struggle as their parents did. They didn’t have their parents’ responsibilities, though—jobs to hold on to, rent to pay, families to support—that made the cost of defiance so high. Ask the children to march, said Bevel. They’d come. And if the police tried to stop them, as they were likely to do, the clash would be so powerful it would capture the nation’s attention.
Some of King’s advisers, particularly those from Birmingham, vigorously opposed the move. What right did the movement have to put children at risk? What if official violence escalated? What if a child were injured? What if she were killed? Others argued that children old enough to profess their faith were old enough to put it into action. King was torn. He knew that the campaign was failing, that something drastic had to be done. But the risk was so great, the possibility of tragedy so high. In the end he didn’t formally endorse the tactic. But he let Bevel send out the word. On Thursday the children would march.
Hope
WITHIN HOURS OF the Friday afternoon assault grainy footage of the carnage was playing on the networks’ evening news shows. The next morning photos of the dogs and the hoses were plastered across the front pages of the newspapers that a few weeks before were condemning the campaign: the New York Times ran not one but three photos, stacked one on top of another. The international press ran the images too, along with fierce condemnations of the southern racial regime. “To turn high pressure hoses on peaceful demonstrators is another act of calculated barbarity which besmirches Alabama,” declared the editors of an Indian newspaper, “if that state had any reputation left to be besmirched at all.”6
In Birmingham the protests intensified. There was another afternoon of marches on Saturday, May 4, the situation so tense King and Bevel feared the protesters might meet violence with violence. On Sunday the campaign took a day of rest, followed on Monday with the biggest march yet, adults now joining the children, at least a thousand people taking to the streets, eight hundred of them arrested and shipped off to jails that couldn’t possibly hold them, their every move recorded by the army of reporters who had descended on the city over the weekend. Finally the Big Mules had had enough. In a series of tense negotiations brokered by Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department, they gave in to almost all of the campaign’s original demands. But by then the movement had surged far past the desegregation of Birmingham’s stores. For more than sixty years the nation had accommodated Jim Crow. And in a week of moral witness, of the boundless courage that redemptive suffering required, the children of Birmingham had released in America a force that sparkled with hope.
There were critics, of course. “I’ll say this,” Malcolm X told the press, “if anybody sets a dog on a black man, the black man should kill that dog—whether he is a four-legged dog or a two-legged dog.”7 But the doubters were overwhelmed by the movement’s momentum. Its leaders saw it in the wave of protests that rolled across the towns of the South in Birmingham’s wake, over a hundred of them by summer’s end. They saw it in the money that was pouring into the movement, the donations arriving in such volume that SCLC’s mailroom couldn’t keep up with them all. They saw it in the outpouring of support from musicians and movie stars—from out of the Hollywood Hills came a $5,000 check from Marlon Brando—politicians and powerful public figures. They saw it in the sudden commitment of church groups inspired and more than a little shamed by the release of the letter King had written during his time in the Birmingham jail, which became an instant sensation. And they saw it in the massive crowds that came out to declare their solidarity with the struggle: 15,000 people at a rally in Los Angeles; 20,000 in San Francisco; an astonishing 125,000 at a June march through downtown Detroit, King at the front, striding as fast as he could to avoid being trampled by the throng behind him.
John Kennedy saw the momentum too. For two years he’d done what he could to avoid the issue, reacting only when activists forced his hand, and then going only as far as the situation required. But Birmingham had swept away the middle ground. He could offer no federal response to the movement’s sudden power, which would in effect ally him to the white South. Or he could, at long last, commit his administration to racial justice.
He chose the latter. In late May, just two weeks after the Birmingham settlement, he told his advisers to begin drafting a civil rights bill stronger than anything a president had proposed in the course of the twentieth century. As they worked on the provisions, the movement again met the force of massive resistance. In Jackson, Mississippi, white thugs attacked five protesters who tried to desegregate a downtown lunch counter; in Greensboro, North Carolina—site of the original sit-in—the police arrested 278 student marchers; in Tallahassee, Florida, they tear-gassed demonstrators; in Danville, Virginia, they attacked with their nightsticks, injuring scores of marchers. And in Alabama, Governor Wallace triggered yet another constitutional crisis when he promised personally to block two African Americans from enrolling at the University of Alabama in accordance with a federal court order, a dangerous replaying of the previous fall’s confrontation at Ole Miss.
