The Stand in the Schoolhouse Door - 17 June 1988

Most newspaper editors have on their shelves, if not at their elbow, a big book called Timetables of History. On days when the news looks lean they can fatten it up by looking back 25 years, 50 years, 100 years and seeing if there isn’t some great or startling event, some famous life that they can tell a feature writer to commemorate.

My old newspaper editor, a canny Lancastrian, had whimsical ways of exploiting this newspaper custom. One time I remember he riffled through the pages back over 100, 200 years, on and on and suddenly said, like an Agatha Christie policeman coming on a footprint, “Hello!”.

Next day he wrote the piece himself, jammed it on the editorial page and had the odd satisfaction the next morning of finding that he had scooped the entire British press on the eleven hundredth anniversary of Alfred the Great.

Twenty-five years is an attractive interval because you can always find somebody alive who was there at the time and it would seem from a flurry of 25-years-ago pieces we’ve had lately that 1963 has become, in retrospect, a year in which American society in several ways took an historic turn from which it would not turn back.

Returning here from an English spring, frequent showers with what are called sunny intervals and an occasional brazing March day, I landed in New York and it could just as well have been Chicago or any other place within a thousand miles of the east coast, a New York that was a blazing furnace.

The date of my arrival and the coincidence of atrocious heat combined to strike a chord. Twenty-five years ago to the day I had landed at Montgomery, Alabama, to cover an event which we had no way of anticipating at the time might turn out to be humdrum or clownish or a threat to life and limb.

A young black had applied to enter the University of Alabama. He was the first of his race to dare to do this and the governor of Alabama, Mr George Wallace, had proclaimed far and wide that he would not permit it. He would, if need be, as he put it “stand in the schoolhouse door” and physically block the passage into the sacred halls of this young James Marshall. [James Hood?]

President Kennedy was well aware that Governor Wallace, a man elected on the promise that Alabama would stay segregated for ever more, meant what he said and could inspire a general brawl. The road into town was alive with ominous signs of trouble ahead, white youngsters in cars flashing along the highway waving Confederate flags, flags hanging out of bedroom windows, restless groups of young whites on street corners; occasionally, two blacks walking close together and close to the buildings along the sidewalk.

Nearer the campus a slightly swaying crowd of young whites, hundreds of them hoisting signs, “Alabama for ever” and “Wallace for President”. No hint of a competing placard. The blacks very sensibly stayed home. The reporters with credentials were threaded through this bristling mass of people and we stood up front only a few yards away from the steps that led up to that schoolhouse door in which Governor Wallace hoped to make history.

We unfolded newspapers or tied handkerchiefs into bandanas and laid them on our heads. It was over 100 degrees, it was officially said in any discoverable shade, but the only shade we saw was the slanting shadow that hid the little plump form and the jutting chin of the governor. In the pitiless sun somebody held up a thermometer: it was 127 degrees. There was no shouting, no bawling, no rowdy protest.

The crowd sweated and rippled in the heat like a gently-moving tide and it seemed to me at the time far more threatening than an eruption of open defiance. I remember some joking, but many rows of sullen white faces. After what seemed like an hour or more but was actually much less there was some motion off near the campus gates to one side. A small detachment, maybe no more than a dozen or so, of men with blue badges, federal marshals, paced quickly towards the entrance.

They were led by a man who was, I believe, then six feet six. He was Nicholas Katzenbach, the assistant attorney general of the United States, a graceful hulk of a man of, as it came out, extraordinary gentleness. He stopped at the foot of the steps, his men behind him. They waited, like the rest of us, for the ceremony to begin.

Then the governor, this small, stocky man with attractive brown eyes and a jutting chin appeared, backed by a posse of state officials. What I remember now was that he seemed to go on in a forceful but small voice reciting his credentials, almost like a droning person starting the marriage service, “In accordance with the authority vested in me by the State of Alabama and my duty to enforce the laws of this state according to the Constitution of the State of Alabama..." on until I thought I heard “Who giveth this man to be entered into this university?” at which point Mr Katzenbach strode forward and said he did.

By his side was a small, slender, woefully humble-looking hero. It was James Marshall [Hood?]. Whereupon Governor Wallace performed the movement of his one-man blockade. He stood forward, pushed out his chest and took up the marshal stance of a turkey cock. He would make good his promise: he stood in the schoolhouse door.

