Estórias da História

[Vaart10]

@Mayday 👏👍👌

[Mayday]

Coisas do Arquivo RTP. Deixei de fora entrevistas, conversas, debates, reportagens.

ESTADO NOVO

Salazar, de Coimbra à Presidência do Concelho
Estado Novo I
Estado Novo II
Estado Novo III
Isolamento de Uma Nação
História da PIDE
A Mordaça
António Ferro
As Grades que nos Guardaram
Os Clandestinos
Retrospetiva sobre o primeiro mandato do Almirante Américo Tomás na presidência da República
O Longo Adeus às Armas
O Povo é quem Mais Ordena II
Dicionário de Abril (de A a Z)
Portugal e o Fascismo na Europa
Era Uma Vez… o Tarrafal – Parte I
Era Uma Vez… o Tarrafal – Parte II
Mulheres
Um Povo Unido Dentro e Fora do País
A Emigração
Legal q.b - MUD
Construção do Estado Coporativo
As Lutas de Um Povo
Seara Nova: 75 Anos de Intervenção Democrática – Parte I
Seara Nova: 75 Anos de Intervenção Democrática – Parte II
Álvaro Cunhal
A Década de 1950 em Portugal – I Parte
A Década de 1950 em Portugal – II Parte
A Década de 1950 em Portugal – III Parte
General Humberto Delgado – I Parte
General Humberto Delgado – II Parte
General Humberto Delgado – III Parte
Humberto Delgado: obviamente, assassinaram-no – Parte I
Humberto Delgado: obviamente, assassinaram-no – Parte II
A Década de 1960 em Portugal I
A Década de 1960 em Portugal II
A Década de 1960 em Portugal III
Da Década de 1960 até ao 25 de Abril de 1974 I
Da Década de 1960 até ao 25 de Abril de 74 II
1961 – Guerra Colonial
Anos de Fogo
A Guerra Inútil I
A Guerra Inútil II
Geração de 60 I
Geração de 60 II
1967 – Grandes Cheias
Crise Académica
Anos 70: Imagens duma Década 
Marcelo Caetano
20 anos da Revolta das Caldas

25 DE ABRIL E REVOLUÇÃO
O Porquê duma Revolução I
O Porquê duma Revolução II
25 de Abril – Dia da Liberdade
Retratos duma Revolução
Retratos Contemporâneos: Salgueiro Maia
1974 – 25 de Abril

PÓS 25 DE ABRIL:
A Operação Nortada
O 28 de Setembro e a Maioria Silenciosa
Retrospetiva sobre o 28 de setembro
Do 11 de Março ao Fim do Gonçalvismo
Matança da Páscoa: Memórias do 11 de Março de 1975
Independência já! Uma história a pretos e brancos – Ep. 1
Independência já! Uma história a pretos e brancos – Ep. 2
Independência já! Uma história a pretos e brancos – Ep. 3
Independência já! Uma história a pretos e brancos – Ep. 4
A Terra a Quem a Trabalha
A Terra a quem a Trabalha – Parte I
A Terra a quem a Trabalha – Parte II
1975 - PREC
Portugal 74/75
O Golpe do 25 de Novembro
Novembro Escaldante
Biografia de Ramalho Eanes
Retrospetiva histórica do pós 25 de Abril
Mudanças políticas após o 25 de Abril
Os Homens sem Sono

 

 

[Mayday]

 

 

[Mayday]

 

 

[Mayday]

Citação de Mayday, Em 24/04/2020 at 21:46:

 

 

Aprendi que a batalha de Ourique é um mito e que Dom Afonso Henriques já era Rei em 1138, antes da suposta batalha. 

Os nacionalistas devem estar com os cornos à roda.

[Jpa]

Não dá para ver o 'Armas e o Povo' na RTP Play? 😕 

[Mayday]

Citação de Jpa, há 43 minutos:

Não dá para ver o 'Armas e o Povo' na RTP Play? 😕 

Youtube.

[Mayday]

https://www.publico.pt/2014/03/25/politica/noticia/ou-da-fogo-ou-meto-lhe-um-tiro-na-cabeca-1629510

O mito a ser destruído pela realidade.

[Mayday]

Citação de Mayday, Em 25/04/2020 at 22:01:

Aprendi que a batalha de Ourique é um mito e que Dom Afonso Henriques já era Rei em 1138, antes da suposta batalha. 

Os nacionalistas devem estar com os cornos à roda.

Muito bom o episódio 2 sobre o mito de Viriato.

[Lebohang]

A Volta ao Mundo em 200 mensagens

[Black Hawk]

Citação de Lebohang, há 1 hora:

A Volta ao Mundo em 200 mensagens

Surpreendentemente interessante.

[Lebohang]

Citação de Black Hawk, há 6 minutos:

Surpreendentemente interessante.

Não gostei muito da parte onde falam de "Expedição Conjunta" quando o objetivo declarado era pura e simplesmente encontrar uma rota para as Molucas em zona exclusiva espanhola (referem isso depois). Aliás ser financiada pelo Rei Espanhol e banqueiros privados (não referem) diz tudo numa altura onde o Novo Mundo Espanhol ainda não prometia grandes riquezas (queda dos Aztecas e Incas veio depois).

Também não gosto desta versão oficial da "expedição científica" que já vi por aí e também é mentira pois o cravinho da nau que chegou a Espanha pagou a viagem e deu o lucro de duas ao ponto de Espanha ter organizado logo depois mais duas expedições "científicas".

[Black Hawk]

Citação de Lebohang, há 13 horas:

Não gostei muito da parte onde falam de "Expedição Conjunta" quando o objetivo declarado era pura e simplesmente encontrar uma rota para as Molucas em zona exclusiva espanhola (referem isso depois). Aliás ser financiada pelo Rei Espanhol e banqueiros privados (não referem) diz tudo numa altura onde o Novo Mundo Espanhol ainda não prometia grandes riquezas (queda dos Aztecas e Incas veio depois).

Também não gosto desta versão oficial da "expedição científica" que já vi por aí e também é mentira pois o cravinho da nau que chegou a Espanha pagou a viagem e deu o lucro de duas ao ponto de Espanha ter organizado logo depois mais duas expedições "científicas".

Os países tentam aproveitar cada ínfima oportunidade para se associarem a eventos marcantes e retirarem daí dividendos, e isto já é tão frequente que já nem ligo.

[challenger]

Citação de Mayday, Em 02/05/2020 at 02:28:

Muito bom o episódio 2 sobre o mito de Viriato.

Os últimos episódios sobre o envolvimento de Portugal na 2a Guerra Mundial foram bastante interessantes. 

[Lebohang]

Citação

"Não reconheço, por exemplo, que os índios vermelhos da América ou os negros australianos tenham sido gravemente prejudicados. Não reconheço que esses povos tenham sido prejudicados pelo facto de uma raça mais forte, mais refinada, mais sensata, por assim dizer, ter aparecido para tomar o seu lugar.” Esta frase não foi dita por Hitler ou Mussolini. Foi dita, em 1937, por Winston Churchill perante a Palestine Royal Comission, mais conhecida pela Peel Comission, para justificar a injustiça que poderia estar a ser cometida em relação à população árabe.

Mas o racismo estrutural e agressivo de Churchill não era exclusivamente (ou especialmente) dirigido aos árabes. Na realidade, os indianos eram o seu alvo preferencial, o que se explica pela sua experiência militar no território. Assumia que os detestava e considerava-os “um povo brutal com uma religião brutal”. O secretário de Estado para Índia e Burma (Birmânia), o judeu Leo Amery, escreveu, nas suas memórias, que, no que toca aos indianos, não via “muito diferença entre o seu olhar e o de Hitler”.

