CHAPTER 28

THE CRUX OF THE MATTER

THE CAMPAIGN FOR REFORM IN EDUCATION ANDhealth care unfolded in the midst of the ongoing struggle by black Americans to achieve political power in the South. The 1954Brown decision had opened the door to school integration, and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had outlawed Jim Crow policies in parks, theaters, hotels, and public transportation. But in six southern states—Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia,—the vast majority of blacks still could not vote.¹As part of the Freedom Summer Project of 1964, the Council of Federated Organizations and SNCC had established freedom schools in Mississippi to build support for the Mississippi Freedom Democratic party. More than eighty thousand black Mississippians had voted for the MFDP delegation that traveled to Atlantic City. But that political process had taken place outside the regular voting mechanism, still dominated by the white power structure and still closed to African Americans. Only 6 and 19 percent, respectively, of voting-age blacks were on the rolls in Mississippi and Alabama.²In some counties in those two states in which the majority of residents were black, not a single one was registered to vote. White registrars in league with local sheriffs used the poll tax and literacy tests to discourage black voting, but if these did not suffice, those seeking to exercise the franchise could be fired from their jobs, arrested on trumped up charges, or simply beaten up.

Given his philosophy and experience, LBJ believed that the vote was everything. In a remarkable conversation with Roy Wilkins of the NAACP, Johnson spelled out his faith in democracy. His only hope for really empowering his people, LBJ told the civil rights leader, was to get behind the movement for mass enfranchisement and registration for poor whites as well as blacks. “I know you get disheartened,” he told Wilkins,

and I do, and you think that there is no use trying to get an illiterate [white] truck driver and tell him what is best for him because he has been mistreated—and how he will not cooperate and so forth. I feel that way every day. But when the chips are down and you hurt a man and you whip him, chain him and handcuff him and make the vox populi go to the polls, he has a better smell and better sense of values and knows better what is better for the country than [banker-turned-diplomat] John Mc-Cloy … This old farmer that rides looking at the back end of the mule on the cultivator all day long—he just sits there and thinks. It is his boy that is in Viet Nam, his sister that is out of a job, his brother-in-law that got his car repossessed—and somehow or other, they just add up and they will do what is right … I will resign my office twelve months from now if I am not right, you will see the people [blacks] come into power in every Southern state if you will let them vote … Everyone of these states that you consider the worst ones in the Union will wind up being the best.³

“Now let’s just go register,” Johnson told Wilkins, “and anybody that is not registered is not patriotic.”⁴In his January 1965 State of the Union address, the president informed lawmakers that he was going to press for the elimination of “every remaining obstacle to the right and the opportunity to vote.” Privately he asked Nicholas Katzenbach, the acting attorney general, to draft legislation that would enforce the constitutional guarantee of the right of every adult American to cast a ballot.⁵

Working closely with LBJ to secure the franchise for black Americans was Martin Luther King. From the beginning, the alliance was an uneasy one. Throughout his political career, LBJ had preferred to deal with black leaders such as A. Philip Randolph, Roy Wilkins, Whitney Young, and even Adam Clayton Powell.⁶They were people from the world of politics, or they were associated with interest groups who sought protection and power in the political arena. He had leverage with them; they were subject to deal making and compromise. They seemed willing to trust his superb sense of political timing and his prioritizing. Not so Martin King. The head of the SCLC was both an intellectual and a spiritual leader. His and Johnson’s values were similar, but they relied on dramatically different means for putting those values into action. Like William Lloyd Garrison, Martin Luther King lived in the tension between conscience and law. “Civil disobedience presupposes that conscience must obey not statutory or constitutional law but a higher moral law,” historian David Burner has observed.⁷In the South, King and his associates realized that the law was the bulwark of injustice and thus morally invalid in many cases. Consequently, King deliberately flouted the law and went to jail, and he encouraged others, including children, to do the same. During the debate over the 1964 Civil Rights Act, he had told his lieutenants that he was going on a hunger strike. He would tell the nation, “Either you stop the filibuster and pass the Civil Rights Bill … Or let me die.”⁸Johnson valued the parliamentary process, the orderly working of democracy, as much as the social justice that the system was supposed to produce. He believed in this sense that means and ends were inseparable. Demonstrations, deliberate violation of the law, the politics of confrontation, all of which King and the SCLC practiced, made LBJ extremely uncomfortable. Confrontation could easily spiral out of control into violence, black rage, white backlash, and even, ultimately, racial war. At the same time, LBJ understood the political value of demonstrations and sit-ins; he realized that they created the energy necessary for reform. Moreover, he recognized that the laws that the white power structure in the South were trying to enforce were unconstitutional.

There was also the religious dimension. Martin King was first and foremost a Christian minister, a preacher, a spiritual leader. As a mass movement, the Second Reconstruction was in no small part an evangelical religious crusade.⁹Johnson acknowledged the validity of prophets and preachers, but the world in which they lived was alien to him. Out of faith and an experience of the divine came social values, and it was proper at times to invoke religion in behalf of social justice in the rhetoric of politics, but Johnson feared a world in which religion transcended law and politics. In this he was not unlike other liberals of his day. The Schlesingers, Galbraiths, and Lippmanns were ambivalent about civil disobedience and social action based on faith and testimony. Liberals felt most at home in the ordered world of courts and laws, of science and universities; the nonviolence practiced by King and his followers was rooted in the southern black evangelical church, with all its fervent spirituality and emotion.¹⁰Unlike many liberals, LBJ was not a secular humanist, but he believed that morality and religion must be harnessed to and not pitted against the existing order. For his part, King understood and appreciated Johnson, but unlike Wilkins and Young, insisted on holding him at arms’ length. In his recorded conversations with the president, King is cordial but formal and restrained. If the civil rights game had been played solely by Lyndon Johnson’s rules, King believed, the Second Reconstruction would have died aborning.

