Races: The Long March

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The first Negro student ever admitted to the University of Alabama, Autherine Lucy, met with a violent barrage of hate. During her first day of classes, in February 1956, a mob of 1,000 students marched to the university president's house shouting "To hell with Autherine!" and "Keep 'Bama white!" Two days later, rioting students hurled stones and eggs at the car in which she was riding to class, pursued the car to the classroom building. With the mob yelling outside, she waited in the building until state policemen arrived to escort her to safety. She shortly went home to Birmingham. And she never returned to Tuscaloosa.

For seven years, no Negro followed Autherine Lucy to the University of Alabama. One by one, the states of the South submitted to at least token school integration—until Alabama stood as the only state in the nation without a single Negro attending a state-supported school with white students.

Last week, in an event of historic contrast with the 1956 episode, Alabama fell too: enrolled at the Tuscaloosa campus of the University of Alabama were two Negroes, Vivian Malone and James Hood, both 20. The only opposition was an empty gesture of defiance by Governor George C. Wallace. On the campus, the Negroes encountered no hostile mobs, no shouting, no thrown stones. Instead, they met with smiles and friendly greetings from white students. The Negroes merged into the life of the campus so uneventfully that it almost seemed as if the color of their skins made no difference.

The Promise. The contrast between 1956 and 1963 in Tuscaloosa was paralleled in Washington. In 1956, President Eisenhower remained a bystander when violence erupted at the University of Alabama. He would, he said, be inclined to "avoid interference." But in the years since then, the Executive Branch under both Eisenhower and Kennedy became closely and inextricably involved in the Negroes' march toward equality. Last week President Kennedy played an active role in the drama at Tuscaloosa. The man he assigned to direct events was his younger brother, U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy.

Bobby rolled up his sleeves and turned his office into a command post. With him there were Burke Marshall, Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, several other aides, four maps of Tuscaloosa, a TV set and a radio. An open telephone line and a radio-telephone hookup linked him with the Administration's field force in Tuscaloosa: a team of U.S. marshals and Justice Department officials, headed by Deputy Attorney General Nicholas de Belleville Katzenbach, a big, balding man who is even tougher than he talks. At Fort Benning, Ga., 400 Army troops, specially trained for riot duty, sat in helicopters, ready to spin away to Tuscaloosa if they were needed.

Standing in almost pitiable solitude against Bobby's forces was Governor Wallace, 43, a former state judge and sometime amateur boxer, now grown a bit pudgy. During his raucous campaign for the governorship last year, Wallace vowed that he would oppose any federal school-integration order "to the point of standing at the schoolhouse door," defying the feds to arrest him.