At the last moment Wallace backed down. But his public belligerence forced JFK into the open. A few hours after the African American students were registered, on the evening of June 11, Kennedy went on national television to announce that his administration would send a civil rights bill to Congress, a decision he wrapped in language more reminiscent of King than of the Kennedys. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” he said. “It is as old as the scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution. One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet free from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet free from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and its boasts, will not be free until all its citizens are free.”8
The bill JFK sent up to Capitol Hill wasn’t quite as courageous as his words suggested. It did include a number of far-reaching provisions. It banned discrimination in virtually all public accommodations, thus wiping out the segregation of drinking fountains, bus terminals, hotels, and restaurants. It threatened to cut off federal money to school districts that defied the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown. And it gave the attorney general the power to bring suit to protect the civil rights of African Americans if such help were requested. For all its positive provisions, though, it also neglected several measures that civil rights activists had long been advocating. Civil rights leaders wanted the federal government to create a Fair Employment Practices Commission to combat discrimination in hiring; Kennedy left it out. They wanted the attorney general to have the power to bring suit even if an African American didn’t request it; Kennedy left it out. Most importantly, the bill made no mention whatsoever of protecting African Americans’ right to vote.
Still, Kennedy’s civil rights bill had dared to do something that no other Democrat—no other twentieth-century president—had been willing to do: to insist that Jim Crow be dismantled everywhere but at the voting booth. Politically the bill carried huge risks. Kennedy would be running for reelection in a year’s time. No matter how carefully he moved, the bill would inevitably cost him countless white votes in the South, something no Democrat could afford. And there was every chance that southern congressmen would block its passage, as they had done almost every other time civil rights legislation had come up for consideration. Kennedy was gambling everything, in other words, for a bill he might never get to sign into law.
The civil rights forces wanted more. Once Kennedy’s bill was delivered to the House of Representatives, the movement’s leaders and its allies began an intense legislative campaign, not simply to push it through Congress but to strengthen it. Everyone understood that adding a voting provision would be a step too far: not only would southern Democrats oppose it, so too would Republicans, since it would bring millions of Black voters into the Democratic column. The other missing provisions, though, were within reach. Together lobbyists from the NAACP and the nation’s most progressive labor unions, aided by suddenly mobilized church groups, convinced the liberals on the House Judiciary Committee—the bill’s first stop—to add both the fair employment provision and the additional powers they thought the attorney general needed. But these changes simply made the bill’s passage all the harder. By summer’s end the administration’s proposal, though stronger, was also still stuck in the Judiciary Committee, nowhere near a vote in the House or the Senate. So the movement upped its pressure.
The idea of a mass march on Washington had come from A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin. When they’d started their discussions, in late 1962, they’d envisioned it as a two-day event: the first devoted to nonviolent protest, the second to a huge rally aimed at addressing the “economic subordination of the American Negro,” as Rustin put it, a perfect phrasing of the socialist politics that Randolph had been championing for almost half a century. Gradually they brought into the planning some of the major civil rights organizations—SNCC and CORE both signed on in March 1963—but others kept their distance, among them the NAACP and SCLC, rejections that made Rustin wonder whether he ought to give up on the enterprise altogether. But then came Birmingham and the civil rights bill. Suddenly King and the NAACP saw the wisdom of some sort of mass action in the nation’s capital, both as a demonstration of the movement’s dedication and as a prod to Congress. By early July Rustin had brought both the SCLC and the NAACP into the march, along with another important civil rights organization, the National Urban League. The United Automobile Workers, which was deeply involved in the movement’s lobbying, and several major religious figures—one each from the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish traditions—also committed to the march. To keep his carefully constructed coalition together, Rustin scaled back the march from two days to one, set aside the promise of civil disobedience, and focused instead on a mass rally “for jobs and freedom,” to be held at the end of August on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.9
The Kennedys hated the idea. “We want success in Congress,” JFK pointedly told Randolph, King, and their colleagues, “not just a big show at the Capitol. . . . The wrong kind of demonstration at the wrong time will give those fellows [in the House] a chance to say they have to prove their courage by voting against us.”10 But Rustin wasn’t going to allow any mistakes. This was going to be the movement’s golden moment.
