Tracesbut February 1964 Was Not Just the Month of the Beatles

G. Lawson “Our Problems are Legion”: Kuehnert the Popular Response to Civil Rights Reform in North Carolina afer Brown v. Board of Education, 1954-1957 It was February 7, 1964, and the Beatles had arrived. Landing in New York’s Kennedy Airport on their frst visit to the United States, the band was greeted at the terminal by 3,000 screaming fans, the latest instance of musical immigration in an era later dubbed the “British Invasion.” Teir song “I Want to Hold Your Hand” had just topped the US charts, and on February 9 they would perform in front of over 70 million viewers on the Ed Sullivan Show. Rock-and-roll’s greatest icons were live on American soil, and “Beatlemania” spread like an epidemic.1 tracesBut February 1964 was not just the month of the Beatles. Beyond the giddy celebration of pop music in concert venues and on television shows, the US civil rights struggle thundered. Early 1964 marked the zenith of decades of infamed rhetoric, political agitation, and racial tension. It had been ten years since the US Supreme Court had ruled segregation in public schools unconstitutional, but the civil rights of black Americans had not yet been secured by federal legislation. Te Civil 1 Ian MacDonald, Revolution in the Head: the Beatles’ Records and the Sixties (London: Pimlico, 1998); Barry Miles, The British Invasion: the Music, the Times, the Era (New York: GMC Distribution, 2009). 15 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History Phasellus in molestie mi, eu rhoncus diam. In eu odio sed arcu dapibus dictum. Suspendisse mattis eleifend feugiat. Vivamus ultrices mi at felis ultrices tempus. Suspendisse a quam ex. (Photo by Xxxx Xxxx.)1 Rights Act of 1964 was being debated in Congress, but its legislative fate was far from predetermined. Would southern Democrats in the Senate be able to add crippling amendments afer another long flibuster? Te opposition was virulent. Sam Ervin, a Democratic senator from western North Carolina, promised one of his constituents on February 11 that southern politicians “will do everything within our power to defeat” the bill.2 Although the civil rights decade from 1954-1965 is commonly framed by signposts of federal political action, from Brown v. Board of Education to 2 Letter, Sam Ervin to Mr. R.H. McLain, February 11, 1964, Subseries 1.11.2., Folder 4359, Coll. 03847A, Sam J. Ervin Senate Papers, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (hereafter “Ervin Senate Papers”). 16 G. Lawson Kuehnert the Voting Rights Act, the most important shif in the civil rights landscape during these years was not political. Lyndon Johnson recognized this well in 1964. On the same day that the Beatles arrived in New York, President Johnson penned a short personal letter to Sam McKenzie, a Superior Court Judge of the Atlanta Judicial Circuit, on the topic of civil rights reform in the South. He wrote that the “task of persuading people to change the patterns of a lifetime is difcult, but it must and it will be done.”3 In order for the civil rights movement to succeed, ordinary people in the South had to change their attitudes and behavior. Even Johnson, the man who arguably worked harder than anyone to secure passage of efective civil rights legislation in the Congress, understood that real change could not be legislated. Te American public, especially in the South, needed a change of soul. It is therefore the popular response to reform, not the political response, that speaks most powerfully about the processes and patterns of change in the South during the civil rights movement. Tis article shows ordinary people across North Carolina coming to grips with a changing racial order in the years immediately afer the Brown decision in 1954. Based on investigation of hundreds of letters sent to North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin from 1954- 1957, this article traces the attitudes, concerns, and emotional responses that North Carolina residents revealed in writing to their senator.4 Te letters are a window into the white opposition ideology and tactics, the support of civil rights legislation by a small but vocal contingency of white liberals and moderates, and the hesitant assertiveness of black Americans. Most importantly, the letters provoke—subtly on the surface, boldly between the lines—a new understanding of how the general public in a southern state came to terms with the civil rights movement. Te predilection toward categorizing the popular response to civil rights reform in terms of a simple, binary metric disguises the more fuid processes of individual and community change that occurred. Te popular response to reform cannot be measured only by shifs in political afliation or opinion polls, but must be traced in the murky realm of popular expression. Te 3 Letter, Lyndon Baines Johnson to Sam Phillips McKenzie, February 7, 1964, Box 2, Executive Files for Dates 11/22/63-3/25/64, Human Rights (HU 2), White House Correspondence Files (WHCF), The Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, TX. 4 In the years between 1954 and 1963, Ervin received over 1000 personal letters from constituents on the subjects of civil rights and segregation, and from 1964-1965, at the height of the civil rights controversy, Ervin received another 1000-1500 letters. 