Não estamos a falar apenas de palavras. A grande fome de 1943 em Bengala deu-se depois do fracasso das safras de arroz, por causa de cheias, e dos japoneses invadirem Burma. Mas Madhusree Mukerjee, autor de “A Guerra Secreta de Churchill”, responsabiliza o primeiro-ministro britânico por se recusar a atender os pedidos da Índia por trigo e insistir, em plena fome, que fornecesse arroz e combustível para ajudar ao esforço de guerra. A onda de fome causou a morte de mais de três milhões de indianos. Não é pacífica a responsabilidade direta de Churchill na situação, mas perante os apelos de Leo Amery, ele perguntou ao vice-rei da Índia porque é que, havendo tanta fome, Gandhi ainda não tinha morrido. E responsabilizou os indianos pela sua própria desgraça. Reproduziam-se como coelhos, dizia. "Temos a imagem de um Churchill perspicaz e profético, mas o que ele fez no caso da fome em Bengala revelou zero de avanço desde a fome irlandesa, cem anos antes”, escreveu John Charmley, autor de “Churchill: The End of Glory”.

Dirão que temos de olhar para o Churchill no seu tempo. Sim, o seu tempo era o tempo do racismo científico e impiedoso. Também era o de Hitler, e não retiramos um milímetro ao odioso dos seus horrendos ideais. Churchill até poderia estar muito acompanhado no desprezo pelas raças que considerava inferiores. O problema é que não estaria sozinho se tivesse combatido essas ideias. Longe disso. Escreve Charmley: "Churchill estava muito à direita da política britânica no que toca à Índia. Mesmo para a maioria dos conservadores, quanto mais liberais e trabalhistas, as suas opiniões sobre a Índia entre 1929 e 1939 eram bastante abomináveis." Em resumo: Churchill era indubitavelmente racista, mesmo para o seu tempo.

Quando a estátua de Churchill foi atacada, tendo sido escrita a frase “Churchill era racista”, muitos se indignaram: como podia o homem que derrotou a mais odiosa das ideologias supremacistas ser chamado racista? Nem recordo que Estaline também a derrotou - e isso não fez dele menos criminoso. Isso seria comparar o primeiro-ministro britânico ao genocida soviético. Não o faço. Apenas digo uma coisa mais simples: a transformação de Churchill num herói deste tempo, símbolo dos valores da tolerância, da moderação e da modernidade contra o racismo, implicou um extraordinário apagamento de boa parte da sua história e das suas convicções. Como é comum quando se constroem heróis. O exercício de reescrita da História foi de tal forma eficaz que uma descrição objetiva e dificilmente contestável de Churchill passou a parecer-nos uma abjeta demonstração de ignorância.

Acho que é necessário fazer o que se fez à estátua de Churchill? Não. O que interessa na estátua é o que ela pretende representar, não quem representa. E é por isso a estátua que não deve, não pode, ser tratada como um testemunho da História. Ela é um testemunho daquilo em que se quis transformar Churchill, não do que ele foi. A estátua pretende representar o homem que liderou o Reino Unido na resistência ao ódio nazi. Da mesma forma, as homenagens a Martin Luther King ou Mahatma Gandhi são tributos ao antirracismo, ao anticolonialismo e ao pacifismo, e não ao provável machismo dos dois.

Só não digam que pintar a palavra “racista” na estátua de Churchill é apagar a História. Ou sequer, neste caso, reinterpretá-la à luz dos valores atuais. É destapar o que foi escondido pelo poder triunfante. Recordo que Estaline foi, para muita gente, um herói no pós-guerra. Pela mesmíssima razão: venceu Hitler. Sabemos como todo o seu papel foi reanalisado, depois da sua morte e à medida que o horror estalinista foi sendo conhecido. Estamos sempre a fazer isso.

Não será normal que os descendentes de indianos, que Churchill considerava inferiores e que tratava como tal, queiram participar nessa reescrita? Quem acha que a História é feita de heróis e vilões quer guardar os seus nas estátuas que se ergueram. Quem quer mais do que isso não se choca com este confronto. Churchill foi racista e antifascista. Defensor dos judeus e abjeto contra os indianos. Foi contraditório, como nem a sua estátua nem a pichagem que se fez nela, por si só, podem resumir. Uma e outra são retratos legítimos da História. Uma foi erguida pelo poder, outra foi lá posta por quem não o tem. Podemos discutir se essa é a melhor forma de fazer este combate. Mas a verdade e a mentira está nas duas. As duas revelam e escondem.

https://expresso.pt/opiniao/2020-06-30-Churchills-ha-muitos

Interessante, confesso que não conhecia estas estórias.

[Lebohang]

Citação de Mayday, Em 24/04/2020 at 21:46:

Apanhei hoje o episódio do Ouro de Salazar.

Excelente operação de lavagem de ouro entre a Alemanha Nazi, Suíça, Espanha e Portugal. E irónico que a comissão de investigação que concluiu que Portugal não sabia de nada e que o ouro era suíço tenha sido liderada por Mário Soares. 🤣

[Pan]

Já ouviram o podcast do Rui Tavares? Está ótimo.

[Mayday]

 

[Lebohang]

Da saga "Teorias da conspiração a envolver Templários e Portugal".

https://www.bbc.com/reel/playlist/hidden-histories

[Mayday]

https://www.rtp.pt/play/p7533/exilio-no-atlantico

[toze2]

Não sei se é o melhor tópico, mas fica um podcast com episódios semanais (serão 8 no total, saiu na segunda-feira o primeiro) a detalhar a história da Guerra no Iraque.

https://open.spotify.com/show/3MaR7hyRf0lx184eVJcRDy

[Victarion]

O pessoal deve conhecer os jogos de Assassin's Creed, onde a Ubisoft tenta recrear o mundo do passado, juntando uns elementos do próprio franchise. Têm como costume fazer uma pesquisa enorme e tentar recriar com melhor fidelidade possível. AC Origins foi lindo. AC Odyssey foi fantástico. Claro que há coisas que se pode olhar e discordar a nível histórico - algumas devido a "rule of cool" e outras devido ao fantástico que faz parte da série.
Recentemente lançaram Assassin's Creed: Valhalla. Sobre vikings e a invasão a Inglaterra. E claro, fizeram m*rda porque romantizaram os vikings.

https://acoup.blog/2020/11/20/miscellanea-my-thoughts-on-assassins-creed-valhalla/

excelente e longa análise aos problemas que o jogo tem a nível histórico. Já conhecia alguns, mas houve outros que não sabia e me deixaram mesmo impressionado. É um bocado fatela estarem a ridicularizar os ingleses - os bons nesta invasão - e enaltecer os vikings - os invasores, colonizadores, e claro, gente com reputação má mas romantizada pa crl.0

edit: ei onde é que vejo essa cena do Portugal Secreto? suponho que muito do que falam advém a propaganda feita durante o Estado Novo.

Editado 20 Novembro 2020 por Victarion

[Quan Chi]

 

[bmfpcdm]

Citação

Brown, Violence, and Civil Rights Legislation

 

 

Before the Freedom Rides, Birmingham, Freedom Summer, and Selma, some of the most violent racial episodes in the South involved school desegregation. Virtually every year after Brown, school desegregation generated violent resistance somewhere: Milford, Delaware, in 1954; Hoxie, Arkansas, in 1955; Tuscaloosa, Alabama; Clinton, Tennessee; Mansfield, Texas; and Clay and Sturgis counties, Kentucky, in 1956; Little Rock, Arkansas, and Nashville, Tennessee, in 1957; Clinton (again) in 1958; New Orleans, Louisiana, in 1960; Athens, Georgia, in 1961; Oxford, Mississippi, in 1962; and Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Thus, in addition to radicalizing southern politics in ways that enhanced the likelihood of racial violence, Brown created concrete occasions for such outbreaks.

