September 26, 2000

Trip South in '63 Gave Lieberman a Footnote, and Hold, in History

By KEVIN SACK

hirty-seven years ago, in the autumn of another political season, Joseph I. Lieberman and a carload of other Yale students headed south from New Haven on a trip of nearly 1,300 miles, stopping only for gas and a quick dinner in the Washington suburbs. They were eager to get to Mississippi, where they hoped to make a little history.

Recruited by William Sloane Coffin Jr., Yale's radical campus chaplain, and Allard K. Lowenstein, the crusading student organizer and future New York congressman, Mr. Lieberman was among 67 Yalies who formed the first large group of Northern white students to travel south for the cause of civil rights.

It was dangerous work. Although Mr. Lieberman escaped harm, some of the students were beaten, others were jailed, and almost all endured petty harassment. They found dirt in their gas tanks, and they were ticketed by sheriffs for running nonexistent stop signs.

The students canvassed the state, raising awareness about a mock election that was intended to debunk the segregationist myth that black Mississippians had no interest in voting. Like Mr. Lieberman, most stayed only a week or two before returning to their classes. But in that short time they demonstrated the vital role white students could play in what had been an almost exclusively black movement.

Along with Mr. Lieberman and his Ivy League friends came the attention of the Northern press and, to some extent, the protection of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Their efforts helped inspire a much larger invasion of students in the summer of 1964 — "Freedom Summer" — which in turn generated pressure for the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

Until Mr. Lieberman, the Connecticut senator, became the Democratic candidate for vice president, he did not talk much about this brief but intriguing interlude of his youth. But Mr. Lieberman's civil rights history, including his sojourn to Mississippi and his participation in the March on Washington in 1963, captivated the aides to Vice President Al Gore who researched his life as part of the vice-presidential selection process. And it has since been elevated by Mr. Lieberman and others into a significant component of his political biography as the campaign seeks to energize its base of black voters.

"Look, I hadn't talked about it for years and years and years," Mr. Lieberman said in a telephone interview last week, "but I think it just struck people when I went through the vetting process. They kind of carried it on, and then it was picked up by others when I became a candidate to just say, you know, here's who he is."

When Mr. Gore announced his vice-presidential selection in Nashville on Aug. 8, he concluded by reading from a column written by Mr. Lieberman in The Yale Daily News explaining why he went to Mississippi. When Representative John Lewis of Georgia, the civil rights veteran, spoke just before Mr. Lieberman at the Democratic National Convention, he talked of how Mr. Lieberman had "responded to the greatest moral crisis of our time."

In Mr. Lieberman's own convention speech, which followed aggressive efforts to tamp down black discontent about his positions on affirmative action and school vouchers, he told of how he "walked with Martin Luther King in the March on Washington for jobs and freedom" and then "went to Mississippi, where we worked to register African-Americans to vote."

Several black leaders said in interviews that Mr. Lieberman's background made them more willing to forgive what they saw as his apostasy on some issues. What he did as a 21-year-old, they said, was courageous and rare for a white man, and it showed that he supported their cause with more than just political talk.

"He is given a lot of slack," said Julian Bond, the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. "The dangerous work he did in Mississippi is a sure sign that he is a good person, willing to accept great risk to advance civil rights for black Americans."

And yet some of those same black leaders also question how someone who marched with Dr. King and risked a trip to Mississippi could have later questioned the viability of affirmative action and supported a voucher experiment that black leaders broadly oppose.

Indeed, when Mr. Lieberman said in 1995 that he could no longer defend policies that were "based on group preference instead of individual merit," Mr. Bond wrote a scathing rebuke for the op-ed page of The Hartford Courant.

"Perhaps Senator Joseph I. Lieberman has forgotten that trip south three decades ago," wrote Mr. Bond, himself a civil rights leader who now teaches the history of the movement. "Perhaps he believes 32 years is long enough to overcome a 300-year-old system of inequality."

That critique stung, Mr. Lieberman said. "It was the first time in my life that I recall, certainly the first significant time," he said, "when people I respected, like Julian Bond, but also just generally the civil rights community, was on the other side from me."

Since joining Mr. Gore's ticket, Mr. Lieberman has said he now supports affirmative action. He plays down the rather explicit opposition he expressed in 1995, saying it must be viewed through the prism of a Supreme Court decision that prompted a national re-examination of the issue that year.

"I raised some questions," he said, "and perhaps, as has been my tendency, thought out loud more than some public figures do."