The relationship between King and Johnson was further complicated by the machinations of J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director was obsessively protective of the Bureau’s reputation. Martin Luther King’s name first came across his desk on a letter to the incoming Kennedy administration that called for a more integrated FBI; the agency had virtually no black employees other than janitors and maids. Hoover, who thought blacks unworthy of the Bureau, was indignant. Then, in 1962 King, when asked why he thought the FBI had not arrested whites who had openly assaulted nonviolent protesters in Albany, Georgia, speculated that the local FBI agents were white southerners who were culturally and emotionally linked to local racists.¹¹In August 1963, the FBI marked King internally as “the most dangerous Negro to the future in this nation,” and Hoover persuaded Bobby Kennedy to authorize wiretaps of King’s home and his SCLC offices in Atlanta and New York.¹²

In December 1963, the FBI began delivering massive amounts of raw data to the White House on a variety of subjects; J. Edgar Hoover thought the information might be “of interest” to the new president. These were the famous “raw files” consisting of uncorroborated secondhand information, but also excerpts from wiretaps that, though spun by the Bureau, still provided valuable political intelligence. These reports were for LBJ’s eyes only and were kept in a safe by Mildred Stegall, Walter Jenkins’s secretary. Among the communications were special memos signed by Hoover himself designed to portray Martin Luther King as dangerously unstable and a tool of communists who had thoroughly infiltrated the civil rights movement. Every communication ended with a paragraph listing the “communist credentials” of King’s top aides. A March 9, 1964, letter was typical: “As of July, 1963, [Stanley] Levinson [adviser and fund-raiser for King] was a secret member of the Communist Party, USA. [Clarence] Jones [another King aide] has been identified as a person in a position of leadership in the Labor Youth League … designated as subversive pursuant to Executive Order 10450 … [Bayard] Rustin has admitted joining the Young Communist League in 1936.”¹³

As he turned to confront civil rights, the most compelling and potentially divisive issue facing America, Johnson was chilled by the knowledge that Hoover and the FBI were waiting in the wings, ready to provide the Dixie Association with intelligence, real or manufactured, that the Second Reconstruction was nothing more than a Trojan horse for the Communist International and Martin Luther King nothing less than a stooge of the Kremlin. Matters were further complicated by the fact that the Justice Department had to rely almost entirely on the Bureau to investigate civil rights crimes and gather the evidence necessary to bring the guilty to justice. In its criticism of the Bureau, an increasingly enraged black leadership might push Hoover into open alliance with Russell and Eastland. Conversely, if the federal government did not legislate equality and protection for black Americans and then protect them in the exercise of those rights, it would deliver the movement into the hands of extremists. The line he would have to walk, LBJ perceived, would have to be fine indeed.

Then, in early 1964, the FBI’s campaign against King reached a new low. On the night of January 6, agents, with the cooperation of the management of the Willard Hotel in Washington, installed bugs in King’s suite. Following a day of business, the civil rights leader and several of his assistants returned to the hotel room. At least two women were already there. The FBI recording machines picked up the sounds of clinking glasses and cocktail party conversation. As the hours passed the gathering became more lively, eventually resulting in group sex. At one point, King’s voice could be heard above the others: “I’m not a Negro tonight!”¹⁴Upon hearing the tapes, Hoover was both appalled and ecstatic. “King is a ‘tom cat’ with obsessive, degenerate sexual urges,” the director wrote in a memo on the incident. If being a “communist dupe” was not enough to discredit the civil rights leader and undermine his position as America’s pre-eminent civil rights leader, perhaps evidence of sexual “perversion” was. In February, Deke DeLoach delivered the FBI’s voluminous file on King and his associates to the White House.

To Hoover’s consternation, LBJ observed that he knew he could trust the agency to ensure that the dirt on the civil rights leader did not become public, and he proceeded to meet with King, Wilkins, and Young to plot strategy to get the public accommodations bill through Congress. LBJ was hardly one to hold nonmonogamous activity against another man.¹⁵When Whitney Young heard a rumor of the existence of the King sex tapes and pictures, he went directly to Johnson to ask if they were true. The president said, “Yes, it’s true.” Young asked to see some of the evidence, and LBJ obliged. Appalled, the civil rights leader said to Johnson, “This is terrible. You’ve got to do something. What are you going to do about it?” Meaning, what was the president going to do about reining in the FBI? Johnson replied, “Well, what are you going to do about it? You’re the civil rights leader!” Meaning, what was Young going to do to force King to be more discreet?¹⁶

On December 18, 1964, the Johnsons had welcomed Martin and Coretta King to the White House following their return from the Noble prize festivities in Oslo. In his acceptance speech, King had declared, “All that I have said boils down to the point of affirming that mankind’s survival is dependent upon man’s ability to solve the problems of racial injustice, poverty and war.” LBJ could not have put it more succinctly.¹⁷The two men were in total agreement concerning the next great goal of the civil rights movement: voting rights. Where they differed was on timing and tactics. In January 1965 in Selma, Alabama, King addressed a cheering crowd of several hundred. “Today marks the beginning of a determined, organized, mobilized campaign to get the right to vote everywhere in Alabama,” he declared. “If we are refused, we will appeal to Governor George Wallace. If he refuses to listen, we will appeal to the legislature. If they don’t listen, we will appeal to the conscience of the Congress … We must be ready to march. We must be ready to go to jail by the thousands … Our cry to the state of Alabama is a simple one. Give us the ballot!”¹⁸What King wanted was an ironclad national voting rights bill. So did LBJ, but he was not sure it could or should be done in 1965. The political and racial waters were still roiled from the fight over the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Johnson was in the process of placing the main components of the Great Society program before Congress, and he was afraid another major debate over civil rights would polarize the House and Senate and bring his beloved reform program to a halt.

