1
The Moment
On February 1, 1960, seventeen-year-old Franklin McCain and three Black friends went to the whites-only counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina, and took a seat. âWe wanted to go beyond what our parents had done. . . .The worst thing that could happen was that the Ku Klux Klan could kill us . . . but I had no concern for my personal safety. The day I sat at that counter I had the most tremendous feeling of elation and celebration,â he told me. âI felt that in this life nothing else mattered. . . . If thereâs a heaven I got there for a few minutes. I just felt you canât touch me. You canât hurt me. Thereâs no other experience like it.â
A few years later, in May 1963, in Birmingham, Alabama, a burly white police officer attempted to intimidate some Black schoolÂchildren to keep them from joining the growing antisegregation protests. They assured him they knew what they were doing, ignored his entreaties, and continued their march toward Kelly Ingram Park, where they were arrested. A reporter asked one of them her age. âSix,â she said, as she climbed into the paddy wagon.
The following month in Mississippi, stalwart civil rights campaigner Fannie Lou Hamer overheard Annell Ponder, a fellow campaigner, being beaten in jail in an adjacent cell.
âCan you say yes, sir, nigger? Can you say yes, sir?â the policeman demanded.
âYes, I can say yes, sir,â replied the protester.
âSo say it.â
âI donât know you well enough,â said Ponder, and then Hamer heard her hit the floor again. The torture continued like this for some time, with Ponder praying for God to forgive her tormentors.
Hamer later recalled that when she next saw Ponder, âone of her eyes looked like blood and her mouth was swollen.â
âAll books about all revolutions begin with a chapter that describes the decay of tottering authority or the misery and sufferings of the people,â wrote the late Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski in Shah of Shahs. âThey should begin with a psychological chapter, one that shows how a harassed, terrified man suddenly breaks his terror, stops being afraid. This unusual process demands illuminating. Man gets rid of fear and feels free.â
The period preceding Martin Luther Kingâs speech at the March on Washington was one such chapter. Until that point there had, of course, been many fearless acts by antiracist protesters. But in that moment the number who were prepared to commit them reached a critical mass. âIn three difficult years,â wrote the late academic Manning Marable in Race, Reform and Rebellion, âthe southern struggle had grown from a modest group of black students demonstrating peacefully at one lunch-counter to the largest mass movement for racial reform and civil rights in the twentieth century.â
In May 1963, the New York Times published more stories about civil rights in two weeks than it had in the previous two years, points out Drew Hansen in The Dream: Martin Luther King Jr. and the Speech That Inspired a Nation. According to the Justice Department, during the ten-week period following Kennedyâs national address on civil rights in June, shortly before Kingâs speech, there were 758 demonstrations in 186 cities, resulting in 14,733 arrests. Such were the conditions that made the March on Washington possible and Kingâs speech so resonant. As Clarence Jones would later write in Behind the Dream: The Making of the Speech That Transformed a Nation: âText without context, in this case especially, would be quite a loss.â
The context was global. Two days after McCain made his protest in Greensboro, the British prime minister Harold Macmillan addressed the South African Parliament in Cape Town with an ominous warning. âThe wind of change is blowing through this continent,â he said. âWhether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact.â
Some, including his immediate audience, did not like it at all. But as the decade wore on, that wind became a gale. In the three years between Macmillanâs speech and the March on Washington, Togo, Mali, Senegal, Zaire, Somalia, Benin, Niger, Burkina Faso, CĂŽte dâIvoire, Chad, Central African Republic, Congo, Gabon, Nigeria, Mauritania, Sierra Leone, Tanganyika, and Jamaica all became independent. Internationally, nonracial democracy and the Black enfranchisement that came with it were the order of the day. The longer America practiced legal segregation, the more it looked like a slum on the wrong side of history rather than a shining city on the hill. âThe new sense of dignity on the part of the Negro,â argued King, was due in part to âthe awareness that his struggle is a part of a world-wide struggle. He has watched developments in Asia and Africa with rapt attention. . . . [It] is a drama being played out on the stage of the world with spectators and supporters from every continent.â
Those places that clung to rigidly codified racism would be increasingly reduced to a rump: South Africa, Namibia, Rhodesia, and Mozambique in Africa; the Deep South in the United Statesâthat region W. J. Cash described, in The Mind of the South, as ânot quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.â From here on, white privilege could be explicitly defended only by resorting to ever more heinous acts of violence that prompted, in response, ever more determined acts of defiance.