But it is also clear that in Mr. Lieberman's public life as a state senator, as state attorney general and as a United States senator, civil rights matters have not taken precedence over consumer protection, foreign policy and his assault on Hollywood. Black leaders in Connecticut consider him a friend, but say he rarely takes the lead on issues of concern to them. His ratings by civil rights groups have been good, but inconsistent. His votes sided with the N.A.A.C.P.'s positions 100 percent of the time in the current Congress but only 60 percent of the time in 1997-98.

As state attorney general, Mr. Lieberman was credited with diversifying his staff. When he took office in 1983, one of the 119 lawyers on staff was black and 15 were women. When he left in 1989, 15 of 168 lawyers belonged to minorities and 51 were women. Of his 58 Senate staff members, 6 are African-American and 31 are women.

Mr. Lieberman said in the interview that he had no desire to inflate his role in the civil rights movement. He recalled working in an office in Jackson, Miss., drafting press releases and calling reporters. He also attended mass meetings at churches and handed out brochures in black neighborhoods, encouraging people to vote in the mock election for Aaron Henry and Edwin King, the designated candidates for governor and lieutenant governor. Eventually, some 85,000 black Mississippians voted in ballot boxes placed in churches, restaurants and barber shops.

"I don't want to overstate what I did," Mr. Lieberman volunteered. "I'm very proud that I went. It was a very important experience in my life. But, you know, there were others who were there much longer and did much more than I did, including ones who went back the following summer."

Mr. Lieberman is not remembered by either Edwin King or Robert Moses, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader who directed the so-called Freedom Vote (the other candidate, Aaron Henry, died in 1997). But both men paid tribute to the role played by students from Yale and Stanford in gaining media attention and providing moral support.

Mr. Coffin, whom Mr. Lieberman regarded as a mentor and "a prophetic voice," invited him to his house one night, and joined with Mr. Lowenstein in making the pitch for the Mississippi trip.

"We talked a lot about religious values, and you've got to do this to be consistent, and if you do it others will follow," recalled Mr. Lieberman, who as the charismatic chairman of The Yale Daily News was perhaps the biggest man on campus. "I found it to be an irresistible argument."

Other Yale students returned to Mississippi in 1964, and some joined tense protests in St. Augustine, Fla., and other Southern towns. Mr. Lieberman did not. He stayed at Yale to attend law school and by 1970 was running for the State Senate in Connecticut.

Bruce Payne, who was also a Yale student at the time, recalled trying to convince Mr. Lieberman that going to Mississippi would help his political aspirations by giving him credibility with the left wing of the Democratic Party.

"I said, `You know, Joe, your connections to the center of the old Democratic Party are solid, but that's not where the party's going to be,' " said Mr. Payne, a lecturer in public policy studies at Duke University who now chuckles at his errant prediction. "I remember that Joe just kind of smiled."

Mr. Lieberman, now a centrist, said he did not recall the encounter. "I've got to say, with all due respect to Bruce Payne, that that's got to be a latter-day filter," he said, "because I was an undeniable, um, you know, liberal right through law school."

Mr. Lieberman had grown up with black neighbors and friends in Stamford, Conn., and had attended integrated schools. An observant Jew, he says his parents and religious studies placed a heavy emphasis on respecting diversity.

In the summer of 1963, while working as an intern for Senator Abraham A. Ribicoff of Connecticut, Mr. Lieberman joined the more than 250,000 marchers in Washington who heard Dr. King deliver his "I have a dream" speech. While it did not instantly strike him as one of the defining speeches of the century, he said he knew that "something extraordinary had happened."

At The Daily News, Mr. Lieberman wrote frequently and often movingly in support of civil rights, declaring in one column that "the history of the Negro in America is a blatant contradiction to all that this nation promises." In a column explaining his decision to go to Mississippi, he wrote, "There is much work to be done there and few men are doing it."

But having been largely sheltered from racism and even anti-Semitism as a child, Mr. Lieberman had little direct exposure to segregation until he arrived in Mississippi. "It was at once stunning and infuriating to see it for real," he said. "For the first time in my life, I was uneasy, even fearful, in the white community and comfortable and secure in the black community."

Having seen Mississippi change, Mr. Lieberman now says the trip taught him profound lessons about the courage of the oppressed, about the perils of caution and about democracy's capacity for change. "It was such a denial, a shocking denial," he said, "not only of the religious principles of equality that I'd been brought up with but of the promises that America makes to its citizens."