LBJ also continued to see himself as the hope of the white South, segregationists as well as liberals. “We’ve got to have some understanding,” he told Ed Clark, an old Austin friend. “We’ve got to have some leadership; we’ve got to have some sympathy; we’ve got to have some kindness. I called them in South Carolina yesterday and Georgia and told them that as long as I was in the White House the door would be open to them and they would be treated with respect … I love Alabama and I love Mississippi and I’m going to tell ’em so and they can tell me to hell with you if they want to,” but in the end they would come around, he said. “We’ve got to educate ’em [white southerners] and you can’t be putting ’em off by themselves,” he declared following his victory in the 1964 election. “That creates a juvenile problem right off the bat. The first thing that happens the sociologists say is that … you develop an inferiority complex and the rest of your life you’re hitting at people when you think they’re going to strike you even when they’re not.”¹⁹Indeed, it may have been that domestically, LBJ’s greatest impact was on white southerners. “I ran for governor in 1958,” Buford Ellington recalled, “and was elected on an anti?civil rights stand here in Tennessee, because I just couldn’t bring it to my mind that anybody had any business telling us what we had to do in our state. Yet in less than two years I was traveling the country for this man, trying to help him in his fight to bring it about.”²⁰

Martin Luther King, too, was interested in redeeming the white South, but he was determined to do it sooner rather than later and even if the recipients of his beneficence had to be dragged to grace kicking and screaming. Montgomery civil rights leader Reverend James Bevel was named to head a statewide voting rights campaign that would begin in Selma. Large numbers of blacks would appear at the courthouse on registration days, and there would be marches and demonstrations until all were registered. Selma, a city of some twenty-nine thousand, was still entirely segregated in 1965. TheBrown decision and the 1964 Civil Rights Act seemed to have made no impression at all. Parks, restaurants, schools, water fountains, public restrooms—all were segregated. In Dallas County, of which Selma was the county seat, there were 14,400 whites and 15,115 blacks of voting age. Exactly 156 African Americans, or 1 percent, were registered. Chief enforcer of Jim Crow in Dallas County was Sheriff Jim Clark, the stereotypical southern law officer, complete with paunch, jowls, campaign hat, pistol, and cattle prod. He had at his command not only his deputies and the Selma police but also white “posses,” whose members salivated at the thought of forcibly disbanding marches and breaking up demonstrations. The mayor, Joe T. Smitherman, was somewhat more progressive. He felt the sight of police dogs and water hoses being used against black women and children was not conducive to economic development, but he was a segregationist, and his hold over Clark was quite tenuous. In league with Clark was Circuit Judge James Hare, an amateur anthropologist who believed that Alabama blacks were particularly retrograde because they were descended from the Ibo tribesmen of Nigeria and had no Berber (Arab) blood.²¹Presiding over this motley crew was Governor George Corley Wallace, who was just as determined to stand in the schoolhouse door as always.

Though Bevel was the principal organizer for the Selma voting rights effort, King planned to be its chief symbol. Judge Hare had issued a decree forbidding some fifty named individuals and fifteen organizations from holding meetings of more than three persons. Among other things, King intended to convene gatherings in defiance of the order and get himself arrested. Beginning Monday, January 18, he led waves of local blacks to the courthouse to register, where they were confronted by Clark and ordered to disperse. They did, but subsequently returned. The demonstrators were duly arrested, made bail, and then returned again. As the organizers had anticipated, Clark’s temper quickly frayed. He and his officers began to rough up the marchers. In the second week of the demonstrations, Clark shoved Mrs. Annie Lee Cooper, a dignified, sturdy woman, who hit him in the face. As he staggered back, she delivered two more punches, kicking him in the groin. Enraged, Clark got up and knocked the woman down and jumped on top of her, his baton in hand. The next morning that picture appeared on the front page of theNew York Times. On February 1, the next regular registration day, King was arrested and thrown in jail.²²

LBJ and Nick Katzenbach, meanwhile, were monitoring events closely in Washington. Justice had dispatched trouble-shooter John Doar to the scene to try to keep a lid on things. The first week in February, he persuaded U.S. District Judge Daniel Thomas to issue an order suspending Alabama’s literacy test and demanding that Selma speed up registration. King was still not satisfied. From jail, using his aide Andrew Young as a messenger, he asked LBJ to send a personal representative to Selma, declare his support for voting rights in Alabama, and use his office and his influence with Congress to see that those rights were realized.²³The day after King’s release from jail, the White House announced that it was going to send a voting rights bill to Congress before the end of 1965.²⁴On February 9, King traveled to Washington to meet with Katzenbach, Humphrey, and a somewhat reluctant LBJ.²⁵Emerging from the chat, King assured reporters of the president’s commitment to voting rights, but he returned to Alabama in a fairly pessimistic mood. The state, the nation, and the president would need additional prodding, he had concluded.

King found tempers were on the rise in Selma. Police had shot and killed a young demonstrator, Jimmie Lee Jackson, who was planning a march to protest the arrest of a local SCLC leader in the nearby town of Marion. King delivered a moving, fiery eulogy at the interment, and James Bevel announced that there would be a march from Selma to Montgomery, the state capital, situated some fifty-four miles to the east on Highway 80. The Reverend King would lead the way and present petitions to Governor Wallace and the state legislature demanding that all voting-age Alabamans be allowed to cast their ballot. The march would get under way on Sunday, March 7. On the evening before the demonstration, word came that Governor Wallace had declared the event to be an unauthorized assembly and dangerous to the public order. He ordered Albert J. Lingo, head of the Alabama State Troopers, to assemble just off the Edmund Pettus Bridge, which arched Highway 80 over the Alabama River east of Selma, and use whatever means necessary to stop the march. Wallace had personally recruited Lingo, who was known as “hell on niggers.”²⁶

As the five hundred or so marchers crossed the Pettus Bridge, they came face to face with Major John Cloud and his contingent of state troopers. Lurking behind them were Sheriff Clark and his deputies. Whites lined the south side of the road. Major Cloud ordered the marchers to disperse. When they did not, his troopers, many on horseback, charged. Several fired teargas canisters into the crowd. As the knot of demonstrators broke and ran for town, state police rode them to the ground, where dismounted officers and Clark’s men beat them with billyclubs, kicked, and stomped them. The next day a vivid, blow-by-blow account of what came to be known as “Bloody Sunday” appeared on the front page of theNew York Times.²⁷ ABC interrupted its regularly scheduled programming that night to present a long televised report on the brutality.²⁸King immediately announced that the marchers would try again on Tuesday. He called for sympathetic volunteers from around the country to come and join the column. Stirred by images of violence on television and in the newspapers, hundreds responded.