Violent episodes involving school desegregation tarnished the national image of white southerners. Resisting court orders to desegregate inevitably placed them on the wrong side of the law. Most Americans believed that judicial rulings should be obeyed, even by those who strongly disagreed with them; the alternative was anarchy. Eisenhower capitalized on this widespread conviction, insisting that the federal troops he had sent to Little Rock were there “to support our federal court system—not to enforce desegregation.” When Kennedy sent federal troops into Oxford, Mississippi, he likewise emphasized his duty “to implement the orders of the court,” which was necessary to preserve “a government of laws, and not of men.” For individuals to violate court orders was bad enough, but mob resistance was even worse. Few things offended national opinion more than substituting the rule of the mob for that of the law. In addition, violent confrontations over school desegregation tended to reveal blacks at their best and whites at their worst. The few blacks who had been handpicked as desegregation pioneers were almost always middle class, bright, well dressed, well mannered, and nonviolent. The mobs that sought to exclude them from white schools tended to be lower class, vicious, obscene, unruly, and violent. Photographic images of these confrontations, according to a New York Post editorial, showed “quiet, resolute Negro children defying jeers and violence and sadism.” To the extent that Americans formed their opinions on school desegregation and Jim Crow from watching televised scenes of mob violence from Little Rock or New Orleans, southern whites were in a lot of trouble.

Some violent outbreaks over desegregation were brief, as it did not take long to bomb schools in Clinton and Nashville. Other episodes were protracted, such as Little Rock and New Orleans. Lengthy desegregation confrontations attracted media attention, especially from television reporters, and bombings provided graphic photographs. Confrontation and violence play well on television, and extended conflict gives photographers and reporters time to assemble. Few Americans owned television sets in 1950. By the time of Little Rock, most of them did, and by the time of New Orleans and Oxford, the vast majority did. Live footage of white mobs assailing black students affected national opinion more profoundly than did still images of bombed buildings.

 

 

FIGURE 7.7
A white man kicks black newspaper reporter Alex Wilson as a mob watches outside of Little Rock’s Central High School, September 23, 1957. Wilson said, “I fought for my country, and I’m not running from you,” as he was attacked. (Arkansas History Commission)

 

Desegregation riots at Tuscaloosa, Little Rock, and New Orleans helped to shape national opinion on race. In February 1956, a mob numbering more than a thousand, throwing rocks and eggs and threatening a lynching, drove Autherine Lucy out of the University of Alabama. One northern newspaper condemned mob violence in opposition to court decisions and proclaimed, “Shame Falls on Alabama.” Adlai Stevenson, not known for his strong statements on civil rights, denounced the mob violence as “deplorable” and “intolerable.” A South Carolina newspaper called the riot “a public disgrace,” which “has given the South another black eye” and “played right into the hands of professional South-baiters.” Compared with the mob, blacks had been models “of discipline, patience, and understanding.” The Washington Post predicted that the incident would “outrage opinion even in areas where extreme views against integration prevail.” Roy Wilkins cited the riot as evidence of the need for civil rights legislation to protect against mob violence and to withhold federal funds from defiant educational institutions in the South.

Little Rock was a much larger event; it lasted for weeks and culminated in the use of federal troops to protect black students from an enormous mob surrounding Central High School. Outside of the South, public opinion overwhelmingly condemned the mob violence and supported the president, “who had no choice” but to act as he did. Governor Faubus was widely ridiculed—“the sputtering sputnik from the Ozarks,” according to Maryland governor Theodore McKeldin. The NAACP’s Gloster Current “thank[ed] God for Governor Faubus. He has hastened integration five years by opening the eyes of the country to the kind of thinking that will call out the National Guard to keep nine Negro students out of Little Rock High School.” Wilkins similarly labeled Faubus “a valuable enemy, [who] has aided in many ways in clarifying the issue of segregation” and “aroused and educated to our point of view millions of people in America.” Ironically, though Faubus alienated northern opinion, southern whites hailed him as a hero, thus ensuring that other southern politicians would mimic his behavior and further repulse northern opinion. Little Rock influenced attitudes around the world, not just in the United States. But whereas nonsoutherners criticized the South, non-Americans tended to condemn the entire nation for tolerating such behavior.

In November 1960, similarly ugly scenes were repeated in New Orleans. But this time, the targets of the mob were six-year-olds. Night after night, nationwide television audiences watched hundreds of vicious protestors, their faces contorted by hate, spitting, snarling, and yelling obscenities—such as “kill them niggers”—at first-graders walking to school in their Sunday best. The author John Steinbeck, who happened to be traveling through New Orleans at the time, called the mob’s rantings “bestial and filthy and degenerate,” and he compared them to “the vomitings of demoniac humans.” The New York Times, which thought that the effort of “a racist rabble . . . to subvert the Constitution and substitute anarchy for law” was “degrading and dangerous,” warned that “[t]he conscience of America” would not tolerate the “mobsters” or the “insurrectionary histrionics” of the state’s elected officials. A Miami woman reported that “the appalling sight and sound . . . [made her] sick—almost physically ill,” while a German-born doctor compared the scenes from New Orleans to those enacted in Nazi Germany in the 1930s.

Much of the southern white-on-black violence of the 1950s occurred in the context of court-ordered school desegregation. To the extent that such violence helped transform national opinion on race, Brown was directly responsible.

 

Brown helped foment violence in other ways as well. Though it is hard to know for sure, the simple existence of Brown may have fostered violence against blacks by white vigilantes. It is more nearly certain that Brown induced extremist politicians to use inflammatory rhetoric that may have indirectly incited violence. Brown also led some officeholders to calculate the political benefits of violently suppressing civil rights protest. One cannot prove that Brown, or the extremism that it encouraged in southern politics, caused whites to beat or kill blacks, but such causal inferences are plausible, perhaps even probable.

Polls revealed that 15–25 percent of southern whites favored violence, if necessary, to resist school desegregation. The post-Brown rebirth of the Ku Klux Klan in the South suggests a greater willingness among whites to use violence. One Klan leader reported that Brown created “a situation loaded with dynamite” and “really gave us a push.” In 1956, Klan rallies drew hundreds, even thousands, in parts of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida—states where the Klan had recently been deemed defunct. Such gatherings condemned the Court and the NAACP and threatened forcible resistance to desegregation. Now that the justices “have abolished the Mason-Dixon line,” Klansmen vowed “to establish the Smith and Wesson line.” In 1957, six Birmingham Klansmen castrated a randomly selected black man after taunting him for “think[ing] nigger kids should go to school with [white] kids.”

In the late 1940s, Mississippi whites had threatened and beaten blacks for their suffrage activities, but in 1955, the Reverend George Lee in Belzoni and Lamar Smith in Brookhaven were killed for voting or encouraging other blacks to do so. The annual number of reported lynchings in Mississippi had dropped to zero in the years before Brown, but in 1955, in addition to the Lee and Smith murders, fourteen-year-old Emmett Till was killed for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi. That year, the NAACP published a pamphlet entitled “M Is for Mississippi and Murder.” Connecting these killings to Brown is speculative, but the timing suggests a possible linkage, and some contemporaries inferred a causal connection. The Herald of Yazoo City, Mississippi, declared that the blood of Till was on the hands of the justices. The unwillingness of white jurors to indict or convict the clearly guilty white murderers of blacks is even more plausibly linked to Brown’s impact on southern white opinion. One Mississippi white declared, “There’s open season on the Negroes now. They’ve got no protection, and any pecker-wood who wants can go out and shoot himself one, and we’ll free him.” Till’s funeral in Chicago attracted thousands of mourners, and a photograph of his mutilated body in Jet seared the conscience of northerners. Segregating black schoolchildren was one thing, lynching them quite another. Wilkins condemned Mississippi’s “political murders” and the “system that permits the shooting down of little boys,” and demanded federal civil rights legislation. Republican representative Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania itemized the Mississippi brutalities and also called for legislation to “eliminate this kind of horror from American life.”

