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- ║,$/ Æ< ╚May 17, 1963RACESFreedom-Now
-
-
- The blaze of bombs, the flash of blades, the eerie glow of
- fire, the keening cries of hatred, the wild dance of terror in
- the night -- all this was Birmingham, Ala.
-
- Birmingham's Negroes had always seemed a docile lot.
- Downtown at night, they slouched in gloomy huddles beneath
- street lamps, talking softly or not at all. They knew their
- place: they were "niggers" in a Jim Crow town, and they bore
- their degradation in silence.
-
- But last week they smashed that image forever. The scenes
- in Birmingham were unforgettable. There was the Negro youth,
- sprawled on his back and spinning across the pavement, while
- firemen battered him with streams of water so powerful that
- they could strip bark off trees. There was the Negro woman,
- pinned to the ground by cops, one of them with his knee dug into
- her throat. There was the white man who watched hymn-singing
- Negroes burst from a sweltering church and growled: "We ought
- to shoot every damned one of them." And there was the little
- Negro girl, splendid in a newly starched dress, who marched out
- of a church, looked toward a massed line of pistol-packing cops,
- and called to a laggard friend: "Hurry up, Lucille. If you stay
- behind, you won't get arrested with our group."
-
- Finally, outlined against the flames that shot 150 ft. in
- the air, there was the mass of Negroes barring with their
- bodies and with a rain of rocks, bottles and bricks the firemen
- who had rushed to save a white man's store.
-
- For more than a month, Negro demonstrations in Birmingham
- had sputtered, bursting occasionally into flames, then
- flickering out. Martin Luther King, the Negroes' inspirational
- but sometimes inept leader, had picked this bastion of racial
- inequity for the crusade, "because Birmingham is the symbol of
- segregation." In the last six years, there have been 18 racial
- bombings (Negroes call it "Bombingham") and more than 50
- cross-burnings. Schools are totally segregated. So are
- restaurants, drinking fountains, toilets. Birmingham gave up its
- professional baseball team rather than have it playing
- integrated teams in the International League. The Metropolitan
- Opera Company no longer visits the city, because officials
- refused to integrate the municipal auditorium. Parks were shut
- down last year because officials would not integrate them after
- a court order.
-
- Unquestionably, Birmingham was the toughest segregation
- town in the South, from the Negroes' viewpoint. And it was
- symbolized by Public Safety Commissioner Eugene ("Bull") Connor,
- who had cowed Negroes for 23 years with hoarse threats and
- club-swinging cops. It was against Connor's Birmingham that King
- began secretly recruiting volunteers just before last Christmas.
-
- King and Connor clashed head-on. The commissioner had his
- cops -- plus a pack of snarling police dogs and a battery of
- high- pressure fire hoses. The Negro minister had only the
- determination and courage of his people. He had mobilized
- school- children for his freedom parades. Hundreds of kids were
- in jail, and, as least week began, Birmingham was at the point
- of explosion.
-
- "Forgive Them." On Sunday, the Negroes tried, as they had
- before, to worship in white churches. But segregation in
- Birmingham's Christian churches is nearly as rigid as in public
- toilets: Negroes got into four churches, were ordered away from
- 17 others. Late in the afternoon, King called a mass meeting at
- the New Pilgrim Baptist Church. Outside, Bull Connor massed 50
- policemen and a fire truck with water pressure cranked up to 700
- lbs. When the crowd of 1,000 poured out of the church just
- before dusk, they lined up and marched toward the police. A
- police captain demanded their parade permit. They had none.
- Seeing the fire hoses, they knelt in silence as a Negro minister
- solemnly began to pray: "Let them turn their water on. Let them
- use their dogs. We are not leaving. Forgive them, O Lord."
-
- Suddenly, inexplicably, in a moment of overt mercy, Bull
- Connor waved the Negroes through the police line. He allowed
- them 15 minutes of hymns and prayer in a small park near the
- city jail; inside, behind bars, hundreds of other Negroes could
- hear the singing. Returning to the church, the demonstrators
- were told that Negro children would march again next day -- and
- should carry their toothbrushes with them to use in jail.
-
- The march began a few minutes past 1 o'clock, led by
- Comedian Dick Gregory, from the 16th Street Baptist Church.