As he had feared, LBJ was caught between King and the civil rights activists on the one hand and Wallace and the segregationist power structure in Alabama on the other. On the scene, John Doar, LeRoy Collins, head of the Federal Mediation Service, and Buford Ellington tried to work out a compromise. Somewhat ironically, Wallace wanted federal intervention. If LBJ was forced to nationalize the Alabama National Guard and send the troops in, Wallace could claim to bitter-end segregationists that he had been overwhelmed by a greater force. “This damned little Wallace!” Lister Hill, the other senator from Alabama and a friend of Johnson’s, told the president. “That’s a hell of a decision to have to make, because when you move in there, the people down home are going to think, My God, he [LBJ] just moved in there and took over for this King!”²⁹And LBJ most certainly did not want to send an occupying force to Alabama. Neither did his advisers. At the same time, he and Katzenbach seriously considered arresting both Clark and Lingo for violating the civil rights of the marchers. “Hell, we’ve got three cases against Sheriff Clark now,” Katzenbach said.³⁰

Meanwhile, in Selma, the Reverend James Reeb, a Unitarian minister working for the American Friends Service Committee in Boston who had flown to Selma to march with King, was assaulted along with two other white ministers by four thugs. One of them shattered Reeb’s skull with a three-foot-long bludgeon. He died in a Birmingham hospital on Thursday evening. King, who confided to Doar and Katzenbach that he was in fear for his life, more so than usual, led some two thousand marchers across the Pettus Bridge the next day. The procession halted before Lingo, Clark, and their massed forces. King led the group in singing “We Shall Overcome,” the group knelt in silent prayer for several moments, and then got up and walked back into town. King put everyone on notice, however, that he was still determined to march to Montgomery.

In an effort to retake the initiative from King and Johnson, Wallace asked for a summit meeting with the president. He should have been alarmed by the alacrity with which LBJ accepted. In fact, the president had already decided to invite the governor to the White House when he received Wallace’s request.³¹Just before noon on February 13, a smiling Johnson welcomed Wallace and his attorney general, Seymore Trammel, to the Oval Office. The president had the diminutive Wallace sit in the large overstuffed sofa while he occupied the rocking chair opposite, pulled so close that when he leaned forward his nose nearly touched the top of the governor’s head. It seemed to him, Johnson offered in a friendly voice, that all the demonstrators wanted was the right to vote. “You cannot deal with street revolutionaries,” Wallace replied sternly, “you can never satisfy them … First, it is a front seat on a bus; next, it’s a takeover of parks; then it’s public schools; then it’s voting rights; then it’s jobs; then it’s distribution of wealth without work.”³²Johnson pulled closer, reached over, and gripped Wallace’s knee and launched into an hour-long monologue on his vision of a just and prosperous America. “You can be a part of that,” he kept saying. Stop “looking back to 1865 and start planning for 2065.” As Wallace seem to shrink, Trammel tried to interrupt, invoking “the growing menace of the Communist demonstrators in Alabama.” Johnson turned slowly. “He looked at me like I was some kind of dog mess,” remembered Trammel. Johnson thrust a pencil and tablet in his hands and told him to take notes. Why, oh, why was Wallace abandoning his liberal roots? “Why are you off on this black thing? You ought to be down there calling for help for Aunt Susie in the nursing home.” Then he went to the crux of the matter. “Why don’t you let the niggers vote?” Wallace protested that he had no power over county registrars. Johnson suddenly stiffened. “Don’t you shit me, George Wallace,” he said.³³Rising, Johnson put both hands on the back of the sofa, leaned over Wallace, and said, “George, you’re fucking over your president. Why are you fucking over your president?”³⁴

After three hours, Wallace emerged looking like a wilted plant. In the subsequent press conference in the Rose Garden, Johnson continued to dominate. “The Governor expressed his concern that the demonstrations which have taken place are a threat to the peace and security of the people of Alabama,” LBJ told the more than one hundred reporters who had assembled for the occasion. “I said that those Negro citizens of Alabama who have systematically been denied the right to register and to participate in the choice of those who govern them should be provided the opportunity of directing national attention to their plight … I am firmly convinced, as I said to the Governor a few moments ago, that when all of the eligible Negroes of Alabama have been registered, the economic and the social injustices they have experienced throughout will be righted, and the demonstrations, I believe, will stop.”³⁵

 

LYNDONJOHNSON WAS NOT A MANto ignore the power of circumstance. His advisers and his instincts told him that the time had come for the administration to exploit the momentum created by Martin Luther King and his followers, to lead rather than follow in the struggle for dignity and equality for African Americans. “What the public felt on Monday [the day following Bloody Sunday], in my opinion, was the deepest sense of outrage it has ever felt on the civil rights question,” Harry McPherson told the president. “I had dinner with Abe Fortas Monday night. That reasonable man was for sending troops at once.”³⁶On the evening of March 14, LBJ met with congressional leaders of both parties, and the group decided on a televised presidential address to a joint session to denounce the Selma outrages and introduce his voting rights bill. With only twenty-four hours to prepare, Johnson summoned McPherson, Goodwin, Busby, Valenti, and company. “I sat with my staff for several hours,” Johnson later recalled. “I described the general outline of what I wanted to say. I wanted to use every ounce of moral persuasion the Presidency held. I wanted no hedging, no equivocation. And I wanted to talk from my own heart, from my own experience.”³⁷According to Goodwin, he drafted the speech, but the substance and, in the end, the wording were entirely Johnson. “It was by me,” he said, “but it was for and of the Lyndon Johnson I had carefully studied and come to know.”³⁸

As the time for LBJ’s evening address approached, the Capitol and the nation sensed that something extraordinary was about to happen. The House chamber was packed. In addition to the legislators, all of the Supreme Court justices, the entire ambassadorial corps, and the cabinet were present. Even the aisles were filled, an unprecedented occurrence. The galleries were jammed with whites and blacks, some in street clothes fresh from demonstrations and others in business attire. Lady Bird and Lynda sat among them, as did J. Edgar Hoover. The entire Mississippi congressional delegation boycotted the event. Virtually all Americans were aware of the historic moment, and most had their television sets on in anticipation. At 9P.M. Johnson entered the hall, tall, erect, smiling, making the customary handshakes as he proceeded to the podium. He wasted no time. “I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy,” he began in a slow melodious tone. “At times history and fate meet at a single time in a single place to shape a turning point in man’s unending search for freedom,” he intoned. “So it was at Lexington and Concord. So it was a century ago at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama.”³⁹Those who were there remembered almost total silence, a collective holding of breaths.