Mississippi was not the only southern state to become more racially violent after Brown. Birmingham, Alabama, where civic leaders in the early 1950s had tried to clean up the city’s image by suppressing violence, once again became “Bombingham” after Brown. Between 1955 and 1963, Birmingham blacks were the targets of twenty-one bombings, none of which the police were able to solve. In Montgomery, the homes and churches of several black ministers and other civil rights leaders were bombed during and after the bus boycott. One study counted more than 100 violent incidents in the South connected to civil rights activity between January 1, 1955, and May 1, 1958. Most of these involved the bombing of homes, schools, and churches, but some Jewish synagogues were also targeted. The victims were usually black, but moderate whites were occasionally attacked as well. After listening to a judge denounce the Supreme Court’s “asinine” decisions for an hour, a grand jury in Camden, South Carolina, declined to indict six men who were charged with beating the white director of a school band for allegedly making integrationist statements. Synagogue bombings attracted special attention and condemnation in the North. Both New York senators visited Atlanta after a temple was bombed in late 1958, and they demanded legislation that would authorize federal intervention in such cases.

The lynching of Mack Parker in April 1959, which captured front-page headlines in major newspapers as well as the attention of President Eisenhower, “revolted and stunned” Americans. Whites had seized Parker, who was scheduled to stand trial for raping a white woman, from the jail in Poplarville, Mississippi, and killed him—the state’s first old-style lynching since World War II. One cannot say whether Brown’s radicalizing effect on southern whites contributed to the lynching, though a Mississippi newspaper blamed the Court and drew the lesson that “force must not be used in pushing revolutionary changes in social custom. Every such action produces equal and opposite reaction.” Moreover, the judge who presided over the grand jury that was investigating the lynching urged its members to “have the backbone to stand against any tyranny . . . [even including] the Board of Sociology setting [sic] in Washington, garbed in Judicial Robes, and ‘dishing out’ the ‘legal precedents’ of Gunnar Myrdal.” Southern congressmen worried that Parker’s lynching would prompt efforts to pass civil rights legislation. Governor Coleman condemned the murder and hoped that Mississippians “won’t be punished by civil rights legislation for what a handful have done.” Citizens’ council guru Judge Tom Brady predicted that the NAACP would “rejoice in this highly regrettable incident” and “will urge passage of vicious civil rights measures.” He was right. Wilkins declared that Parker’s murder proved that “mob violence is not dead in the South,” and it demonstrated “the necessity of further and stronger protection of civil rights . . . by the federal government.” He also called the lynching “the natural consequence of an organized campaign of law defiance” by southern politicians. Constituents wrote to their congressmen to express horror and to demand federal legislation to curb such atrocities. Attorney General Rogers announced that he was studying the need for new legislation in light of Parker’s lynching and the unwillingness of a local grand jury to indict known participants, which he thought “as flagrant and calculated a misjustice as I know of.” Prominent liberals, such as Senators Hubert Humphrey, Paul Douglas, and Jacob Javits, made forceful calls for federal civil rights legislation.

It is speculative to attribute to Brown incidents of white vigilante violence against blacks, but diehard segregationists identified and promoted precisely that linkage. In 1956, John Kasper traveled through Alabama, attacking Governor Folsom’s moderation, and calling for “marching bands” and “roving forces” to converge on any area threatened with desegregation. Mississippi citizens’ councils, which claimed to repudiate violence, conceded that “there is a point beyond which even the most judicious restraint becomes cowardice.” A Dallas minister told a large citizens’ council rally that if public officials would not block integration, plenty of people were prepared “to shed blood if necessary to stop this work of Satan.” A member of the Tuskegee citizens’ council warned, “We will stop integration if it takes bloodshed.” A handbill that was circulated at a huge citizens’ council rally in Montgomery denounced desegregation and declared, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary to abolish the Negro race, proper methods should be used,” including guns and knives. When extremists blew up a Jewish community center in Nashville in 1958, a caller to a rabbi’s home explicitly made the connection to desegregation by threatening any other “nigger-loving place” in town.

White southerners could hardly be collectively blamed for random acts of violence committed by white vigilantes against blacks. However, when public officials incited such violence, which they did both directly and indirectly, many northerners responded by demanding civil rights legislation. Southern politicians fomented violence by explicitly encouraging it, by predicting it, and by using extremist rhetoric that inspired it.

Most southern politicians avoided explicit exhortations to violence, and many affirmatively discouraged it, either to immunize themselves from criticism when violence occurred or because they rightly understood that violence would “do irreparable harm to our cause and turn public opinion against us.” A southern congressman warned that the gains made in convincing northerners that Brown was lawless “can be swept away by one shotgun blast, by one explosion of dynamite touched off in the heat of passion.” Still, a few politicians could not restrain themselves. An Alabama legislator declared that whites must leave the state, “stay here and be humiliated, or take up our shotguns.” A Mississippi legislator stated that “a few killings” now could “save a lot of bloodshed later on.” Others promoted violence more discreetly. A few days after a raging mob had driven Autherine Lucy out of Tuscaloosa, Senator Eastland told an enormous citizens’ council rally that he knew “you good people of Alabama don’t intend to let the NAACP run your schools.” On other occasions, Eastland told audiences that they were “obligated to defy [Brown]” and that southern whites, when previously tested, had “not been found wanting.” Such indirect exhortations to violence were scarcely more subtle than those of Senator Bilbo in 1946.

Rather than explicitly promoting violence, many southern politicians simply predicted it, which King pointed out was “a conscious or unconscious invitation to it.” The attorney general of South Carolina warned, “[O]ur patience may become exhausted, and when that happens, God knows what the results will be.” Roy Harris predicted that integrationist efforts would produce “hatred and bloodshed,” and Judge Tom Brady endorsed the view of the Jackson Daily News that “[h]uman blood may stain Southern soil in many places because of [Brown].” Diehard segregationists, after hearing enough of such predictions, were likely to make good on them. The failure of public officials to condemn violence also had the effect of encouraging it. Rather than denouncing a Mansfield mob that blocked court-ordered desegregation and called for the blood of black students, Governor Shivers commended the “orderly protests against a situation instigated and agitated by the [NAACP].”

Other officials repudiated violence, while using extremist rhetoric that probably encouraged it. Governor Griffin condemned violence but also insisted that “no true Southerner feels morally obliged to recognize the legality of this act of tyranny [Brown],” and he proclaimed that the South “stands ready to battle side-by-side for its sacred rights, . . . but not with guns.” Senator Talmadge likened Brown to a coup d’état by a foreign dictator, and he called it “judicial tyranny” and “the greatest single blow ever . . . struck against constitutional government.” After the temple bombing in Atlanta, Griffin and Talmadge called for severe punishment of the perpetrators—probably “communists,” they said—yet in the same breath they denied that Brown was the law of the land and vowed that the South would never “surrender.” Eastland condemned Brown as “illegal, immoral, dishonest, and a disgrace,” and he proclaimed, “[R]esistance to tyranny is obedience to God.” Though he did not explicitly endorse violence, handbills distributed at meetings at which he spoke called for abolishing the black race. In another speech, Eastland cautioned, “Acts of violence and lawlessness have no place,” and he insisted, “The fight we wage must be a just and legal fight.” But this was immediately after he had incited his audience with reminders that “[t]here is no law that a free people must submit to a flagrant invasion of their personal liberty” and that “[n]o people in all the history of Government have been forced to integrate against their will.” Congressman James Davis of Georgia likewise insisted, “There is no place for violence or lawless acts,” right after he had called Brown “a monumental fraud which is shocking, outrageous and reprehensible,” warned against “meekly accept[ing] this brazen usurpation of power,” and denied any obligation on “the people to bow the neck to this new form of tyranny.” These politicians either knew that such rhetoric was likely to incite violence, or they were criminally negligent for not knowing it.

