Guest Blogger: Amy Schapiro on the 89th birthday of civil rights hero Nicholas Katzenbach.

Katzenbach confronting Alabama Governor George Corley Wallace outside the University of Alabama, 1963.  
In the last half of the twentieth century, the United States was transformed by many conflicts. None caused more public outcry than the struggles of the civil rights movement here at home and the bloodshed a world away in Vietnam. One man deeply entwined with both struggles, but often overlooked by history, is Nicholas Katzenbach, who celebrates his 89th birthday today.




For decades the image of this tall, balding government official confronting Governor George Wallace at the University of Alabama has come to symbolize the lengths to which Washington would go to desegregate America’s educational institutions.  Katzenbach, then Deputy Attorney General, was dispatched to Alabama by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to challenge the segregationist governor over the integration of the state university.




Nicholas Katzenbach in 1968.



In the midst of a media storm, Katzenbach stood his ground, ensuring that James Hood and Vivian Malone, two African-American students seeking entrance into this historically white university, were registered.



Among the throngs who watched this encounter unfold was a 12-year-old boy. As he later said, “1963 was a good year, the Dodgers beat the Yankees. I was 12, I was becoming aware of a lot going on, and seeing Katzenbach with Wallace sparked my interest.”

“I remember wondering who is a Deputy Attorney General (DAG) and looked it up in the encyclopedia to find out. I’m not sure if I found it there, but I remember learning that the DAG was essentially the Vice President of the Department of Justice.” Thirty years later that boy, Eric Holder,  became Deputy Attorney General. Today he serves as the first African American Attorney General in American history.  Little could Eric Holder have known then that he would assume the same positions as Katzenbach, both as DAG and later Attorney General, or that Vivian Malone, one of the two students who integrated the University of Alabama, would be his future sister-in-law.


Katzenbach’s focus as both Deputy Attorney General and Attorney General was on passage of civil rights legislation and its enforcement. Without enforcement, the law would be hollow. Katzenbach was the rare person who was trusted by both Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. And, it was Katzenbach who succeeded Kennedy as Johnson’s Attorney General. Although RFK and LBJ despised each other, they both, at different times, came to rely on Katzenbach to advise, shape, and move legislation forward.


When Katzenbach was not putting out fires in the field, he was busy navigating the legislative minefield and the pressure of civil rights activists to secure the codification of equal rights for all Americans.
 As we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr., and his great strides in changing the fabric of our society, let’s also remember Nicholas Katzenbach who today, January 17, celebrates his 89th birthday. 

Happy Birthday.


Amy Schapiro is writing a biography of Nicholas Katzenbach entitled, Leading Justice: The Life of Nicholas deBelleville Katzenbach to be published by the University of Alabama.

Eric Holder: “Nation of Cowards”? Not Really.

Eric Holder, the new Attorney General, raised hackles in Washington, D.C. yesterday for calling Americans a “national of cowards” on race relations, pointing to failures to build inter-racial ties outside the workplace. I certainly respect Holder for raising a sensitive and important issue. But on the history, I think he’s wrong.
The roster of heroes on this score is long and impressive and, to my mind, it deserves more attention than the cowards. Other countries have struggled with racism and zenophobia, but America is rare in addressing it so directly. Obviously, divisions and prejudice still exist. But we live in an tie of promise and good will, with Barack Obama in the White House and Holder himself making history at Justice.

As my brief contribution, I’d like to mention some heroes, specifically two relationships that crossed the divide during times when attitudes were ugly and simple handshakes required courage. Both helped lay groundwork for the civil rights successes to come later:
— A friendship among two US Senators, Roscoe Conkling and Blanche Bruce; and
— The work of a great lawyer, Clarence Darrow, for a ground-breaking client, Ossian Sweet.

Blanche Bruce (photo above) was the second African-American to reach the U.S. Senate (Riram Revels of Mississippi was the first), the first to serve a full term (1875-1881), and the only black senator during those years. Bruce had escaped slavery during the Civil War and gone north. He taught school in Hannibal, Missouri, and briefly attended Oberlin College. After the War, he returned to Mississippi to make money as a planter and rose in Reconstruction politics.

By 1875, when Bruce reached Washington, D.C., America had already lost its wartime idealism and grown tired of Reconstruction, spawning an attitude of resentment against freed slaves. Lynchings and other crackdowns were were on the rise. Bruce, as the only black Senator, confronted stark bigotry from colleagues — particularly fellow Mississippi Senator Lucius Lamar. On the day of his swearing-in on the Senator floor, Bruce rose to step forward and take the oath, but both of his Mississippi colleagues (Lamar and out-going Senator James Alcorn) refused to escort him. For a moment, Bruce stood absolutely alone — until one Senator finally saw his embarrassment, stood up, and walked over from across the chamber, took Bruce’s arm, and announced himself Bruce’s sponsor. It was Roscoe Conkling of New York.

Roscoe Conkling was one of Washington’s most powerful figures in 1975, boss of the NY State Republican machine, leader of the Republican Stalwarts and intimate with President US Grant. Conkling took Bruce under his wing, made him a protege, coached him in Senate procedures and helped him win key committee seats. They became fast friends, and Bruce would go so far as to name his first-born son after Conkling. Young men named Roscoe would populate the family tree for generations.

Clarence Darrow had never met Ossian Sweet in 1925 when he agreed to take Sweet’s case. Sweet, an African-American physician, had purchased a home in a white neighborhood in Detroit. A mob of neighbors tried to drive him out, but Sweet refused to be intimidated. Mobs started congregating around the Sweet home. One night, gunshots rang out, and Sweet fired back. A white man in the crowd was hit and died.
Local prosecutors quickly indicted Sweet for murder and set trial before an all-white jury.
The recently-formed NAACP had trouble at first finding a lawyer to take Sweet’s case, until they asked Darrow. Darrow was already famous from a lifetime defending headline clients from labor leaders Eugene V. Debs and Bill Haywood to most recently John Scopes, the high school tachers accused in 1924 of teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee. Darrow quickly saw the importance of the case and agreed to lead the defense.
His appeal to the jury based on common humanity became an instant classic:

“You are facing a problem of two races, a problem that will take centuries to solve. If I felt none of you were prejudiced, I’d have no fear. I want you to be as unprejudiced as you can be…..Draw upon your imagination and think how you would feel if you fired at some black man in a black community, and then had to be tried by them…. The danger of a mob is not what it does, but what it might do. Mob psychology is the most dreadful thing with which man has to contend. Its action is like the starting of a prairie fire. A match in the stuble, and it spreads and spreads, devouring everything in its way….the mob was waiting to see the sacrifice of some helpless blacks. They came with malice in their hearts…”

It took two trials, but ultimately Darrow prevailed, presuading the jury to reach a unanimous verdict of not guilty on ground of self defense. Ossian Sweet went free, and a precedent against housing discrimination was set forty years before the Civil Rights Act.

We don’t often think of Clarance Darrow and Roscoe Conkling as civil rights heroes, and Blanche Bruce and Ossian Sweet rarely get attention for their ground-breaking roles. But if today we are keeping score on heroes versus cowards on achieving racial justice in America, then I am happy to offer them as evidence on the good side. Thanks. –KenA
For more background, see my two book recommendations for today:

— On Blanche Bruce, The Senator and the Socialite: The True Story of America’s First Black Dynasty, by Lawrence Otis Graham.
— On Darrow and the Sweet trials, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age, by Kevin Boyle.