The nation had reached a moral juncture brought there by “the cries of pain and the hymns and protests of oppressed people [who] have summoned into convocation all the majesty of this great government … Rarely in any time does an issue lay bare the secret heart of America itself,” Johnson declared, his voice rising, his pace quickening. “The issue of equal rights for American Negroes is such an issue. And should we defeat every enemy, should we double our wealth and conquer the stars, and still be unequal to this issue, then we will have failed as a people and as a nation … For with a country as with a person, ‘What is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul.’”⁴⁰He was interrupted by the first burst of applause, hesitant, solid, then thunderous. No president, not even Abraham Lincoln, had so forthrightly identified himself, the Constitution, and the values of the country with the cause of equal rights for African Americans. One shrewd heartland politician was finishing what another had started.

The next great step in the march to equality was a national voting rights law. He was, he said, sending to Congress immediately following his speech a special message that would put in place machinery to register black voters in areas where local officials were unwilling to do so and to provide protection to them in their exercise of the franchise. What president who took his oath of office seriously could do less? By now, LBJ’s voice was inspired, rolling, ringing, a Texas version of the southern Baptist rhythm and tenor that Martin Luther King had mastered. “There is no constitutional issue here,” LBJ declared. “The command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.” The real heroes of the hour were the civil rights activists who were demonstrating, going to jail, and dying. “Their cause must be our cause too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”⁴¹And then, the president of the United States, remarkably, raised his arms over his head and proclaimed slowly, deliberately, “We—shall—overcome!” The assembled throng rose almost as one and delivered a roaring, prolonged ovation. In the galleries and on the floor, long-time laborers in the vineyard of civil rights wept openly. Watching from their homes, stunned, black Americans dared to hope that at last their dream of full citizenship might actually come true. As Lady Bird and Lynda departed the chamber, a reporter asked the president’s elder daughter how she felt about the speech. “It was just like that old hymn,” she said. “ ‘Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide.’ ”⁴²

Johnsonian rhetoric notwithstanding, Martin Luther King intended to keep the pressure on. Alabama was still a long way from Washington, and he sensed no softening in the attitudes of the George Wallaces, Al Lingos, and Jim Clarks of the world. On March 17, Federal District Court Judge Frank Johnson, sitting in Montgomery, issued an order sanctioning the SCLC’s planned march from Selma to the capital and declaring that participants were entitled to state protection. Wallace was at last trapped. On March 18, he called the president. “These people are pouring in from all over the country,” he whined. “Two days ago … James Forman suggested in front of all the nuns and priests that if anybody went in a café and they wouldn’t serve ’em, they’d ‘kick the fuckin’ legs of the tables off ’ … It inflames people … I don’t want anybody to get hurt. But … I don’t want to be in the position of intimating that I’m asking for federal troops … A Negro priest yesterday asked all the patrolmen what their wives were doing, whether some of their friends could have dates with their wives. You know, trying to provoke them … These fifty thousand people … They’re going to bankrupt the state.” LBJ listened patiently, but remained firm. It would be much better, much less divisive if the national guard acted as state rather than federal troops. But Wallace would not give.⁴³

That night, Wallace told the Alabama legislature in a televised speech that the state could not afford to activate the guard. He demanded that the president send federal authorities to Alabama. LBJ was furious. “You’re dealing with a very treacherous guy,” he told Buford Ellington. “He’s a no good son of a bitch … Son of a bitch! He’s absolutely treacherous.”⁴⁴Later, Wallace wired the White House that he did not have the assets available to protect a march from Selma to Montgomery. Absurd, Johnson told reporters. The governor had available to him ten thousand Alabama national guardsmen, but if Wallace could not or would not call them up, he would dispatch federal troops to protect King and his fellow demonstrators.⁴⁵The president issued orders federalizing the Alabama National Guard and dispatched a sizable contingent of regular army troops to Maxwell Air Force Base to stand by if needed. “Be sure what ever we do is measured, fitting, and adequate—like in Viet Nam,” he told Katzenbach, Ellington, and Justice Department official Burke Marshall.⁴⁶

On March 21, 392 marchers with King at their head set out on foot from Selma to Montgomery. Federalized guardsmen lined the route, and there were only minor incidents along the way. The entire march was covered by television cameras and print journalists. The trek, some fifty-four miles, took several days. It was bitterly cold at night, and King slept in a trailer that accompanied the marchers. By the time the demonstrators reached the outskirts of Montgomery, their numbers had swelled to twelve hundred, including show business celebrities Peter, Paul, and Mary; Joan Baez; Dick Gregory; Frank Sinatra; and Marlon Brando.⁴⁷The morning after the marchers arrived, King addressed a throng of some twenty-five thousand that had gathered on the plaza in front of the state capitol. The redoubtable Wallace peeked at the proceedings from behind Venetian blinds in his office.

That night a white civil rights activist from Detroit, Viola Liuzzo, was shot in the head and killed as she drove Le Roy Moton, a young black man, back to Selma from Montgomery.⁴⁸In his subsequent report on the incident, Hoover informed LBJ, “We found numerous needle marks indicating she had been taking dope although we can’t say that definitely because she is dead.” To Katzen-bach he reported that Mrs. Liuzzo “was sitting very, very close to the Negro in the car … It had the appearance of a necking party.”⁴⁹The White House ignored Hoover’s innuendoes and ordered the FBI to apprehend the perpetrators at once. In response to questions from reporters concerning the Liuzzo murder, the president described the Klan as a “hooded society of bigots.”⁵⁰The thing to do, Johnson subsequently told Katzenbach, was to turn the House Un-American Activities Committee loose on them.⁵¹That would spike Hoover and the segregationists’ red-baiting guns.