Mr Katzenbach looked down at him from a great height and they talked quietly, rapidly, Mr Katzenbach like a best man apologising to the parson for having forgotten the ring. I can’t recall now how long they talked together. It couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

Mr Katzenbach turned round and motioned the marshals. Two of them flanked young Mr Marshall [Hood?]. The governor grumbled a little and a little more as other marshals advanced in order. It was then seen – or to the mass of the onlooking crowd it became known – that President Kennedy had called out the National Guard and that they were herded way back there like the reserves that the Union army used to pile up just in case the brave Confederates were under the delusion that all they had to contend with were the forward units of the Northern troops.

The rumours of these reserve forces more than the fact stilled the crowd, had Governor Wallace tiptoeing to see what trouble brewed on the horizon and quite suddenly, with no more fuss than a shrug he stepped aside and the young black with two marshals at his side and more to come, and the assistant attorney general looking like a towering field marshal, on foot they all moved and entered the building. The first black student had been enrolled at the University of Alabama.

He had a lonely and often humiliating time of it during his four years, but he came through and is today a successful lawyer. Governor Wallace went on to run for president five years later and against Richard Nixon’s 31.75million votes and Hubert Humphrey’s 31.25million, Wallace picked up nearly 10million, mostly from southerners and midwesterners who hungered and prayed for a return to segregation.

And four years after that, in 1972, Governor Wallace was shot in Maryland in an assassination attempt and has been paralysed from the waist down ever since. He has borne this atrocity ever since considerable courage. Last week he was interviewed as he sat in his wheelchair and congratulated the black captain of the University of Alabama’s football team.

He said, just as forcefully and defiantly as ever, “Everything changed and history moved on; I was wrong, I was wrong”. Today, incidentally, there are 1700 black students in the University of Alabama.

On the same day last week, and still in the deep south, it was graduation day, commencement as Americans call it, at the University of Georgia. At that ceremony 25 years ago the University of Georgia too had just bowed, with equal reluctance, to the same challenge or – as the great majority of its students and faculty thought – to the same indignity. It had finally let in two lacks, a young man – Hamilton Holmes – and a beautiful black girl, Charlayne Hunter.

At that commencement ceremony those two, the only two dark faces amid an ocean of whites, looked up and listened to the commencement address of Georgia’s senior senator, Senator Richard Russell, a famous segregationist. The senator’s theme was what he called “The Majesty of Local Law” which, being interpreted, meant that the segregation laws of the state of Georgia, like those of all the southern states, could be tamped with only at peril to the old and revered southern way of life.

Well, in those days 25 years ago those majestic laws still saw to it that that particular black girl, the first to enter the university, could not use the regular facilities like the restaurants or the bowling alleys in the nearby towns. The federal law, which had enforced integration on the university campus, still didn’t apply to the neighbouring towns. Once off the campus these black students could be refused food in a lunch counter, forced to sit up in what they dubbed the crow’s nest at theatres and in football games.

Well, last Saturday, the University of Georgia again held its commencement and the speaker, the privileged guest of honour was that same unprivileged, beautiful black girl, Charlayne Hunter. She is now Charlayne Hunter-Gault and is one of the team of three expert interviewers – and they are the best in the country – on the incomparable television news hour put on by the Public Broadcasting Network, the non-commercial network, five evenings a week, the MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour.

A brief news summary is followed by four or five long segments in which Robin MacNeil or Jim Lehrer or Charlayne Hunter-Gault don’t just think aloud with other journalists but dig into the big issues with the people at the centre of them, with the prime ministers, the generals, the ambassadors, the secretaries of state, the dictators, or whoever has made the news that day.

Mrs Hunter-Gault spoke with much eloquence and, without sentimentality or self-pity, praised the university president for hiring 15 new black faculty members, didn’t pretend that the old south was dead, recalled that “I first came here a brown girl bearing an idle gift, would do it again but hope for less of a struggle”.

And if any of the applauding whites thought they had cause for self-congratulation, she ended by mentioning that “in admitting only 1200 blacks in a student body of 26,000, permit me to say we have failed our responsibility to this institution and this state”.

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