âThe year before [the March on Washington] had been like a second Civil War,â wrote John Lewis in his autobiography, Walking with the Wind, âwith bombings, beatings and killings happening almost weekly. A march would be met with violence, which would cause yet another march, and so on. That was the pattern.â
As the segregationistsâ violence escalated, so did the militancy of Black activists. Earlier that year King had been heckled in Harlem with the chant âWe want Malcolm, we want Malcolm.â
As long as there has been racism in America, there has been a rift between those who sought to fight alongside whites for equality and integration on the one hand and on the other Black nationalists, who argued that Blacks should organize separately from whites to establish an autonomous homeland either within the United States or in Africa. For some the issue was tactical, for others a matter of principle, providing for plenty of overlap between the two. At this time Malcolm X was the most prominent Black nationalist and a member of the Nation of Islam, a Muslim sect that did not believe in nonviolence or integration.
âItâs just like when youâve got some coffee thatâs too black, which means itâs too strong,â Malcolm X once said, explaining his wariness about working with white people. âWhat do you do? You integrate it with cream, you make it weak. But if you pour too much cream in it, you wonât even know you ever had coffee. It used to be hot, it becomes cool. It used to be strong, it becomes weak. It used to wake you up, now it puts you to sleep.â
By the summer of 1963 some African Americans were losing hope that white America would ever accommodate their most basic demands for human rights. âThere were many in the summer of â63 who did [agree with Malcolm X]âmore it seemed every day,â wrote Lewis. âI could see Malcolmâs appeal, especially to young people who had never been exposed to or had any understanding of the discipline of non-violenceâand also to people who had given up on that discipline. There was no question Malcolm X was tapping into a growing feeling of restlessness and resentment among Americaâs blacks.â
On May 13, John F. Kennedyâs principal Black adviser, Louis Martin, wrote a memo to the president, explaining: âAs this is written, demonstrations and marches are planned. The accelerated tempo of Negro restiveness . . . may soon create the most critical state of race relations this country has seen since the Civil War.â A month later the US ambassador to India, J. K. Galbraith, urged: âThis is our last chance to remain in control of matters.â
While such warnings were portentous, this was no existential threat. The American state was not about to be overthrown. Nonetheless, the moment represented a thoroughgoing assault against one of the fundamental pillars on which the nation had been established: white supremacy.
One of the central aims of the civil rights movement was to create a crisis in the polity. This strategy was explicitly laid out by James Farmer, the head of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in 1961 during the Freedom Rides, when a racially mixed group of protesters went through the South on buses with Blacks sitting at the front and whites at the back. âWhat we had to do,â said Farmer, âwas make it more dangerous politically for the federal government not to enforce the law than it would be for them to enforce federal law. We felt we could count on the racists of the South to create a crisis so that the federal government would be compelled to enforce the law.â
The white citizenry of the South was only too happy to oblige. When one bus rolled into Anniston, Alabama, it was chased up the highway and firebombed. When another arrived in Birmingham, it was met by men wielding baseball bats and lead pipes. These attacks took place with the active collusion of the regionâs political class. Alabamaâs governor, George Wallace, took office in the year of Kingâs speech. Shortly before he did so, his attorney general, Richmond Flowers, warned him of the predictable consequences of following through on the defiant segregationist rhetoric that had been a hallmark of his election campaign. âLook George, you gonna be whupped all through the courts. And when youâre whupped in the courts, the Klanâs gonna come out on the streets and the killingâs gonna start. You know thatâs whatâs gonna happen.â
Wallace told him, âDamnit, send the Justice Department word, I ainât compromising with anybody. Iâm gonna make âem bring troops into this state.â
A populist and a demagogue, Wallace aimed not to score a substantial victory but to perform resistance; a strategy that, a century after the Confederate defeat in the Civil War, had particular appeal among a section of southern whites. âWallaceâs political psychology essentially derives from the Southern romance of an unvanquished and intransigent spirit in the face of utter, desolate defeat,â argues Marshall Frady in Wallace.