In terms of influencing national opinion, whether political demagoguery produced violence was less important than the perception that it did. The NAACP constantly asserted such a linkage, for example, blaming southern politicians for fostering a climate that was conducive to the lynching of Mack Parker. Wilkins insisted that the bombers of southern synagogues “were made bold by groups of so-called respectable people which have urged publicly that the courts be defied.” James Meredith blamed the assassination of Medgar Evers in 1963 on “governors of the Southern states and their defiant and provocative actions.” Others drew similar connections. A lawyer in Clinton, Tennessee, blamed school desegregation violence on the congressmen who signed the Southern Manifesto: “What the hell do you expect these people to do when they have 90 some odd congressmen from the South signing a piece of paper that says you’re a southern hero if you defy the Supreme Court.” The Honolulu Star-Bulletin attributed the desegregation riot in Tuscaloosa to the “fiery . . . language” of public officials. After Atlanta’s temple bombing, Mayor Hartsfield declared, “Whether they like it or not, every rabble-rousing politician is the godfather of the cross-burners and the dynamiters who are giving the South a bad name”—a judgment with which Attorney General Rogers concurred.

The general connection between extremist politicians and violence is plausible, but the linkage between particular public officials and the brutality that inspired civil rights legislation is compelling. The principal players were Bull Connor, John Patterson, Ross Barnett, George Wallace, and Jim Clark. The violence that they cultivated, condoned, or unintentionally fomented proved critical to transforming national opinion on race.

Though the increased violence of southern whites against blacks in the late 1950s influenced national racial opinion, it was neither sufficiently sustained nor frequently enough captured on television to generate the widespread outrage that would be necessary to the enactment of transformative civil rights legislation. As of 1960, southern whites still tended to care more about preserving segregation than northern whites did about eliminating it. In the early 1960s, civil rights leaders consciously evolved a new strategy for turning northern racial opinion in their favor. In the 1950s, Martin Luther King, Jr., was still trying to convince southern whites that racial segregation was wrong—to “awaken a sense of moral shame in the[m].” Within a few years, however, he had largely abandoned such efforts in favor of trying to win support from northern whites, most of whom already thought that segregation was wrong but were disinclined to do much about it. Lynchings, such as those of Till in 1955 or Parker in 1959, had educated and energized northern whites by unveiling the violence at the core of white supremacy and belying the claims of southern whites that blacks endorsed the racial status quo. In 1961, a white New Yorker told the NAACP that he had sympathized with the association’s cause for years but that it took the murders of Till and Parker “to crystallize my rage.” Wilkins put the point more bluntly: Whenever “some outrage occurs, white people send the NAACP checks.” To transform northern opinion, then, southern civil rights leaders concluded that they had to provoke violence against themselves, especially in settings that were likely to attract national media attention. Direct-action protest would probably incite brutal repression, and if the conflict lasted long enough, the national media would pay attention and so would the nation.

The success of this strategy of “creative tension” depended on the presence of certain conditions. In 1960, most white Americans disapproved of direct-action protest. Many shared former President Truman’s view that “f anyone came into my store and tried to stop business, I’d throw him out.” To win public support, then, protestors had to be unambiguously in the right and their adversaries in the wrong. Their behavior had to be impeccable and their objectives clearly legitimate. The contrast they sought to portray was between well-dressed, polite, studious blacks peacefully protesting and “a ragtail rabble, slackjawed, black jacketed, grinning fit to kill” assaulting them. The demonstrators’ success also required the “cooperation” of law enforcement officers, either by countenancing private violence or perpetrating their own. Peaceful arrests, even if illegal, dampened protest without generating violent confrontation; the media got bored, the demonstrators grew tired, and the Kennedy administration failed to intervene. Such was the lesson of Albany, Georgia, in 1961–1962, as Laurie Pritchett, the “nonviolent police chief,” arrested hundreds of demonstrators and outlasted the movement. Violent assaults on protestors, by contrast, captured media attention, forced the administration to intervene, and outraged northerners. Thus, the freedom riders “count[ed] upon the racists of the South to create a crisis,” and SCLC leaders “calculated for the stupidity of a Bull Connor.”

T. Eugene “Bull” Connor was first elected to the Birmingham city commission in 1937 on a pledge to crush the communist/integrationist threat posed by the CIO’s unionization efforts. In 1938, he broke up the inaugural meeting of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Birmingham because it violated a local segregation ordinance. In the late 1940s, Connor’s police department failed to take action in response to a wave of bombings that were directed at black families moving into contested neighborhoods. By 1950, however, civic leaders had come to view Connor as an embarrassment. A committee to encourage business relocations was hampered by the city’s racial violence and the extremism of politicians such as Connor. Businessmen orchestrated his public humiliation through an illicit sexual encounter, and Connor retired from politics in 1953. Birmingham then saw some racial progress, including the establishment of the first hospital for blacks, the desegregation of elevators in downtown office buildings, and serious efforts toward desegregating the police force.

After Brown, however, Birmingham’s racial progress ground to a halt. In 1955, the city council rejected proposals to hire black police officers, which it said might lead to “serious racial trouble” in light of Brown. An interracial committee disbanded in 1956; consultation between the races largely ceased; and Connor resurrected his political career. In 1957, he regained his seat on the city commission by promising that he would not permit “professional agitators and radicals to come into Birmingham and stir up racial strife” and attacking his opponent, who insisted that “it doesn’t take agitation to maintain segregation,” as weak on the race issue. In the late 1950s, a powerful Klan element wreaked havoc in Birmingham with a wave of unsolved bombings and brutality. The police, under Connor’s control, declined to interfere and may well have covered up evidence of the crimes. Standing for reelection in 1961, Connor cultivated extremists by offering the Klan fifteen minutes of “open season” on the freedom riders as they rolled into town. Promising the Klansmen through an intermediary that he would keep officers away from the scene, Connor reportedly beseeched them: “By God, if you are going to do this thing, do it right!” After horrific beatings were administered to media representatives as well as demonstrators, the Birmingham News wondered, “Where were the police?” Voters may have been less curious, having handed a landslide victory just two weeks earlier to Connor, who had invited the violence.

 

FIGURE 7.8
Bull Connor at a press conference, May 10, 1963. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

 

When the freedom riders traveled on to Montgomery, the police again mysteriously disappeared, and the demonstrators were savagely beaten once more. Governor Patterson had promised safe passage, and thus he bore considerable responsibility for the violence. Patterson was one of the most extreme southern politicians of the 1950s; he had won the governorship in 1958 while predicting that integration would cause “violence, disorder, and bloodshed” and refusing to repudiate the Klan’s endorsement. As governor, Patterson frequently reiterated his diehard opposition to desegregation, and he warned that southern “enemies” were launching “an all-out war to completely destroy our customs, traditions and way of life.” After New Orleans erupted in violence over school desegregation in 1960, Patterson promised that the violence there would be nothing as compared with the consequences of forced integration in Alabama, where there would be “hell to pay.” Patterson vowed that when the federal showdown came, “I’ll be one of the first ones stirring up trouble, any way I can.” He blamed the freedom riders themselves—“professional agitators,” he called them—for the violence they suffered. But Klansmen may have taken their lead from the governor, who could probably have prevented the violence had he been so inclined. Whether Patterson, Connor, and Montgomery police commissioner L. B. Sullivan had incited violence against the freedom riders or merely failed to prevent it, public opinion generally deemed them responsible. Federal judge Frank Johnson, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, Senator Kefauver, and former governor Folsom all blamed state and local officials for the brutality. Time wrote that Alabama officials, from “Governor John Patterson on down, abdicated their duties of maintaining law and order.” The Birmingham News singled out Patterson specifically for blame, noting that he had “talk[ed] for months in a manner that could easily say to the violent, the intemperate . . . that they were free to do as they pleased when it came to the hated integrationists.”

