WARREN KOZAK: The 24 Hours That Rocked U.S. Race Relations A Day That Began with George Wallace and Ended with Medgar Evers Changed U.S. History.
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WARREN KOZAK IS AUTHOR OF ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS ON WW2 THAT I EVER READ:
LeMay: The Life and Wars of General Curtis LeMay by Warren Kozak (Oct 17, 2011)
Fifty years ago, on June 11, 1963, the United States opened a new chapter regarding a pivotal matter—race—that had been a source of contention from the nation’s beginning. At the center of this watershed moment for America were the president, a governor, two 18-year-old college students and one of the leading civil-rights activists of that era. The dramatic 24 hours played out in three separate locales, with repercussions that are still felt half a century later.
The day began in sweltering heat at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, when two black students, James Hood and Vivian Malone, tried to enter Foster Auditorium to register for classes. They couldn’t because the governor of the state, George Wallace, physically blocked the door in a desperate attempt to stoke the dying embers of the segregated South.
Television news cameras were rolling when Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, from the Justice Department, asked Wallace to step aside. He refused. But President Kennedy, foreseeing Wallace’s refusal, had federalized the Alabama National Guard. Gen. Henry Graham, the head of the Alabama Guard, ordered the governor, who was essentially his commander, to move.
Before the governor grudgingly surrendered, he delivered a thinly veiled racist speech for the TV cameras in which he denounced the “unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted and force-induced intrusion . . . by the central government.” The moment established Wallace on the national stage, and he would go on to make four racially charged runs for president.
In Ted Sorensen’s 1965 Kennedy biography, the writer described JFK as mildly and quietly in favor of civil-rights legislation as a senator in the 1950s. But Kennedy’s own views had evolved by the early 1960s, and he became a major force in the struggle. At risk to his political career, he had decided to send a federal civil-rights bill to Congress. Kennedy asked the three TV networks for time on the evening of June 11 to announce it to the nation.
Governor George Wallace speaks in the doorway of a campus building at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, publicly refusing to allow African-American students entry to the school despite a federal mandate.
The president, who faced re-election the following year, understood that the bill would cost him the Southern states. Since he was elected by the thinnest of margins in 1960, giving up five or six states could mean no second term.
In one of the strongest speeches of his presidency, Kennedy laid out the case for ending all forms of racial segregation in America. “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue,” Kennedy said. “It is as old as the Scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.”
Some of his arguments were practical. How could the U.S. promote freedom abroad, the president asked, when millions of its own citizens were by law less than free?
But his basic theme was one of moral rightness. “This is one country,” Kennedy told the nation. “It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to 10% of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way they are going to get their rights is to go in the street and demonstrate. I think we owe them and we owe ourselves a better country than that.”
Kennedy signed off, made some phone calls, and then retired to the White House residence. But the day wasn’t over.
Three and a half hours after Kennedy’s speech, Medgar Evers, a World War II veteran and civil-rights activist, got out of his car in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Miss., and was shot in the back. Evers died less than an hour later, leaving behind a widow and three young children. The murder underlined the urgency of Kennedy’s appeal for racial equality earlier that night.
Byron De La Beckwith, a member of the White Citizens Counsel, was arrested 10 days after the murder, but all-white juries deadlocked twice. He was finally convicted in 1994, 31 years after Evers was killed. De La Beckwith was 80 when he died in prison in 2001.
Just weeks after JFK’s assassination in November 1963, Lyndon Johnson focused on the civil-rights bill as the best possible memorial to the slain president and pushed it through Congress the following spring. Johnson lost the South when he ran for president in 1964, but he carried almost every other state in a landslide.
America has changed dramatically over the past half-century. At the same time the issue of race has not disappeared, even after the rise of a black middle class and the election and re-election of an African-American president. One example now occupying cable television news is the trial of George Zimmerman for the killing last year of Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old African-American—a case that would not have attracted national coverage were it not for its racial overtones.
But perhaps one of the most compelling indications of the changes that Americans are capable of making might be seen in, of all people, the evolution of the one-time segregationist George Wallace.
Wallace came to publicly admit, in 1982, that he was wrong in his earlier views. He asked the black community for forgiveness and, in large measure, he received it. In 1997, Wallace was planning on personally handing to James Hood the Ph.D. diploma that he earned at the University of Alabama—the same institution that Wallace once barred Hood from entering. But Wallace’s failing health prevented it, and he died a few months later. If Wallace had been able to make it to the event, a video of the moment would have been the perfect bookend to his first national-television appearance, on June 11, 1963.
Mr. Kozak is the author of “Presidential Courage: Three Speeches That Changed America,” an e-book published last year.
A version of this article appeared June 11, 2013, on page A15 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The 24 Hours That Rocked U.S. Race Relations.
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