Speech Day
From MURRAY KEMPTON
NEW YORK, WEDNESDAY
TWO young Negroes were admitted to the University of Alabama yesterday in a ceremony which might have been designed to assure all persons who might object to the advance of history in the United States that history has not advanced at all.
Governor George Wallace of Alabama came to the campus of his university, fitted a lapel microphone to his silk suit, and proclaimed that he was there to resist the incursions of what he persists in calling the 'Central' Government. Nicholas Katzenbach, Assistant Attorney- General of the United States, walked up to face him, out of place, hesitant, an obviously unwill- ing intruder, to explain that the United States Government 'has no choice in this matter.' George Wallace stood and Nicholas Katzen- bach retreated and took his two charges away, and they waited while the President of the United States called the Alabama National Guard into Federal service and then ordered its com- mander to go to the University of Alabama and tell its Governor that he had made his point and could go home.
Governor Wallace looked sadly upon Brigadier-General Henry Graham, the com- mander of his State Guard, and observed, with absolute truth, that this was as bitter a pill for General Graham as it was for him, and got into his car and drove back to his state capital just as he must have promised the Central Govern- ment he would when the Central Government promised in return to allow him the show and with it all the style of this historic, if hardly premature, occasion.
The national custom still dictates extra- ordinary concern for the feelings of what is white and established. President Kennedy had choices to make as to procedure : he made them with care for the sensibilities of George Wallace and official Alabama. He could, as an instance, have ordered to the university a detachment of regular Federal troops: but any such unit, of course, would have included Negroes and would have confronted Governor Wallace with the reality of Federal authority which is that Federal authority is integrated. Two Federal soldiers might have picked the Governor up and removed him from his command post, and one of those soldiers might, quite by coincidence, have been a Negro, and this indignity would have made George Wallace a mockery to his constituents: one politician simply does not do this to another.
The Alabama National Guard does not have a single Negro trooper. When the Governor of Alabama surrendered then to his own segregated army, he knew that General Graham did not want to do what he had to do: Mr. Katzenbach's un- happy observation about the Government's hav- ing no choice was a polite fiction that the Federal administration was also doing what it didn't want to do. There was only this ballet scored by un- known parties. The campus was ringed and guarded by various authorities. All white and Alabaman: and so these two young people came to a campus where there was not one face that welcomed them. We grant them victory but we will not allow them a moment when they can feel it.
The sense of triumph belonged in defeat to George Wallace, as he read off his announce- ment that the tyrant's heel was on his shore and got comfortably into his sedan to drive away, reminding us again that the South had won the Civil War.
President Kennedy was on television last night explaining to the American people that the Negro revolt was a 'crisis of conscience' and a `moral issue.' It was an extraordinary speech, if only because no other President before him had ever used nouns like 'conscience' or adjectives like 'moral' about this issue before. But it was not premature : a President whose pride it is to understand history has been surprised to con- front a history that has been made by unknown persons, most of them Negroes. In the after- noon he struggled to persuade George Wallace that nothing had happened; in the evening he struggled to catch up with a condition where everything has happened.
The Negro created these conditions when he commenced at last to march all over America. Official America waited to announce that this is a moral issue only until the moment came when everyone in private America knew that it is. It cannot really be said gracefully or well because to say it that way would be to admit that what the Negro has gained has not 'been given to him by us but grasped by him. And so the President can say everything the Negro wants except words he really deserves; he cannot say that the history of the last ten years in America has been written by poor Negroes alone and undefended. The President could not, for example, have gone to the University of Alabama armed with nothing but the awful majesty of his office and looked at George Wallace and stared him down. Only poor Negroes, apparently, can make that naked con- frontation.
Jimmy Hood and Vivian Malone walked into the University of Alabama alone as the Negro has been all this time; every official guide who came with them was nervous, embarrassed, feel- ing himself an intruder. They alone were entirely calm. That is because they are not pragmatists. But the President suggests a law that would end segregation at department store lunch counters. Negro children, with only their unprotected bodies, have already accomplished the desegre- gation of lunch counters, or soon will, all over the South. The pragmatist can only engage the past, he is nervous in the present, he cannot imagine the future. The ceremony which brought Negroes to the University of Alabama had, there- fore, to be graceless and without style. Official America yielded style to George Wallace because it conceded that he is official Alabama and there- fore the custodian of Alabama's history. To think otherwise would be to admit that history can be made by lonely private men and thus to admit the Negro into American history (a place he has occupied only as object of barter or charity until now), accepted as a piece of its glory.
That is asking a great deal of President Kennedy, but, until he and all of us make that concession, we are condemned not to create history but only, too late, to announce it.
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