33

Footsteps

LYNDON JOHNSON HAD DETERMINED, down on his ranch during his heart attack summer of 1955, that the surest path to the presidency was to win the Democratic nomination for that job in 1956: then, even if Eisenhower decided to run again and that nomination therefore became worthless, he would, as the party’s last standard-bearer, be the front-runner to win its nod in 1960, when Eisenhower would not be running. Almost ridiculously long as were the odds against his winning the nomination—favored (in the most favorable poll) by a meagre 3 percent of the country’s rank-and-file Democrats, and by exactly twenty-nine out of 1,944 county chairmen outside the South—he had therefore spent the autumn of 1955 grabbing for the prize, flying across the country to rustle up financial support, forcing Adlai Stevenson into the primaries, accepting both the chairmanship and the favorite-son nomination of the Texas delegation, trying to blunt at least somewhat the knife edge of liberal antipathy toward him by passing the Social Security Bill.

Despite his overtures to liberals, however, the base of his support—the sine qua non of his candidacy—was the South: his strategy was to arrive at the Democratic Convention in August with most of that region’s 324 votes; to add to that base some western support; to keep Stevenson from winning on an early ballot; and then, with the convention deadlocked, to become its compromise choice. And for the South, of course, one issue loomed above all others.

THAT ISSUE WAS LIKE A WOUND IN 1956, a wound that, as the year went by, gaped wider and wider, red and raw, across the bland face of peaceful, prosperous 1950s America.

Nineteen fifty-six had hardly begun when the scars of the Emmett Till case were abruptly ripped open anew—when the two murderers decided to tell the world their story.

They did so because, having been acquitted of Till’s murder, they could not be tried again for the same crime—and because of greed. A journalist, William Bradford Huie, offered them four thousand dollars for their story, and Roy Bryant and Big Milam were broke and needed money, and in the Mississippi Delta four thousand dollars was a lot of money. And, they did so for applause. They were sure that if they told the world the whole story, explained the good reason they had had for executing the visitor from Chicago, people—not “nigger lovers” from the North, perhaps, but plenty of people—would understand, and approve. As Huie said in his article, published in the January 24, 1956, edition of the national magazine Look, Bryant and Milam “don’t feel they have anything to hide”; rather, they felt they had something to boast about.

Their original intention, Milam explained to Huie, was to “just whip” the boy “and scare some sense into him”—that had to be done, of course; “when a nigger even gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman,” stern measures had to be taken. But young Till had not been scared, Milam said. “We never were able to scare him. They had just filled him so full of that poison he was hopeless.” Even after they drove him to the toolhouse, and beat him on the head with their pistols, he refused to be scared, Milam said. So, of course, he and his half brother Roy had no choice. “What else could we do? He was hopeless. I’m no bully. I never hurt a nigger in my life…. But I just decided it was time a few people got put on notice. As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids…. Me and my folks fought for this country, and we’ve got some rights.” That was the reason, he said, that he had told Till, “I’m going to make an example of you.” That was the reason he and Bryant took the youth to the cotton gin, forced him to load the exhaust fan onto the truck, and then drove him to the bank of the Tallahatchie. That was the reason he shot him in the head.

The lawyers who had been so proud to defend Bryant and Milam were also quoted in Huie’s article. They had advised their clients to cooperate with the journalist because they, too, felt that people would understand if only the reasons were explained. And, being men of higher education and broader outlook than their clients, they had an additional reason: they felt that the case should be publicized as widely as possible because it would make clear to the rest of America the futility of trying to impose desegregation on the South. Milam was not a pleasant person, one of the lawyers admitted to Huie: “He’s got a chip on his shoulder. That’s how he got that battlefield promotion in Europe; he likes to kill folks.” But, the lawyer explained, there was a need for men like Milam and Bryant: to “keep the niggahs in line.” And the country should understand, he said, that the “niggahs” were going to be kept in line. “There ain’t gonna be no integration,” he told Huie. “There ain’t gonna be no nigger votin’. And the sooner everybody in this country realizes it, the better. If any more pressure is put on us, the Tallahatchie River won’t hold all the niggers that’ll be thrown into it.” Publication of the true facts of the case would be valuable, therefore, to “put the North and the NAACP and the niggers on notice”; it might even force the repeal of school integration, “just like Prohibition.” And the “true facts” did indeed reach audiences not accustomed to seeing how parts of the South kept blacks in line, because after Look, with a circulation of three million, published Huie’s article, it was excerpted in Reader’s Digest, with a circulation of eleven million—much of which was in the North’s largely white suburbs.

THEN, STILL EARLY IN 1956, the wound was widened. In February, the Supreme Court ordered the University of Alabama to admit its first black student—and with that order, white fury spilled over. The Till atrocity and the Mississippi voter-registration murders had been violence by individuals. The Alabama incident escalated abruptly into violence by mob.

The would-be student was twenty-six-year-old Autherine Juanita Lucy. Quiet and shy, the young woman had been brought up on her father’s farm in backcountry Alabama, her home an unpainted frame shack and her high school another unpainted frame shack, but she wanted to be a librarian, and had put herself through a small Negro college. She applied to the graduate program in library science at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa, but was not accepted because of her race. With the help of the NAACP, she sued for admittance, on the grounds that Alabama had established no institution, separate or not, in which blacks could obtain a library degree, and now, in February, her suit was granted, and the university’s trustees complied, although, to avoid contaminating the otherwise all-white student body, she was barred from dormitories and dining halls so that the other students would not be forced to live or eat with her.

That restriction did not satisfy some students. For two days, Autherine Lucy went to classes, passing burning crosses on campus, amid what she was to call “hateful stares,” and then, on February 6, came the “day I’ll never want to live through again.”

Ms. Lucy went from class to class in a dean’s car that day, “chased from one building to another,” a reporter wrote, “as though she was an animal pursued by a pack of hounds.” At each building there was a mob, made up not only of students but of rednecks from the countryside and hard-bitten factory workers from the industrial plants near Tuscaloosa, and the mobs threw eggs and stones, smashing the car’s windows, as they shouted, “Kill her! Kill her!” “There was murder in the air,” the reporter wrote, but state highway patrolmen on the scene made no move to protect her, or to arrest any of the stone-throwers, reportedly on orders from Governor James (Big Jim) Folsom. As the mob grew larger and more menacing, university officials asked for city fire engines to be sent, so that fire hoses could be used if necessary, but no engines appeared. Finally, the mob trapped her in a building, and she had to stay there (“I could still hear the crowd outside”) until, after a very long time, the police arrived. The disturbances spread from the campus to downtown Tuscaloosa; when the rioters spotted cars driven by Negroes, they blocked their paths, smashed their windows, and climbed on their roofs and stomped dents in them. The university’s trustees reacted by suspending not the rioters but her, “for her own safety”: had they not done so, they said, there was the possibility of a lynching. “God knows I didn’t intend to cause all this violence,” she said. “I merely wanted an education.”