Focus now shifted to Congress and the voting rights bill. “We needed something where you didn’t have to litigate for fifteen years before you finally get … some relief,” Deputy Attorney General Ramsey Clark said.⁵²The legislation that the White House presented to the Hill on March 17 began by echoing the Fifteenth Amendment. It prohibited the denial of the right to vote on the basis of race or color. The measure invalidated “any test or device” that was used to discriminate in any federal, state, or local election in areas in which, as of November 1, 1964, fewer than 50 percent of the persons of voting age were not registered and did not vote in the presidential election. Twenty or more residents of a jurisdiction were empowered to petition the attorney general, charging that they had been denied the right to vote on the basis of race. If the complaint was validated, the Justice Department would appoint examiners to check the qualifications of voter applicants and certify them to vote if they were twenty-one or over and legal residents. Finally, no person could be denied the right to vote for failure to pay a poll tax.⁵³

Even legislators of the Deep South were not willing to argue publicly that qualified individuals did not have the right to vote. Russell Long let the White House know that he was going to vote for the measure, and he predicted that he would be able to carry eleven other southern senators with him. Everett Dirksen and the Republican leadership never gave serious thought to holding hands with southern conservatives on the issue. The black vote was coming to the South, and the GOP did not want to be left out. Led by Robert Kennedy, liberals in the Senate made a brief but unsuccessful attempt to toughen the administration’s measure by outlawing the poll tax altogether.⁵⁴Johnson, of course, believed that the move was just one more attempt by his archrival and the liberals to upstage and embarrass him.⁵⁵The Voting Rights Act of 1965 passed the Senate by a vote of seventy-seven to nineteen. The majority included five southern and border state Democrats. The House followed suit on July 9 by a vote of 333 to 85. Among the majority were thirty-three Democrats and three Republicans from the South. On August 6, 1965, LBJ proudly presided over a televised signing ceremony in the rotunda of the Capitol.⁵⁶

Throughout the fall and indeed for the remainder of his administration, LBJ badgered Justice, local officials, and civil rights leaders to pursue voter registration relentlessly. “I will go to any meeting,” he told Roy Wilkins. “I will issue any proclamations. I will go to Cleveland. I will go to Huntsville. I will go to Birmingham or Little Rock. And let’s just say ‘let every person in this State vote’ … I don’t care if you are Mexican, American, Negro, Baptist, Catholic, Jew—just vote. Questions of race and religion would then disappear; with every person voting his best interests, social justice would inevitably follow and it would be based on democracy, on ‘home rule’ rather than federal edict.”⁵⁷

By July 14, 1965, federal agencies had identified eight counties each in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana along with four in Georgia that did not meet the 50 percent rule. Operating from Civil Service offices in Atlanta and Dallas, supervisors opened local offices in the affected areas. By the end of January 1966, the campaign would claim 93,778 new voters, 91,212 black and 2,566 white. Of the 310,641 potential black voters, 30 percent had been registered. Progress was slow but steady. In March 1966, the Supreme Court would hold the basic components of the Voting Rights Act constitutional.⁵⁸Southern conservatives quickly recognized the handwriting on the wall. “[Virginia Democratic Congressman A. Willis] Robertson is in a great mood these days,” White House aide Mike Manatos reported to LBJ in February 1966. “He is looking at those Negro votes. He told me point blank one day, he said you know they have registered about 200,000 Negroes down there and he said I just want to be on the good side of ’em.”⁵⁹By the 1968 presidential election, Mississippi had reached 59 percent, and black registration in the eleven former Confederate states averaged 62 percent. In 1980 only 7 percent fewer blacks proportionately than whites were on the nation’s voting rolls.⁶⁰

 

DURING THE DEBATEover the poverty bill, LBJ had come to understand that the story of the disadvantaged in America was a complicated one, and that even if white attitudes changed overnight, the culture of poverty would still persist. The White House began to get an inkling by the summer of 1965 that the number one racial battleground of the future would be the large urban areas of the Northeast and Midwest, where millions of blacks had migrated between 1940 and 1970. In August 1965,Newsweek ran a piece entitled “New Crisis: The Negro Family.” The article, citing a Department of Labor report, painted a dismal picture of overpopulated urban ghettoes teeming with unemployed youths, fatherless children, drug addicts, gang members, rats, and predatory white shopkeepers. “The evidence—not final, but powerfully persuasive—is that the Negro family in the urban ghettoes is crumbling … This is the time bomb ticking at the very heart of America’s ‘most dangerous social problem.’ ”⁶¹

In his conversation with black leaders and the architects of the Great Society, LBJ had made it clear that he considered the Office of Economic Opportunity and other facets of the War on Poverty to be civil rights programs. Implicit in this strategy was the assumption that equality under the law, equal access, and voting rights were not enough. The history of the African American was quite different from that of other ethnic, immigrant groups. Slavery had deliberately fractured families, prohibited literacy, and denigrated notions of self-worth. The sharecrop, crop-lien system, and Jim Crow were steps up from slavery but miles short of equality. Even withBrown and the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965 in place, blacks were not simply working-class whites ready to move up to the next rung on the socioeconomic ladder. By virtue of education, income, IQ, and other accepted measures of achievement, African Americans did not measure up.

