The Word From Washington
The Word From Washington How long ago and how faded seems the Lyndon Johnson campaign of 1964. One of the most memorable episodes of that campaign was Mr. Johnson's entreaty to the American...
...In the year of the backlash, such guarantees do not suffice...
...There were appreciative sniggers in the East Room at the political archness of it all...
...I think that the United States would be far better off if he would resign . . . . " Howe's grave offense has been to preach racial justice, not to enforce it...
...Platitudes as well as plantations have their place in the new post-reconstruc tionism...
...From the segregationist standpoint it is the only chance we've had to wake up the white people...
...Did anyone call the Anti-Defamation League...
...The snail's pace of compliance will inevitably be slowed even more, now that the President has shown how he feels about the "differences" that develop as a result of "enthusiasm...
...Senator Mansfield envisions "a nation which moves with a quiet but unre mitting determination...
...I doubt that the President should get into every race in every state," said Mr...
...I think he knows exactly what he is trying to do...
...Elsewhere in Dixie voters have resurrected the voices of racial illiberalism...
...A great silence has descended on such agencies as the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission...
...The tide of recidivism is running strong through the South as it did three-quarters of a century ago...
...Johnson's entreaty to the American South to bind its wounds and heal its history -meaning the history of relations be tween white and black...
...POTOMACUS...
...which moves in dignity but without surcease against the barriers of human inequity...
...The greatest speech of his campaign, in our book, was the one he delivered in New Orleans less than a month before the election...
...The hate industry has once again begun to prosper after a fall-off from the 1964 campaign, with Ku Klux Klan membership, along with the rest of the frantic fringe, showing measurable growth both North and South during this period of festering racial malaise...
...An Ohio savant, Representative Wayne L. Hays, took exception to the latter epithet...
...Elsewhere in the bureaucracy, it took no stream of Congressional invective, no hint of Presidential rebuke to put the damper on civil rights...
...Appeals to conscience have gone out of vogue...
...But Washington's anthem is no longer "We Shall Overcome...
...It is a jest of power that a Roman emperor might relish...
...He is trying to destroy the neighborhood school and he is trying to substitute for it a system set out by him...
...Commission on Civil Rights for accepting "desegregation plans" that resulted in no desegregation...
...There was Majority Leader Mike Mansfield on the Senate floor picking up an old Eastland refrain that the race-mixing bureaucrats were going too far, too fast in pushing school and hospital desegregation and then-the next day-retracting only half his statement...
...With a smile too, New York's Representative Emanuel Celler-an antique gold-plated liberal if there ever was one-spoke at a news conference of applying retroactive birth control to SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael...
...InAlabama the control of Governor George C. Wallace has reached dynastic proportions on a bedrock of support so firm that a connubial puppet, Lurleen, will probably become titular head of state...
...Sargent Shriver's Office of Economic Opportunity, always superbly sensitive to the shifting winds of politics, last month gave Eastland and his cohorts just cause for gratification by scuttling the Head Start programs of the Child Development Group of Mississippithe one Southern anti-poverty project that has managed to attain a broad base of support among disadvantaged and disfranchised Negroes...
...In its collective wisdom, too, the Georgia electorate left no honorable choice to Representative Charles Weltner of Atlanta, one of the South's few voices on Capitol HilI for civil rights progress, but to withdraw from his campaign for reelection rather than support Maddox...
...and all of a sudden, even Northern Democrats could play...
...In some states, the figure is closer to two per cent...
...It now seems clear," said the Reverend Kenneth Neigh of the United Presbyterian Church's Board of National Missions, "that OEO has adopted a new plantation policy where the South's poor are concerned...
...He appealed to them as only one Southerner could to his feJlows...
...The sentiment of the entire country," bragged Senator James East land, the jocose defender of Mississip pi's state sovereignty, "now stands with the -Southern people...
...With one nervous eye on Congressional reaction and the other on the White House, they have moved ever so cautiously to enforce the law that bars Federal financial aid to schools that practice discrimination-only to discover that the little they have done has been too much...
...Georgia voters exercised their freedom of choice to backslide i n t 0 paleolithic Talmadgery when the y spurned that mild Establishment figure, Ellis Arnall...
