Robert Francis ‘Bobby’ Kennedy the younger brother of the President and since 20th January 1961 the Attorney General of the United States of America was under no illusion that the thousands filing down towards Auburn Avenue had come to see him. As his heavily protected cavalcade of bullet proof limousines crawled down Jackson Street to the intersection with Auburn Avenue he had the oddest sense that the future was rushing towards him. America was changing and sooner or later the American people were going to wake up to a different country. Sooner or later that change might have happened anyway but the October War had pressed the ‘fast-forward’ button, brought things to a head years before they might otherwise have become the over-riding domestic issues confronting not just the present Administration, but whichever came after it. Here in Atlanta a century after William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union Army had passed through on its ‘March to the Sea’ through Georgia, only a fool or a charlatan or a diehard Klan bigot could still believe that the hundred year old post-Civil War settlement which, even now, disenfranchised and disadvantaged men, women and children simply because of the colour of their skin, was anything other than fundamentally wrong. Here in Atlanta and elsewhere in the South, whites and blacks alike had realised that their futures were inexplicably intertwined, that the old ways which had so recently killed so many of their fellow Americans, were unsustainable in the new age. Bobby Kennedy didn’t hear many people saying it out loud, not yet, but one day they would shout it out in their thousands and millions and when they did, he planned on being there to hear the thunder of righteous voices.
The Attorney General’s apotheosis had come upon him late. He had grown up in the hothouse of northern Democratic Party politics, suspicious of and forever mindful that Southern Democrats weren’t like him. Yet it hadn’t been until he and Jack had been on the election trail and of necessity courted exactly that southern constituency that the reality of life in the Deep South nearly a hundred years after the abolition of slavery in the Union and the end of the Civil War, had really stuck in his craw. This was his fifth visit to Atlanta since the October War and nothing in politics had given him more pride and satisfaction than his association and developing friendship with the extraordinary man to whom the massive crowd had come to look to for hope.
Something remarkable had happened — and was happening — all across the Deep South. Yes, religious and racial bigotry, segregation and countless injustices remained ingrained, entrenched within the fabric of the South but increasingly, the Civil Rights movement was being embraced by poor whites who shared the privations of the large part of the coloured community, and by middle class whites who just wanted to live in peace with their neighbours. For every diehard red neck bigot there were tens of pragmatic souls who — rocked by the near disaster of the October War which had robbed them of the certainties of their former lives — had privately seen the light. All men were equal in the sight of God; and all men were the same flesh and bone beneath the skin.
“Now and then,” the Attorney General of the Unites States of America said distractedly as he smiled and nodded at the waving, cheerful throng pressing close to the Governor of Georgia’s limousine, “I find myself honestly believing that some good might yet come out of the war.”
Samuel Ernest Vandiver, the forty-five year old seventy-third Governor of Georgia did not reply immediately. But for the war and the dislocation in its aftermath he would have had to run for re-election last fall. Not that the local Democratic hierarchy would have rowed in behind him; he’d made too many enemies cleaning up the mess — mostly good old-fashioned graft that had gotten out of hand — he had inherited from his predecessor, Marvin Griffin. He’d been Griffin’s Lieutenant-Governor and was therefore tarnished by association. This hadn’t made his job any easier and he’d made a lot of enemies among Georgia’s Democratic Party aristocracy, many of whom regarded themselves as the guardians of the ‘proud’ tradition of their plantation-owning ancestors. Georgia democrats had never forgotten that it was the Abe Lincoln’s Republican Union that had raped the South; it was the same nineteenth century mindset that allowed otherwise well-educated, rational men to refer to the Civil War as the ‘War of Succession’, or the “War for State’s Rights’.
Like the President’s younger brother Vandiver had trained as a lawyer before entering politics. Elected Mayor of Lavonia in Franklyn County in 1946 soon after he left the United States Army Air Corps he’d become the State Adjutant-General in 1948, been elected Lieutenant-Governor in 1954 and successfully run for the Governorship in 1958 when it was still de rigor for a Southern Democrat in Georgia to be a conviction segregationist. Not that Vandiver had ever had a problem with that. Back in 1958 he’d pledged to defend segregation in the State education system; his campaign motto had been ‘No, not one!’ declaring that under his administration not one black child would attend a white school. Notwithstanding this promise, Vandiver had meekly complied with a decision in a US District Court ordering the admission of the first two black students to the University of Georgia. Afterwards, he had persuaded the Georgia State Assembly to repeal a law banning the funding of integrated schools and set up a commission to plan for wider school desegregation.
Like many of contemporary Southern Democrats his college education, war service and exposure to influences and ideas from outside his immediate Georgia caucus, Vandiver had for many years found himself espousing views and prejudices that he no longer personally regarded — if he ever had — as being articles of faith. He was no latter-day born again reformist and he’d fought tooth and nail to preserve Georgia’s County Unit System of voting — a form of electoral college rather than one man one vote form of democracy — right up until the moment the United States Supreme Court had ruled it as unconstitutional; but a part of him had secretly welcomed being forced to eventually start doing the right thing.
There was no shame in that; Bobby Kennedy had decided that Vandiver, despite his faults, was a man with whom he and the Administration could do business. Vandiver’s Governorship had been efficient, relatively ‘clean’ by Georgia standards and but for the war would have improved the lot of many of the poorest Georgians.
How many other state governors of either Democratic or Republican persuasions could honestly claim that?
“That’s a stretch,” the Governor of Georgia remarked. “I find it very hard to see any good coming out of what happened back on October sixty-two.” Unlike his companion in the back seat of the limousine he was still intensely uncomfortable to be seen paying court to the most famous living Georgian. It wasn’t because he was a racist — because he didn’t consider himself to be one, other than in the small things imbued in one from birth in the Deep South — but he was much more aware than the President’s younger brother that crowds in the streets around the Ebenezer Baptist Church represented only a section, albeit a significant section, of the natural Democratic constituency that he represented. The Democratic Party, especially in the South, was an unimaginably broad ‘church’ embracing Northern liberals and Southern white supremacists and every shade of politics in between. First and foremost he was a practical man. If he alienated too many people on the right he honestly didn’t know if that left him enough votes on the left to one, win the Democratic nomination for the next gubernatorial race; and two, win the actual General Election. He could not remember a time in his adult life when opinions had been more polarised, or when the Democratic Party machine in Georgia had been so fragmented. “The economy of the great State of Georgia is still in recession,” he went on. “I’ve got military bases shutting down all over the place, nowhere near enough police to keep the streets safe. Hell, it isn’t as if I can trust the National Guard to do much more than direct traffic. You’ll forgive me if I beg to differ with you, I hope, sir.”