- When a policeman demanded his parade permit, Gregory spoke
- softly -- in contrast to his wise cracking smart talk to cops
- during last month's Greenwood, Miss., voting registration
- demonstrations. Gregory and 18 teenagers in his protest platoon
- were herded into a paddy wagon. In squads of 20, 30, and 40,
- more youngsters left the church, were shoved into paddy wagons
- and taken to jail. Bull Connor arrived and yelled at a police
- captain: "I told you these sons of bitches ought to be watered
- down." That night, to shouts of "Amen, brother, amen," a King
- aide cried: "War has been declared in Birmingham. War has been
- declared on segregation."
-
- The Negro leaders intended it to be a particular, pacific
- kind of war. King had preached Gandhi's nonviolent protest
- gospel ever since he arrived in Birmingham. The demonstrations
- were meant to be an outgrowth of the passive sit-ins and bus
- boycotts mounted in other Southern cities. But not every Negro
- in Birmingham remained so placid before Bull Connor's ferocity.
-
- "Those Black Apes." So there was violence. It began shortly
- after noon the next day. Connor's cops were relaxed, eating
- sandwiches and sipping soft drinks. They were caught by surprise
- when the doors of the 16th Street church were flung open and
- 2,500 Negroes swarmed out. The Negroes surged across Kelly
- Ingram Park, burst through the police line, and descended on
- downtown Birmingham. Yelling and singing, they charged in and
- out of department stores, jostled whites on the streets,
- paralyzed traffic.
-
- Recovering, the police got reinforcements. Firemen hooked
- up their hoses. Motorcycles and squad cars, sirens blaring,
- rushed into the area. Two policemen grabbed a Negro, shoved him
- against a storefront -- and found themselves caught inside a
- glowering circle of 300 Negroes. A voice growled menacingly:
- "Let's free him." But demonstration leaders quickly broke into
- the circle and managed to save the policemen.
-
- The riot ebbed -- and then, an hour later, exploded again.
- In Kelly Ingram Park, hundreds of Negroes began lobbing bricks
- and bottles at the lawmen. A deputy sheriff fell to the
- pavement, shouting "Those black apes!"
-
- For two hours, the battle raged, but slowly, inexorably,
- in truck and cars, the police closed in on the park. The Rev.
- Fred Shuttlesworth, one of King's top advisers, yelled
- helplessly at rioters from in front of the church, finally took
- a blast of water that slammed him violently against a wall. An
- ambulance took him away, and when Bull Connor heard about it
- later, he leered in mock despair: "I waited a week down here to
- see that, and then I missed it. I wish it had been a hearse."
-
- Now it was over. The Negroes were forced back into the
- church, and Commissioner Connor glanced at the closed doors.
- Said he: "If any of those guys in that church there is a
- preacher, then I'm a watchmaker -- and I've never seen the
- inside of a watch. They say they're nonviolent? I got three men
- hurt today. Is that nonviolence?"
-
- That night, Alabama's ultra-segregationist Governor George
- Wallace sent 600 men to reinforce Bull Connor's weary cops. And
- Martin Luther King appeared before his followers to say: "We
- will turn America upside down in order that it turn right side
- up."
-
- Birmingham had already been upset -- and all but
- overturned. Downtown merchants, plagued for more than a year by
- a Negro boycott that was 90% effective, saw their profits
- plunging even more because of the demonstrations. Birmingham's
- racist reputation had long been bad enough to frighten away
- potential industry; rioting by King's forces would further scar
- the city's image. And, despite the headline-hogging prominence
- of such racists as Bull Connor and Governor Wallace, there was
- a significant number of moderates in Birmingham who wanted
- peace, simply because they believed the Negro indeed deserved
- better treatment than he was getting. In fact, last month
- Birmingham had elected Mayor Albert Boutwell, 58, a relatively
- cool thinker on racial affairs, over Bull Connor.