Going back to court, the NAACP charged that university trustees had conspired with the rioters, and a federal judge ordered the university to lift the suspension—whereupon the trustees expelled her permanently (for, they said, falsely accusing them of conspiracy). Promising to “keep fighting until I get an education,” she moved to the Birmingham home of her brother-in-law, Ulysses Moore, where men with rifles guarded the porch (“I’m not going to have her snatched from my care as they did the Till boy,” Moore said). But the phone rang constantly with callers saying, “We’re coming after you,” or “We’ll get you this time,” and she was unable to put from her mind the enraged faces that had pressed against the windows of the dean’s car. “All I could do then was pray, and I thought, ‘Am I going to die?’” Rioters whom the NAACP had named in its suit sued her for defamation, asking four million dollars. She flew to New York where Thurgood Marshall, glancing with evident concern at her tense, hollow-eyed face, told reporters at LaGuardia Airport, “She left Alabama because at this stage she’s taken as much as a human being can take….” A reporter asked if Miss Lucy had in effect lost the fight despite the court verdicts. “You and other American citizens have lost,” Marshall replied. As the reporters pressed around her, she said to Marshall, “Please get me out of here.” Then he drove her away, not to his office but to a doctor, who ordered her to take a long rest.

Some Alabama whites crowed that the riot had “worked,” and in fact, by their definition, it had: it had restored segregation at the university. The trustees had expelled Miss Lucy “because the mob forced them to,” said one student leader who was on her side. “The mob won.” In addition, the South’s indignation at the Supreme Court’s interference in its affairs “woke people up like nothing else did,” a spokesman for the White Citizens Councils said. Tens of thousands of new members joined; wrote a reporter at one huge Council rally, “They filed in the coliseum doors in long lines, millionaires mingling with farmers, as many women as men, all with eager looks on their faces like people going to a Billy Graham revival.” There was no longer, said John Bartlow Martin, any doubt “that the South … has found in the Citizens Councils a flag to rally round. The Deep South was solid once more.”

Yet it was not only in the South, not only among conservatives and racists, that the Autherine Lucy episode had stirred, and solidified, deep emotions. The death of her modest dream of being a librarian, like the death of Emmett Till, might on the surface have seemed like a victory for injustice, like simply another defeat for Martin Luther King’s “great cause.” But these victories were Pyrrhic, for in both cases, an entire nation had been reading about the injustice, had seen it all, stark and clear. Into the hearts of those willing to have their hearts opened had been brought home, with new vividness, the cruelty and inhumanity with which black Americans were treated in the South. These two episodes had hardened, among men and women of good will, a desire that, at last, something be done on behalf of these long-downtrodden people.

DRAMATIC AND SIGNIFICANT as were the Till and Lucy encounters, trumpet calls to rally Americans behind the banner of justice, they were not the most significant on the southern civil rights front of 1956. Justice marched that year not to a trumpet call but to a drumbeat—a soft, undramatic, but unfaltering drumbeat, that instead of fading away like a trumpet call went on all that year, month after month. It was a drumbeat of footsteps on pavement—the footsteps of maids and washerwomen and cooks, of garbagemen and yardmen and janitors. For, month after month, all through 1956, the Montgomery Bus Boycott went on.

“Come the first rainy day and the Negroes will be back on the buses,” Montgomery’s Mayor, W. A. Gayle, had predicted, shortly after the boycott began in December, 1955. He could hardly be blamed for his confidence. “To a largely uneducated people … [t]he loss of what was for many their most important modern convenience—cheap bus transportation—left them with staggering problems of logistics and morale,” Taylor Branch has written. Their jobs might be five or six miles from their homes. Drivers in a hastily organized car pool, using cars loaned by blacks, took black workers to and from their jobs, but there were never enough cars, and many had no choice but to walk. Others had the choice but chose to walk anyway, preferring to “demonstrate with their feet” their determination to end the indignities and humiliation of bus segregation. Passing an elderly lady hobbling slowly and painfully home after her day’s work, a car pool driver offered her a lift. Refusing, she explained: “I’m not walking for myself. I’m walking for my children and my grandchildren.” There had been black bus boycotts before in other southern cities, but they had all ended quickly—perhaps the longest had been one in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1953, that lasted two weeks—as their participants gave up and admitted defeat. But the Montgomery boycott didn’t end. Rain came indeed, and cold, and, as the seasons changed, the heat of an Alabama summer, and Montgomery’s blacks kept walking.

One reason they kept walking was their leader, that twenty-six-year-old preacher only recently come to Montgomery.

The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. was one of the generation of new, better-educated, more confident black leaders who were beginning to appear in the South—one with unusual political sophistication. Hardly had he become minister of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when he announced a goal: “Every member of Dexter must be a registered voter.” Registered—and knowledgeable. Weekly forums discussed election issues; a political action committee was formed.

At Boston University, where the Reverend King had been studying for his Ph.D., the faculty, impressed by him, had urged him to become an academic, but, although attracted by that prospect, he rejected it in favor of a southern pastorship; “That’s where I’m needed,” he told his wife, Coretta. He was to discount his role in the Montgomery boycott. “I just happened to be there,” he was to say. “There comes a time when time itself is ready for a change. That time has come in Montgomery, and I have nothing to do with it.” But at the boy-cotters’ nightly mass meetings, he echoed Douglass the Lion, who had said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will”; said Martin Luther King: “Freedom is never given to anybody, for the oppressor has you in domination because he plans to keep you there.” And he went beyond Douglass to espouse a doctrine of passive, non-violent resistance. “Hate begets hate, violence begets violence; toughness begets a greater toughness,” King said. “Our aim must never be to defeat or humiliate the white man, but to win his friendship and understanding…. This is a nonviolent protest. We are depending on moral and spiritual forces.” King’s phrases were ringing, rhythmic, unforgettable; as the young preacher left the pulpit each evening, men and women who had walked for miles that day reached out their hands to touch him, and the next morning walked again. When, in January, 1956, Montgomery’s white leaders arrested King for a minor traffic violation, thinking thus to break the boycott, he was very afraid. As he sat in the back seat of a police cruiser, his mind was so filled with thoughts of lynchings—crossing a bridge, he feared that a mob was waiting for him on the other side; he could not stop thinking about the river below—that when he finally saw the jail, he was overwhelmed by happiness that he was not going to be killed or mutilated. But even as he was entering the jail, carloads of Negroes were racing toward it, and the jailer hastily released him on his own recognizance. So many people attended that night’s mass meeting in order to get a glimpse of him that it was announced that a second meeting would be held at another church, and when that was filled, a third meeting was announced, and then a fourth—seven meetings, packed with men and women who just wanted to see for themselves that the Reverend King was all right. And when he went home after the last meeting, he was accompanied by a group of young men who had decided they would guard him from then on whenever he left his house; he was too precious to lose.

Montgomery’s blacks also kept walking because of themselves.