The War on Poverty had spawned a number of government studies that sought to uncover the historical and social roots of the culture of poverty. One of those, a report on the black family by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, had been circulating in the West Wing and throughout the federal bureaucracy for four months. The Moynihan report ticked off the statistics and then focused on that most widely accepted criterion of social stability and progress: the family. One-quarter of city-dwelling black women who had ever been married were now divorced, separated, or deserted—22.9 percent compared to 7.9 percent for whites. As a result, one black family in four was fatherless. More than half of all Negro children would have lived in broken homes by their eighteenth birthday. Twenty-five percent of all black babies born in America were illegitimate, compared to 3.07 percent of whites. As a result, recipients of Aid to Families with Dependent Children had become primarily un-married black females and their dependent children. More than half of all Negro children subsisted on AFDC checks at some time during their childhood. At the same time, the birthrate for ghetto-dwelling blacks was 40 percent higher than for whites.⁶²

The intention of the report, Moynihan later recalled, was not to indict the black family but to use it as “the best point … at which to measure the net, cumulative plus or minus impact of outside forces on the Negro community. All the abstractions of employment, housing, income, discrimination, education, et al. come together here.”⁶³With its focus on the African American nuclear family, the Moynihan report proved to be a bombshell, however. Harry McPherson recalled that when Moynihan, a close friend and intellectual soul mate, finished his study, he, McPherson, was in the hospital recovering from a hernia operation. Moynihan showed up with the document and a full bottle of Johnny Walker Black scotch. As McPherson read, he grew drunker and increasingly alarmed. It would be fodder for every racist who was trying to discredit the values and morality of African Americans.⁶⁴He was right. Black activists, especially the more radical in SNCC, CORE, and the Black Power movement, insisted that the government was trying to blame the victim for the crime. It seemed to be saying that if only blacks would take control of their lives, embrace monogamy, and nurture their children, all would be well. But where would the jobs come from, where the schools, where the rat-control programs, where the health care? How could inner-city blacks reach the suburbs, where the jobs were, without transportation?

Initially, George Reedy recalled, Johnson and his staff were not willing to accept preference for blacks, with the notion of hiring quotas that it implied.⁶⁵By the summer of 1965, however, LBJ began to shift gears. The first week in June, the president delivered the commencement address at Howard University, in which he justified and defined affirmative action. “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘you are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair,” he declared. It was not sufficient simply to open the gates of opportunity; all must be able to enter those gates. Equipping black Americans to take advantage of the opportunities available to them would be “the next and more profound stage for the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.” Summarizing the Moynihan report, LBJ emphasized the historical role that racial prejudice and exploitation had played in blighting black youth and their families. “Ability is stretched or stunted by the family that you live with,” Johnson told his all-black audience, “and the neighborhood you live in—by the school you go to and the poverty or the richness of your surroundings.” It was the responsibility of all Americans to see that this blight was lifted from those who suffered from it. Typically, LBJ quoted Scripture: “I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart, which shall not be put out.”⁶⁶

“The strategy of the speech,” Moynihan later observed, “was that by couching the issue in terms of family … white America could be brought to see the tired old issues of employment, housing, discrimination and such in terms of much greater urgency than they ever evoked on their own.” Moreover, family as an issue raised the possibility of enlisting the support of conservative groups for quite radical social programs. The architects of the Howard speech recognized that “the intense moralisms of conservative Catholic and Protestant religion” were “simply a clumsy effort to maintain standards of family stability that most of us regard as eminently sane.”⁶⁷

In fact, the administration got the worst of both worlds. Conservatives for the most part chose to view the disintegration of the black family as proof of the innate depravity of inner-city blacks, and many blacks elected to treat the Moynihan report and references to the family in the Howard speech as attempts by the white power structure to blame the victim. And then there was the reaction to affirmative action, especially to Johnson’s new, more radical definition of it. The president did not develop the notion of affirmative action with any specificity, but his allusion to equality of condition as well as equality of opportunity pointed to the righting of historic wrongs through hiring quotas and preferences. Traditional civil rights leaders like King, Young, Randolph, and Wilkins hailed the Howard speech as historic. Some white liberals were not so sure, however. Quotas and preferences violated the “American philosophical creed,” libertarian Daniel Bell wrote. Special subsidies for the poor were acceptable, but a plan that would end up discriminating “against others” was not.⁶⁸The managing editor ofChristian Century , Kyle Haselden, agreed. “Compensation for Negroes is a subtle but pernicious form of racism,” he editorialized. “It requires that men be dealt with by society on the basis of race and color rather than on the basis of their humanity.”⁶⁹

In part, the Howard speech was an attempt to dissipate the storm that was gathering in America’s ghettoes before it burst upon the nation and created a white backlash that would undo all that LBJ and his colleagues had accomplished. But, despite its promise, it was too little too late. Just days after LBJ signed the Voting Rights Act in August 1965, riots erupted in Watts, Los Angeles’s teeming black ghetto.⁷⁰The violence began when a white policeman attempted to arrest a black youth for driving under the influence. As the officer tried to push the young man into his patrol car, he began to struggle. By this time, the youth’s mother had arrived, accompanied by a crowd from nearby street corners. Suddenly, she and the onlookers began pelting the police with rocks and bottles. Reinforcements arrived, and a major confrontation ensued. Fueled by chronic unemployment, poor schools or no schools at all, rat-infested tenements, police brutality, and the general hopelessness and frustration of ghetto living, Watts boiled over. A mob estimated at five thousand roamed the streets, looted stores, attacked whites, and fire-bombed white- and Korean-owned businesses. When police and firemen responded, isolated sniper fire from surrounding rooftops greeted them.⁷¹At this point, the governor of California called in the national guard. Still the looting and violence continued. Crowds of young blacks chanted “Burn, baby, burn” and prevented firefighters from dousing flames. After a curfew was imposed, soldiers and policemen began shooting indiscriminately. For six days Watts was turned into a combat zone. When the rioting was finally quelled, thirty-four lay dead, one thousand were injured, four thousand had been arrested, and large sections of the ghetto had been reduced to a smoldering ruin.⁷²