What Farmer could not have predicted, however, was just how reluctant the federal government under Kennedy would be to intervene when faced with these crises. This was partly because the members of his administration didnât fully comprehend the enormity of what was happening. JFKâs brother, US attorney general Robert Kennedy, evidently struggled to grasp the indignity of segregation. âThey can stand at the lunch counters. They donât have to eat there. They can pee before they come into the store or the supermarket.â Nor was he particularly sympathetic to Black peopleâs impatience with the slow pace of change. âNegroes are now just antagonistic and mad and theyâre going to be mad at everything. You canât talk to them. . . . My friends all say [even] the Negro maids and servants are getting antagonistic.â
The president, meanwhile, was worried about alienating a key sector of his electoral base: white southerners. The Democratic Party at that time was a curious coalition of southern segregationists, northern liberals, and those African Americans who were allowed to vote. The Black vote had been crucial to Kennedyâs narrow victory against Nixon in 1960, but so too were southern whites. Both Wallace and King had voted for Kennedy.
From the outset, the president decided the wisest strategy was to avoid coming between them. âKennedy now worried that any attempt to push Southern Democrats on civil rights was likely to produce a backlash,â writes Nick Bryant in The Bystander: John F. Kennedy and the Struggle for Black Equality. âIf we drive . . . moderate southerners to the wall with a lot of civil rights demands that canât pass anyway,â Kennedy told an aide, âthen what happens to the Negro on minimum wages, housing and the rest?â
But in the absence of federal intervention the crisis didnât disappear; it deepened. African Americans became more determined; segregationists became more desperate. âThe crisis,â argued Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci in his Prison Notebooks, âconsists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born.â
Until the summer of 1963, when King delivered his speech, even though the health of the old segregated polity in the South was clearly failing, the birth of a new integrated one had yet to be induced. Eventually the Kennedy administration was forced to play midwife. It had no choice. By the time of the March on Washington the civil rights movement had raised acute questions of power: Who has it? Who wants it? How do you get it? How do you keep it? The answers would be delivered in the bluntest fashion. Governors personally blocked schoolhouse doors, cities were put under martial law, National Guard troops were federalized and dispatched, children filled jails, protesters were killed. In short, the fundamental ability and right of the state to maintain law and order became an open question, assaulted at every turn from all directions.
In the South, segregation had been the norm for more than two centuries, with a brief break during Reconstruction after the Civil War. While it had always been resisted, generations of both Blacks and whites, not to mention officials both federal and local, had grown accustomed to it. âWho hears a clock tick or the surf murmur or the trains pass?â asked James Kilpatrick, editor of the New Leader, of Richmond, Virginia, in The Southern Case for School Segregation in 1962. âNot those who live by the clock or the sea or the track. In the South, the acceptance of racial separation begins in the cradle. What rational man imagines this concept can be shattered overnight?â
Now, with the status quo openly challenged and brutally defended, long-held allegiances were tested and positions polarized. Key players who had learned to live with segregationâthe federal government, business interests, liberal whites, conservative Blacksâwere forced to reckon with the arrival of a new order. And fissures opened up not just between these various interested parties but also within them as events tested their ability to accommodate, negotiate, and confront this impending transformation, drawing sharp distinctions at each juncture between those who ostensibly held power and those who actually wielded influence.
