Races: The Long March

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"My Sad Duty." The second confrontation came 4½ hours after the first. In midafternoon, Brigadier General Henry V. Graham, assistant commander of the 31st Infantry, an Alabama Guard division, walked up to Governor Wallace and saluted. "It is my sad duty," the general said gently, "to inform you that the National Guard has been federalized. Please stand aside so that the order of the court may be accomplished."

Wallace read off a parting-shot statement and then walked away. Shortly afterward, the two Negroes went into the building and were registered. "Hi, there," a man seated at a desk said to Vivian Malone. "We've been waiting for you."

Two days later, Dave Mack McGlathery, 27, a Negro employed at the U.S. space research center at Redstone Arsenal, went to the University of Alabama's Extension Center at Huntsville and registered for night classes in mathematics. Not a single hiss, boo or catcall was audible. Governor Wallace did not even bother to show up.

Enough? With that, Alabama was breached as the last state fortress of total school segregation. Attorney General Kennedy's tactics, to which he applied all his shrewd, tough abilities for detail-by-detail planning, had worked. But was that enough? Was it in any substantive sense a settlement to the Negro revolution? The answers could only be no.

Nine years had passed since the U.S. Supreme Court's historic school-desegregation decision. To some, the mere fact that now all 50 states had integrated schools might seem reasonable progress. But not to Negroes in the late spring of 1963.

Successful revolutions typically originate less from a sense of hopelessness than from aroused hope. What began as a legal evolution with the Supreme Court's May 1954 school-desegregation decision has now burst into a feverish, fragmented, spasmodic, almost uncontrollable revolution.

In the last three weeks alone, by a Justice Department count, some sort of facility was desegregated in 143 different cities or towns. Last week Atlanta desegregated its public swimming pools, and in Nashville, Tenn., all the major hotels and motels and most of the restaurants agreed to integrate their facilities promptly. In a single recent week Bobby Kennedy counted 60 separate demonstrations by Negroes in various U.S. cities. Last week Negroes marched, picketed, sat in or rioted in Savannah, Ga., Danville, Va., Cambridge, Md., New York City, Providence, R.I., and dozens of other cities. In Washington, a crowd of 3,000 Negroes marched to Bobby Kennedy's Justice Department. When he came outside to speak to them, a Negro spokesman complained to him that "We haven't seen many Negroes coming out of the Justice department." Kennedy, using a bullhorn, replied that "individuals will be hired on their ability."

In the pattern of revolutions, the recent Negro victories have only whetted their hunger for full equality. Cries the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the Southern Negroes' most outstanding leader: "We're through with tokenism and gradualism and see-how-far-you've-comeism. We're through with we've-done-more-for -your -people -than -anyone -elseism. We can't wait any longer. Now is the time."