“If a single event can be picked to mark the dividing line of the sixties,” Life editorialized, “it was Watts.” The outburst of violence “ripped the fabric of democratic society and set the tone of confrontation and open revolt.”⁷³Martin Luther King flew to the scene to appeal for calm only to be heckled by young militants. A feud had long been brewing between the older generation of civil rights leaders like King and Randolph and the younger, more radical elements in CORE and SNCC who had grown disillusioned with the American political process and nonviolent civil disobedience. Revolutionary activists such as Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, and Bobby Seale took over existing organizations or formed new ones that called for whatever means necessary, including violence, to achieve equality and opportunity for African Americans. They were aided and abetted by black writers and intellectuals such as Eldridge Cleaver(Soul on Ice , 1967) and James Baldwin(The Fire Next Time , 1963), who moved beyond Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison in their anger and their vision of an apocalyptic end to the struggle of African Americans against oppression and exploitation. The new militants even questioned the value of integration. “Integration,” Stokely Carmichael wrote, “is a subterfuge for the maintenance of white supremacy.”⁷⁴

The ultimate prophet of the new militancy, which the press dubbed “the Black Power movement,” was Malcolm X, who had risen to the leadership of the Black Muslims, or Nation of Islam. The organization was a puritanical association of African Americans that practiced a variation of the Islamic creed and that drew its converts primarily from the pimps, drug pushers, and generally down-and-out of the big-city ghettos. Malcolm X argued that blacks had been abused and reviled for so long that the only way they could liberate themselves spiritually as well as politically and economically was through violent struggle. “If someone puts a hand on you,” he told his followers, “send him to the cemetery.”Newsweek called him a “spiritual desperado … a demagogue who titillated slum Negroes and frightened whites.”⁷⁵

For Johnson, the rioting in Watts was the ultimate nightmare. Up to this point, he had been relatively successful in denying conservatives use of the “law and order” issue. During the 1964 campaign, Goldwater and the ultras had tried to raise the specter of lawlessness, subtly attempting to link civil rights demontrations with communist subversion and inner-city crime.⁷⁶They had gotten nowhere. Johnson had turned the law-and-order table on conservatives by comparing the Klan to the Communist Party and pointing to the lawlessness of anti?civil rights forces in the South. Indeed, his final, unanswerable appeal to southern whites faced with the Second Reconstruction was the demand and the expectation that they “obey the law.” Now the nation was faced with the reality of black violence and, worse, black leaders who were hailing the therapeutic value of violence and denouncing white society and white political processes as impotent and irrelevant. Johnson’s first reaction to Watts was incredulity and then denial. “How is it possible,” he asked “after all we’ve accomplished? How could it be?” When he first received word that mass violence had erupted in South Los Angeles, LBJ was at the ranch, celebrating the signing of the Voting Rights Act. Stunned, he drove around his pastures alone for hours refusing to return calls from White House domestic adviser Joseph Califano, who was quickly besieged by California Governor Pat Brown, Los Angeles Mayor Sam Yorty, and other state officials pleading for federal aid.⁷⁷

On the second day of the rioting, LBJ began to emerge from his shell and grapple with the situation. He and his advisers at once realized how symbolically important would be the manner in which the federal government reacted to Watts. There was obviously an overriding need to get at the roots of the rioting, lest other American cities go up in flames. The White House dispatched Ramsey Clark and a team of troubleshooters to Los Angeles to confer with Mayor Yorty and black leaders.⁷⁸The president agreed to meet with King.

“What should we do?” LBJ asked. “Get the Poverty Program going in L.A.,” King replied.⁷⁹Johnson ordered Katzenbach to put together an emergency task force to develop summer job programs and funnel government funds into the “rehabilitation of recreation centers and playgrounds.” The government had initiated such programs in Washington, D.C., where violence had been predicted during the summers of 1963 and 1964. At the very least, Katzenbach observed, such moves would “show the children and juveniles that their government cared about their problems.”⁸⁰But such aid would have to be discreet lest the federal government appear to frightened whites to be rewarding violence and lawlessness. “The riot had, you know, just stunned and polarized the community there particularly, but also the nation,” Ramsey Clark noted. Gun sales to white suburbanites skyrocketed, and so did the popularity of law-and-order candidates like actor-turned-politician Ronald Reagan. “And there was great concern that what we would do might appear to reward rioters,” Clark observed.⁸¹Joe Califano, who had moved over from Defense to the White House to handle domestic affairs after Moyers became press secretary, recalled how worried the president was that out of frustration, hopelessness, and ignorance, poor blacks would lash out and undermine the very programs he was initiating to help them.⁸²

Despite his frustration, disappointment, and occasional anger, however, Johnson had no intention of abandoning inner-city blacks to their fate. “We are on a powder keg in a dozen places,” he told John McCone, whom he was trying to persuade to head up an inquiry into urban unrest. “You just have no idea of the depth of the feeling of these people. I see some of the boys that have worked for me, have 2,000 years of persecution, now they suffer from it. They [ghetto dwellers] have absolutely nothing to live for, 40% of them are unemployed, these youngsters live with rats and have no place to sleep, and they all start from broken homes and illegitimate families and all that narcotics circulating around … We have just got to find some way to wipe out these ghettos and find some housing and put them to work.”⁸³At the same time that he appealed to the compassion of liberals, he tweaked the fears of conservatives. “I got 38 percent of these young Negro boys out on the streets,” he told Arkansas Senator John McClellan. “They’ve got no school to go to and no job. And by God, I’m just scared to death what’s going to happen … You take an old hard-peckered boy that sits around and got no school and got no job and got no work and got no discipline. His daddy’s probably on relief, and his mama’s probably taking morphine. Why, he ain’t got nothing hurt if he gets shot. I mean, he’s better off dead than he is where he is.”⁸⁴By the end of August, the administration had allocated more than $29 million to help rehabilitate Watts alone.

In the months ahead, LBJ would turn his attention once again to the War on Poverty, now perceived as both an exercise in idealism and an emergency fire station to keep the American house from burning down. At the same time, the president increasingly employed the language of law and order. A few days before announcing the new federal programs for Watts, he addressed a White House Conference on Equal Employment Opportunities. “A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and a mask on his face,” he declared. “They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties, and ultimately destroyers of a free America. They must be exposed and they must be dealt with.”⁸⁵