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 weeks, 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 weeks, 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 repeater 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 against segregated public facilities. In Oklahoma City, scores of Negroes sat stubbornly for nine hours trying 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 segregation 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--from 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 (see BUSINESS).

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 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.

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