Alabama politicians had handed the civil rights movement an important victory on a silver platter. Reflecting a visceral opposition to direct action, only about 24 percent of Americans had supported the Freedom Rides, while 64 percent disapproved. Critics viewed the demonstrators as “provocateurs, or inciters to disorder.” David Brinkley of NBC television thought that the freedom riders, though within their legal rights, should cease their “exhibition,” which was “doing positive harm” by “inflam[ing] . . . Southern opinion” and making “advances even more difficult than they already were.” But the freedom riders were behaving nonviolently, exercising rights recently declared by the Supreme Court, and enduring vicious beatings. This was southern white supremacy at its ugliest—“the violent brutality of mobsters,” as the NAACP described it. Even in Montgomery and Birmingham, Alabama, leading newspapers criticized the “savage scene,” the “howling mobs,” and the “raging attack.” Most Americans condemned Alabama for its treatment of the freedom riders. Roughly two-thirds of all Americans now supported desegregation of public transportation, and overwhelming majorities endorsed Kennedy’s decision to use federal marshals to protect the freedom riders in Montgomery. Influenced by “horrified” constituents, northern congressmen began discussing civil rights legislation—a topic that had previously been considered dead. Senator Javits of New York stated, “[T]he whole country must be deeply shocked, appalled and . . . ashamed by the . . . violence,” while Senate majority leader Mike Mansfield declared that the Alabama disorders “should cause us—as a nation—to hang our heads in shame.”

 

FIGURE 7.9
Freedom rider Jim Zwerg after he was beaten in Montgomery, May 21, 1961. (Bettmann/CORBIS)

 

The fall of 1962, when James Meredith integrated Ole Miss, was the first time that people were killed in a desegregation riot. Governor Barnett did not openly advocate violence, and he probably hoped to avoid it. But his defiant rhetoric likely contributed to the bloodshed in Oxford, Mississippi, and it certainly fostered the perception that he was responsible. Barnett had been elected governor in 1959 on an extreme segregationist platform. As a candidate, he implicitly endorsed violence: “We can stop this integration fight if we have the blood and guts of our forefathers.” In a speech to the citizens’ council after his nomination, Barnett declared: “Physical courage is a trait sadly lacking in altogether too many of the South’s so-called leaders. We must separate the men from the boys. We must identify the traitors in our midst. We must eliminate the cowards from our front lines.” In his inaugural address, Barnett promised, “[O]ur schools at all levels must be segregated at all costs.”

As court-ordered desegregation became imminent at Ole Miss in the summer of 1962, Barnett was trapped. His defiant vows made retreat politically unpalatable. Rather than preparing Mississippians for the inevitable, he continued to breathe defiance, planned to “interpose” his authority against that of the federal courts, threatened to arrest federal officers who interfered with state officials in the performance of their duties, and called for the resignation of all state officials who were unwilling to go to jail for defying federal authority in this “righteous cause.” One state senator went even further, demanding resistance “regardless of the cost in human life.” After twice physically blocking Meredith’s entrance to the university, Barnett privately negotiated an agreement with the Justice Department that would enable him to avoid contempt sanctions by retreating after a public display of federal force. Yet his defiant ravings had created a frenzied atmosphere in which Barnett could not prevent violence. A race riot involving as many as 3,000 people broke out in Oxford on September 30, 1962, killing two and injuring several hundred. Barnett blamed federal marshals for the fiasco, but most commentators and national politicians pinned the responsibility on him. Whether or not Barnett had sought the violence, he reaped political benefits from it and became “the dominant political figure in Mississippi as long as he live[d].” Barnett was ineligible to succeed himself in office, but in 1963 voters rewarded the futile defiance that had caused deadly violence by electing Paul Johnson, who campaigned on the role that he had played as lieutenant governor in blocking Meredith’s admission.

Meanwhile, after the failed demonstrations of Albany, Georgia, in 1961–1962, the leadership of the SCLC was searching for a city with a police chief who was unlikely to duplicate Laurie Pritchett’s restraint. They selected Birmingham, perhaps the South’s most violent city, where Bull Connor, as commissioner of public safety, had already achieved notoriety by allowing the Klan to beat freedom riders in 1961. King was much criticized for refusing to defer the Birmingham demonstrations until after he had attempted to negotiate with the new mayor, Albert Boutwell, who had recently defeated Connor for the post. But Reverend Shuttlesworth was urging King to act quickly, while Connor remained police commissioner—a position that would be eliminated under the city’s new form of government once the mayoralty results had survived legal challenge. King’s lieutenant Wyatt Walker later explained: “We knew that when we came to Birmingham that if Bull Connor was still in control, he would do something to benefit our movement. We didn’t want to march after Bull was gone.” The strategy worked brilliantly. After some initially uncharacteristic restraint, Connor unleashed police dogs and fire hoses against demonstrators, many of whom were children. Television and newspaper coverage featured images of police dogs attacking unresisting demonstrators, including one that President Kennedy reported made him “sick.” Congressmen condemned the “shocking episodes of police brutality.” Newspaper editorials called the violence “a national disgrace.” Citizens voiced their “sense of unutterable outrage and shame” and demanded that politicians take “action to immediately put to an end the barbarism and savagery in Birmingham.” Within ten weeks, spin-off demonstrations spread to more than 100 cities, as Birmingham “detonated a revolution.”

 

FIGURE 7.10
One of Bull Connor’s police dogs attacks a black bystander during street demonstrations. President John Kennedy said this photograph made him “sick.” (Birmingham News)

 

Televised brutality against peaceful civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham dramatically altered northern opinion on race and enabled the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Comparing the Kennedy administration’s civil rights policy before and after Birmingham demonstrates the transformative effect of that episode. When Kennedy was elected president in 1960, he was not a civil rights enthusiast, and his victory depended on the support of southern whites. At the outset of the Kennedy administration, the NAACP was not expecting legislation to accelerate the pace of school desegregation. The administration warned against congressional efforts to condition the receipt of federal education funds on progress being made toward school desegregation, and polls showed that Americans were opposed to such measures by a 3–1 margin. Critics called the administration “timid and reluctant” and accused it of “dragging its feet” on civil rights, but polls showed that two-thirds of Americans thought the pace of desegregation was “too fast” or “about right,” and only 11 percent thought it “not fast enough.” When Kennedy finally proposed civil rights legislation in February 1963—two months before the Birmingham demonstrations began—it focused on voting rights. With regard to school desegregation, the administration proposed only technical and financial assistance to desegregating districts—a proposal that even Eisenhower had supported in the late 1950s. Kennedy did not endorse the proposals of liberals to grant the attorney general authority to institute desegregation suits or to empower the president to terminate federal education funds for school districts that remained segregated. Administration critic William F. Buckley rightly observed that the landmark civil rights bill proposed by Kennedy in the summer of 1963 “was not even conceived of as recently as a year ago.”

Outside of the school desegregation context, the administration had also been cautious on civil rights before Birmingham. After promising during the 1960 campaign that civil rights legislation would be his first priority, during his first two years in office Kennedy repeatedly declared that he would not seek such legislation because Congress would not pass it. For those two years, Kennedy also delayed fulfilling a campaign pledge to eliminate race discrimination in federally assisted housing with the “stroke of a pen.” When he finally did issue the housing order, it was limited in scope and prospective only. Kennedy placated southern Democrats with atrocious judicial appointments, including William Harold Cox, Senator Eastland’s college roommate, who later referred to blacks from the bench as “niggers” and “chimpanzees.” The Kennedy Justice Department negotiated the resolution of racial conflict with white southerners behind the scenes, rather than confronting it openly, prosecuting wrongdoers, and compelling the enforcement of civil rights. Rather than supporting the freedom riders’ exercise of federal rights to nonsegregated transportation, the administration privately authorized Mississippi officials to illegally jail them in exchange for promises to avoid violence. After convincing civil rights workers in Mississippi to redirect their energies toward voter registration, which was assumed to be less provocative than freedom rides or street demonstrations, the administration broke its apparent promise to protect them from violence. By 1962, congressional liberals and black leaders were regularly criticizing the administration for failing to take a vigorous stand on civil rights. Birmingham changed everything.

