Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight against Civil Rights, 1938-1965

6. This Is Where the Battle Will Be Won or Lost

6. This Is Where the Battle Will Be Won or Lost on 4 may 1961, members of the Congress of Racial Equality headed south from Washington to test southern compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1960 Boynton v. Virginia decision, which banned segregation on interstate bus lines and in interstate terminals. As the delegation moved through Virginia , the Carolinas, and Georgia, they encountered only limited opposition. When the Freedom Riders reached Alabama, the situation degenerated into a flurry of violence as white locals assaulted the activists. Only the deployment of federal marshals by a reluctant President John F. Kennedy restored order. Most northern media outlets depicted the racial violence in Alabama as a byproduct of white southern intolerance. On the other hand, many southern whites believed that they, not the black demonstrators, represented the true victims of the interracial strife. Furthermore, they argued that despite the alleged nonviolent philosophy of the protesters, the unrest had resulted from the provocations of outside “agitators,” who deliberately fomented turmoil where tranquility once ruled. Although most considered the white response in Alabama excessive, the prevailing southern interpretation held that racial violence occurred only when intentionally provoked. Culpability for the assault on the Freedom Riders thus rested with the demonstrators.1 1. Inge Powell Bell, CORE and the Strategy of Non-Violence (New York: Random House, 1968), 10–11; Branch, Parting the Waters, 412–450; Carl M. Brauer, John F. Kennedy and the Second Reconstruction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); 98–112; Robert Cook, Sweet Land of Liberty? The African-American Struggle for Civil Rights in the Twentieth Century (New York: Longman, 1998), 123–125; Adam Fairclough, Better Day Coming: Blacks and Equality, 1890–2000 234 delaying the dream Not surprisingly, southern senators also blamed the Freedom Riders for the turmoil in Alabama. Allen Ellender, for one, bluntly proclaimed, “I have always said that if anyone goes looking for trouble, he is sure to find it. That is exactly what happened in Alabama.” Lister Hill, who had a direct political stake in removing the federal presence in his bailiwick, pleaded with Attorney General Robert Kennedy to withdraw the U.S. marshals, just as he urged Kennedy to do “everything possible . . . to keep outside agitators out of Alabama.” In keeping with his desire to quell the protests, Hill joined James Eastland, John McClellan, A. Willis Robertson, George Smathers, John Sparkman, John Stennis, and Strom Thurmond in cosponsoring an antidemonstration bill that would make it a criminal o≠ense to travel across state lines “with the intent to make a riot.” Like most white southerners, the drafters of the proposal recast the civil rights fight by labeling the demonstrators dangerous insurgents bent on flouting state law. Before the arrival of CORE activists, Hill asserted, peace had marked race relations in Alabama. The fact that social stability in the state deteriorated upon the arrival of the Freedom Riders proved evidence enough for Hill that external pressure played a central role in precipitating racial violence in the South. As the Alabaman’s comments underscore, southern senators had yet to acknowledge that black resistance in the region resulted from its repressive racial order. They had very little choice. To admit that even a shred of injustice prompted the protest movement would be to undermine everything they had said and planned to say regarding civil rights. How could they argue that nothing was wrong and the South, if trouble emerged, could take care of its own problems “as it always has” if they were on record criticizing, even if only obliquely, the racial order they defended? Southern senators would remain, until the end of their struggle against civil rights, unwilling to deviate from their mantra that peaceful coexistence marked white and black social intercourse in the region. Disturbances, they would argue, stemmed from the agitation of outsiders. The mythological portrait of Jim Crow as a benevolent system that fostered idyllic race relations remained the foundation of southern arguments in defense of segregation.2 (New York: Viking, 2001), 253–256; August Meier and Elliott Rudwick, CORE: A Study in the Civil Rights Movement, 1942–1968 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 135–158; Stephen B. Oates,LettheTrumpetSound:ALifeofMartinLutherKing,Jr.(NewYork:HarperCollins,1994),174–178. 2. Mississippi’s John Stennis drafted the antidemonstration bill. For introduction of the proposal, see CR, 87th Cong., 1st sess., 24 May 1961, 8708; AE to D. T. McKearan Jr., 31 May this is where...