So it was. August 28 turned out to be a perfect summer day in Washington, sunny and warm without a hint of rain. Before dawn the busloads of marchers began to arrive, thousands of people from across the country, the vast majority of them African American. By noon the crowd around the Lincoln Memorial had reached a quarter of a million, twice as many as Rustin had hoped would attend. Malcolm X was among them—the NAACP’s Roger Wilkins saw him sitting under a tree, looking out over the throng—though Elijah Muhammad had explicitly forbidden anyone from the Nation to participate. Through the afternoon the program ran, Randolph serving as master of ceremonies, shuttling Rustin’s lineup of speakers to the podium: the UAW’s longtime president Walter Reuther, NAACP’s president Roy Wilkins, SNCC’s John Lewis, whose incendiary speech Rustin had insisted on editing, because it wouldn’t do to have a young civil rights activist tell the nation that “the revolution is at hand.”11
Even in their more tempered form, the day’s speeches reflected the dynamics that Birmingham had created. The speakers demanded again and again that Kennedy’s bill be strengthened and then signed into law. But legal rights were not enough: the nation needed to tackle the problem of economic inequality too. Poverty trapped millions of Americans as surely as Jim Crow did, and “we will not solve education or housing or public accommodations,” Reuther proclaimed, “as long as millions of Americans, Negroes, are treated as second class economic citizens,” a line of argument that led the movement exactly where Randolph and Rustin had always wanted it to go.12
Rustin left King to last, mostly because no other speaker wanted to follow him. He started slowly, reading the text he’d prepared, his delivery halting, almost labored. Then the pace began to change. He started with the sacrifice the movement demanded. “I am not unmindful,” he said, “that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering.” Now the nation ought to see what their suffering could do.
Much of what followed wasn’t original. He’d used many of the same words, and the entire central imagery, at the Detroit march two months before. And he took his powerful closing almost word for word from a Chicago pastor’s address to the 1952 Republican convention. But in the moment none of that mattered. He laid his foundation with a recitation of the self-evident truth that defined the American creed. From there he took the crowd through a new South, where the sons of slaves and the sons of slave owners sat together as equals, and little Black boys and Black girls joined hands with little white boys and white girls as brothers and sisters. Then he moved them to Isaiah, the greatest of the Old Testament’s prophets, and one creed fused with another, as it always had for King.
“I have a dream,” he proclaimed, “that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith with which I return to the South. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. . . . With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that one day we will be free.”13
In the decades to come King’s speech would become a set piece, a string of overused phrases, some of them twisted and turned to purposes antithetical to their meaning. But in that moment, in that sacred spot, King was doing something extraordinary. He was drawing from the brutality of America’s racial order a radical vision of a nation transformed, its sins redeemed by the suffering of its most courageous citizens, who dared to imagine that hatred could give way to love. The Beloved Community—glittering in the summer of 1963.
Dark Currents
THERE WERE OTHER currents swirling through the summer of 1963 too. Some white southerners were pleased with the movement’s success, to be sure, while many more simply wanted the conflicts to go away. But it was the movement’s violent opponents, defenders of a mortally wounded social order, who set the tone.
The brutality continued through the summer of 1963. Shortly after midnight on June 12, just hours after JFK announced his civil rights bill on television, a Klan sniper shot the Mississippi NAACP’s Medgar Evers as he got out of his car in the driveway of his Jackson home. His wife and children watched him die. In Winona, Mississippi, deep in the Delta, SNCC workers and their local allies, among them a longtime sharecropper named Fannie Lou Hamer, were brutally beaten while in the custody of the local sheriff. In Americus, Georgia, authorities charged three other SNCC activists with inciting insurrection, a crime that carried the death penalty. In Birmingham itself, there were threats and intimidations, as the Klan tried to stem the tide that the children had unleashed.