Opinion polls revealed that the percentage of Americans who deemed civil rights to be the nation’s most urgent issue rose from 4 percent before Birmingham to 52 percent afterward. A majority of Americans now favored expansive civil rights legislation. Denouncing the Birmingham violence, congressmen introduced measures to end federal aid to segregated schools. Kennedy overhauled his earlier civil rights proposals to include broader voting rights protections, the desegregation of public accommodations, authority for the attorney general to bring school desegregation suits, and the termination of federal funding for programs that engaged in race discrimination. Only after the police dogs and fire hoses of Birmingham did Kennedy announce on national television that civil rights was a “moral issue as old as the scriptures and as clear as the American Constitution.” Bishops now announced that the nation’s 45 million Catholics had a “strict moral duty” to support civil rights. That fall, after a quarter of a million Americans had marched on Washington, D.C., in support of civil rights and four black youngsters had been blown up in Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, congressmen toughened the administration’s bill, adding prohibitions on employment discrimination and broadening the attorney general’s authority over desegregation suits. Just five days after Kennedy’s assassination on November 22, 1963, President Lyndon Johnson told a joint session of Congress that “no memorial oration or eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil rights bill for which he fought so long.” With Johnson’s strong backing, the bill became law in the summer of 1964, after withstanding the longest filibuster in Senate history.

Alabama’s governor, George Wallace, had played a minor role in suppressing the Birmingham demonstrations and would play a more substantial role in the violence that lay ahead. Perhaps more than any other individual, Wallace personified the post-Brown racial fanaticism of southern politics. Early in his political career, in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Wallace had been criticized as “soft” on segregation. Unlike Connor, he was in the half of the Alabama delegation that did not walk out of the 1948 Democratic National Convention over the civil rights plank, and in 1954 he had been Folsom’s campaign manager for southern Alabama. By the mid-1950s, however, Wallace felt the changing political winds, broke with Folsom, and cultivated conflict with federal authorities over race issues in his position as Barbour County circuit judge. After his defeat in the 1958 gubernatorial election, Wallace vowed never to be “out-niggered” again, and in 1962 he made good on that promise. Though some Alabama officials repudiated massive resistance after Ole Miss, Wallace continued to denounce federal “tyranny” and to promise “segregation forever.” Like most southern politicians, he publicly condemned violence. Yet Wallace’s actions from 1963 to 1965 directly and indirectly encouraged the brutality that helped transform national opinion on race.

During the Birmingham demonstrations in the spring of 1963, Wallace dispatched several hundred state troopers to the city, and they supplemented Bull Connor’s brutality with some of their own. He also publicly praised Connor for forcefully suppressing the demonstrations. That summer in Tuscaloosa, Wallace fulfilled his pledge to stand in the schoolhouse door, physically blocking the university’s entrance before, in a carefully planned charade, stepping aside in the face of superior federal force—more than 15,000 federalized national guardsmen. Learning from Ole Miss, Wallace had warned that he would not “tolerate mob action,” and massive security measures kept Tuscaloosa “peaceful and serene.”

Yet Wallace, like Barnett, had grown overconfident in his ability to spout defiant rhetoric without provoking violence. After Tuscaloosa, Wallace continued to promise a “forceful stand” against grade school desegregation, which federal courts had ordered in Alabama for the fall. In September, Wallace used state troopers to block school desegregation in Birmingham, Mobile, Huntsville, and Tuskegee—action that was contrary to the wishes of most local officials, who called Wallace a “dictator” for preventing them from complying with court orders to desegregate. In Birmingham, white mobs demonstrated outside the schools that were scheduled to desegregate; the home of a black lawyer who was heavily involved in school desegregation litigation was bombed; and a minor race riot erupted, in which police killed a black man and roughly twenty others were injured. Wallace had encouraged extremist groups to wage “a boisterous campaign” against school desegregation, and now he defended the rioters, who he insisted are “not thugs—they are good working people who get mad when they see something like this happen.” Threatened with contempt citations by all five Alabama district judges, and overmatched by President Kennedy’s federalization of the state national guard, Wallace relented. The schools desegregated, but Wallace had “stirred up a devil’s brew of racial hatred that [could] erupt any minute into further violence.” Within a week, tragedy had struck. Birmingham Klansmen, possibly inspired by the governor’s protestations that “I can’t fight federal bayonets with my bare hands,” dynamited the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, killing four black schoolgirls. Within hours of the bombing, two other black teenagers were killed, one by white hoodlums and the other by the police. It was the largest death toll of the civil rights era, and Wallace received much of the blame, though he denied any “blood on his hands” and attributed responsibility instead to some “demented fool.” Wilkins charged Wallace with encouraging a “deliberate mass murder,” while King blamed the governor for “creat[ing] the climate that made it possible for someone to plant that bomb.” Alabama attorney general Flowers linked the carnage to Wallace’s defiance: “The individuals who bombed the Sixteenth Avenue [sic] Church in their way were standing in the schoolhouse door.” President Kennedy noted “a deep sense of outrage and grief” and thought it “regrettable that public disparagement of law and order has encouraged violence which has fallen on the innocent.” Senator Javits of New York declared that Wallace “cannot escape some responsibility” for the bombing. Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina decried Wallace as “the chief aider and abettor of those who would attempt to pass foolish [civil rights] laws.” Wallace may not have sought the violence, but his provocative rhetoric probably contributed to it, and he certainly took no measures to prevent it, as had South Carolina officials, whose public schools peacefully desegregated that same month.

Most of the nation was appalled by the murder of innocent schoolchildren, which even the Alabama congressional delegation condemned as a “heartless criminal atrocity.” One week after the bombing, tens of thousands of people across the United States participated in memorial services and marches. Northern whites wrote to the NAACP to join, to condemn, and to apologize. One white woman asked the association to “[p]lease enlist me in an army of protest or help me to find a way to express my feelings.” A white lawyer from Los Angeles wrote, “Today I am joining the NAACP; partly, I think, as a kind of apology for being caucasian, and for not being in Birmingham to lend my physical support.” Another white woman in the North condemned those Birmingham whites who were involved in the bombing or who condoned it as “the worst barbarians,” and she said that she was “ashamed to think that I bear their color skin.” She also declared that the bombing had “certainly changed my attitude,” which previously had been “somewhat lukewarm” on civil rights. A white man from New Rochelle wrote: “How shall I start? Perhaps to say that I am white, sorry, ashamed, and guilty. . . . Those who have said that all whites who, through hatred, intolerance, or just inaction are guilty are right.” A black veteran of World War I from South Carolina, who had “seen many things that have been irksome” in his seventy years, including the lynchings of Till and Parker and the murders of Moore and Evers, told the NAACP that “nothing in my life has had the effect upon me [that] the bombing of the Church and the Murder of the six Negroes in Birmingham [had].” He prayed that God would not “let these children die in vain,” and he enclosed money to be divided among the families of the murdered youngsters. The NAACP urged its members to “flood Congress with letters in support of necessary civil rights legislation to curb such outrages,” and Wilkins demanded that the federal government “cut off every nickel” going to Alabama. Northern congressmen reflected the outrage of their constituents by introducing amendments to strengthen the administration’s pending civil rights bill.

 

FIGURE 7.11
The Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in Birmingham after it was bombed on September 15, 1963. (Birmingham Public Library, Department of Archives and Manuscripts, no. 85.1.22)

 

Wallace’s critics in Alabama attacked his schoolhouse-door routine at Tuscaloosa as “the greatest production since Cleopatra,” and they accused him of making “a monkey of himself” and “a mockery of Alabama.” But most voters apparently disagreed. Wallace remained enormously popular, and in January 1964 he won an important victory when the state Democratic executive committee instructed the Alabama delegation to the 1964 national convention to support Wallace as a favorite-son candidate for president. Meanwhile, Wallace continued to rail against the “shocking” pronouncements of federal “judicial tyrant” and to urge local authorities to resist desegregation, though he refrained from any more schoolhouse-door stands. But the linkage between Wallace and civil rights violence had not ended, with Selma still in the future.