Though incidents on the city’s buses had been increasing in recent years, they had invariably ended in defeat and humiliation for the black person involved. Boarding a bus with her arms filled with packages one Christmas, Jo Ann Robinson, a professor at Montgomery’s black college, Alabama State, took a seat in the white section without thinking. Striding toward her, his arm up as if to strike her, the bus driver shouted, “Get up from there! Get up from there!” “I felt like a dog,” Mrs. Robinson was to recall, and, crying, she left the bus. But when she asked friends to help her protest the incident, they demurred, saying that the driver’s conduct was simply what one expected in Montgomery. Once, Martin Luther King’s predecessor in the Dexter pulpit, Vernon Johns, had dropped his dime as he was trying to put it in the fare box. Although it rolled near the driver’s seat, the driver ordered Johns to pick it up, saying, “Uncle, get down and pick up that dime and put it in the box.” When Johns asked the driver to do it himself, the driver said that if Johns didn’t do it, he’d throw him off the bus. Turning to the other passengers, all of whom were black, Johns said he was leaving and asked them to join him. Nobody moved.

But now, partly because of their new leader, partly because of a new determination, emblematic of the widespread new determination among southern blacks, Montgomery’s blacks kept on walking even when ten thousand people attended a White Citizens Council rally in the Montgomery Coliseum—“the largest pro-segregation rally in history”—to hear Mississippi’s senior United States Senator, James O. Eastland, shout that “In every stage of the bus boycott we have been oppressed and degraded because of black, slimy, juicy, unbearably stinking niggers … African flesh-eaters. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used. Among these are guns, bows and arrows, slingshots and knives…. All whites are created equal with certain rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of dead niggers.” They kept on walking even when, after that rally, long caravans of cars filled with hooded men brandishing rifles and Confederate flags roamed the city. Montgomery’s Negroes kept on walking even when the city fathers, who thought they were dealing with blacks from the past—ill-educated, easily divided, and without access to national publicity outlets—turned to the “get tough” policies that had always worked with blacks in the past, urging businessmen to fire Negro employees who came to work on foot instead of by bus, ordering police to break up for “loitering” groups of Negroes waiting for car pool pickups, and to give car pool drivers so many traffic tickets—Jo Ann Robinson got seventeen in two months—that the drivers faced the loss of their licenses and insurance. They kept walking even when a grand jury—an all-white grand jury, naturally—subpoenaed more than two hundred Negroes, and it became known that wholesale criminal indictments were being prepared under an obscure anti-boycott ordinance. They kept walking even when, in late February, after 115 indictments, twenty-four against ministers, had been returned by the grand jury but had not yet actually been served by police, the city commissioners called on the Reverend Ralph Abernathy, a key figure in the boycott, and delivered an ultimatum: a broad hint that the indictments would not be served if the boycott was called off immediately. “We have walked for eleven weeks in the cold and the rain,” Abernathy replied. “Now the weather is warming up…. We will walk on….”

They walked on even when the indictments were served—walked on, and found the courage not to be cowed by the indictments.

“For centuries,” as Taylor Branch has written, “the jailhouse door had conjured up visions of fetid cells and unspeakable cruelties” for southern blacks. Now one of the 115 blacks indicted, E. D. Nixon, a rough-hewn railroad porter, didn’t wait for the sheriff’s deputies to come for him, but walked into the county courthouse and said, “Are you looking for me? Well, here I am.” Released on three hundred dollars’ bail, he emerged, having removed a little of the terror from the act of being arrested. Then a dignified elderly black pastor followed Nixon, joking with the deputies as they were booking and fingerprinting him. News of what the two men had done spread across Negro Montgomery. A crowd gathered around the courthouse, shouting encouragement to the men and women who walked into it, applauding them as they came out. The furious sheriff came outside to shout, “This is no vaudeville show!” but that dreaded jailhouse door had begun to turn, in Branch’s words, “into a glorious passage.”

One of the ministers indicted was Martin Luther King. He was away when the indictments were handed down, and his father, a renowned black minister himself, in Atlanta, pleaded with him not to return to Montgomery lest he be killed. The Atlanta police chief told the younger King that that was a strong possibility: “I think you’re in great danger,” he said. “I think you’re a marked man.” There might be no bail for the boycott’s leader—and if he was kept in jail, what might not happen to him there? King replied that he must go back, and he did—arrested, he was photographed as a criminal, with a number, 7809, under his chin. He was released on bond, but only after an early date had been set for his trial.

One evening not long thereafter, King was speaking at a mass meeting when, looking down from the podium, he saw a man hurry into the hall and say something to Abernathy, who quickly left the room, and, when he returned, seemed very upset and started whispering urgently to ministers near him in the audience. Then King saw other men come in, and he saw some of them start to walk toward the podium, and then hesitate and retreat, as if there was something they didn’t want to tell him. He saw some of them whisper something to Abernathy. Abernathy didn’t come up either. Motioning Abernathy to come up to the podium, King whispered “What’s wrong?” and Abernathy had to tell him. “Your house has been bombed,” he said. When King asked, “Are Coretta and the baby all right?” Abernathy had to say, “We’re checking on that right now”—he had been desperate to have the answer for King before telling him anything.

In front of King’s home was a barricade of white policemen shouting to a huge crowd, a black crowd, to disperse, but the men in the crowd, yelling in rage, were brandishing guns and knives, and teenage boys were breaking bottles so that they would have weapons in their hands. King pushed through the crowd. The front porch, broken in two by the bomb, was covered with shattered glass from broken windows. He walked across it. Inside the front room, which was still reeking of dynamite fumes, were the Mayor and other city officials, whom King brushed past. In a back room was a crowd of neighbors; it was only when they parted to make way for him that he saw that at its center were Coretta and Yoki, unharmed.

And then, having made sure of that, Martin Luther King became very calm, with what Branch calls “the remote calm of a commander.” Stepping back out on the porch, he held up his hand for silence. Everything was all right, he told the crowd. “Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky. Don’t get your weapons. If you have weapons, take them home. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what Jesus said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”

The crowd was silent now, as King continued speaking. He himself might die, he said, but that wouldn’t matter. “If I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us.”

The people left, the men taking their weapons home. The boys put down the broken bottles. “I owe my life to that nigger preacher,” a white policeman said. That very night, floodlights were strung around the King home with its shattered porch, and for the remaining months of the boycott, men stood guard around it. They knew nothing must happen to the man inside. I. F. Stone had said that Negroes needed a Gandhi. They had a Gandhi now.

THE EMMETT TILL CASE had been the first great media event of the civil rights movement, but it had been a brief event—its centerpiece a five-day trial—and it had been primarily a story for the print media. The Montgomery Bus Boycott took place not in a hamlet but in a big city, and it went on for months—for almost all of 1956, in fact—a dramatic story from the start, with its basic theme of downtrodden people fighting for a very basic right; and with the arrest and trial of Martin Luther King, and the bombing of his home, the drama escalated and escalated and escalated again. The reporters from the big northern newspapers who had come together for the first time in Money now came together again in Montgomery, and were joined by many others. And even in the six months since the Till trial, television had grown immensely, and so had the importance of its news programs, and this story provided the raw material that television needed—dramatic, unforgettable pictures: of elderly women trudging wearily home from work, passed by the buses they refused to ride; of King’s wrecked home; of mass meetings with hundreds, thousands of men and women lifting up their heads in defiant song. The days of setting down planes in fields were over; the networks set up direct feeds from Montgomery, for the boycott was on the news night after night.

