The fact that the country’s first serious dialogue on civil rights in a century began around graduation time seems to us instructive. We were reminded by the many statements on the urgency of the situation that have been included in Commencement speeches, traditional vehicles for the platitude and the cliché, how quickly the dialogue could turn into cant and how easily the action that is called for could be confused with rituals that have no relevance to an American who is crippled by his color. All of us were given a particularly tragic lesson in distinguishing the ritualistic from the real last week when in the space of fourteen hours the country passed three landmarks in its painful efforts to meet its own standards. First, Governor George Wallace, of Alabama, with his lips compressed and his back stiffened, like some stubborn schoolboy determined to go through with a childish dare, stood in the doorway of an auditorium at the University of Alabama and—microphone strapped around him, script carefully prepared—“turned away” two Negro students who were already using the dormitory rooms assigned to them by the university and who by the time the Governor permitted their admission had eaten lunch in the university dining hall and chatted amiably with their classmates. Our own first reaction was much like that of Deputy Attorney General Nicholas de B. Katzenbach, the federal official who was on hand to be barred by the Governor. He said, “I don’t know what the purpose of this show is.” How could anybody fail to wonder what connection the performance had with the conditions causing street demonstrations in a dozen American cities or with the education of Vivian Malone and Jimmy Hood, who are, as President Kennedy said in his speech that evening, simply “two clearly qualified young Alabama residents who happened to have been born Negro”? We had to wonder about the relevance of President Kennedy’s need to federalize seventeen thousand National Guardsmen so that a general rather than a Deputy Attorney General could ask the Governor to move aside. Even the President’s speech, vital and often eloquent though it was, sometimes seemed detached from the crisis. That “we are confronted primarily with a moral issue” is precisely what some Negroes have been urging Mr. Kennedy to say ever since his inauguration, and what, from the time of the Supreme Court decision in 1954, they vainly asked President Eisenhower to say. But then, as President Kennedy noted, the issue “is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution,” and “the heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities.” The importance of Mr. Kennedy’s speech—that, after nine years, a President was finally moved to remind the citizens that their country is morally committed to equality—was at first lost for us in the reflection that, phrase by phrase, the speech could have been written by compiling the basic truths that the President had been asked to reiterate, and, phrase by phrase, it did not differ greatly from the Commencement speeches reported in the same newspapers during the past week—or the Fourth of July speeches that will be reported in them next month. Then, a few hours after the President had finished his speech and after Governor Wallace, his day in the sun and the television lights over at last, had returned to his capital, Medgar Evers, the N.A.A.C.P. field secretary for Mississippi, was murdered in Jackson. For the first time in those startling fourteen hours, through the ultimate relevance of a man’s life, it was made clear to us that the confrontation in Alabama, bizarre as it was, was no mere circus, and that the President was not merely appeasing his critics when he acknowledged that “we face a moral crisis as a country and as a people.” ♦
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