-
- The Pallid Peace. Even as Negroes fought whites on
- Birmingham's streets, peace talks were under way. A team of
- Justice Department lawyers, headed by Assistant Attorney General
- Burke Marshall, went to Birmingham, began a series of meetings
- with local businessmen. Of the white negotiators, Martin Luther
- King made four demands: 1) desegregate all public facilities in
- department and variety stores; 2) give Negroes equal job
- opportunities; 3) drop all charges against the 2,500 Negroes who
- had been arrested during the demonstrations; 4) set up a
- biracial committee to establish a timetable for reopening parks
- and other facilities which Birmingham's city fathers had closed
- to avoid integration.
-
- The first meetings were held in deep secrecy, for the
- white businessmen involved feared both economic and physical
- reprisals from redneck hoodlums in Birmingham. Marshall attended
- nearly all of them. Negroes were represented by a local
- committee, including A.G. Gaston, one of the U.S.'s few Negro
- millionaires. Sidney Smyer, a lawyer and real estate man, was
- the chief spokesman for the whites -- and, at week's end, still
- the only negotiator from that side who had the courage to permit
- himself to be publicly identified.
-
- There were meetings on Sunday and Monday -- handled much
- like union-management negotiations, with representatives
- bringing results of the conference back to their leaders. To add
- to the pressure, the crisis spurred dozens of pleading phone
- calls from Washington and such Administration officials as Bobby
- Kennedy, Treasury Secretary Douglas Dillon and Defense Secretary
- Robert McNamara. Finally the businessmen gave halfhearted
- agreement to King's demands -- but there was no assurance that
- they could persuade Birmingham's segregationist politicians to
- go along.
-
- "We'll Kill You." It was a truce -- but there was to be no
- peace. Saturday night, after a Ku Klux Klan meeting near
- Birmingham, two dynamite bombs demolished the home of the Rev.
- A.D. King, brother of Martin King. The minister, his wife and
- five children raced to safety just before the second blast.
- Suddenly, the street filled with Negroes. They hurled stones at
- policemen, slashed car tires. Within the hour two more bombs
- exploded at the Gaston Motel, headquarters of the
- demonstrations.
-
- And Birmingham went to war. Thousands of enraged Negroes
- surged through the streets, flinging bricks, brandishing
- knives, pummeling policemen. A white cab driver was knifed, his
- taxi overturned and burned. A policeman was stabbed in the back
- and a white youngster's arm was slashed from shoulder to elbow.
- Negroes put a torch to a white man's delicatessen, fought off
- firemen as they arrived to put out the blaze. Two Negro homes
- nearby went up in flames, then three more white men's buildings.
- The rioters, bathed in the flickering orange light of the
- flames, looted a liquor store and screamed into the night:
- "White man, we'll kill you!"
-
- Miraculously, there were no deaths. But Bull Connor's
- cops, frazzled from weeks of pressure, were all but helpless.
- Negro rioters ruled almost until dawn Sunday and calm came only
- after 250 Alabama state troopers invaded the city.
-
- As the sun rose Sunday, a sullen peace descended on
- Birmingham. There had been no winners in a war that had no
- heroes. Bull Connor was by no means Birmingham's only shame;
- the city's newspapers, for example, put the story of the
- mid-week riot on an inside page. Yet at the same time, Negro
- Leader King could be criticized for using children as shock
- troops and for inciting the protests even as a new, relatively
- moderate city administration was about to take over Birmingham.
-
- President Kennedy also came in for criticism. At his press
- conference, Kennedy claimed that the Federal Government had
- done all it legally could do about Birmingham. But that,
- insisted other leaders, both white and Negro, was untrue. Said
- Harvard Law School Dean Erwin Griswold, a member of the U.S.
- Civil Rights Commission: "It seems clear to me that he hasn't
- even started to use the powers that are available to him." Said
- N.A.A.C.P. Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins: "White people in
- Alabama make it impossible for us even to debate whether the
- President should act. My objectivity went out the window when
- I saw the picture of those cops sitting on that woman and
- holding her down by the throat."
-
- Birmingham's Negroes were certainly not worried about
- legalities; they were not worried about the niceties of
- "timing," or even about the morality of using children as
- troops. Instead, theirs was a raging desire to achieve equal
- human status -- now, and by whatever means. Massachusetts
- Attorney General Edward Brooke, a Negro, expressed it well: "The
- pressure is mounting. It has been smoldering for some time --
- many, many years. And it is a justifiable impatience." Bob
- Eckhardt, a white and a member of the Texas Legislature, put it
- another way: "The Negroes' goals are not in reach of court
- decisions any longer."