Among the effects of this coverage was increased safety for the boycott’s footsore troops. As David Halberstam says, “The more coverage there was, the more witnesses there were, and the harder it was for the white leadership to inflict physical hardship upon the blacks. In addition, the more coverage there was, the more it gave courage to the leadership and its followers. The sacrifices and the risks were worth it, everyone sensed, because the country and the world were now taking notice.”

The coverage also affected the television viewers who were watching it, particularly, perhaps, those in the North. The “educational process” begun in the Till case was continuing, and intensifying. For people for whom “segregation” had been only an abstraction, disliked but vague, segregation was suddenly, night after night, a reality brought into their living rooms, in all its injustice and cruelty.

And this story had a hero. A keen sense of the possibilities of the media was combined in Martin Luther King with rare courage and a passionate desire for justice, and TV caught it all. An interview with that serious young man, who quoted Hegel and Nietzsche with evident familiarity, was memorable for reasons that went far beyond erudition. “Are you afraid?” an interviewer asked him after the bombing, and there was a pause, and then Martin Luther King said, very firmly, “No, I’m not. My attitude is that this is a great cause, a great issue that we’re confronted with, and that the consequences for my personal life are not particularly important. It is the triumph of a cause that I am concerned about, and I have always felt that ultimately along the way of life an individual must stand up and be counted, and be willing to face the consequences, whatever they are, and if he is filled with fear, he cannot do it.” His arrest and trial—on March 19, he was found guilty, sentenced to pay a $500 fine or serve a year at hard labor but was freed pending appeal—was front-page news everywhere. More and more, it was not just to Negroes that King was a hero. Arriving in New York to raise funds for his cause, he received what one newspaper called “the kind of welcome [the city] usually reserves for the Brooklyn Dodgers”; there were white people as well as black among the thousands who crowded into New York churches to hear him. White people as well as black came from all over the world on pilgrimages to Montgomery. A Swedish woman wrote, “I went directly from the airport to the by now world-famous car-pool lot. I stood across the street from it for a moment, and although I am neither a sentimental nor an emotional woman—we Swedes are neither—I don’t mind telling you that my throat tightened as I watched the crowded station wagons entering and leaving the car park and as I watched the many gayly smiling people who waited so patiently for their turn to be brought home after a hard day’s work…. I felt that somehow I was standing on historical ground.” The Negroes of Montgomery, Alabama, had gained—had won, won by sacrifice, by determination, by courage—the attention, and, increasingly, the admiration of America.

AND, BEFORE 1956 WAS OVER, they would win more than admiration. They would win.

On November 13, 1956, Martin Luther King was sitting again at the defendant’s table in a Montgomery courtroom. The city fathers had finally devised a maneuver that would cripple the boycott; they had asked for an injunction banning the car pool as an unlicensed transportation system, and the lawyers for his Montgomery Improvement Association had told King the injunction would be granted. If it was, the boycotters, with another winter approaching, would no longer have the car pool to help their fight—and to his wife Coretta, King confessed that without the car pool, “I’m afraid our people will go back to the buses. It’s just too much to ask them to continue if we don’t have transportation for them.” On November 13, when the hearing began, “the clock said it was noon, but it was midnight in my soul,” he was to remember.

But it was noon.

All that year, since long before the injunction suit had begun, another suit—brought not against the MIA but filed by the association itself—had been rising through the federal court system. Back in February, the MIA’s leaders had decided that the fight should be not merely for more seats for blacks on buses, and for a section reserved for blacks from which they could not be ousted, but rather for the right to sit anywhere on a bus they wanted, and the association had therefore filed a federal lawsuit not to modify bus segregation ordinances but to eliminate them entirely, on the grounds that they were unconstitutional because they violated the Fourteenth Amendment. The suit had been filed not only against Montgomery’s ordinances but also against Alabama’s, so it carried the hope of a victory over all bus segregation in the state. (MIA attorney Fred Gray had been arrested for barratry for filing it.) The suit had been upheld by lower federal courts, and had reached the Supreme Court that fall. And it was that case—not the unlicensed transportation system injunction—that was decided first: on that very day, November 13, on which King was sitting desolate in court.

Pushing through the crowd, a reporter handed him a slip of paper that had just been torn off the Associated Press teletypewriter. It said: “The United States Supreme Court today affirmed a decision of a special three-judge U.S. District Court in declaring Alabama’s state and local laws requiring segregation on buses unconstitutional.”

Although the city went ahead with the injunction request, and the judge granted it, the Supreme Court decision made the injunction irrelevant. The Emmett Till and Autherine Lucy episodes had ended in defeat. Not the Montgomery Bus Boycott. On the morning after the Supreme Court decision, a bus pulled up at the bus stop near Martin Luther King’s home and King boarded it. The driver, a white man, smiled at him. “I believe you are Reverend King,” he said. “Yes, I am,” King said. “We are glad to have you with us this morning,” the driver said. Martin Luther King sat down—in the front row. All that year, black Americans had been proving they could fight. Now they had proved they could win.

SOUTHERN WHITES REACTED to this development with heightened fury. A shotgun blast was fired into the King home; snipers fired on the integrated buses, one volley wounding a pregnant Negro woman in both legs; a car pulled up to a bus stop at which a fifteen-year-old Negro girl was standing alone, and five men jumped out and beat her; the long Klan caravans honked through Negro sections of Montgomery, and Klansmen marched through the streets in full regalia; fiery crosses burned in the night. One night explosions rumbled across the city as four churches and two homes—one of them Ralph Abernathy’s—were wrecked. Praying for guidance at a mass meeting the next day, King said, “Lord, I hope no one will have to die as a result of our struggle for freedom in Montgomery. Certainly I don’t want to die. But if anyone has to die, let it be me.” Two weeks later, while Coretta and Yoki were in Atlanta, something—he wasn’t sure what—disturbed King during the night; leaving his home, he went to a friend’s. A few hours later, a bomb exploded at his house; another—twelve sticks of dynamite—failed to explode; it was found at the house later. But the victory—a victory at last—had given southern blacks hope, and they met segregationist fury with increased determination. King and Abernathy established a permanent organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, to launch civil rights protests all across the South. In one sense, the victory in Montgomery was confined to a single front. While it was no longer illegal on a Montgomery bus for someone with black skin to sit beside someone with white skin, the rest of the city was still rigidly segregated, and whites vowed to keep it that way, planning not only new tactics of physical intimidation but legal strategies that could keep such threats as desegregation of the schools ensnarled in perpetual litigation. In a larger sense, however, the victory elevated the fight for civil rights to a new level, in part because it had produced a leader whose greatness was equal to the greatness of the cause—Martin Luther King gave people “the feeling that they could be bigger and stronger and more courageous than they thought they could be,” Bayard Rustin said—in part because of the powerful new weapon, non-violent resistance, that had been forged on the Montgomery battlefield. For perhaps the first time, and certainly the first time on such a scale, a black community had risen up in the heart of Dixie and defeated entrenched white power, and blacks had a new self-respect. After the Montgomery Bus Boycott victory, after they had proven they could endure, and could win, they were ready to move on to new fronts. They could sit beside white people on buses now; why couldn’t they sit beside them in theaters, in restaurants? Why couldn’t they live beside them in the same housing developments and apartment houses? Why couldn’t they compete equally with white people for jobs? Why couldn’t they vote in elections as easily as white people voted? Why was it that their children, whom the Supreme Court had ruled three years before could attend the same schools as white children—why were their children still not attending those schools? Fed, after Till and Lucy, by indignation, driven, after Montgomery, by hope, the tide was rising steadily now, southern black and northern liberal demand for equality combining to beat more and more powerfully against the political barriers that had, for so long, held it back.

