To the Editor
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: March 1, 1961 to March 31, 1961?
Location: Atlanta, Ga.?
Genre: Letter
Topic: Civil Disobedience
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Political and Social Views
Montgomery Bus Boycott
Student movements
Details
In a speech before the National Civil Liberties Clearing House on 23 March, special assistant to the president Harris Wofford defended the Kennedy administration’s strategy of using executive action to end segregation. To the ire of some civil rights groups, Wofford also suggested that organizations should abandon their “well established methods” of protesting and litigation in favor of getting in “better gear with the Government.”1 Responding to an editorial critical of Wofford published in the Washington Afro-American, King defends Wofford’s record, citing proof of his civil rights activism and maintaining that “his counsel is responsible for a good part of the executive action” taken by the administration.2 The letter was not published in the Afro-American.
To the editor:
Since you were good enough to suggest me as one of the persons President Kennedy might call on for advice on civil rights, I want to comment on your inaccurate and unfair description of Harris Wofford, one of President Kennedy’s special assistants who is working both on the Peace Corps and on civil rights problems.3
Harris Wofford has been an apostle of the civil rights {—and never delay—} during all the years I have known him. I am sure that his counsel is responsible for a good part of the President’s new program of executive action.
Mr. Wofford has been actively engaged in the struggle for civil rights ever since his studies of Gandhi in India in 1949 and his book, India Afire.4 Although from a southern white family, he attended and graduated from Howard Law School—and later taught there.5 In 1955, before the Montgomery bus boycott began, he gave a talk at Hampton Institute, calling for non-violent direct action against segregation.6 This talk and other talks and articles by him on civil disobedience were widely distributed in the South, helping to create better understanding of what we were doing in Montgomery—and of what the sit-in students have been doing since.7
Mr. Wofford was one of the first persons to offer help to us during the bus boycott, and his advice has been available and useful ever since.8 His role in the Civil Rights Commission, as counsel to Father Hesburgh, as director of the studies and hearings on discrimination in housing, and then as an editor of the Commission’s Report, was an important {valuable} one.9
He was one of the authors—probably the main author, I understand—of the strong Democratic civil rights platform of 1960.10 All of us who know him know that his efforts inside the new Administration will be to see that this platform is carried out.
The speech on which your editorial “Wofford vs. Civil Rights” was based, is no counsel of delay but instead was a call for executive action—and for public efforts to secure executive action.11 I am sure that his counsel is responsible for a good part of the executive action which the Administration has already undertaken, and that he will be a significant factor in the further steps which still must be taken.
1. Wofford, “New Frontiers in Civil Rights,” 23 March 1961. Responding to Wofford’s contention that civil rights organizations should work more closely with the government, NAACP executive secretary Roy Wilkins argued that the group has been a “pioneer in trying to be ‘in better gear with the government’” (Wilkins to Wofford, 5 April 1961).
2. “Wofford vs. Civil Rights,” Washington Afro-American, 15 April 1961.
3. An editorial in the Washington Afro-American suggested Kennedy turn to King or other black leaders including New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, NAACP lawyer Thurgood Marshall, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, or Roy Wilkins to “find out something about civil rights and how the colored man feels about it” (“Wofford vs. Civil Rights,” 15 April 1961).
4. In India Afire, co-authored with his wife, Clare, Wofford detailed conditions in India, noting that Gandhi had special relevance for “the challenge of America’s social frontier which runs roughly through the millions of Negroes, unorganized Southern workers, and landless farm laborers” (India Afire [New York: John Day, 1951], p. 338).
5. Harris Wofford received his J.D. in 1954 from Howard and was a visiting lecturer there in 1956.
6. Wofford argued that Gandhian civil disobedience “permits peaceful, civil resistance” and “reinforces the process of persuasion, and the basis for law” (Wofford, “Gandhi the Civil Rights Lawyer,” Mankind 1, no. 1 [August 1956]: 70–74).
7. For example, see Wofford, “Nonviolence and the Law,” 7 November 1957; “The Law and Civil Disobedience,” 20 November 1959. In Stride Toward Freedom (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), King drew on Wofford’s “Nonviolence and the Law,” a version of which Wofford delivered at the “Non-Violence and Social Change” conference at Howard University in 1957; King also spoke at the conference. Wofford also delivered the speech at an MIA gathering that King attended in December 1957 (see note 131, Introduction in Papers 4:32).
8. For more on Wofford’s role during the boycott, see Wofford to King, 25 April 1956, in Papers 3:225-226.
9. Wofford was acknowledged for his work in the 1959 report by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Report of the United States Commission on Civil Rights 1959 [Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1959], p. viii).
10. According to Wofford’s memoir Of Kennedys & Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980), Chester Bowles, chairman of the Democratic Platform Committee, assigned Wofford to draft a civil rights platform with aides Thomas Hughes and Abram Chayes (pp. 51–52). Among other issues, the plank pledged to eliminate literacy tests and poll taxes, enforce the 1954 Brown decision, and end discrimination in federally assisted housing (Paul A. Smith and Richard E. May, eds., Official Report of the Proceedings of the Democratic National Convention and Committee [Washington, D.C.: National Document Publishers, 1964], pp. 71–73).
11. Denouncing what was perceived as an approach designed to “not rock the boat too fast,” the editorial argued Wofford’s image as a “‘spokesman’ for the colored community’s desired pace of progress” should be “deplored.” The editorial concluded: “We don’t need any Mr. Harris Wofford speaking for us in this area, thank you, and the less he advises, the happier we’ll be” (“Wofford vs. Civil Rights,” 15 April 1961).
Source: MCMLK-RWWL, Morehouse College Martin Luther King, Jr. Collection, Atlanta University Center, Robert W. Woodruff Library Archives and Special Collections, Atlanta, Ga.