Southern politicians fanned the resistance. In Alabama Wallace slashed away at the pending civil rights bill; if Congress dared to pass it, he said during a July appearance on Capitol Hill, “You should make preparations to withdraw all our troops from Berlin, Vietnam, and the rest of the world, because . . . they will be needed to police America.” Other extremists added to the tension. For half a decade the John Birch Society had been building a mass audience for its brand of militant anti-Communism, thanks to the generous support of archconservative businessmen like Dallas’ Bunker Hunt and Missouri’s Fred Koch. By 1963 half a million Americans were receiving the group’s literature, with its repeated attacks on the movement as nothing more than a Soviet front. “The trouble in our southern states has been fomented almost entirely by the Communists for this purpose,” explained the society’s Robert Welch, “to stir up such bitterness between whites and blacks in the South that small flames of civil disorder would inevitably result. They could then fan . . . these little flames into one great conflagration of civil war.”14
The backlash even reached into the federal government. For years FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had been convinced that Martin Luther King was a tool of international Communism. He was so obsessed that he had maneuvered the Kennedys into authorizing wiretaps on King’s phone and the placement of hidden listening devices in his bedroom. With the information he gathered Hoover began to compile a massive file that he planned to use to discredit King and destroy the movement he’d come to symbolize.
There was another dark current running through Washington that summer as well. For two years the Kennedy administration had grappled with the tangle left by Dwight Eisenhower in South Vietnam: an increasingly brutal guerrilla war pitting the unstable government of Ngo Dinh Diem, the president handpicked by the United States, against a Communist insurgency in the countryside, run by Ho Chi Minh’s government in North Vietnam. Diem’s dictatorship seemed too weak to combat the Communists, even with the mounting support of the American military. Bit by bit JFK had increased US involvement. By 1963 there were 16,000 American troops in South Vietnam, sixteen times the number that had been on the ground when Kennedy took office. Although the troops were technically advisers to the South Vietnamese military, in truth they were starting to fight alongside Diem’s soldiers: in the course of 1963, 400 American troops were killed in combat. Still, the Diem regime struggled to hold on.
Then the situation began to spiral out of control. On May 8, 1963, six days after the start of the children’s march in Birmingham, a group of Buddhist priests and their followers gathered in the old imperial city of Hue to protest Diem’s decision to ban the display of flags on Buddha’s birthday. Trying to break up the rally, South Vietnamese soldiers opened fire on the crowd. That triggered more protests, led by Buddhist monks opposing Diem, his high-handed ways, his connection to the Americans, and his lack of commitment to democracy. Rallies in Hue and Saigon—cities that were supposed to be Diem’s strongholds—drew huge crowds.
On June 11—the day Kennedy announced his civil rights bill, the day George Wallace stood in the schoolhouse door, the night Medgar Evers was assassinated—the crisis reached a crescendo. That day an elderly Buddhist monk sat in a busy intersection in Saigon, drenched himself in gasoline, and set himself ablaze. That horrifying public sacrifice pushed the protests to an extraordinary level. College students, working people, even segments of the army rushed to join the Buddhists’ campaign: Diem, it seemed, was on the brink of being toppled not by the Viet Cong but by his own people. If Diem were to fall, Kennedy and his advisers knew, the Communists would be ready to step into the void.
For JFK it was a dangerously precarious situation. Containment policy required that the United States prevent a Communist victory in South Vietnam. Now Diem, by his arrogance and stupidity, was undermining all those efforts. But the Kennedys thought that the situation could be finessed. They began searching for other options.
The moment came at summer’s end. On August 21, six days before the March on Washington, Diem struck back at his Buddhist opponents, staging a series of military raids against pagodas and arresting 1,400 monks. As the crisis in Vietnam spiraled downward, Kennedy took a weekend’s vacation at the family compound on Cape Cod. As a result, it was his advisers who received secret word from some of the generals in Diem’s army on August 23. They’d decided that Diem had no ability to lead the South Vietnamese anymore. Any government in South Vietnam had to have American backing and approval. So they were asking whether the Kennedy administration would approve a coup.
