There are few people in this country today, white or black, who have not become seriously concerned about the school-segregation controversy and the turmoil it has aroused. Like just about everyone else, I have been trying to understand, from stories I have read in the papers and from people I have talked with, what is happening and what is at stake. Early last month, on hearing that the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was about to hold a regional meeting in Atlanta, Georgia, to assess the turbulent situation, I decided to ask permission to attend it, and I was very glad when, presently, my request was granted. I did not, of course, expect to come back from the meeting with the whole story of race relations in the South. Necessarily, what I heard and saw down there would be one-sided. Even so, the N.A.A.C.P. is the organization that had the most to do, directly, with starting all this; its staff pressed cases involving segregation through the inevitable years of litigation, and argued them before the Supreme Court, and won. What I wanted to find out at first hand was how some of its leaders were taking their victory and what they would make of it. This was to be the first Southern regional meeting since the impact of the United States Supreme Court’s order of last May requiring local school boards to desegregate had made itself widely felt. A great deal had happened since then.
My travelling companion on the flight to Atlanta, I was pleased to learn, would be Thurgood Marshall, the N.A.A.C.P.’s Special Counsel and the man who pleaded the segregation cases before the Supreme Court. He is a tall, vigorous man of forty-seven, with a long face, a long, hooked nose above a black mustache, and heavy-lidded but very watchful eyes. He is about as swarthy as a Sikh, and, in fact, rather resembles one when he is in a fierce mood. His mother is a retired schoolteacher; his father, who died eight years ago, was a waiter in Baltimore. In the last fifteen years, Marshall has attained the stature of a semi-legendary folk hero among his people. At the same time, he has earned the deepest respect of sophisticated jurists and students of the law. Since 1938, as the N.A.A.C.P. Special Counsel, he has appeared before the United States Supreme Court to argue sixteen cases. He has won fourteen of them. This would be an extraordinarily high record under any circumstances, but in the light of the fact that in each case Marshall was appealing a lower court’s decision, which lawyers consider a much tougher proposition than defending one, and, moreover, was seeking to persuade the highest court in the land to upset established precedent, it may be a unique record. The undisputed dean of constitutional lawyers in our time was the late John W. Davis, once a Democratic Presidential nominee, but the only occasion on which he and Marshall argued on opposite sides before the Supreme Court, Marshall won. That was in connection with the five school-segregation cases on which the court based its momentous ruling. It is as the result of Marshall’s victories before the United States Supreme Court that Negroes have won the right to vote in primaries in the South, the right to be free from Jim Crow restrictions when travelling from one state to another, and, now, the right to attend public schools without suffering segregation on the basis of race. Few living individuals have had a greater effect than Marshall on the social fabric of America. Not a scholarly or academic lawyer himself, he has been given credit for assembling a scholarly, painstaking staff and for knowing how to use their research and ideas creatively. No one denies that he is eloquent. He has made his most telling arguments when he has taken off from dry questions of legal precedent to range over the human and social implications of the matter at hand. Out of court, he is informal, colloquial and pungent in his speech, occasionally moody and brusque, sometimes stormy, and often playful, even at serious moments, but without violating his sense of the seriousness of the moment. His courtroom manner is quite different. At such times, his vivid personality does not become muted, but it does become transmuted. In court, he is deferential, respectful, and of a most imposing dignity. His associates say that this alteration of demeanor is not studied but, rather, stems from a profound, almost religious, respect for the law.
The meeting was to take place on Saturday, February 18th. Marshall and I were to leave New York Friday afternoon. It snowed all that morning. When I set out for LaGuardia Airport to make a four-thirty-five plane, the sky was bleak. Icicles hung from the grilles of parked cars. The snow, already sooty and impure, lingered on the tops of cabs, on the fenders and running boards of trucks, and on the heaps of upturned earth and broken asphalt beside street excavations, around which the clogged traffic flowed sullenly. The pavements were wet, the gutters full of slush. In Queens, as the airport bus rushed along the highway, a freezing rain began to fall, turning to ice under our tires. It was nasty Northern weather. Lots of people were going South that weekend, the clerk who checked my ticket at the airline’s counter at LaGuardia told me, and he didn’t blame them a bit.
I found Marshall waiting in the plane. Wearing a double-breasted blue suit, he was slouched in his seat, his long legs crossed. I took off my hat and coat and sat down beside him. There was a brief delay while the wings were deiced, and then the plane taxied out onto the field, paused, and roared down the runway. During the takeoff, Marshall sat hunched at the window, gazing with concentration into the heavily overcast sky, as if contributing his will power to the effort to get us off the ground. After the plane was well in the air, he slumped back like a man who had done his part and was now entitled to relax, unfastened his safety belt, lit a cigarette, put on horn-rimmed glasses, and settled down to reading the New York Post. He went through it page by page, picking up the continued stories as he came to them. When he had finished, he offered the Post to me and took up the World-Telegram, remarking, “Now let’s see what the other side has to say.” He went through that paper in the same way, impartially devoting as much attention to its pages, including the comics, as he had to the Post’s. The tumult over segregation in the South loomed up from both newspapers. Stories and editorials talked of racial strife, of violence and threats of violence. Marshall lit another cigarette. “One thing troubles me about this meeting ahead,” he said. “We won’t be able to smoke. That’s gonna hurt. The meeting’ll be at a Baptist church. The planning committee got together with Reverend Borders a while back, and he said, ‘I won’t mind if you smoke.’ We all looked real happy. And then he said, ‘But God will mind—and it’s His house.’ You should’ve seen our faces fall. We were sad.” The recollection of his gloom, and the telling of it, made Marshall quite merry for a moment.
Of all the worries that might beset a Negro leader setting out for Georgia, this was one I had not anticipated. I asked Marshall whether he ever had qualms about his safety when he went South. On several occasions in the past, I knew, he had had some close calls. “I’m a Southerner,” he told me. “Born and brought up down there. I know my way around. I don’t go looking for trouble. I ride in the for-colored-only cabs and in the back end of streetcars—quiet as a mouse. I eat in Negro cafés and don’t use white washrooms. I don’t challenge the customs personally, because I figure I’m down South representing a client—the N.A.A.C.P.—and not myself. So up until about six months ago I had no qualms when I started out on one of these trips.” He paused, rubbing his long nose, and then said, “But I got ‘em nowadays. Those boys are playing for keeps. My wife followed me out to the elevator when I left today, begging me to be careful.” His laughter over his wife’s concern was fond and slightly wistful. Their marriage had taken place only nine weeks before. (It was Marshall’s second marriage; his first wife died a year ago.) “There won’t be any trouble in Atlanta, though,” Marshall added confidently. “I like Atlanta. That’s a pretty civilized town.”