...For such backlash evangelists as Maryland's George P. ("Your Home Is Your Castle") Mahoney, Arkansas' tub-thumping Judge Jim Johnson, and Louisiana's bumptious John R. Rarick, 1966 seems to be a banner year...
...Our people are delighted with the riots in the North," a South Carolina restaurant owner told The Wall Street Journal...
...I realize," the President confided, "that in some instances there has been some harassment and some mistakes have been made...
...The Office of Education is firmly committed to the principle of local control of public schools...
...The name of the game on Capitol Hill was "Who's Afraid of Harold Howe...
...That battle was lost more than a year ago, when the White House peremptorily pulled the rug out from under Commissioner Howe's predecessor, Francis Keppel, when he tried to intervene in the flagrantly biased Chicago school system...
...The President pledges to see that "all citizens of this country are treated equally without discrimination...
...The new theme song is "We Can Sit This One Out," and you can hear them whistling it in the dark on both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue...
...There have been apprehensive tremors along Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to the mount of the Capitol...
...I would not characterize him in that way at all," Hays said...
...I think what he is trying to do is to destroy the school system of the United States as we know it...
...In this, the thirteenth year since the Supreme Court held racial assignment of pupils to be unconstitutional, perhaps eight or ten per cent of the Negro children in the South actually attend desegregated schools...
...There was unwitting irony in the President's references to "harassment" and "mistakes," for the harassment has been directed at the Federal bureaucrats and their mistakes have been on the side of leniency and tokenism...
...Only a few months ago the Office of Education was excoriated by the U.S...
...In speeches' to stand-pat school administrators, he has raised the troublesome issues of quality and equality in education, urging local officials to take the bold course that the Federal government cannot or will not pursue...
...The seismic rumble of the backlash has made no small impact on Washington, which stands, after all, almost at sea level on a foundation of mud...
...Howe has repeatedly assured implacable Congressmen that "the Office of Education has no intention . . . of compelling school busing and the redrawing of school boundary lines...
...The President joined in the game too, which is played with a United States Commissioner of Education and a dozen microphones...
...In the North, Federal officials no longer even pretend to have any leverage to cope with school discrimination...
...But last month, at a White House press conference, he adopted the caginess of a Philadelphia lawyer in refusing to disavow the segregationist candidates of 1966...
...Now, on election eve 1966, the thunderhead of another post-reconstruction era is boiling up once again across the land...
...In Georgia, which has set the pace for racial moderation in the Deep South, a petit-bourgeois racist, Lester Maddox, won the Democratic nomination for governor on a shoestring and is running against suave, country club Republican racist, Representative Howard H. (Bo ) Callaway...
...The message came through loud 'and clear to those in the Office of Education who have been "enthusiastic" about attacking at least the most blatant instances of unyielding racism...
...This is our chance for an alliance with them to regain control of the country...
...Lists of "backlash districts"-areas chiefly of middle and low income white residency -are being watched with microscopic diligence by the political technicians of both parties...
...The bold treatment of the racial theme two years ago is hardly visible in today's Presidential rhetoric...
...In 1965 the President adopted the anthem of the civil rights movement, proclaiming "We Shall Overcome...
...The President stood up before a lily-white audience of Louisiana politicians and begged his listeners to abjure the yahoo politics of the long post-Reconstruction night...
...His calls for local initiative are being hurled back at him as evidence of Federal tyranny and his appeals to conscience are cited as signs of a diabolical plot...
...Yet only a few dozen of the region's thousands of school districts have been required to pay the ultimate penalty for defiance provided by lawthe forfeiture of Federal funds...
...These gubernatorial candidates . . . have not asked me to support them and I have no plans to do so...
...Some people have been enthusiastic and differences have developed...
...The political experts will closely scan the row of northern cities from Watts to Harlem where violence boiled around the Negro ghettos...
...They did not keep the South Carolina statesman, Representative L. Mendel Rivers, from concluding that Howe "talks like a Communist," or from calling him "a misfit" and "an idiot...
Vol. 30 • November 1966 • No. 11