Without asking Kennedy’s permission, the advisers crafted a meticulously worded reply. They wanted Diem to reform his ways and make peace with the Buddhists. But if a coup should occur, the United States would provide “direct support to any interim” government. They checked with the president quickly and sent off their answer. By the time Kennedy returned to the White House on Monday, August 26, he’d started to have second thoughts. His advisers had pushed him into a corner, he thought, just as the CIA had done with the Bay of Pigs two years before. “This shit has got to stop,” he barked at them during a particularly tense meeting. But he didn’t send word to the generals that he’d changed his mind. Over the next few days—as the civil rights forces gathered at the Lincoln Memorial, as King preached of right and justice—JFK simply waited for news of the coup to begin.15
Two currents running through the summer: one of boundless hope, the other of blood. The summer belonged to hope. In the fall the balance tipped.
Six Deaths
SEPTEMBER 15 WAS an ordinary Sunday in Birmingham. Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was holding its first Youth Day, an effort to expand its children’s fellowship. The youngsters began arriving early, filing into the basement, where Sunday school was held. A few of the kids in the children’s choir slipped into the women’s lounge so they could spend a little while primping and priming for their featured performance at the eleven o’clock service. Four little girls, making themselves look pretty.
The bomb went off at 10:22 a.m. For a moment the great church shook, the force of the blast surging through the sanctuary, out to the street, into the morning sky. Then came the soot and the smoke, thick and white; chunks of plaster and shards of stained glass. The sanctuary stood. But a section of the basement, the epicenter of the explosion, had been blown away—the northeast portion, the corner with the women’s lounge.
Desperately the church deacons dug through the rubble, scrambling through the piles of brick and stone until they found them: Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, each of them just fourteen, and eleven-year-old Denise McNair. Four little girls, their clothes ripped off by the blast, their faces maimed by debris, their bodies so badly burned they could barely be recognized. “The slaughter of the innocents,” the Vatican called it.16 Four little girls on a Sunday morning, primping and priming for church. Pools of blood starting to spread.
After the flurry of messages in August, the South Vietnamese generals seemed to back down from their threat to overthrow Diem. For the next two months rumors of a coup circulated through Saigon, but nothing happened. Inside the Oval Office Kennedy’s advisers vigorously debated the best route to follow. A few of them pressed the president to cut his losses, pull out the US troops, and find a way to settle South Vietnam’s future peacefully. Others advised a deeper commitment: more troops, more money. JFK tried to maintain a middle path, applying pressure on Diem to improve his regime, keeping aid flowing as best he could, as he had since taking office.
Then, in late October, the dissident Vietnamese generals resurfaced, again asking for US support for a coup. They received the same reply as before: the president would not encourage the generals, but he would not oppose them, either. That was enough. On the afternoon of November 1, the officers made their move, seizing key buildings in Saigon and declaring themselves the new heads of state. All that afternoon Diem tried to regain control of his government, to save himself. At one point he called the American ambassador from his embattled presidential palace, desperate to know whether the United States still supported him. No, the ambassador told him. Nor would it ensure him safe passage out of the country.
He escaped the presidential palace through a series of underground tunnels and fled to a nearby Catholic church, where he went to confession and received communion. There the generals’ forces found him. He was arrested, pushed into a personnel carrier with his hands tied behind his back, and shot in the head. His body was buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery next door to the ambassador’s residence.
Kennedy was informed of Diem’s murder during a morning meeting on November 2, 1963. The president immediately “leapt to his feet and fled the meeting with a look of shock and dismay on his face,” according to one of the participants.17 If he hadn’t intended the generals to murder Diem, he must have understood that his administration’s willingness to go along with the coup carried that potential. There was one of the great tragedies of the Cold War: in the course of that struggle, the United States committed itself so singly, so purposefully to preventing Communist expansion that it repeatedly violated the basic principles of democracy. Nowhere was that contradiction clearer than in Vietnam. First the United States blocked the will of the Vietnamese people, who surely would have elected Ho Chi Minh as their president in the mid-1950s. Then the Americans created in South Vietnam a country that many of its people didn’t support. Now that its policy was failing, the Kennedy administration acquiesced in the toppling of the government it had created and the murder of the man the United States had handpicked to run it.
