However, despite his hesitation when he spoke the words spilled from his lips as if he was still reading from the same script as the rest of the Administration.
“The President will go to any lengths to avoid a new war with the USSR,” he declaimed quietly, like a loyal Vice President was bound to do. “Any lengths.”
Gretchen digested this.
It seemed that the man who was a heartbeat away from the Presidency was, as her father believed, unsold on the new ‘all or nothing’ thinking coming out of the State Department.
“That’s very interesting, sir.”
The man and the woman rose to their feet, she rather more gingerly than the tall Texan.
“You be sure to convey my regards to your father, Mrs Brenckmann.”
Chapter 5
Ivan Allen, the fifty-three year old 52nd Mayor of Atlanta, had embraced the need for change long before the tragic events of 7th February in Bedford Pine Park, although like many good men he had walked a long — somewhat winding road — towards his own personal epiphany. He was a businessman turned politician, a pragmatist by nature who was inherently more interested in what made sense than by what this, or that, racial ideology or political dogma dictated. That said, he had been brought up in the Old South of Jim Crow, born and bred in the place where if anywhere, most Southerners believed the war for secession had been (tragically) lost, and when he had run to be Mayor of Atlanta he had had no alternative but to run on the same segregationist ticket as his rival Lester Maddox.
However, unlike Maddox, a dyed in the wool bigot who had refused to serve blacks in his restaurant and had been a virulent advocate of states’ rights in the 1961 Mayoral race, Allen’s campaign had broadcast hope. Virtually the entire non-white electorate of the city — approximately forty percent of all eligible voters — had swung in behind him. Not just because he was the least worst option for Mayor but because when he was on the stump he talked about the future, not the past, and it was obvious that he had plans for the betterment of the lives of all the city’s peoples.
On his first day in office Allen had ordered the removal of all WHITE and COLORED signs from city hall, and one misstep apart — building a wall between a black and white neighborhood, which he later came to bitterly regret — by the time of the atrocity of 7th February no other big city Mayor in the Deep South had done more to promote inter-communal and racial understanding.
Within weeks of assuming office he had started to winnow out the petty regulations and the entrenched nineteenth century bigotry which forbade the city to employ blacks in anything other than menial jobs. More ought to have been achieved faster and probably would have been, had it not been for the Cuban Missiles War. He ought to have done more. The one saving grace was that people in the black districts of Atlanta knew that unlike his predecessors he had done something and that he honestly wanted to do a lot more for them. Not because he was saint but because it was the right thing to do; and in Georgia that made him so different from most white men in positions of power and authority as to make him to all intents, unique.
After the Bedford Pine Park shootings there had been isolated local riots and low-level mostly non-violent ongoing civil unrest in Atlanta but nothing comparable to the conflagrations in Mississippi and neighboring Alabama. Whereas elsewhere in the south order had not been restored until the National Guard and Marines had shot dead hundreds and whole districts had burned down, Atlanta had been an island of relative calm amidst a sea of troubles. Although at the time of the shootings Allen would not have described himself as any kind of personal friend of Dr Martin Luther King; the two men had encountered each other many times, always in the spirit of Christian charity and understanding, and he and his wife had met King’s wife, Coretta and been introduced to several of his children.
In those terrible days after the shooting while Dr King fought for life the surviving leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, members of King’s family and Allen had visited black neighborhoods and pleaded for patience. People in those beleaguered, angry streets had been astonished to see their white Mayor, his wife and the Atlanta Police Department Chief, Herbert Jenkins unarmed and hatless, entrusting their safety to the good will of people who had no reason to trust them, accompanying community leaders and worshippers from Dr King’s Ebenezer Street Chapel going from door to door asking for restraint in the face of intolerable provocation.
Allen had found himself in homes and speaking in halls and chapels in parts of Atlanta where no previous Mayor had ever stood, or even driven through, talking about how when he had joined the family business in 1933 at the height of the Great Depression he had started off in the basement of the company’s Atlanta store, ‘learning the ropes’ from a long-time black employee. It had been a shock being a privileged ‘college boy’ fresh out of the Georgia Institute of Technology brandishing his Degree in Commerce one day; and the next to be the lowliest of the low receiving a practical education in the business from the very bottom up! It helped that he had discovered very early in his political life that his faith — he was a devout Presbyterian — gave him common ground and cause with many of his constituents in the black neighborhoods of his city. In retrospect, looking back over the last four months he was painfully aware of what he, his city, his state and his country had very nearly lost on that dreadful day in early February.
The Bedford Pines atrocity had not wrought any kind of miracle of reconciliation in Atlanta. Two hundred years of history could not be wiped away in a single day or by a single act. The atonement of one white man or tens of thousands of white men could not undo the iniquities of slavery and the unjust settlement of a war that had ended almost a hundred years ago. To pretend otherwise was to live in a fool’s paradise.
The thing was not the journey it was the taking of the first dangerous steps, the laying of foundations for men of good will to build upon in the years to come.
Four months on the Bedford Pine Park shootings had brought together every man and woman of good will in Atlanta and on this sweltering summer day. They had come to Oakland Cemetery to remember the dead and to think of all those who had lost friends and loved ones.
Big public address speakers had been positioned on poles around the north eastern quadrant of Oakland Cemetery. The Atlanta PD estimated at upwards of a hundred thousand people had massed in Potters Field and the Black section of huge graveyard. There were television cameras, scores of photographers and journalists of ever political and social leaning in the city. Later today the March on Philadelphia would parade through Atlanta at the outset of its historic — and everybody prayed non-violent — trek to the nation’s temporary capital.
Samuel Ernest Vandiver, the Governor of Georgia was winding up his remarks on the low podium. He was practically invisible to the great crowd behind a battery of perhaps two dozen microphones.
Ivan Allen knew his turn was about to come. Having run through his speech countless times in recent days he tried to concentrate on calming his nerves, and composing his soul for the forthcoming trial. He was accustomed to public speaking, to coping with all manner of heckling, and each and every manifestation of stage fright; today was different. This was the largest assembly he would ever address in his life and this was possibly the most important day of his life. On this day the eyes of America were on the city and he spoke for Atlanta.