17 The UNC-Chapel Hill Journal of History people of North Carolina held disparate visions about the future of their state and of race relations. Indeed, the popular response to civil rights reform in North Carolina form a complicated matrix of ofen conficting ideas about the future of American society. Tis research is situated in the growing body of literature about the public response to civil rights in the South. Among popular civil rights studies, discussions of the white opposition have generally focused on the local or regional level and on opposition within the political sphere.5 While at least two state-level studies have been conducted in recent years on the public response to civil rights, most notably Adam Fairclough’s exhaustive work on the civil rights movement in Louisiana, here the historiography is thinner.6 Tis article aims to fll this historiographical gap, though it also stands on the shoulders of important research about the civil rights movement in North Carolina, complementing local studies by William Chafe and Charles McKinney. It also provides a broader perspective to David Cunningham’s recently published research on the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina.7 5 Important regional-level studies include: George Lewis, Massive Resistance: the White Response to the Civil Rights Movement (London: Oxford UP, 2006); Numan V. Bartley, The Rise of Massive Resistance: Race and Politics in the South during the 1950s (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969); Neil R. McMillen, The Citizen’s Council: Organised Resistance to the Second Reconstruction (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971); Elizabeth Jacoway and David R. Colbur, eds., Southern Businessmen and Desegregation (Baton Rouge and London, 1982); David L. Chappell, Inside Agitators: White Southerners in the Civil Rights Movement (Baltimore and London, 1994); Keith Finley, Delaying the Dream: Southern Senators and the Fight Against Civil Rights, 1938-1965 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008); and Jason Sokol, There Goes My Everything: White Southerners in the Age of Civil Rights, 1945-1975 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006). Notable local studies include: J. Mills Thornton, Dividing Lines: Municipal Politics and the Struggle for Civil Rights in Montgomery, Birmingham, and Selma (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002); David R. Colburn, Racial Change and Community Crisis: St. Augustine, Florida, 1877-1980 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); John Dittmer, Local People: The Struggle for Civil Rights in Mississippi (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Glenn T. Eskew, But for Birmingham: The Local and National Movements in the Civil Rights Struggle (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1997). 6 Adam Fairclough, Race and Democracy: The Civil Rights Struggle in Louisiana, 1915-1972 (Athens, Ga., and London, 1995); see also Lassiter and Andrew B. Lewis, eds., The Moderates’ Dilemma: Massive Resistance to School Desegregation in Virginia (Charlottesville and London, 1998). 7 Relevant literature includes: William H. Chafe, Civilities and Civil Rights: Greensboro, North Carolina, and the Black Struggle for Freedom (New York and Oxford, 1980); Charles Wesley McKinney, Greater Freedom: the Evolution of the Civil Rights Struggle in Wilson, North Carolina (Maryland: University Press of America, 2010); David Cunningham, Klansville, U.S.A.: the Rise and Fall of the Civil Rights-era Ku Klux Klan (New York: Oxford UP, 2013); Anders Walker, The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 18 G. Lawson Kuehnert Phasellus in molestie mi, eu rhoncus diam. In eu odio sed arcu dapibus dictum. Suspendisse mattis eleifend feugiat. Vivamus ultrices mi at felis ultrices tempus. Suspendisse a quam ex. (Photo by Xxxx Xxxx.)1 Te methodology of this article—employing letters from the North Carolina public to demonstrate the nuances within the opposition to civil rights reform—represents a new approach, though it comes with some limitations.8 Te letters are not necessarily representative. Indeed most white North Carolinians did not express their opinions to Senator Ervin in writing. Moreover, many white citizens believed that Ervin already understood their views and was representing them adequately. As Mrs. L.D. Justic of Henderson noted in the postscript of a letter in February 1964, she had asked “two or three women” to sign her letter opposing integration, but they “said Senator Ervin knows how we feel and will vote against” the Civil Rights Act of 1964.9 Beyond this, ascertaining the sentiments of the black public in North Carolina through Ervin’s letters is even more difcult, as so few black citizens wrote to him.

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