Before Selma, though, the civil rights stage shifted back to Mississippi, where movement leaders during the summer of 1964 successfully repeated the Birmingham strategy. Civil rights activists in Mississippi, after struggling for years against horrific violence to organize the state, decided to import hundreds of mostly white northern college students for a Freedom Summer of civil rights activity. They understood that bringing “outside agitators” to Mississippi would probably elicit a deadly response, and they calculated that the national media and the Johnson administration would lavish attention on relatively affluent whites from the nation’s most prestigious universities. The strategy worked even more effectively and more tragically than they had anticipated. Within days, three civil rights workers had disappeared. For much of the summer, FBI agents and national media representatives blanketed the state searching for them. Their murders, combined with dozens of church bombings, shootings, beatings, and other atrocities taught an attentive nation unforgettable lessons about Jim Crow, Mississippi-style. The groundwork was laid for further civil rights legislation. Selma brought it to fruition.

Situated in the heart of Alabama’s black belt, Selma was home to the state’s first citizens’ council, which had quickly enrolled nearly a quarter of Dallas County’s white males. Selma was also home to Sheriff Jim Clark, one of the South’s most notorious racial hotheads. Indeed, in the spring of 1963, at Wallace’s instigation, Clark had traveled to Birmingham to assist Bull Connor in forcibly suppressing street demonstrations. Early in 1965, the SCLC brought its voter registration campaign to Selma, in search of another Birmingham-style victory.

In Selma, King and his colleagues refined the already successful tactics of Birmingham. They chose Selma as the site of their voter registration campaign partly because of the presence there of a law enforcement officer with Bull Connor–like proclivities. Sheriff Clark had a temper which “could be counted on to provide vivid proof of the violent sentiments that formed white supremacy’s core.” Moreover, in contrast with Birmingham, the Selma demonstrators had a more defined objective—voting rights—and were better able to maintain strict nonviolence. The result was another resounding success for the civil rights movement. After initially displaying restraint that “disappoint[ed]” SCLC workers, Clark finally returned to form and brutalized nonresisting demonstrators. The violence culminated in Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, when county and state law enforcement officers viciously assaulted marchers as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on the way to Montgomery. Governor Wallace had promised that the march would be broken up by “whatever measures are necessary,” and Colonel Al Lingo, Wallace’s chief law enforcement lieutenant, insisted that the governor himself had given the order to attack. That evening, ABC television interrupted its broadcast of Judgment at Nuremberg for a lengthy film report of peaceful demonstrators being assailed by stampeding horses, flailing clubs, and tear gas. Two white volunteers from the North were killed in the events surrounding Selma: a Unitarian minister from Boston and a mother of five from Detroit.

Most of the nation was repulsed by the “ghastly scenes” from Selma that they watched on television. Time reported, “Rarely in history has public opinion reacted so spontaneously and with such fury.” President Johnson “deplored the brutality.” Over the following week, huge sympathy demonstrations took place across the country. Hundreds of clergymen from around the nation flocked to Selma to show their solidarity with King and his comrades. Citizens demanded remedial action from their congressmen, scores of whom condemned the “deplorable” violence and the “shameful display” of Selma and now endorsed voting rights legislation. On March 15, 1965, President Johnson proposed such legislation before a joint session of Congress. Seventy million Americans watched on television as the president beseeched them to “overcome this crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice” and declared his faith that “we shall overcome.” Prior to Selma, administration officials had been divided over whether to pursue voting rights legislation in the near term, but national revulsion at the brutalization of peaceful protestors prompted immediate action.

Although most Americans were appalled by the violence of vigilantes and law enforcement officers at Birmingham and Selma, the politicians who were partly responsible for it calculated—usually correctly—that Alabama voters would reward them for their role in fostering it. Contemporaries speculated that Connor’s violent suppression of civil rights demonstrations in Birmingham was calculated to earn him support among segregationist voters should he run for state office. Indeed, the following year, Connor was elected state public service commissioner, as he capitalized on the name recognition he had achieved during the Birmingham demonstrations. Wallace remained enormously popular among whites in Alabama, in spite of—or perhaps because of—his partial responsibility for the violence at Birmingham and Selma. When he provoked a showdown with the Kennedy administration over the desegregation of grade schools in several Alabama cities in the fall of 1963 (the episode that culminated in the bombing of Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church), Wallace was apparently anticipating political gain—specifically, a change in the state constitution that would enable him to serve a second consecutive term as governor. Sheriff Clark calculated that his brutality against demonstrators in Selma would translate into a viable gubernatorial candidacy in 1966. He withdrew from that race only after Wallace, who was barred from succeeding himself, announced the candidacy of his wife, Lurleen, who then won the election. Clark rightly appreciated that nobody could outflank Wallace as a symbol of resistance to racial change.

The violence used by white law enforcement officers in the South against peaceful black demonstrators repulsed national opinion and led directly to the passage of landmark civil rights legislation. Brown was less directly responsible than is commonly supposed for putting those demonstrators on the street, but it was more directly responsible for the violent reception they encountered.

 

The post-Brown racial fanaticism of southern politics produced a situation that was ripe for violence, while Brown itself created concrete occasions on which violent opposition to school desegregation was likely. Some of the ensuing violence was mainly attributable to white vigilantes, but much of it was encouraged, directly or indirectly, by extremist politicians, whom voters rewarded for the irresponsible rhetoric that fomented atrocities. Even before the violent outbreaks of the 1960s, most white northerners had agreed with Brown in the abstract, but they were disinclined to push hard for its enforcement; many of them agreed with Eisenhower that the NAACP should rein in its demands for immediate desegregation. It was televised scenes of officially sanctioned brutality against peaceful black demonstrators that transformed northern opinion on race. By helping to lay bare the violence at the core of white supremacy, Brown accelerated its demise. President Eisenhower, Justice Black, and many southern moderates had foreseen that Brown would retard southern racial progress and destroy southern political liberalism. Justice Jackson, too, had warned, “When the Court has gone too far, it has provoked reactions which have set back the cause it was designed to advance.” Though these individuals rightly anticipated Brown’s backlash, they failed to foresee the ensuing counterbacklash that would develop as northerners were repulsed by the violence of southern whites against peaceful black demonstrators and endorsed landmark civil rights legislation in response. The harder that southern whites fought to maintain Jim Crow, the more they seemed to accelerate its demise.

Would the same violence have confronted civil rights demonstrators without Brown? One cannot know for certain. But without Brown, school desegregation would probably not have been a pressing issue in the 1950s. Southern blacks generally had other priorities, including ending police brutality, securing voting rights, gaining access to decent jobs, and equalizing public funding of black schools. Moreover, before Brown, southern whites had proved willing to make small concessions on racial issues that were less important to them than school segregation. Without Brown, negotiation might have continued to produce gradual change without inciting white violence. How southern whites in this counterfactual universe would have responded if and when black street demonstrations erupted is impossible to tell. In the absence of post-Brown political fanaticism, however, one can imagine freedom riders arriving in Birmingham and Montgomery without police commissioners inviting Klansmen to beat them, and one can imagine blacks demonstrating for voting rights in Selma without law enforcement officers brutalizing them. By the early 1960s, most southern whites could probably have tolerated desegregated transportation and black suffrage, had Brown not converted all racial challenges, in their minds, into fundamental assaults on Jim Crow. Whether and how southern schools would have desegregated in this counterfactual scenario is anybody’s guess, but it almost certainly would not have happened as quickly as it did under the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Only the violence that resulted from Brown’s radicalization of southern politics enabled transformative racial change to occur as rapidly as it did.

 

Excerpt from Chapter 7 of "From Jim Crow to Civil Rights: The Supreme Court and the Struggle for Racial Equality", by Michael J. Klarman
 

Editado 11 Janeiro 2021 por bmfpcdm

[Mayday]

Hoje passa na RTP2, às 23:55, o documentário Luz Obscura da Susana de Sousa Dias.