It was growing dark outside. The stewardess came along the aisle taking orders for drinks—Scotch-and-soda for me, for Marshall coffee. He seemed to feel that the coffee called for an explanation, and said that, as an Episcopalian, he was observing Lent. “It doesn’t hurt to take a month off once a year to prove to myself that I don’t need liquor,” he added. “Having proved it, I can really enjoy the stuff the other eleven months.” He removed his glasses and put them in his pocket, and then drank his coffee, gulping it rather joylessly, I thought. I asked him if he’d care to give me some sort of summary of the situation in the South as he saw it. He replied that he did not know what the situation was himself. “That’s what I’m going down to find out,” he said. “That’s what the meeting’s about.” Didn’t the N.A.A.C.P. branches send reports to keep him up to date, I asked. “Some do, some don’t,” he said. “Some are leery about putting everything they know on paper. And when they phone and hear clicking on the line all the time, they get leery about that, too. I can’t blame them. It’s not safe to be an N.A.A.C.P. leader in some parts of the South today.” He lit a cigarette, then turned toward me and said, “Some of them speak out without hesitation, though. I don’t know how they do it. They have more courage than I would have in their place.” He bent over and picked up a Manila folder from beside his seat. “Here,” he said as he opened it. “Here’s a letter I got a while ago from one of our people in South Carolina. Would you like to read it?” The letter, typewritten, was from Levi G. Byrd, correspondent and secretary-treasurer of the Cheraw branch of the N.A.A.C.P., Cheraw, South Carolina. It read as follows:
“Mr. Byrd is quite a man,” Marshall said, with undisguised admiration, as he glanced over the letter after I handed it back to him. “He knows what’s right and nobody can frighten him. He thinks education’s real important. He’d like his children to get some.” Marshall looked at the letter again and laughed. “ ‘Trusting that you is injoyen your married life,’ ” he repeated with relish. He peered out the window into the darkness. “Where are we now—somewhere over Virginia, North Carolina? Won’t be too long before we’re over Mr. Byrd’s territory.” He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another. I could see why he would have wished God to be a little more permissive about what went on in His house.
Marshall talked of how much the N.A.A.C.P. had grown in the past twenty years, to the point where it now has over five hundred thousand members, most of whom pay annual dues of two dollars. “You know, they didn’t use to have people like Mr. Byrd in the N.A.A.C.P.,” he said. “The organization used to be much more of an élite affair, with everybody trying to be so refined. I remember when I was a kid”—his eyes suddenly gleamed with humor—“we used to say that N.A.A.C.P. stood for the National Association for the Advancement of Certain People. There was a redcap at Grand Central Station who brought more than three hundred members into the organization. Somebody proposed that he be put on the executive board. The other board members were horrified. A redcap!” Marshall mimicked them, sighting down his nose and pursing his lips fastidiously. “ ‘What college did this person attend? Who are his family?’ ” His imitation dissolved in laughter.
I asked who the people were that would be taking part in the Atlanta meeting. “Oh, people of all sorts,” Marshall replied. “Lots of lawyers, of course, because the law’s what this meeting’s about, and a few schoolteachers. And then there’ll be the state presidents—one works in a post office, one’s an undertaker, another’s a dentist. And then there’s a college president—let’s not go to the other extreme and leave him out. When I get to this meeting, I’ll not only find out from them what the situation is but also find out what they want to do about it, because they’re the ones that are gonna have to live with any action that’s taken. Then I’ll try to figure out how to help them do it. That’s my part, actually.”
The public-address system switched on with a click. A man’s voice greeted us. He announced our speed and altitude, said amiably that we were encountering fifty-mile-an-hour head winds, and hoped we were having a pleasant flight. We were, in fact, having a rather rough one—no sudden, sickening drops but a constant bumpiness, as if we were going along a cobblestone road. Marshall ran his fingers through his already tousled hair. On one of them, I noticed, he was wearing a gold ring bearing the gold numeral “33”—emblem of the highest Masonic degree. “You know, you hear all this talk about the movement for the Negro’s rights and desegregation being pushed by the North faster than the colored people down in the South want,” he said. “Thurgood Marshall’s supposed to be masterminding this whole campaign, somehow, against the wishes of Southern Negroes, those millions of childlike, happy, easygoing colored folk—that’s the way segregationists talk about Negroes when they’re not describing them as vicious, immoral, and diseased—who would be as contented as pie if agitators didn’t come along and stir them up. That’s funny, because our people in the South are actually way ahead of us on this thing. It reminds me of the story of the crowd that was rushing at top speed down the street. A man standing on the sidewalk saw them go by and naturally got curious. He went out on the road and grabbed a guy huffin’ and puffin’ along at the tail end of the crowd and said, ‘What’s goin’ on here?’ The other guy pulled loose and cried, ‘Don’t hold me back, man! Don’t you know I’m the leader of that crowd? And if I don’t run like hell they’ll get away from me altogether.’ ” Marshall told this story with enthusiasm, as he tells all his anecdotes, savoring the details along the way as well as the point. “That’s me,” he said, laughing. “The leader at the tail end.”
The stewardess approached again, this time with dinner trays. I took steak, and Marshall took fish. He ate heartily. After the trays were cleared away, our conversation continued—reminiscent, perhaps less guarded than before, somewhat rambling, as conversation is apt to be on a night journey aboard a plane or train as it rushes through the darkness. “In Baltimore, where I was brought up, we lived on a respectable street, but behind us there were back alleys where the roughnecks and the tough kids hung out,” Marshall said. “When it was time for dinner, my mother used to go to the front door and call my older brother. Then she’d go to the back door and call me.” He spoke of the painful moment of realization that at one time or another all Negro children have to go through in some fashion. “I heard a kid call a Jewish boy I knew a kike to his face. I was about seven. I asked him why he didn’t fight the kid. He asked me what would I do if somebody called me nigger—would I fight? That was a new one on me. I knew ‘kike’ was a dirty word but I hadn’t known about ‘nigger.’ I went home and wanted to know right that minute what this all meant. That’s not easy for a parent to explain so it makes any sense to a kid, you know.”
Inevitably, our conversation circled back to the present controversy. Some weeks previously, I had read an article in Harper’s by Thomas R. Waring, a newspaper editor of Charleston, South Carolina, entitled “The Southern Case Against Desegregation” and introduced by the magazine as the viewpoint of a conservative, deeply concerned Southerner, though by no means that of the editors. Prominent among the author’s arguments was one to the effect that Negro children in the South today have such a high incidence of disease that they would subject their white classmates to the risk of contamination, and I remembered he had also said that they are so inferior scholastically as to hold white children back unfairly if the two races were put in the same classroom, and that their morals, as the result of the unfortunate example set by their ignorant, irresponsible parents, are lax and corrupting. These, he wrote, were the inescapable realities, and these realities made segregation necessary, at least until the Negro could become a fit companion for whites.