And now, in 1956, some of these barriers were, all at once, no longer quite so solid as they had been. Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill had long been able to count confidently on support for their anti-civil rights stands from conservative Republicans (and not a few Democrats) from midwestern or Mountain States with negligible black populations. During the last two or three years, however, the years of Brown and Till and Lucy and Martin Luther King, that support, on the surface as solid as ever, was nonetheless being eroded.

To some extent, it was being eroded by conscience. Emmett Till’s battered face and Autherine Lucy’s haunted eyes and the weariness of Montgomery’s cleaning ladies had now been brought into millions of American homes, including the homes of elected officials—and, in some cases, into their hearts. It had in the past been easy for congressmen and senators whose constituents included few blacks and for whom southern injustice was only a distant, remote issue, to ignore that injustice. It was less easy now.

To some extent, it was being eroded by embarrassment. Congressmen and senators who had traditionally been able to vote with the South without their constituents caring no longer enjoyed that luxury; constituents who had read about the Till case and had seen on television the mobs rampaging unchecked through the streets of Tuscaloosa, now began to ask questions of their elected representatives about their pro-southern votes, questions that were not easy to answer.

And to some extent, it was being eroded by calculation. After the Civil War, African-Americans had remained loyal to the party that had freed them—the Republican Party of Lincoln—for more than half a century, from Reconstruction to Depression. When the Depression struck, however, the heartlessness of Republicans—and of another Republican President, Hoover—changed that, particularly after the arrival in the White House of a Democratic President who demonstrated that government didn’t have to be heartless. Unemployment compensation, Social Security, relief payments, strong unions, the chance, through WPA and PWA, to be back at work again—all these meant so much to the people hardest hit of all Americans by any economic downturn. Wooden-legged William Dawson of Chicago, during the 1940s the only African-American among the 435 members of the House of Representatives, had been raised in Georgia’s Dougherty County, which was not far from Richard Russell’s idyllic Winder, but his view of the area was not quite the same as Russell’s. Dougherty County, Dawson was to say, “was just one step this side of hell. I stood guard with my father all one night to stop a lynching when I was fifteen.” He had, he said, “hated the word Democrat when I came north,” but the New Deal had changed his allegiance. Without FDR, he was to say, “Negroes would have died like flies.” While Negroes didn’t vote in the South, they voted in the North—and in 1956, they had, for more than two decades, been voting solidly Democratic, becoming one of the key elements in the coalition that had made the Democrats America’s majority party.

And more Negroes were voting now—a lot more.

In bus depots and train stations throughout the South—in Mobile and Tallahassee and Raleigh and Nashville and New Orleans, and in a thousand small towns scattered across the countryside of the Old Confederacy—the same scene was being enacted day after day: whole families of black people, sometimes two or even three generations, clustered together, clutching their tickets (a ticket to the North usually cost more than a week’s pay), waiting to get out of the South. Most of them were very poor; they carried their possessions in cardboard suitcases or cloth sacks or simply in bundles wrapped in string—and what they carried was often all they owned; “They went north largely without possessions and yet they left behind almost nothing,” David Halberstam has written. And every evening, in the North’s huge railroad terminals—in Chicago, the great railhead, due north of the Delta, but also in New York’s Grand Central Station and Washington’s Union Station and Detroit’s Central Depot—another scene was enacted. The black families would step off the trains and buses to be met by relatives, who took them to their new homes in the fast-spreading northern slums.

African-Americans’ vast migration from the southern countryside to the northern cities had surged during the two world wars, when jobs were opened up by the cutting off of immigration and the departure of white workers for the armed forces, but even between wars it had never really stopped, because as bad as were conditions in the North—and they were terrible: overcrowded schools; brutalization by police; cramped apartments in fetid slums or in the public housing ghettos they hated—they were nonetheless better than the conditions from which these people had come; as Nicholas Lemann says: “Money and dignity were indisputably in greater supply in Chicago than in the Delta.” Since 1949 that migration had been accelerating dramatically, because the mass production of the mechanical cotton picker and the introduction of chemicals that killed the weeds between cotton plants which formerly had had to be laboriously chopped out made human hands largely unnecessary in the cotton field. During the 1940s, Chicago’s black population, concentrated in its huge South Side ghetto, had increased by more than twenty thousand a year; during the 1950s, it was increasing by more than thirty thousand a year; by 1955, 17 percent of Chicago’s population was African-American—and that inflow was being mirrored in a dozen industrial cities of the North. By 1956, the exodus of the Negro from the South to the North had become the largest American migration since the pioneers drove west in their covered wagons. In 1910, 90 percent of all American Negroes had lived in the Old South. By 1956, almost half—about eight million of the sixteen million African-Americans in the United States—lived in the North.

Huge as was this mass movement of millions of people, very little was being written about it. There was nothing very dramatic in the daily debarkation of twenty or fifty or eighty black people from a train, and in James Reston’s words, journalists do a better job of covering revolution than evolution. But a public official was ignorant of these implications at his peril. Chicago Mayor Martin Kennelly failed to treat Congressman Dawson with respect despite Dawson’s control of the five wards of the South Side; in 1955, partly at Dawson’s instigation, Kennelly was supplanted by Richard J. Daley, and Daley, supported by Negro votes, was to hold the mayoralty until he died twenty-one years later.

Rising within the growing northern urban black voting bloc, moreover, was what the black journalist Carl Rowan described as “a new kind of Negro leader.” In the past, all too many African-American black leaders had been complaisant puppets selected by a city’s white power structure because of their willingness to be manipulated by strings held in white hands. The new Negro voters, their eyes opened by war service, by higher education, by the victory in Montgomery, wanted a new type of leader, and, in 1956, while there were still many of the old “Uncle Toms” left, there were more and more leaders of whom Rowan could say, “These men … are not the semi-literate ward heelers who used to sell Negro votes at $5 a dozen; these are articulate Negroes, moved by a passion for justice.” These new leaders, and the new voters in their wards, saw, quite clearly, that the party they and their people had supported so faithfully for two decades was, despite Roosevelt and Truman, also the party that was in power on Capitol Hill—and was therefore the party that was denying their people justice.