-
- It Could Happen Anywhere. Birmingham therefore set off a
- chain reaction -- uncontrolled. New lunch-counter sit-ins
- started in Atlanta, Nashville and Raleigh. The N.A.A.C.P. called
- for peaceful sympathy demonstrations in 100 cities. Jackie
- Robinson, now a vice president of Chock Full O' Nuts, said he
- would go to Birmingham to join in the Negro protest. So did
- Floyd Patterson. Communism was having a field day. Gloated Radio
- Moscow: "We have the impression that American authorities both
- cannot and do not wish to stop outrages by racists."
-
- Perhaps most baleful of all, the Black Muslim movement
- within the U.S. Negro community took full recruiting advantage
- of the Birmingham riots. The Black Muslims do not seek
- integration; they want total separation of the races, with
- Negroes not only independent but, if possible, superior. Now
- Malcolm X, top Eastern torchbearer for the militant movement,
- could only sneer at Martin Luther King's gospel of nonviolence.
- Said he: "The lesson of Birmingham is that the Negroes have lost
- their fear of the white man's reprisals and will react with
- violence, if provoked. This could happen anywhere in the country
- today."
-
- Last week, at the crest of the crisis, a white Birmingham
- waitress said to a customer from the North: "Honey, I sure hope
- the colored don't win. They've winned so much around the South.
- Why, you go down and get on a bus, and a nigger's just liable
- to sit right down beside you. Oh, that's hurt Birmingham
- somethin' awful."
-
- Neither Malcolm X nor the Birmingham waitress represents
- the majority of their races. But they do represent and symbolize
- two fixed positions: the Negro who looks with eagerness toward
- a militant solution, and the unyielding Southerner who hopes not
- to be further disturbed. There are many other positions, and
- there is a long gaping valley of confusion and diffusion. It is
- a great uncharted space where leaders follow and followers lead,
- for there is no certainty of plan or purpose there. Negro
- Author James Baldwin has illuminated this grey gulf with bolts
- of intellectual lightning.
-
- Baldwin cries out in hopelessness and helplessness as he
- gazes across the gulf. For that gulf cannot be bridged by law
- alone; the law can furnish a foundation upon which Negroes can
- build to achieve their rights, but it cannot provide education,
- or cure poverty, or enforce understanding, or give body to an
- old-fashioned thing called humanity.
-
- _______________________________________________________________
- June 7, 1963
- RACES
- The Revolution
-
- Spring 1963 will long be remembered as the time when the
- U.S. Negro's revolution for equality exploded on all fronts.
-
- Negroes faced snarling police dogs. They went to jail by
- the thousands. They risked beatings as they sat on
- lunch-counter stools. They were bombed in their homes. They were
- clubbed down by cops. They sent out their children to battle
- men. In the week, months and even years to come, there will be
- lulls in the revolution. But it will revive -- for, after the
- spring of 1963, there can be no turning back.
-
- Pain & Silence. Last week, as in all week,s the center of
- the revolution was in the U.S. South. In Jackson, Miss., sit-in
- demonstrators entered a segregated five-and-ten lunch counter,
- sat stoically on the stools as white roughnecks crowded around
- them. At first there were only insults. Then the whites seized
- catchup bottles, mustard and sugar dispensers, spattered the
- stuff all over the demonstrators. Still there was only that
- stolid silence.
-
- Infuriated, a burly ex-cop dragged Negro Memphis Norman,
- 21, off his stool, slugged him to the floor. As the Negro lay
- there, the white man kicked him in the face, kicked him again
- and again and again. Later, Norman was sent to a hospital -- and
- charged with disturbing the peace.
-
- The demonstration continued for three hours. A white
- college professor joined the sit-in demonstrators; he was beaten
- by the white hoodlums until his face was raw. He stayed hunched
- over the counter, flinched but did not fight back when his
- tormentors poured salt in his wounds.
