COLUMBIA, SC — The
heated national rhetoric of the civil rights period hit home in Columbia in
April 1963, with two very different speakers making their point to very
different crowds eight days apart.
Nation of Islam
leader Malcolm X swept in first, on April 17, preaching his message of black
separatism before a small crowd of blacks at a Columbia mosque.
U.S. Attorney
General Robert F. Kennedy followed, on April 25, addressing two mostly white
groups affiliated with the University of South Carolina.
In both cases, local
leaders fretted about what might happen during those visits by outsiders. Many
people who wanted to maintain the segregated status quo did everything they
could to stop the visits.
In the end, the
fears of fallout proved overblown. As was typical of South Carolina during that
period, both appearances came off without any major protests or arrests.
Malcolm X
mesmerized his listeners during a nearly three-hour speech: “Let the white man
have his own, control his own and use his own for the benefit of his own,” he
said. “We only want what we can develop and earn for ourselves without help
from the white man; something we will never receive anyway.”
Kennedy gave a
talk to USC law students before turning political with his push for integration
in a speech to a university professors group: “It has been 100 years since the
slaves were freed,” he said. “During that time in many places little progress
has been made to give full liberty to the descendants of the slaves. Now time
is running out fast for this country.”
A sit-in at the Woolworth's department store in Columbia, SC, in March of 1960.
Robert Anderson, Henrie Montieth Treadwell and James Solomon, the first three African-American students who integrated the University of South Carolina
Harvey Gantt leaves the Registrar's Office at Clemson University, in January of 1963. Gantt was the first black student to be admitted to Clemson
Bigots rally on the State House grounds in 1963 to protest integration
Considering the
mood of the times, the words were incendiary. But most of the fireworks had
come before the speeches, before the speakers even arrived in town.
Township turns
away Black Muslims
Columbia leaders
openly plotted to stop the appearance of Malcolm X, the young firebrand of the
Nation of Islam, an organization they viewed as an extremist hate group.
When word slipped
out that a local Nation of Islam leader had rented the Township Auditorium for
Malcolm X’s visit, the county legislative delegation forced the manager of the
county-owned venue to back out of the contract (which included cash for 10
extra police officers to ensure safety). When organizers moved the event to a
Masonic lodge in West Columbia, local African-American church leaders prompted
that venue to turn away the Nation of Islam group, too.
State Rep. Heath
Manning noted that “reputable Negro leaders in the community are just as much
opposed” to the Malcolm X meeting as white leaders. The Rev. I. DeQuincey
Newman, head of the local NAACP, praised Black Muslims for their stress of
good, moral behavior, but he said he didn’t approve of their anti-white,
anti-Christian, anti-Semitic attitude. J. A. Bacoats, Benedict College
president, said the Nation of Islam group should be allowed to gather and hear
Malcolm X under the Constitution’s freedom of speech clause, but “I am dubious
and very hesitant to endorse or give cooperation to any extremist group.”
Malcolm X ended up
speaking April 17 to about 70 people crammed into a small mosque called
Muhammad’s Temple of Islam on Waverly Street. (The building no longer stands.)
He came and went without any problems. Law enforcement officers, including SLED
director Pete Strom, watched his group from a respectable distance.
Columbia educator
King B.L. Jeffcoat, then working on his master’s degree at Atlanta University,
heard about the planned Columbia speech from one of his professors, Lonnie
Cross. He decided he wanted to hear what the man receiving so much attention
had to say.
Two things stand out
in Jeffcoat’s memory: How difficult it was to find the speech location as it
was moved several times, and the fire-and-brimstone nature of Malcolm X’s
speech delivery. At age 82 now, Jeffcoat doesn’t remember details of the
speech’s content.
Jeffcoat was
allowed into the mosque because of his connection to Cross, who was prominent
in the Nation of Islam and went by the name Abdulalim A. Shabazz. Since he
wasn’t a Black Muslim, Jeffcoat was a bit of an outsider in the crowd, but he
wasn’t fearful to attend.
“The idea of the
secrecy (of the location) was a little disturbing,” Jeffcoat said. “I remember
everybody dressed in white, and he had these security guards so you knew you
didn’t want to bother him.”
When he mentions
to friends now that he was at that speech, they often regret that they missed
the chance to hear Malcolm X.
An Associated
Press article on the visit, written by Kent Krell, noted that patrol cars
circled the block during the nearly three-hour speech. He branded integration
as a trick foisted on Southern blacks by “foxy liberal Northern whites,”
according to Krell’s story.
Malcolm X told The
State reporter Sam McCuen, who met him at the airport and talked with him
several times during the multi-day visit, that he understood why the contract
for the Township had been voided.
“We never try to
force ourselves on anyone or into any place where we are not wanted,” he said.
“The hall belongs to the county, and the delegations had every right to
cancel.”
McCuen, who
covered many of the top civil rights stories of that era and now runs a
public-relations firm in Lexington, said that remains one of the most
extraordinary days of his life. “I was so young and stupid, he probably didn’t
figure I was very harmful,” McCuen said.