When Democratic strategists sat down to analyze the 1952 election returns, they saw that while in city after city the African-American vote had still been overwhelmingly Democratic, it had not been as overwhelmingly Democratic as in the past. In black wards where once FDR and Truman had polled 80 or even 90 percent, Adlai Stevenson had polled 70 percent, or even less; his percentage of the country’s overall black vote was 68 percent.

The Democrats’ initial reaction had been to ascribe the slippage to Ike’s popularity, and this was certainly part of the explanation, but when, their attention focused now on the black vote they had previously taken for granted, they began analyzing it more closely, they realized that the decline was also due to deeper, and much more disturbing, factors, for, they realized, it had actually begun not in the 1952 presidential election but in 1948, and, in some cities, in the congressional elections of 1946. Quietly but steadily, they realized, their party had been losing the Negro vote.

That fact had the gravest of implications. The Negro vote was concentrated in the big cities of the big industrial states of the North that cast the highest electoral votes. In fact, it was concentrated in the queen cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Newark, and Los Angeles) of the nine states (Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, and California) which alone had a total of 223 of the 266 electoral votes necessary to elect a President. The bloc Negro vote in these cities had been a key reason that the Democrats had, in five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1948, been able to count on those states—and therefore occupancy of the White House. The magnitude of the Eisenhower landslide had rendered the Negro shift relatively insignificant in 1952, but in a closer election it could be a decisive factor.

Nor was the significance of the slippage limited to the presidential level. Gerrymandering and other devices instituted by the white power structure made blacks’ leverage in presidential, or statewide or city wide, elections greater than in elections for aldermen or congressmen; the House of Representatives, after all, still contained only three Negroes (Chicago’s Dawson and Detroit’s Diggs, who had sat at the press table in Sumner; and New York City’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr.). In no fewer than thirty-five congressional districts outside the South, however, the number of eligible Negro voters in 1956 was going to be greater than the winning congressional candidate’s margin of victory had been in 1954, so that in these districts Negroes would hold the balance of power. And while every one of these districts had gone Democratic in 1954, as they had been going Democratic since 1932, in many of them the 1954 Democratic plurality had been, disturbingly, much narrower than in the past—uncomfortably narrow, in many cases.

The possibility of even greater slippage had been increased by the recent civil rights atrocities in the South. After years of unswerving Democratic allegiance, the loyalty of many northern Negroes in 1956 was going to be not to a party but to a purpose: to an insistence on justice for their embattled southern brethren. “We Negroes have got to think this year, because here in the North, we will be speaking for all the Southern Negroes who can’t speak for themselves on Election Day,” said an engineer interviewed by Rowan. “We’ll be voting for Emmett Till and Miss Lucy and that preacher in Mississippi who was murdered because he wanted to vote.”

The northern black urban vote was therefore a giant political plum ripe for the taking—and Democrats were not alone in seeing this. Republicans knew they had been presented with a great opportunity. Risks were involved. Enthusiasm for Eisenhower among southern white voters had enabled him to carry four southern states (Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia) in 1952; there had been additional signs of increased Republican strength in the once-solid South since then; Republicans were anxious to widen that beachhead; GOP support for civil rights jeopardized it. The southern stake, however, was dwarfed by the northern. Persuade Negroes that the Republican Party, rather than the Democratic, offered the best chance for justice for their race and the GOP might be able at last to get back the Negro vote. Get it back, and for years to come, even without an Eisenhower at the head of the ticket, it might be a Republican who occupied the White House. Get it back, and it might be Republican representatives and senators who wielded the gavels at the head of the green felt tables on Capitol Hill. In only four of the twenty-four years since 1932 had Republicans controlled Congress, and they hungered to do so again. Get that vote back, and the Republicans might become again what they had once been: possessors of the White House and America’s majority party.

REPUBLICAN AWARENESS of the opportunity and eagerness to seize it was evident at the first meeting in 1956 between the party’s congressional leaders and President Eisenhower, held at the White House on January 10. The President was sending Congress a legislation to finance construction of new schools. Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell, a Democrat, was planning to attach to the measure an amendment saying that none of that money could be spent in any state whose schools were still segregated. Similar “Powell Amendments” had failed to attract much Republican support in the past, but the minutes of the January 10 meeting show that key House Republican Charles Halleck, adamant conservative though he was, said that this time “Republicans would have to vote for it.” At the year’s second meeting, on January 24, “It was reaffirmed that there should be no opposition to any anti-segregation amendment that may be offered in connection with this legislation.”

As for the President himself, he was to say in his memoirs that while he was committed to the cause of civil rights, “I did not agree with those who believed that legislation alone could institute instant morality [or that] coercion could cure all civil rights problems.” His record on the single most pressing civil rights issue—the efforts to implement the Brown decision—is a reminder that since Dwight Eisenhower had left the military before Harry Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate it, he had spent all his adult life in a Jim Crow army; that, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose puts it, “he had many southern friends and he shared most of their prejudices against Negroes,” laughingly repeating their jokes about “darkies”; that he felt education was a local matter, in which the federal government should not intervene—and that before the Court ruled on Brown, he had tried to get Chief Justice Warren to see things his way: once, after a White House stag dinner, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm as the guests were leaving the dining room and said about the southerners, “These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” Six years of his presidency remained after the Court’s ruling (which he felt had set back racial progress; “I personally believe that if you try to go too fast in laws in this delicate field … you are making a mistake”). Not once during those six years would Eisenhower publicly support the ruling; not once would he say that Brown was morally right, or that segregation was morally wrong.

“The Supreme Court has spoken, and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country; and I will obey,” he said, but, in Ambrose’s words, the President refused “to associate himself and his prestige in any way with Brown,” dodging every attempt to pin him down. “I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it,” he said at one press conference. “The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it, and I must conform to that and do my very best to see that it is carried out in this country.”