-
- Jackson police stood outside the store, did nothing to
- stop the brutality, and the sit-in protesters left only after
- the manager shut up shop. When other pickets appeared later in
- the week, Jackson officials ordered Negro prison trusties out
- of their cells to carry arrested Negro and white demonstrators
- to police cars and paddy wagons.
-
- Jackson kept growing tenser. A gasoline bomb exploded in
- the carport of an N.A.A.C.P. leader. Negro leaders walked out
- of a meeting with city officials after a misunderstanding with
- Mayor Allen Thompson about their demands. The Negroes prepared
- for more demonstrations, and Mayor Thompson ordered a hog-wire
- enclosure, able to handle 10,000 prisoners, set up on the state
- fairgrounds.
-
- To the Hogpen. As school let out on Friday, hundreds of
- Jackson's Negro students gathered in the Farish Street Baptist
- Church and at Brinkley High School. A minister collected knives,
- pencils and other sharp objects as the kids filed into the
- church. Then they were sent into the street.
-
- Carrying American flags, the first demonstrators headed
- toward a phalanx of 60 cops four blocks away. A police captain
- shouted through a bullhorn that they would be arrested if they
- did not have a parade permit. The marchers stopped. A cop
- smashed a Negro above the knees with his night stick. And many
- demonstrators obediently climbed into trucks for the trip to
- the hogpen prison.
-
- But hundreds more were already jamming the streets. After
- half an hour, state police, armed with repeated shotguns and
- carbines, arrived. Negro demonstrators sprinted into alleys and
- the cops followed, swinging their clubs. Scores of Negroes were
- caught and herded into garbage trucks. In all, 500 Negroes were
- arrested Friday. On Saturday, another massive march was
- launched and police arrested another 100 -- including N.A.A.C.P.
- Executive Secretary Roy Wilkins. But at week's end Jackson Mayor
- Thompson succumbed to the determined onslaught and acceded to
- several key demands for equal Negro employment opportunities in
- municipal jobs.
-
- Other Southern towns were seething too. In Tallahassee,
- Fla., Negro students paraded, clapping and singing, before
- segregated theaters. Police moved in quickly, broke up the
- demonstrations by arresting 257 and dispersing the rest with
- volleys of tear gas. In Clarksville, Tenn., 300 Negroes,
- including Olympic Track Star Wilma Rudolph, crowded around a
- segregated restaurant demanding that they be served. In Baton
- Rouge, 100 Negro children marched in protest hymn segregated
- public facilities. In Oklahoma City, scores of Negroes sat
- stubbornly for nine hours to buy a meal in a segregated
- restaurant.
-
- Beyond Dixie. Yet if the U.S. North thought it could view
- the South's spectacle with any complacency, it was wrong. The
- Negro revolt had burst all regional boundaries. In Philadelphia,
- Negro pickets battled with helmeted policemen during a week of
- demonstrations against job discrimination at a school
- construction site. Knives and broken bottles flashed, more than
- 20 people were hurt.
-
- True to the fever of the season, this violent outburst was
- run by the N.A.A.C.P. -- normally a mild-tempered organization.
- Herbert Hill, national labor secretary for the association,
- made it clear that things had changed: "The arena of combat for
- the N.A.A.C.P. has shifted from the courtroom to direct mass
- action." And he snapped that there would soon be big protests
- over job discrimination in Boston, St. Louis, Chicago,
- Washington and New York.
-
- In Chicago, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., leader of
- last month's Battle of Birmingham, appeared before 5,500
- excited people and brought them shouting to their feet when he
- said: You must defeat segregation in Chicago because the de
- facto segregation of Chicago is as bad as the de jure
- segregation of Birmingham. We're through with tokenism and
- gradualism and see-how-far-you've-comeism. We're through with
- we've-done-more-for-your-people-than-anyone-elseism. We can't
- wait any longer. Now is the time."
-
- The fever was everywhere, and every act seemed to fan the
- flames in another place. Fifteen hundred Chicago Negroes
- picketed a cemetery that had refused to cremate one of their
- race. In Michigan, a resort shut down when 50 pickets arrived
- with signs charging segregation there. In Baltimore, eight
- people went to jail after picketing a segregated amusement park.