I mentioned the article to Marshall, and when he said he had read it, I asked how he replied to such arguments. Did he maintain that the Negro children’s standards of health, morals, and scholarship were as high as those of their white contemporaries? What did he say when asked if he thought it just to condemn the present generation of white children to inferior, perhaps harmful associations during their formative years? Marshall lit a cigarette, leaned back, and began what at first struck me as a digression. He said that the very core of his concern was not the Negro but the individual human being. Other people were engaged in efforts to improve the standards and status of the Negroes as a race, he said, and that was a worthy cause, but it wasn’t his cause. The great contribution America had made to the world was in establishing a society whose law and government were based on a fundamental belief in individual worth, individual opportunity, and individual responsibility, and Marshall’s cause, as he saw it, was to make that idea, which had long been grievously thwarted in the case of many Americans, into a reality.
“Look,” Marshall said, turning toward me. “I’m not going to deny these things that Mr. Waring writes about. I could talk about the loose morals some children bring into the all-white classes in Mr. Waring’s South Carolina—or elsewhere—but that’s not the point. Teachers know what they have to do with problem children—punish or otherwise correct the naughty ones, suspend the impossible ones. There are school nurses and doctors to examine the children. Of course they shouldn’t allow children to come to school with communicable diseases—black children or white children. That’s just common sense. There are scholastic tests and intelligence tests and achievement tests. They can give them to the children—black and white children, both, and yellow or red or brown or green—and put the backward ones into whatever remedial or what-have-you classes are suitable, and all the bright ones together, if they want to do it that way. If ninety-nine colored children out of a hundred are diseased—which obviously they’re not—I believe that under this country’s notion of justice you still have no right to penalize the hundredth one for that. If ninety-nine Negro children out of a hundred should be found to be stupid, that hundredth one still has a right to equal educational opportunities.” Marshall spoke with brooding intensity. His cigarette ash fell on his lapel. He ignored it. The stewardess bent over us and asked us to fasten our safety belts. He buckled his without appearing to notice what he was doing. “All I’m saying is this, and it really says just about everything I have to say on civil rights,” he continued. “Any tests the school wishes to give the children to separate them for one reason or another are O.K. with me except for one test—the racial test. That’s all it comes down to. Not the racial test.”
The plane landed with a bump, swept along the strip, and taxied to the terminal. A ramp was trundled up, and the door was opened. Marshall cocked an eye at the window. “Georgia!” he said.
As we walked down the ramp, I was amazed by the warmth of the night. I had automatically buttoned my topcoat before leaving the plane. Now I took it off and unbuttoned my jacket. I looked at my watch. It was eight-ten—only three and a half hours from New York’s ice and sleet.
In the lobby of the terminal, J. H. Calhoun, president of the N.A.A.C.P.’s Atlanta branch, was waiting for us. The lobby was a long, crowded room, but it was not hard to find him. Other than Marshall, he was the only Negro in sight—a large, carefully dressed man, standing with his hat in hand in the middle of the floor, with a small island of space around him. Under the bright lights, his skin gleamed like burnished ebony. He greeted Marshall warmly but respectfully. Then, with grave courtesy, he shook hands with me. Within a few minutes, other newly arrived N.A.A.C.P. representatives had gathered around us—Robert L. Carter, a slender, youngish attorney with a mustache, who is Marshall’s chief assistant in the New York office and who argued some aspects of the school-segregation cases before the United States Supreme Court; a slight, jaunty, tea-colored man named James Stewart, an N.A.A.C.P. official from Oklahoma; and two or three others, whose names I did not catch. The delegates started talking about where they would be staying. The matter was complicated. There are only three hotels for Negroes in the city, and they are not considered very satisfactory, even by those in no position to be choosy. At that, I was told, Atlanta is better off in this respect than many Southern cities, several of which have no public accommodations whatever for transient Negroes. Some of the delegates were going to stay at a Negro motel, some would put up at the Negro Y.M.C.A., and some were to be quartered in private houses scattered through Atlanta’s colored districts. Marshall and I were to stay in a dormitory at Atlanta University, a university for Negroes, which is the only place in town where, on an occasion such as this, white and Negro visitors can be sheltered under the same roof without public scandal.
Marshall and I got our luggage and then Calhoun ushered us, along with Carter and Stewart, into his car. After we got under way, Stewart congratulated Marshall on his marriage and chaffed him about it. As we drove along, there was a lot of banter and laughter and high-spirited talk among my companions of going out on the town and having themselves a ball tonight. They sounded like Elks Clubbers or American Legionnaires or any other group of conventioneers who have just got together. Calhoun let Marshall and me out at Atlanta University and then the others drove off down the street. I asked Marshall whether he thought they really were going to make a gay night of it. “They might,” he said. “But more likely they’ll sit around some place and talk back and forth all night about the problems of the N.A.A.C.P.”
The University, a privately endowed institution, has a good academic reputation, I understand, and offers quite a varied curriculum. Its red brick buildings looked solid, clean, and comfortable. As we went into the one where we were to stay, we passed a couple of students sitting on the steps—a young man in shirtsleeves and a girl wearing a white cotton dress. Another couple was sauntering up the front walk. In a lounge off the entrance hall, I glimpsed a group of young men sitting about, engaged in a bull session. It all looked, except for the matter of color, very much like any other American college on a balmy Friday night. An attractive co-ed in a loose striped shirt and a dark skirt signed us in and showed us to our rooms. They were spacious and pleasant. I unpacked and showered, then went down the hall to Marshall’s room, where we spent the rest of the evening talking and sipping Cokes before windows wide-open to let in the night air. He talked about how, if he and his wife should have children, they would like to move out of their Harlem apartment to some place in the suburbs, because they felt that New York City was not a good place to raise youngsters.
I was awakened early next morning by birds singing in the trees outside my windows. The sky was clear and blue. I got up and dressed. It was two hours before the time Marshall and some of the other N.A.A.C.P. people had said they would be going out to breakfast, so I thought I’d better scout around for a cup of coffee. In the lounge, I met a faculty member—an affable white man in his late thirties, dressed in a sports shirt and slacks—who pleasantly invited me to join him in the dining room. His name was Robert G. Armstrong, he said; he was an associate professor of anthropology, gray and weathered. Our driver, a local N.A.A.C.P. man, teased Marshall by apologizing elaborately for taking the distinguished Northern visitor through the colored sections of town and hoping he wouldn’t judge the fair city of Atlanta by what he was seeing now. Marshall said he wouldn’t dream of it. One of the people in the car spoke of how difficult—almost impossible—it was to get serious news about Negroes printed in the city’s regular newspapers, the Journal and the Constitution. Even when a congressman came down to Atlanta and addressed a Negro meeting, the occasion was apt to get only a few lines in a column entitled “Our Negro Community,” he said. Another passenger suggested that the local Negro newspaper should start a column entitled “Our White Community.” The others chuckled.