Eisenhower’s refusal to publicly support the Court’s decision did make a difference, of course, for the crucial question was whether or not the President would use the military to enforce the decision if there was a showdown—and in his confusing statements white southerners heard sympathy for them and a deep reluctance to use force; as Ambrose says, “The President’s moderation, the Southerners felt, gave them license to defy the Court.” “To stand above this battle,” Richard Kluger has written, “was to side with the legions of resistance, and Dwight Eisenhower, either by design or by obtuseness, comforted and dignified those who were ranged against the Court.” Asked in 1956 by reporters if he would dip into his “tremendous reservoir of good will among young people” and give them some guidance on how they should act at this crucial moment, he replied: “Well, I can say what I have said so often. It is difficult through law and through force to change a man’s heart….” He then attacked “the people … so filled with prejudice that they even resort to violence; and the same way on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today”—a comparison that equated violent southern mobs with men and women whose only crime was to be active in the cause of civil rights. There was no explicit criticism from Eisenhower even for Emmett Till’s murderers. The murder occurred a month after Frederic Morrow became the first Negro on the White House staff, and thereafter he attempted repeatedly to persuade the President to speak out on the incident—with no success whatsoever. When Emmett’s mother, Mrs. Bradley, sent the President a telegram asking him to intervene in Mississippi to halt the violence against blacks, Eisenhower did not even respond. The Autherine Lucy case certainly seemed like a clear-cut instance of defiance, by the University of Alabama trustees, of a federal court order he was sworn to enforce, but he would do nothing about it. As for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when a reporter at an Eisenhower press conference asked the President for a comment on the jailing and trial of Martin Luther King, he replied: “Well, you are asking me, I think, to be more of a lawyer than I certainly am…. But, as I understand it, there is a state law about boycotts, and it is under this kind of thing that people are being brought to trial.” Even Roy Wilkins, normally so temperate, said that “Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man; but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German today.”

There were, however, other areas, outside the field of education, in which Dwight Eisenhower felt that the responsibility was his, and the issue more clear-cut (his aide Bryce Harlow had been surprised by how “strong” the President was for voting rights; “he felt very strongly that nothing good would happen until Negroes got the vote”), and in these areas it was “the compulsion of duty” that won, together with what Ambrose calls “one of his core beliefs—that he was President of all the people.” He, not some governor, was Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and in the District of Columbia it was not a state that had jurisdiction but the federal government. In his first State of the Union address, Eisenhower had promised to carry out Truman’s edict and end segregation in the military and in the District, and he had kept that promise. By the end of 1953, all public facilities in the capital had been desegregated, and he could boast that in the Navy and the Air Force, segregated units were “a thing of the past”; that would soon be the case in the Army, too.

Furthermore, Dwight Eisenhower, behind his sunny smile, was a canny political strategist—only now, four decades after he left office, is the true extent of that canniness beginning to be grasped—and a man whose desire to win, to win everything, is also inadequately understood. On the evening of his 1956 election victory, he would give his speechwriter Emmet John Hughes a glimpse behind his supposed indifference to the outcome, telling him, when Hughes started to congratulate him on his landslide, that he wasn’t yet satisfied: “There’s Michigan and Minnesota still to see. You remember the story of Nelson—dying, he looked around and asked ‘Are there any of them still left?’ I guess that’s me. When I get in a battle, I just want to win the whole thing…. Six or seven states we can’t help. But I don’t want to lose any more. Don’t want any of them ‘left.’” Ever since the 1952 election, Eisenhower had seen a chance that he could do for the GOP what Roosevelt had done for the Democrats: make his party the majority party. A delicate balancing act would be required if he was to increase the GOP’s appeal to the African-Americans who held the key to the Democratic strongholds of the North while not losing the beachhead he had already established among whites in the once solidly Democratic South, but in his 1956 State of the Union address, he took a first step, making a request—his first request after four years in office—for civil rights legislation, focusing on the right to vote.

Somewhat sparse though it was in civil rights proponents, the Eisenhower Administration did have Attorney General Herbert Brownell, for whom the President, in Ambrose’s words, “had developed unbounded admiration.” Not only the keenest of political strategists himself, Brownell was also a longtime civil rights advocate; as a member of the New York State Legislature, he had, he was to recall, first begun fighting “the scourge of segregation” during the 1930s by advocating a compulsory Fair Employment Act with enforcement powers strong enough to ensure compliance; he had left instructions as to the songs to be played at his memorial service at Christ Church on Park Avenue in New York; and when he died at the age of ninety-two in 1996, two hymns were added to the traditional Methodist program: the Negro spiritual “Amazing Grace” and the marching song of Lincoln’s armies, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” And he had been frustrated “quite deeply” by the fact that “our hands were tied” by the lack of federal jurisdiction in the Emmett Till case, and over so many other areas in which black Americans had supposedly been guaranteed “the equal protection of the law.” He was anxious to draft a new civil rights law, and Eisenhower gave him permission to do so.

“I initially concentrated almost exclusively on voting rights,” Brownell was to recall, but the memory of his frustration in the Till case was too fresh, and “I decided that a more ambitious bill was necessary. So I created … a set of proposals that would give the Attorney General unprecedented power to enforce civil rights” in housing, in parks, in theaters, in restaurants, in hotels and motels—in many aspects of daily life—as well as the power to do so without being forced to wait for individuals to sue first, since individuals might be too poor, or too afraid, to sue. Under the Brownell Bill, an Attorney General could institute suits himself, in the name of the United States—suits not only to redress past injustices but to prevent new ones by obtaining judicial injunctions against them.

When Brownell’s draft legislation was completed in early 1956, the President called a Cabinet meeting for a full debate on the issue. Sentiment seemed to be moving against introduction of the bill, but Eisenhower interrupted, saying, “Where do you think that the Attorney General’s suggestions are moving too rapidly? They look to me like amelioration”—and, of course, sentiment promptly turned the other way.

“After the meeting,” Brownell was to write—in a sentence whose ambiguity was later to prove significant—“I was told by the secretary of the cabinet that the President had decided not to support the general civil rights section of the proposed bill” but only the other sections, and “to submit the bill to Congress … only as a Justice Department,” not as an Administration, proposal. (Cautioning Brownell not to act like “another Charles Sumner” when he testified, Eisenhower illustrated the dangers in stirring up racial emotions with a jocular remark: a southern Negro had recently remarked: “If someone doesn’t shut up around here, particularly those Negroes from the North, they’re going to get a lot of us niggers killed.”) But liberals wanted a broad bill, and in hearings before the House Judiciary Committee, New York’s Kenneth Keating, an old ally of Brownell’s, elicited from Brownell—probably by prearrangement—the fact that another section had been drafted, asked Brownell to send it over, and then amended the bill so that section was included.

AMONG MEN of good will at both ends of the Capitol there was not only determination but a new unity of purpose. Many Democratic House liberals, including Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler of New York, had handed proposed civil rights bills up to the desk in the first days of the 1956 congressional session, but pride of authorship was to be subordinated to a cause. Since Republicans would be more inclined to support a Republican bill, giving it the bipartisan backing it would need for passage, key civil rights strategists Joe Rauh, Clarence Mitchell, Andrew Biemiller, and Richard Boiling, the young representative from Missouri who had become a Rayburn favorite, asked Celler to subordinate his bill to Brownell’s—and Celler agreed, and agreed further to delay reporting any bill until Brownell’s arrived. In the Senate, Paul Douglas helped draft a new civil rights bill, “a model bill,” similar to Brownell’s in “encompassing a whole battery” of provisions empowering the federal government to move against rights violations in many areas besides voting—“a dream bill from the civil rights movement’s point of view,” Joe Rauh was to call it. “A perfect bill.”