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In few places were these developments clearer or more pivotal to both the March on Washington and Kingâs speech than Birmingham, Alabama, during the spring of 1963. Birmingham, nicknamed Bombingham because of the violent attacks on Black leadersâ homes, was one of the most violent and racist cities in the South. In Eyes on the Prize, Juan Williams tells how in 1956 Nat King Cole had been beaten there while performing on stage; a year later a car full of drunk whites castrated a man theyâd snatched from a street corner. âNothing at that time would have surprised me about Alabama,â the late Fred Shuttlesworth, the leading civil rights figure in the town, told me. âIt was just Mississippi moved a little to the east. White people there used to do things first and then think about it later. Even the most liberal white people there supported segregation.â
Shuttlesworth invited King to Birmingham because he knew that where King went the cameras were sure to follow. King came, in no small part, because the previous year he had suffered a crushing defeat in Albany, Georgia, where he had been outmaneuvered by local authorities, and he thought Birmingham could help revive his reputation.
Despite the cityâs notoriety, indeed partly because of it, there was some reason to believe they could mount a successful challenge to segregation there. Birminghamâs white community was split, primarily between business and political interests. Both supported segregation, but their relationship to it was different. Politicians were dependent on segregation for their authority, which they maintained through force or the threat of it. The business community was primarily interested in profits. Integration would result in a sharp increase in Black voters, who would threaten the stranglehold of white politicians. But it would also give rights to Black consumers and open up the labor market, which could, under the right circumstances, help commerce. The violence meted out by the politicians, meanwhile, could now be broadcast both nationally and internationally, sullying the cityâs image in a way that was bad for business. When asked at a press conference why he thought Birmingham would prove more successful than Albany, King retorted: âThe Negro has enough buying power in Birmingham to make the difference between profit and loss in any business. That was not true in Albany, Georgia.â So there was less at stake for the business community in accommodating integration than there was for politicians.
âIn a highly industrialized, 20th-century civilization, we hit Jim Crow precisely where it was most anachronistic, dispensable, and vulnerableâin hotels, lunch counters, terminals, libraries, swimming pools, and the like,â wrote Bayard Rustin two years later. âFor in these forms, Jim Crow does impede the flow of commerce in the broadest sense: it is a nuisance in a society on the move (and on the make).â
In 1962, for example, a student boycott forced some local stores to take down segregationist signs and integrate lunch counters, toilets, and water fountains. Eugene âBullâ Connor, Birminghamâs safety commissioner and head of the segregationist triumvirate running the city, had responded by citing the stores in question for building-code violations. The signs soon went back up.
That year Sid Smyer, the president of the local chamber of commerce, along with other businessmen, launched an effort to change the cityâs government structure from a cabal of three segregationist commissioners to an elected mayor and nine city councilmen. âYou might say it was a dollar and cents thing,â Smyer told Howell Raines in My Soul Is Rested. âIf weâre going to have good business in Birmingham, we better change our way of living.â Voters approved his proposal and in 1963 elected Albert Boutwell over Connor. Connor then petitioned the courts, demanding that he be allowed to complete his term.
This inevitably resulted in confusion. There was not so much a power vacuum as a power glut. âOn Tuesdays the [old] Commission met . . . and proceeded to govern the city, and when they finished, they would march out and [the] nine [new] council members would march in, and they would proceed to adopt laws and spend money and conduct the affairs of the city,â former Birmingham mayor David Vann told Juan Williams. For a while both Boutwell and Connor signed city employeesâ checks.
But if the cityâs white power structure was fractured between those who favored confrontation and those who sought some form of accommodation, Black leadership in the city was no less so. Some local Black businessmen and more conservative clergy were not happy about Kingâs arrival or the escalation of activism, believing the new administration should be given the chance to show its commitment to reform...