It was ten-fifteen when we entered the church’s assembly room—a quarter of an hour past the scheduled starting time for the meeting. “What’s the matter, Thurgood?” a tall, elegant man, paler than most of the people one sees tanning themselves at Miami Beach, asked with mock severity. “Is there a fifteen-minute time differential between here and New York?” Marshall laughed and said, with a wave of his hand, “Hi, Oliver! How are ya?” One of the staff members began passing out copies of the agenda as Marshall took his place at a table in the front of the room, below a small stage on which stood an American flag. On his left was an empty chair, and beyond it sat Roy Wilkins, a slim man with a handsome, sensitive face, successor to the late Walter White as the N.A.A.C.P.’s executive secretary. On Marshall’s right was Carter, his chief assistant.
The room was airy and commodious. There were about fifty men and women present—all Negroes except me—sitting in rows on folding metal chairs. I was in the third row, next to Stewart, the Oklahoma president. The Reverend William Borders, the church’s pastor, came to the front of the room. “Let’s pray,” he said, and all stood with heads bowed. The minister thanked the Lord for a “divine discontent,” for truth, and for “a consciousness of social justice,” adding, “Help us to know that justice, an attribute of God, is backed by the moral order.” He prayed for humility and equally for courage, and he asked God to make those present sympathetic, understanding, and considerate of those who opposed them, even with prejudice and hate. “May we turn aside the hate and prejudice, and love the hater,” he said. “In Thy name we pray. Amen.” The others echoed “Amen” and sat down as he withdrew.
Addressing the meeting in a conversational voice, Marshall said he wasn’t going to waste time making a speech—everybody, he observed, had the agenda and had previously received an outline telling what the meeting was about and stressing that it was facts, not rumors, that were wanted, and so now he would suggest that they elect themselves a chairman and then the delegates from the various states could start giving their reports. By acclamation, the delegates chose the Reverend James M. Hinton, of Columbia, South Carolina, for the job. A short, round faced man with close-cropped white hair, he took the empty chair between Marshall and Wilkins, named a timekeeper, who was to see that none of the states exceeded the fifteen minutes allotted them for their reports, and said they ought to start out by finding what states were represented. One after another, from here and there in the room, people sounded off: “Alabama!” “Maryland!” “Georgia!” “Mississippi!” Mississippi’s name brought a murmur from the delegates. Since this group had last convened, less than a year before, two of that state’s Negro leaders who had been urging Negroes to register as voters had been shot and killed and a third had been seriously wounded. One of the killings took place in as public a setting as one could well find in the South—in front of a county courthouse on a Saturday afternoon. No one has yet been indicted for any of these crimes. “Arkansas!” the calling out continued. “Kentucky’s here!” “Louisiana, too!” “Florida!” “North Carolina!” “South Carolina!’’ “Virginia!” The Reverend Mr. Hinton looked up. “What about Oklahoma?” he asked. Stewart, beside me, had been sitting mum. “Well,” he said now, “Oklahoma’s been doin’ so well we’re practically a Northern state, and I wasn’t sure you Southerners would want me at your meetin’.” This drew laughter, Stewart apparently being known as a humorous fellow. The only states involved in the controversy but unrepresented at the meeting were Delaware, Missouri, and Tennessee. The absence of their delegates was not considered crucial, since desegregation (a word I deplore as a cumbrous monstrosity but am not going to be able to avoid) is proceeding quite smoothly and rapidly in Missouri and the northern half of Delaware; in Tennessee, although the only schools now attended by both white and Negro children are those under federal control at Oak Ridge, Governor Frank G. Clement, unlike many Southern governors, has at any rate asserted that his state is part of the Union and that he will not encourage efforts to circumvent the law of the land.
“Let’s call first for a report from the very fine state of Maryland,” the Reverend Mr. Hinton said. From the N.A.A.C.P. viewpoint, the news from Maryland was indeed quite encouraging. The Baltimore School Board had voted to end segregation shortly after the Supreme Court, on May 17, 1954, issued its basic constitutional decision that “in the field of public education, the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place” and that “separate education facilities are inherently unequal.” Baltimore did not wait, as did most other Southern localities, for the Court’s implementation order, announced a year later, which stated that desegregation would be a matter for local school authorities to work out but that they would be required to show “good faith,” to “make a prompt and reasonable start toward full compliance,” and to move “with all deliberate speed.” By the time this order was issued, Baltimore had already accomplished the change. Although the state’s county boards are moving more slowly, all of them have announced that they will comply with the Supreme Court’s decision, and as far as the N.A.A.C.P. is concerned it is mainly a question of making sure they don’t take too long about it. In Baltimore, Negro teachers have been assimilated into the revised school system. Several Baltimore schools, in districts that contain no Negro children, now have Negro teachers in charge of all-white classes.
The man presenting the Maryland report was a rather prosperous-looking attorney named Robert B. Watts. Wearing a gray suit with a vest and a red plaid bow tie, he spoke in an easy, matter-of-fact manner. The only incident of any sort in Baltimore, he went on to say, had occurred at Southern High School, in an industrial section of the city, where the students staged a walkout one day in October, 1954. “It was a very warm day, and I think the kids mainly wanted an excuse to get out of school and into the open air,” Watts said. “The police commissioner immediately went on TV and warned parents that it was against the law for the youngsters to stay out of school. He said there’d be some arrests made if they didn’t go back. They went back right away.” Watts announced that he now had a suit pending in Harford County, seeking a court order to require that county’s school board to end school segregation. “Edgewood Arsenal and Aberdeen Proving Ground are both in this county, and there are several nonsegregated government housing projects,” he told the meeting. “We felt that there was certainly no excuse for continuing segregated schools near these places where the races are housed together and the men work and train together.” He added that another suit may have to be filed in St. Marys County, and that it is being prepared now. “There the people are more Southern in attitude,” he said, rather apologetically.
When Watts had finished, a delegate from one of the Deep South states asked him in a concerned voice whether it was indeed true that Negro students were not doing as well in their achievement tests as their white classmates. From the table, Carter broke in to say, “It’s a fact. Let’s face it.”
At the other end of the table, Wilkins, who had spoken little so far, said thoughtfully, “It might be well to clarify our position on this. We don’t need to argue the point or be defensive. Some Negroes have flunked out in Baltimore, but some haven’t. That’s what we care about—the right of each individual to a fair chance.” Marshall, who had been quietly making notes during the Maryland report, nodded emphatic agreement. “And some Negro students have been making excellent records, including Robert B. Watts, Jr.,” Wilkins added. This, everybody realized, was a reference to the Maryland attorney’s son. Smiling with fatherly pride, Watts returned to his seat.