Three weeks later John Kennedy went to Dallas. If it weren’t for the political crises caused by the civil rights revolution, it is likely that Kennedy wouldn’t have visited Texas that fall. But he had to carry Texas to win reelection in 1964, and his support for the movement’s demands had put the state in jeopardy. So he planned the trip simply to rally support among Texas Democrats in preparation for the presidential campaign. Some of his advisers urged him not to go. Emotions were running too high in Dallas, they told him: just a few weeks before a rabid crowd of right-wing extremists had driven the US ambassador to the United Nations, Adlai Stevenson, off the stage when he’d tried to speak in the city. The atmosphere was so fevered, a Texas Democratic national committeeman wrote Robert Kennedy on November 4, “I would feel better if the President’s itinerary did not include Dallas. Please give this your earnest consideration.”18
But JFK refused to listen. It was a sign of just how important the trip was that Kennedy turned it into a state visit. His wife Jacqueline accompanied him, something she rarely did. So did Vice President Lyndon Johnson and his wife Lady Bird. They arrived in Texas on November 21, spent the night in Houston, then arrived in Dallas the next morning. They were met at the airport by the Texas governor and his wife. The whole entourage climbed into a string of convertibles for a noontime motorcade through the streets of downtown, a chance for the crowds to come out, for the cheers to begin, for the president to show that he could hold the South.
Along Main Street the motorcade went, the route lined with crowds four or five people deep. At Houston Street the cars made a short jog to the left, then left again onto Elm Street, almost through downtown, five minutes from the president’s destination at the Dallas Trade Mart. Then there was a single sharp report—a firecracker, some people thought—and another and another. Kennedy had been sitting up straight in his seat, waving to the crowds on his left, his posture made rigid by the brace he was wearing to ease his chronic back pain. Immediately he turned to the right, in the direction of the sound, and his hands went up to his neck. Jackie, who was sitting next to him, reached out to see what was wrong. That’s when the second shot hit, the fatal shot, to the back of the president’s head.
News of Kennedy’s assassination reached the public shortly after two o’clock Eastern time, half an hour after the gunfire in Dallas. For the next four days the entire nation shared in the trauma of the moment: the horrific news of his murder; the arrest of his alleged assassin; his assassin’s murder just two days later, his shooting shown live on television; the elaborate rituals of a state funeral; the flag-draped coffin lying in the Capitol rotunda, the long line of mourners—a quarter of a million people came to pay their respects—the solemn procession from the White House to the Catholic cathedral, the Kennedy family trailing behind the caisson, the president’s widow holding the hands of their young children.
In the years that followed, there were all sorts of theories about who killed Kennedy. Was there a single gunman or more than one? Was there a conspiracy? If so, who was involved? The answers are not conclusive, and perhaps never will be. But it seems clear that Kennedy wasn’t killed by rabid racists or right-wing conspirators. He was murdered by a delusional twenty-year-old former marine, Lee Harvey Oswald, who was connected—weakly to be sure—to left-wing supporters of the Cuban government. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Oswald had flirted with Communism, defecting to the USSR for a short time and marrying a young Russian woman. The Soviets kept tabs on him, eventually deciding that he was mentally unstable. In June 1962 the Oswalds returned to the United States. After that, he joined several tiny organizations opposing US policy in Cuba. But he was at best a small-time radical, the sort of man who stood on street corners handing out newspapers that nobody read. Then he heard Kennedy was coming to Dallas. He bought a high-powered rifle and took it with him to the job he held in a building along the president’s motorcade route. From his perch at a sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository, he shot and killed the president.
Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, Denise McNair, Ngo Dinh Diem, John Fitzgerald Kennedy: six lives, six deaths. In the spring and summer of 1963, the southern civil rights movement proved that the powerless could lay the powerful low, that the country could be moved toward justice through the force of moral witness, that redemptive suffering might yet redeem the soul of America. Then came the autumn’s horrors: an act of racial terrorism, a state-sanctioned murder, a political assassination. Together those events brought to the surface the dangerous currents that ran through the United States in the early 1960s: the sheer brutality of white supremacy, the amorality of American Cold War foreign policy, and the extreme political passions that policy unleashed. A season of hope and a season of blood.