-
- In the Courts. But not all the battles were waged in the
- streets. Last week, in an opinion written by Justice Arthur
- Goldberg, the U.S. Supreme Court slapped down segregationist
- notions of stalling on integration. Wrote Goldberg: "The basic
- guarantees of our Constitution are warrants for the here and
- now, and unless there is an overwhelmingly compelling reason,
- they are to be promptly fulfilled." The decision came in a suit
- against segregated recreation facilities in Memphis. The Supreme
- Court ordered that they be immediately integrated. And at week's
- end Memphis officials grudgingly complied, except for swimming
- pools, which were shut down.
-
- Although the civil rights revolution had been building for
- a long time, its intensity in the spring of 1963 caught the U.S.
- by surprise. Now the Kennedy Administration finds itself hard
- up against its most urgent domestic crisis. Georgia-born
- Secretary of State Dean Rusk labeled it "one of the gravest
- issues that we have had since 1865." In a Memorial Day speech
- at the Gettysburg battleground, Vice President Lyndon Johnson
- said: "The Negro today asks justice. We do not answer him, and
- we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil when we reply
- to the Negro by asking `Patience.'"
-
- But at the White House, there was an air of frustrated
- urgency. President Kennedy and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy
- are both earnest workers for civil rights. But they are also
- acutely aware of the political problems that confront them in
- the Negro revolution: the Administration badly needs Southern
- congressional votes for its legislative program this year;
- moreover, there is always the white Southern vote to consider
- in next year's elections.
-
- The President and the Attorney General have therefore made
- every effort to iron out civil rights disputes in behind-the-
- scenes negotiations. Bobby has attended dozens of closed-door
- meetings with white and Negro leaders. They have not all been
- successful. At one, in New York, the Attorney General sat down
- with a group of Negro intellectuals led by Author James
- Baldwin. Bobby was stunned by the militance of the Negroes,
- particularly when one said that many Negroes might not fight for
- the U.S. against Cuba because of the lame Administration stand
- on integration thus far. When the group suggested to Bobby that
- the President might help the situation by making a dramatic
- public appearance -- such as personally escorting a Negro into
- the University of Alabama -- the Attorney General laughed in
- his disbelief that it could be a serious proposal. Dr. Kenneth
- Clark, Negro psychologist at New York's City College, said
- later: "There was no communication. I think we might as well
- have been talking different languages."
-
- Deals and Bargains. Still, the Kennedys persisted in their
- efforts at private persuasion. Bobby met with Southern theater
- owners, department store managers and other businessmen, hoping
- to convince them that desegregation hurts them economically. The
- President called a meeting this week of some 100 Southern
- businessmen to apply this same technique of persuasion.
-
- In their present mood, Negroes were hardly satisfied by
- the Administration's efforts at deals, bargains, and
- closed-door negotiations. But as of last week, about the best
- they could expect from the Administration was a bill, to be sent
- to Congress, proposing to use the interstate commerce clause of
- the Constitution as a weapon to bring federal suits against
- private segregated firms and stores. Because nearly every
- imaginable item -- form films for theaters to catchup for
- restaurants -- moves in interstate commerce, such a law would
- bring nearly every kind of business in the country within reach
- of a federal suit after a refusal to integrate.
-
- Cracks in the Wall. Despite disappointments in the
- President's failure to rally the great moral and political force
- that his office and prestige can command, Negroes could count
- some breakthroughs last week. The University of Kentucky became
- the first school in the Southeastern Conference to open its
- athletic program to Negroes. Atlanta announced it would
- integrate its swimming pools. Negroes were allowed to lunch in
- five Charlotte, N.C., hotels and motels that were previously
- segregated. Harold Richardson, the first Negro to run for office
- in Maine (where Uncle Tom's Cabin was written 112 years ago) was
- elected a trustee of the Portland water district. Across the
- nation, Negro boycotts of U.S. businesses had forced new
- equality in job opportunities.
-
- Such advances create chinks in the walls of segregation,
- but do not crumble them. That can be achieved only when the
- U.S. Negro, with the same zeal that marked his revolution in
- the spring of 1963, actually earns acceptance that cannot be
- legislated, or ordered by courts, or won in the street battles.