One after another, as the Reverend Mr. Hinton called on them, state representatives came forward and delivered their reports. West Virginia was doing extremely well; out of the forty-four counties in the state in which there are Negroes, all but nine had either completely eliminated school segregation or made a start toward doing so. Oklahoma reported that not only had all school segregation ended in Oklahoma City and most of the counties in the state but all race restrictions had been removed from the city’s golf courses, municipal auditoriums, public buildings, and some movies, and from the state parks. The news from Arkansas, Kentucky, and Texas was rather less encouraging. Here and there in each of them some small, tentative forward steps had been taken. In Texas, perhaps the furthest along of the three, Negro pupils had been accepted on a non-segregated basis as of last September in some sixty of the state’s 2,200 school districts, including Austin, Corpus Christi, El Paso, San Angelo, Big Spring, and San Antonio. In Kentucky, a total of only 339 Negroes were attending schools with white children. One white boy there had enrolled in a formerly all-Negro school. In Arkansas, only about twenty Negroes, all told, were attending non-segregated schools, most of them in Hoxie and a few in Fayetteville and Charleston. These states—and Tennessee, as well—were, it seemed, in a delicate, uncertain stage somewhere between compliance and defiance. Here matters could still go either way, but the spirit of opposition was manifesting itself chiefly in efforts to put off a little while longer what many felt to be inevitable. Kentucky, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee, in other words, were like someone feeling the water with his toe, not sure whether he’s going to like it once he plunges in but quite convinced that at least the first impact is going to be an unpleasant shock.
The reports given at the meeting were detailed and factual, and were presented in an unemotional and businesslike way. Each state’s spokesman gave information about the attitudes and actions of governmental officials, about petitions filed with school boards and the responses to them, about negotiations conducted, and about lawsuits, current or contemplated. I would possibly have found these reports deadly dull if it had not been for the circumstances that gave rise to them, the flashes of spontaneous humor, and my awareness of the intense absorption with which everyone in the room was listening to them. With the exception of the ebullient Stewart, of Oklahoma, no one from the states where great progress was being made and a whole social pattern was in the process of change sounded boastful, and even his exuberance was free from any suggestion of gloating. Indeed, what he sounded most like was a chamber-of-commerce booster.
The Reverend Mr. Hinton permitted no one to overrun his allotted fifteen minutes, and no one got the floor without his recognition. I had certainly expected more oratorical flourishes, but the slightest hint of anything of this sort was apt to draw from Marshall the warning “Watch out, man, you’re using up your own time!” Marshall himself was put firmly in his place when he tried to discuss a point after the Reverend Mr. Hinton had ruled that there would be no further discussion of it. No one in the group seemed to question the chairman’s authority, and I, too, in the course of the meeting, came to be powerfully impressed by the strength and firmness of his character, although I would have been hard put to it to say how he communicated these traits, for he never raised his voice and most of the time a mild, kindly smile lingered on his moon-shaped face. This was the Reverend Mr. Hinton mentioned in Levi Byrd’s letter from Cheraw. Shotgun blasts had been fired into the minister’s house only last January. One night a few years before, he had been kidnapped by an outraged mob and threatened with lynching for leading a protest against segregation in the schools in South Carolina. When asked about that night, he diverts attention from its terrors by smiling gently and recalling that among those Negroes who set out angrily to try to save him were two cars filled with fellow-members of the cloth—a “whole posse of preachers”—and saying that it was a good thing for their immortal souls that they didn’t come upon the mob before he was set free. The Reverend Mr. Hinton is one of the people Marshall presumably had in mind when, on the plane down, he had wondered at the courage of the Negro leaders to be found in the South.
Of all the problems raised at the morning session, perhaps the most unusual was the one brought up by an attorney from Texas—a neat, bald, middle-aged man wearing rimless glasses. At the end of his report on school segregation, he mentioned some of the efforts his group was making to overcome other forms of racial discrimination. “Negroes have been trying to get themselves arrested on the buses in Dallas and Houston, in order to test their segregation ordinances, but they’ve had no success whatsoever,” he said.
The Texas delegate’s problem provoked considerable hilarity among the delegates. “If they have no luck, they ought to go to Montgomery, Alabama,” the Reverend Mr. Hinton suggested. In Montgomery, as every member of the audience knew, the Texans would have no trouble finding a police officer to oblige them.
Shortly before one o’clock, the meeting adjourned for lunch, which was served cafeteria-style in a kitchen down the hall and was, as the Reverend Dr. Borders said, “on the house.” Each person carried his own loaded tray into a nearby dining room. We had our choice of barbecued ribs or fried chicken. I took the ribs, and they were delicious. One of the last people to come into the dining room was a delegate from West Virginia, a large, very black man who had read his report, full of notable achievements, in a deep, unexcited voice. He stopped in the doorway, tray in hand, looked around at the others, already at table, and meekly inquired, “May colored folks eat here?” Then, smiling broadly, he marched in and sat down.
After lunch, most of the people went outside and stood in the sunshine on the church steps, smoking avidly. I made my way from one group to another, chatting with some and listening to what they had to say. Marshall was scheduled to go to Birmingham, Alabama, on the 29th to plead Miss Autherine Lucy’s right to be admitted to the University of Alabama, and he was saying that, frankly, he wasn’t looking forward at all to showing himself in that hostile territory. Somebody jokingly urged him to think how much good his becoming a martyr might do the cause, from the long view. “That’s too long a view!” Marshall protested. Wilkins laughed and recalled how in the old days when they were sitting around trying to figure out how the organization was going to raise enough money to stay in existence, Walter White used to look speculatively at Marshall and Wilkins and say, “Now, if one of you heroes would just get lynched, I could arrange the finest speaking tour you ever saw.”
We talked about the situation at the University of Alabama, where the Board of Trustees seemed determined to resort to any expedient to bar Miss Lucy from the campus (as, in fact, it subsequently did). Listening to Marshall and Wilkins discussing the legal steps they planned to take in Miss Lucy’s behalf prompted me to ask a question that had been in my mind for some time: What would the N.A.A.C.P. do if it found in the future that it won lawsuit after lawsuit and court decision after court decision but couldn’t get the decisions put into effect? “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, and I’m not even going to try for it,” Marshall replied. “I don’t know what we’d do. That’s something I can’t even contemplate. It would be anarchy. It would be the end of the country. I can’t imagine it coming to that.”
Presently, I joined a group that was discussing the Montgomery bus boycott. This and the Miss Lucy matter, as might have been expected, were major topics of conversation among the N.A.A.C.P. people that weekend. It was on December 1st that a weary middle-aged Negro seamstress in Montgomery, riding home from work on the bus, refused to get up and give her seat to a white man and was promptly arrested. The bus boycott with which the Negro community responded was in its eleventh week at the time of the meeting. I got the impression from the people I talked to that this passive-resistance movement—with its Gandhian patience, acceptance of physical discomfort, and religious professions of love and tolerance toward the oppressors while refusing to submit to oppression—had taken the N.A.A.C.P. almost as much by surprise as it had the white citizens of Montgomery. The N.A.A.C.P. leaders, many of them lawyers accustomed to working through formal court processes, appeared to me to not know quite what to make of it even while taking pride in the spirit it revealed. They could not refrain from comparing the peacefulness and discipline of the Negroes’ protest in Montgomery with the hysteria and violence of the white mob at the University of Alabama. One member of the group I was talking with said he had been extremely interested to learn that there had been a marked decrease in crime—particularly crimes of violence—in Montgomery’s Negro community since the passive-resistance movement began there.