The small mosque
was packed. The few other reporters there left quickly after the speech to make
their deadlines.
Then, “I was the
only white guy in the building,” McCuen said. And by the end of the speech, “he
had me convinced I was a blue-eyed devil. He was an incredible orator.”
Krell, who retired
as associate editorial page editor at The State, also recalled Malcolm X as a
mesmerizing speaker. “He spoke without notes, and it was riveting,” Krell said.
“At times he sounded like a Shakespearean actor and in the end he used more of
the patois of the blacks.”
McCuen spoke
briefly with Malcolm X after the speech. As the young reporter prepared to
leave, the Black Muslim leader reached out his hand and asked for McCuen’s car
keys. He motioned to several large assistants and said: “This is Mr. McCuen.
He’s a friend of mine. Check his car and make sure there’s nothing in the back
seat and the tires aren’t slashed, and watch until you see his tail lights
disappear and report back to me.”
Kennedy faced
different sort of opposition
Local leaders were
nearly as outspoken in their disdain for Kennedy, who had been at the lead of
federal efforts to integrate Southern universities at the behest of his
brother, President John F. Kennedy.
State Rep. A.W.
“Red” Bethea, a segregationist from Dillon, said he welcomed the attorney
general but wondered why he was meeting only with USC law students and
professors. “For God’s sake, let him take time out to talk to some South
Carolinians with some common sense,” Bethea said.
A few people wrote
letters to the editor to protest Kennedy’s planned April 25 visit — one by
Henry Horton said Kennedy would be “intruding where he is not wanted” — but
most local leaders tried to scuttle the plans behind the scenes. Kennedy was
invited by the USC chapter of the American Association of University Professors
and the law students, who moved up their May 1 Law Day event to welcome the
nation’s 37-year-old attorney general.
Bob Foster, a
member of the law school faculty then, recalled law school dean Robert Figg
showing him a stack of angry letters from lawyers throughout the state.
“The mood was
unbelievable,” Foster said recently. “Inviting the top legal official in the
country to speak at a law school was being condemned.”
One letter writer,
a prominent attorney, accused Figg of deserting his birthright and closed by
saying: “You can tell a person’s character by the company he keeps.”
Figg showed Foster
his response, which used a different pithy quote: “Never explain yourself; your
friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe it.”
USC’s trustees
made it clear they hadn’t invited Kennedy, according to an editorial in The
State. They indicated they had little influence on the decisions by the
professors’ organization or the law school students. USC also pointed out that
only about a third of its professors were members of the group that invited
Kennedy.
Earlier on the day
of his visit to Columbia, Kennedy had been in Alabama, where he was greeted by
segregationist protesters. Eighteen of the protesters were arrested, and Gov.
George Wallace showed his sympathy for the protesters by raising a Confederate
battle flag over the Alabama Capitol.
In contrast,
Kennedy was greeted at Columbia Metropolitan Airport by about 100 supporters,
many of them Benedict College students. The USC law students later gave him a
standing ovation after he spoke of the importance of their planned profession.
The newspaper
coverage from that day doesn’t mention protesters against Kennedy. The Benedict
students at the airport held up signs saying: “Welcome to S.C. Land of
Segregation and Discrimination” and “Let There Be Justice for All Sides.”
Kennedy stopped by
Gov. Donald Russell’s office for what both called a “courtesy” visit that
lasted 24 minutes. Russell said they didn’t discuss integration, but the
governor previously had made it clear South Carolina didn’t want federal troops
at Clemson (which already had integrated) or USC (which would soon).
After speaking to
the law students, Kennedy turned overtly political in his presentation to the
professors at the Jefferson Hotel.
“We must
recognize, as responsible citizens and as responsible government officials,
that the Negroes in this country cannot be expected indefinitely to tolerate
the injustices which flow from official and private racial discrimination in
the United States,” he said.
“The troubles we
see now, agitation and even bloodshed, will not compare to what we will see a
decade from now unless real progress is made.”
Between his two
speeches, Kennedy relaxed at the home of local attorney Terrell Glenn, and he
slept that night at the Glenns’ home.
Lyles Glenn, now
an attorney in Columbia, was a child then. He recalls that he and his brother
met Kennedy at the door of their house and later were hustled off to their
grandparents for the night. The family since then has referred to the bed where
Kennedy slept as “the Kennedy bed.”
Within six years
of their Columbia speeches, both Malcolm X and Kennedy were dead.
Malcolm X, who had
broken with the Nation of Islam by then, was shot during a disturbance at a
speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Manhattan on Feb. 21, 1965. Kennedy, then a
New York senator and presidential candidate, was assassinated June 5, 1968, in
a ballroom at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles as he addressed supporters after
winning the California Democratic primary.
Their visits to
Columbia in April 1963, while mere footnotes in their life stories, marked
important moments in the civil rights efforts in South Carolina, in part
because they came off without the protests and violence that occurred in other
locales.