Bombingham 85the Kennedy administration pressured Wallace to back down or face jail
time. ‘Dammit,’ the pugnacious governor replied to the state attorney general.
‘Send the Justice department word, I ain’t compromising with anybody. I’m
gonna [make the federal government] bring troops into this state.’
On the scorching morning of 11 June, deputy attorney general Nicholas
Katzenbach confronted the governor at Foster Auditorium while Malone and
Hood waited in a government sedan. As the television cameras rolled, the
diminutive Wallace raised his hand for the 6′ 2 ′′, 200-pound Katzenbach to
halt. A visibly angry Katzenbach read a presidential proclamation command-
ing the governor to step aside so that the students could enroll. Wallace read
his own proclamation, a blistering condemnation of the federal government’s
‘unwelcomed, unwanted, unwarranted, and force-induced intrusion upon
the campus of the University of Alabama.’ Katzenbach declared that he was
‘not interested in a show’ and escorted Hood and Malone to their dorm rooms
while President Kennedy federalized the Alabama National Guard.
Having scored points with his white constituency, Wallace declined the
klan’s offer to storm the university and retreated to Montgomery. He admit-
ted, ‘I can’t fight bayonets with my bare hands.’ It was the last college
campus showdown involving a southern governor and the federal govern-
ment. For standing in the schoolhouse door, Wallace and his wife Lurleen
were rewarded with an unequalled four more terms as Alabama’s governor.
Wallace was now America’s top spokesman for segregation. The students that
he tried to exclude from the University of Alabama excelled. Malone became
the university’s first black graduate, and Hood, after first dropping out because
of stress, received his doctorate there three decades later.
Although the president was relieved that there was no Ole Miss rerun in
Tuscaloosa, he faced increasing pressure to take more action for civil rights.
In Cambridge, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where 70 per cent of blacks
were either unemployed or seasonal workers, Gloria Richardson, a college
graduate and a divorced, middle-aged mother of two, led a SNCC campaign
against discrimination in hiring, housing, and education, rather than voting
rights and segregation alone. Described as a Joan of Arc, the uncompromis-
ing Richardson was inspired by Harriet Tubman, the great Underground
Railroad conductor who had been born a slave on the Eastern Shore. The
Cambridge movement was the first grassroots movement outside the deep
South and the first time a woman headed a direct-action campaign. When
the demonstrators and police clashed, the National Guard used bayonets
and pepper gas to restore order. Kennedy was sobered further by reports
that racial clashes in the textile town of Danville, Virginia, sent forty-eight
demonstrators to the hospital. That summer, 100,000 protesters demon-
strated across the nation against police brutality, lily-white construction sites,
and segregated schools, resulting in ten deaths. As the country teetered on
Richardson, Gloria
(1922– ): Led an SNCC
affiliate in Maryland call-
ed the Cambridge Non-
violent Action Committee.