Nearby, Carter and a slim young man wearing a sports coat and a handsome vest were talking about Columbus, Georgia. The young man, apparently an attorney, was telling Carter about a suit he was preparing to file demanding that the city of Columbus allow Negroes to play on the municipal golf course, and about one of the Columbus Negroes who were petitioning for this—a physician named Thomas H. Brewer. “He showed up at the course a week or two ago and was turned away,” the young man said. “His picture was in the papers.” Dr. Brewer, I gathered, was another of the Negro leaders generally admired for their courage and forthrightness; he had been one of the most active in pushing a test case that established the right of Negroes to vote in the Georgia primaries. Not merely was he an outspoken Negro leader but—what was perhaps a matter of equal boldness in Georgia—an outspoken Republican.
I went down the steps and joined some delegates standing on the sidewalk. They were talking about something the Arkansas delegate had said that morning—that the governors of several Southern states were claiming that most Negroes really didn’t want to go to school with whites but preferred to stay among their own kind. One delegate remarked that Senator Eastland, of Mississippi, was fond of saying how happy the “good niggras of Mississippi” would be to have things stay just as they are. A short, serious-looking man, who had been listening to the others in silence, said, “That reminds me of the joke about the good niggra who got put on the radio in Mississippi. The white man drove down to this poor sharecropper’s shack and told him he was gonna put him on the radio. ‘Put me on the radio, boss? Whaffor?’ the sharecropper asks. And the white man says, ‘Gonna put you on the radio, Sam, because you’re a mighty good niggra for a niggra, and we gonna give you a chance to tell the whole world how fine we treat you-all in Mississippi.’ So the two of them drive up to the radio station and they go on in. ‘Now, there’s the microphone, Sam. Jest talk on into it,’ says the white man. ‘This the microphone, boss?’ ‘That’s right, Sam.’ ‘And when I talk, people can hear me?’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘Outside of Mississippi? All over the world?’ ‘Sure ‘nuff, Sam. Jest go ahead and tell ‘em.’ So Sam went up to the microphone, took hold of it with both hands, and called, ‘Help!’ ”
As it happened, the first state scheduled to report when the delegates went back into session after lunch was Mississippi, which was represented by an attorney, wearing slacks, a sports jacket, a bow tie, and horn-rimmed glasses. He had an earnest manner, his stance was square, his gestures simple. He looked as if not too long ago he might have been wearing jeans and doing heavy work. He said that his report on what progress his state was making toward desegregation could be summed up in one word: “None.” In fact, he went on, the state officials and legislators, spurred on by the Citizens Councils—a segregationist movement that originated in Mississippi and spread out from there through the South—were devoting most of their energies and their best thinking to making progress in the other direction. “The Mississippi legislature has been meeting since the first Tuesday in January, and they have yet to get around to anything besides ways of strengthening every form of segregation,” he said, and, permitting himself the luxury of a modest comment, added, “After they get that taken care of, they’ll probably take a couple of weeks to settle the minor affairs of state business.” Reading from a sheet of paper, he went over the bills that, he said, the legislature had introduced so far—an act requiring separate waiting rooms for persons travelling on common carriers within the state and forbidding any person to enter a waiting room other than the one marked for his race; an act requiring separate toilet facilities in these waiting rooms; an act conferring upon any person, firm, or corporation engaged in any public business, profession, or trade the right to choose and select the customers, patrons, and clients of such business, and the further right to refuse to sell or render a service to any person, and providing a penalty for any person who refuses to vacate a public place when ordered to do so by the owner or any employee thereof; an act to abolish common-law marriages (“I think the purpose of that bill may be to prevent the children of such unions from suing for their rights,” he said. “Aside from that, I don’t understand it”); an act making it a felony to hold, or cause to be conducted, athletic contests open to the public wherein Negroes or persons of Mongoloid descent participate with white persons; an act making it unlawful to solicit, advocate, urge, or encourage disobedience to any law of the State of Mississippi or nonconformance to the established traditions, customs, and usages of the State of Mississippi; an act to extend the laws of libel, defamation, and slander so as to prohibit the libelling, slandering, and defaming of states, counties, cities, communities, their inhabitants, their institutions, and their government (“The Jackson newspaper thinks a couple of these bills may be going a little too far”); an act (“Now, this one may deserve careful study”) to safeguard for the citizens of the State of Mississippi the rights, privileges, and immunities granted them by the Constitution and laws thereof, to make criminal any violation thereof, and to create a civil-rights section to protect such rights (“I can’t understand why they’ve brought out such a bill,” he said. “It seems to me,” he went on hopefully, “to offer a strong weapon with which to attack the other segregation laws.” “Not a chance,” Wilkins assured him. “That’s a bill against the N.A.A.C.P. The civil rights that bill protects are the very opposite of what are called civil rights elsewhere”); an act to establish special requirements for out-of-state attorneys (“That’s the Thurgood law,” somebody in the audience said jocularly); and several other acts. Some of them, the Mississippi delegate said, had already passed both houses and most of the rest were expected to pass shortly. Although the Supreme Court had ruled that segregation was illegal in interstate travel facilities, Mississippi police were continuing to enforce it, he reported. They would arrest a Negro who went through the wrong door in a waiting room and fine him twenty-five dollars. However, if the Negro asked for a trial, an action that would require the court to file a written record of its judgment, the case against him would be dismissed. “So,” he said apologetically, “we haven’t been able to test in the law courts what they are doing.”
“Don’t worry about the test,” somebody in the audience said. “If they dismiss the case, that’s progress in Mississippi, man!” Other delegates laughingly concurred.
There followed reports from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Like Mississippi, these states were apparently prepared to go to any lengths to defy or circumvent the Supreme Court’s ruling that segregation has no rightful place in American public schools. Among other things, the reports brought out that Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia have made plans to abandon their public-school systems altogether, rather than tolerate Negro and white children in the same classrooms. Georgia has passed a law that would make any school board permitting a non-segregated school to be set up within its jurisdiction guilty of a felony. Prince Edward County, Virginia, evidently guarding against the possibility that a court might order a local school board to desegregate, has refused to approve a yearly school budget and is supplying operating funds on a month-to-month basis. In Georgia, the State Attorney General has filed a suit against the Valdosta School Board, which had implied that it wants to study the situation. The suit seeks, in effect, as one of the N.A.A.C.P. delegates said, “to prevent the school board from even thinking about possibly studying desegregation.” Alabama, Louisiana, and North Carolina have passed so-called placement statutes, which give local school boards the power to assign students to schools, ostensibly on the basis of categories other than race—such as health, intelligence, and social adaptability. In the eight recalcitrant states, defiance of the Supreme Court ruling comes not just from the mob but from the highest governing officials. The legislatures of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Virginia, and South Carolina in solemn session have passed interposition, or nullification, resolutions, which declare that the Supreme Court’s ruling violates their sovereignty. A citizen of one of these states might, in debate with a Northerner, plead the cause of gradualism and going slow in changing deep-seated social customs, but he would run the risk of ostracism if he suggested in his home town that change should ever come. As Marshall put it, “They don’t mean go slow. They mean don’t go.”