- Whites -- and not just Southern whites -- point to high Negro
- crime, indigence and illegitimacy rates. Yet it may be fairly
- said that the Negro cannot overcome his handicaps until he is
- given at least his legal rights -- the right to equal education,
- the right to vote wherever he may live, the right to equal job
- opportunity. Given these, it will remain for him to take, and
- deserve, his place in American society. Only then will the Negro
- revolution be really won.
-
- The Next Stand. Wherever the revolt of the Negro may lead
- in the long run, one direct clash looms dead ahead. Alabama's
- Democratic Governor George Corley Wallace, 43, a fiery ex-Golden
- Gloves featherweight, is looking toward a showdown next week
- when two Negroes will attempt to enter the University of Alabama
- for the summer session.
-
- Wallace intends to defy a federal court order for the
- enrollment of Vivian Malone, 20, at the university's main
- campus in Tuscaloosa, and David McGlathery, 27 at the school's
- Huntsville extension. Wallace's plan, as outlined to
- confidants, goes like this: 1) he will ring the Tuscaloosa
- campus with highway patrolmen; 2) escorted by a large force of
- patrolmen, he will go to the campus himself; 3) U.S. marshals
- will presumably bring Vivian Malone to the campus, and Wallace
- personally will bar the way; 4) if the marshals attempt to push
- past, Wallace may order his state cops to remove the Negro girl
- bodily from the premises. After that, not even George Wallace
- knows what will happen, but the results are not apt to be
- pleasant.
-
- Slight Victory. To enforce federal court orders against
- Wallace's defiance, the U.S. Government stands ready to use not
- only marshals but at least 2,500 riot-trained troops. Many of
- those troops, sent to Alabama at the peak of Birmingham's riots
- last month, have since been removed. But they can return on
- short notice, as nobody knows better than Wallace. He recently
- filed a suit with the Supreme Court insisting that President
- Kennedy had threatened "a military dictatorship" by ordering the
- soldiers into Alabama in the first place. Last week the court
- brushed off the Governor's suit in one terse paragraph, which
- said that the presence of troops was part of "purely preparatory
- measures," and harmed no one.
-
- At the same time, Wallace did win one slight victory. A
- Federal Court in Birmingham ordered Wallace to appear at a
- hearing on an injunction against his threat to interfere with
- university integration. Two marshals chased Wallace all one
- day, trying to serve a subpoena on him. Wallace kept 16 armed
- state cops surrounding him constantly, and the marshals could
- not break through. They finally gave up and handed the subpoena
- to the Governor's maid.
-
- "Call to Arms." It is Wallace's boast that "I am a
- professional Southerner." But he by no means represents the
- whole South, or even all of Alabama. Last week he forced a
- resolution through the state legislature giving him a vote of
- confidence in his stand at the schoolhouse door. But before it
- passed, State Senator James E. Horton Jr. cried to his
- colleagues: "The presence of Governor Wallace will by
- implication attract a mob which by comparison will make Oxford,
- Miss., look like a Sunday-school picnic." And Senator George
- Hawkins warned, "This resolution is a call to arms to every
- hoodlum in the state."
-
- For months, Wallace had been deluged with pleas from
- clergymen, businessmen and educators that he take a moderate
- stand in the university's integration. Last week 212 Tuscaloosa
- business and professional leaders signed a petition urging him
- to carry on a fight for segregation "by whatever legal redress
- you choose to seek -- but we respectfully urge that you do not
- carry out your announced intention of personally and physically
- interfering with the order of the United States Court."
-
- Moreover, unlike the spineless, stand-aside attitude taken
- by the University of Mississippi faculty during last fall's
- bloody Oxford riot, the University of Alabama faculty seems
- determined that there will be no student violence on their
- campus. President Frank Rose, an able educator and a moderate,
- months ago called in student leaders, pledged strict
- disciplinary action against segregationist demonstrators. Last
- week, with most of the main campus' 9,000 students already gone
- from Tuscaloosa for the summer, there seemed little inclination
- toward violence on the part of those who remained. Said one
- young man: "We're not going to let just one person stop all the
- rest of us from getting an education."
-
- He meant Vivian Malone. But as things now stand, the one
- person who seems most likely to disrupt education at the
- University of Alabama is the Governor of the state.
-
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-