At one end of the Capitol, liberal determination seemed likely to produce results. When, still early in the session, southern vote-counters began polling House members, the results surprised and disturbed them. Conservative Republicans who had stood shoulder to shoulder with them for years were standing there no longer. And neither, in their own party, were more than a few congressmen who had never been particularly liberal on civil rights: solid, dependable, “safe” men who in a crunch had also always come down on the side of the South, partly because of the power of the southern committee (and subcommittee) chairmen over these legislators’ own bills, partly because they felt that their party could not afford to lose the South, that the Old Confederacy was the bedrock of Democratic strength. But the burgeoning northern Negro vote had injected into their calculations a new factor—which, the southerners realized with growing astonishment and dismay, was beginning to equal in weight, or to exceed, the old factors.

In the House, of course, the Speaker was a weighty factor in himself, and his reaction was surprising, too. When, after a Board of Education meeting one evening in January, Boiling walked Sam Rayburn upstairs to his office so that he could have a private word with him about civil rights, the brief (as always) discussion was, as was so often the case with Rayburn, not about strategy but about principle, the very simple principle that mattered to Rayburn. “He wanted to find out what was right and fair, and then do it.” And to Boiling’s surprise, ardent southerner though Rayburn was, with those pictures of Robert E. Lee on his wall, Rayburn felt it was right, that it was “only fair,” that “black people have the right to vote.” Interrupting the eloquent young congressman in full flight, the Speaker said: “I’m not against the right to vote. Every citizen should have that.” Though he said no more, “I walked from his office in relief and delight,” Boiling was to recall. “I was certain that… the Speaker would step in at the critical time in order to give the push that only he could effectively give.” Recalling his discussions with Rauh and Biemiller and Mitchell during the early days of 1956, Boiling would say that “We didn’t really care what was in the bill as long as there was something in it. We felt that as long as we could get the first bill passed, we could get others passed.” And these men felt that now, at last, with representatives from both parties behind it, they could get a bill passed. “Rayburn was for it. We got the idea that at last we could pass a civil rights bill!” The Supreme Court had, of course, already proven itself a friend of civil rights. Now, in 1956, the executive branch had, however tentatively, at last entered the fight—and it appeared that the House would come along, too.

THAT LEFT ONLY THE SENATE. And its Majority Leader.

If one listened to Democratic liberals in the early days of January, 1956, one would have thought that in the Senate, too, the barriers were crumbling. “I am sick of seeing our party bullied and intimidated … in order to accommodate itself to Southern prejudices,” one midwestern Democratic senator said. “If the Southern conservatives want to split off, I for one am for letting them do it. I believe it has got to happen sooner or later anyway, and 1956 might be as good a year for it as any.” There were the usual liberal prognostications that this was the year that the Senate would pass a civil rights bill.

Hardly had the Senate convened, indeed, when Hennings of Missouri introduced four separate civil rights bills that were referred to the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Constitutional Rights, which he chaired, and which quickly reported out the bills, with a favorable recommendation, to the full Judiciary Committee. The same subcommittee—and committee—would also handle Douglas’ bill. Judiciary was one of the three Senate committees chaired by liberals. There was a good chance that under Harley Kilgore’s gavel, the full committee would also report these bills out favorably, which would mean that while the South would still be able to kill them, it would not be able to kill them quietly but only after a highly public floor fight it was anxious to avoid.

In reality, however, the Senate was still the Senate. While some—most—of the political barriers blocking civil rights legislation were, in 1956, less solid than in the past, the walls of the South’s citadel were higher and stronger than ever. On January 3, the first day of its 1956 session—in the very midst of the rosy civil rights prognostications—a meeting of liberal senators was held in Herbert Lehman’s office. For a similar meeting in 1953, nineteen senators had shown up, and had decided to try to reform the cloture rule, an attempt that had mustered a total of a meagre twenty-one votes. Now, at the 1956 meeting, exactly twelve senators showed up—and in a discussion among the twelve it was concluded that a similar attempt at reforming cloture would not muster even twenty-one votes. Since the attempt would therefore reveal that they were even weaker than before, they decided not to make it.

And not long after the 1956 session began, the walls were made even higher—with Lyndon Johnson lending a helping hand.

On February 28, the sixty-three-year-old Kilgore died of a stroke, and the ranking Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee, the senator who would, under the seniority rule, succeed to Judiciary’s chairmanship, was James O. Eastland of Mississippi.

Surely, said the ADA and the NAACP and the great liberal journals, surely the seniority system would not be allowed to prevail in this case. Judiciary (which was referred to as the “powerful Judiciary Committee” so often that its title sometimes seemed to have three words) had jurisdiction over all civil rights legislation. Making Eastland Judiciary’s chairman would place at the committee’s head the senator most outspokenly committed to killing all civil rights legislation, the senator who openly boasted that he had killed such legislation before when he had been only chairman of one of Judiciary’s subcommittees (“I had special pockets put in my pants, and for three years I carried those bills around in my pockets …”). Judiciary, what’s more, had jurisdiction over all legislation “relating to federal courts and judges.” Elevating Eastland to Judiciary’s chairmanship would place at the head of the committee in charge of the courts a senator who had openly advocated defiance of the highest court after its Brown ruling (“You are not required to obey any court which passed out such a ruling. In fact, you are obligated to defy it”), who had proposed a constitutional amendment to overturn the Supreme Court decisions that had helped “slimy, juicy” African-Americans. The chairmanship of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said The New Republic, “is the one seat of power in Washington where a dedicated opponent of civil rights can do his greatest damage.” For Eastland to be given that seat “is unthinkable,” the ADA said, joining the NAACP in telegrams appealing to Lyndon Johnson to see that East-land was not given the post. “Maybe there is no easy substitute for seniority,” the New York Times editorialized. “There is no substitute for wisdom, either. There is no substitute for faith in the American system of democracy. If something has to give way, it had better be seniority.”

Which showed only that the ADA and the NAACP and the Times didn’t fully grasp how the Senate felt about the seniority system—or what Lyndon Johnson’s first priority was.

To all such appeals, the Leader replied that it was not he but the Democratic Steering Committee that made committee assignments, and that he was only one member of that committee, and as such had only limited influence. Eastland, however, was in later years to give him more credit than that. “I had Lyndon’s support all the way,” he was to recall. And, he said, Lyndon had also gone out of his way to spare him the embarrassment of a floor fight on his nomination, or even of a roll-call vote—which might have resulted in an unseemly high number of votes against him. “He [Lyndon] worked it out so that two fellows would make speeches against me, but would not ask for a roll call vote,” Eastland was to say. On March 2, the Senate, following a unanimous recommendation of the Democratic Steering Committee—based, the committee said, on seniority—named Eastland to the chairmanship. It did so, on the motion of Majority Leader Johnson, in an unrecorded voice vote so that senators’ views would not go on record; the voices of only a very few senators—journalists in the Press Gallery estimated no more than four or five—could be heard shouting “No” “A mad dog is loose in the streets of justice,” the NAACP’s Clarence Mitchell said. Since Jim Eastland was only fifty-one years old, he might be loose a long time.