I got the impression that of the eight recalcitrant states, Louisiana and Florida were perhaps the least implacably opposed to change—Florida probably for fear of alienating the tourist trade, Louisiana because of the stand taken by the Catholic Church. The N.A.A.C.P. representative from Louisiana told the group that he understood a pastoral letter from Archbishop Joseph Rummel, of New Orleans, would be read in all the hundred and twenty Catholic churches in the archdiocese the next day, and that he thought the Archbishop was going to voice his disapproval of segregation. (This letter, which was read the next day, went much further than that. The Archbishop condemned segregation as a sin and said it would be ended in all parochial schools in his jurisdiction. This produced a rather curious reaction in Louisiana. A number of Catholic state legislators were angry at the Archbishop, and said that segregation, unlike a matter of revealed religion, such as birth control, was outside the Church’s province. They were particularly angry because he had forbidden them to include parochial schools in a state bill reaffirming the principle of school segregation. It seemed to them discrimination of the rankest sort that Catholics, of all the religious groups in the state, should alone be denied the right to practice racial discrimination in the schools.)
The reports the delegates gave on the eight problem states told of the efforts they had made to discuss the matter with local school boards, and to enter into negotiations with them. With few exceptions, the local N.A.A.C.P. people had been rebuffed out of hand. Petitions sent to the school boards requesting admission of Negro students, in accordance with the Supreme Court ruling, had for the most part not been answered, or even acknowledged. In some states, particularly South Carolina, those who had petitioned had suffered economic reprisals. The afternoon speakers told of these matters with deeper feeling, certainly, than the morning delegates had conveyed, yet they, too, were able to laugh, and without exception their recitations were also purely factual. During the Alabama report, people asked a number of questions about the Miss Lucy matter and the riots at the University of Alabama. “I understand from somebody,” Carter said, “that the—” Several delegates interrupted him. “No rumors!” they called. He laughed, and left his sentence unfinished.
The reports were completed by a quarter to four. Glancing at the agenda, I noted that the meeting was right on schedule. Now that the delegates were familiar with the situation, Marshall took over the chairmanship and they began to discuss what to do about it. In regard to the five states that had been making rapid progress toward desegregation—Delaware, Maryland, Missouri, Oklahoma, and West Virginia—no suggestion was needed other than that they be watched vigilantly to make certain they kept on doing what they were doing. The chief problem there concerned a corollary issue—a number of Negro teachers had been fired as a result of the consolidation of the schools. “We mustn’t allow the burden of racial discrimination to fall on the teachers now that it’s been lifted from the students,” one of the delegates said. It was agreed that steps should be taken toward insuring that professional qualifications and seniority, not race, were the factors that determined which teachers were to be dismissed.
In regard to the four hesitant states—Arkansas, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Texas—the main question seemed to be the good faith of the local school districts. “As long as they are showing good faith and a real desire to work this thing out, we should continue negotiations with them—that’s agreed, isn’t it?” Marshall asked. “But even in these states there are some counties that act as if they were in Mississippi,” he went on. “If they won’t negotiate, we’ll just have to take them to court.”
A Kentucky delegate raised a question that interested me: What attitude should be taken toward a school district that had declared that in the interests of gradual and orderly change it planned to abolish segregation in only one school grade at a time? It would start with the first grade next fall; the year after that, as these children were promoted there would be two mixed grades, then three, and so on until 1968, when the whole school system would be on a nonsegregated basis. The reasoning behind this was that such a significant alteration in social attitudes can be effective only if instituted at the earliest possible age, when the child’s nature is pliant and unformed. To my ears, the argument had a certain plausibility, but the group rejected the plan. They thought this pace was rather slower than what the Supreme Court meant by “all deliberate speed.” And they doubted whether the school board was reasoning in good faith. “In Tennessee, the state colleges have reasoned in just the opposite way,” Carter pointed out. “There they said they would start at the graduate level and work down a year at a time. Obviously, they said, only the most mature person can be expected to adjust to so great a social change as this. Both of these arguments seem dreamed up mainly for the purpose of procrastination.”
When it came to the eight intransigent states—Mississippi and the rest—there was considerable discussion, but all that it added up to was, I think, aptly summarized by the dapper, bald attorney from Texas who was keeping the minutes. After some time, he stood up and said, “I don’t know whether I’m keeping good notes on this. All I can make out of what I’ve got down here is ‘Let’s sue!’ ”
“Those are good notes,” Marshall assured him, with a smile.
Even in this group of states, where the N.A.A.C.P. has been consistently rebuffed, it would still negotiate, the delegates agreed, if, as Marshall said, it could find “any local school board with courage enough to support the Constitution of the United States.”
To my surprise, there was almost no discussion of the theories of “interposition” and “nullification,” and very little attention was given to trying to figure out ways of dealing with the various circumvention statutes that legislatures in the Deep South had been busily passing. The delegates seemed to feel that nullification and interposition were the emptiest of threats, not worth wasting their breath on. As to the segregation devices, whether explicitly so labelled or not, the group seemed confident that these would simply be ruled unconstitutional, one after another, by federal courts. During the past year, federal courts in Louisiana and Tennessee have held their state school-segregation laws unconstitutional. In Arkansas, a federal court enjoined a group of segregationists from interfering with the Hoxie school board’s decision to desegregate. In Texas, the State Supreme Court rejected the State Attorney General’s contention that the desegregation ruling did not apply to Texas because the state had not been a party to the five school cases on which the United States Supreme Court passed judgment. And federal courts in West Virginia, Kentucky, and Tennessee not only have ruled that those states must desegregate schools but have set next September as the deadline for accomplishing this. These decisions were the source of the delegates’ confidence.
At six, the meeting adjourned for two hours, to give a drafting committee, which included Marshall, time to embody the delegates’ conclusions in a formal statement. Most of the others drove down to the Negro Y.M.C.A. for dinner. I decided that I would take a walk, to get some exercise and give myself a chance to think things over. In many ways, the meeting had not been at all what I had expected. I had anticipated more speculation, more oratory, more emotional outbursts. Certainly I had been unprepared for the orderliness—indeed, the ordinariness—of the procedure. I wouldn’t have been surprised to find deep gloom at the turn events had taken in the last year, and demands for an agonizing reappraisal of the N.A.A.C.P.’s position, or even to hear at least some delegates, frustrated beyond endurance, call for violence or other direct action. But the concreteness, the calm, the serene feeling of assurance that the law would eventually prevail—these I had definitely not expected. As for the humor, I had expected some, but of a different sort. Funny without being escapist, the humor I had heard here reminded me in many ways of Mauldin’s G.I.s in the front lines.
Mulling over these things, I walked perhaps a dozen blocks to where the white section of Atlanta begins. There I stopped in at a restaurant opposite the Municipal Auditorium and had a sandwich and a glass of beer. I was unable to get a cup of coffee. “Not much demand for coffee this hot weather,” the proprietor said. A thermometer outside the door read seventy-five degrees. In the park in front of the auditorium, the broom hedges were already in bloom, as was the pelargonium in rows along the side. The grass, on which a number of neatly dressed white children were playing, was deep green and lush. As I watched, the fountains were turned on in the park, spouting half a dozen lovely jets from the center of a large marble basin. The sky was pink now, and I started back. It was dark by the time I reached the church.
“All right, listen to this statement Stewart’s going to read,” Marshall said when everyone had assembled again. “We’re going to debate it, amend it, do anything you want done to it, but we’re not getting out of here tonight till we’ve got something we’re agreed on.” Much of the document was handwritten, and Stewart stumbled over words as he read it aloud. It was, for the most part, an embodiment of the group’s findings as to the progress that had been made and the actions it intended to take where progress had been faltering or nonexistent. When Stewart finished, one of the group said he hoped someone was going to edit out the grammatical errors. “I don’t know whether they were in the writing or the reading,” Stewart said, and Marshall remarked, “I know at least one was in the reading.” A number of minor points were debated at some length, and a few changes made, but on the whole the delegates seemed satisfied with the presentation, and shortly after ten they voted their approval.
Now Wilkins, the executive secretary, walked forward and said that since he’d been keeping fairly quiet all day, perhaps he might say a few words in conclusion about the significance of what they were doing here. “I don’t want to sound over-heroic, but I have the impression that we who are so close to all this don’t comprehend its magnitude,” he said. “I don’t believe we understand the tremendous effect we are having on the nation. All these little decisions we worked out today are part of a social revolution that is taking place. The whole face of a third of America is changing—and what is achieved here in the South will also help to enhance the status of those who live outside this area and bring all of them closer to that condition we speak of so glibly in the phrase ‘first-class citizenship.’ ” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a tall young Negro come into the room. He walked down the aisle, spoke a few words to Marshall, who was standing at one side of the room near the platform, and then sat down among the audience. I paid scant attention to him, because I was finding myself engrossed by Wilkins’ speech. I suppose his words sound oratorical as I’ve set them down here, but at that moment they sounded just right. I had got to concentrating on the specific details involved, and had forgotten that these people were engaged in making history. I was, therefore, startled to hear Marshall suddenly interrupt in a rough voice, “Never mind the philosophy, Roy!” Wilkins stopped, and Marshall said, “You don’t know the news I’ve just heard.”
Wilkins half turned to him and said, “Yes, I do, Thurgood. I didn’t want to say anything about it unless it was definite.” He looked back questioningly toward the tall young man, and the young man must have nodded back to him or made some other sign. Then Wilkins said, “Dr. Brewer’s just had his head shot off.”
For a moment, people sat dumfounded, shocked into silence. But soon they began to blurt out questions: How? Why? Was it definitely Dr. Brewer? The young man stood up and said he didn’t have many details—all he knew was what a reporter had told him on the phone. And then someone asked if it had been a racial killing. “He’s been getting threats for weeks on the phone,” the young man said. “Ever since we started the petition to open the Columbus golf course to Negroes. I have, too, but I didn’t pay much attention to them.”
Wilkins said he would like to ask a minute’s prayer for Dr. Brewer. The delegates stood in silence until Wilkins said “Amen.” Then Marshall strode out of the hall. He looked angry. The others followed. And now the calmness and control they had shown all day disappeared. Fears and rumors flew among them as they stood in tense, excited groups on the church steps. Marshall stood off to one side, alone, staring into the darkness. The young man who had brought the news bolted down the steps to his car, to drive to Columbus, a hundred and twenty miles away, where the shooting had taken place; his wife and children were at home all by themselves. Somebody said, “He’d better get there in a hurry. There’s liable to be a race riot when the Negroes in Columbus find out what’s happened to Dr. Brewer.” A large, powerful looking man from Bessemer, Alabama, said a race riot had been threatening in his town for several weeks and might break out at any moment, perhaps even that night. “Everybody is armed there now—white and black both,” he said. And a woman standing near me, an N.A.A.C.P. official from Alabama, kept saying she was going to start carrying a gun herself, or get out of Alabama altogether.
Marshall and I were driven by Calhoun, the man who had met us on our arrival, back to our dormitory at Atlanta University. We didn’t talk much. A few minutes after we got there, two N.A.A.C.P. attorneys from Virginia arrived—Oliver Hill and Spottswood Robinson. Earlier, they had arranged with Marshall to meet him in his room after the meeting and work out the strategy for two school-segregation lawsuits they had pending, and this still had to be done. They looked drawn and exhausted. Robinson, a former law professor at Howard University, fell asleep in an armchair a few moments after he had sat down, but he roused himself immediately, shook his head, and began fumbling in his briefcase for the legal papers he had brought with him. “All right,” Marshall said, “let’s start with the Prince Edward County case and go all through that before we take up the other. And I guess we’d better get going on it because we’ve got a lot to do tonight.” I left them and went to bed.
There was a press conference scheduled for ten o’clock the next morning. I had breakfast with Marshall and Wilkins, and then we went to the church, where it was to be held. The local papers were there, and A.P., U.P., I.N.S., and someone from Time. The group’s statement, mimeographed overnight, was handed out. The reporters brought up a number of general questions about desegregation, which Marshall and Wilkins answered. Finally, a reporter asked, “What about this shooting in Columbus last night—any comment on that?” Wilkins thought a moment, and then, choosing his words carefully, said, “We are investigating. Dr. Brewer was a very fine old man, an outspoken Negro leader in Columbus.” After another moment’s hesitation, he went on, “From all we’ve been able to learn this morning, he was apparently killed in a private dispute, not connected with any N.A.A.C.P. activity, not with any racial campaign. Our reports are that Dr. Brewer was killed by a white storekeeper who rented the floor below his office. They had been arguing all week over whether the police had used brutality in arresting a Negro in front of the store. If those are the facts, we will consider it a private dispute. We certainly wouldn’t want you people to headline it as a racial killing.”
Most of the men and women who had been at the meeting sat in on the press conference. Afterward, they quietly said goodbye to one another and started off to return to their homes and the work they had cut out for themselves—to Mississippi and Oklahoma and Alabama and the other states of the South. Marshall and I left, too. We stopped briefly at Atlanta University to pick up our suitcases. Then we got on the plane and came back to New York. ♦
