ABSTRACT
A crowd of nearly 10,000 gathered at Wooldridge Park in Austin, Texas, on the warm spring evening of May 22, 1948. They came to hear the tall, lanky, ex-schoolteacher turned politician from the small central Texas county of Blanco. The rally was the official kickoff for Johnson's 1948 Senate campaign. Mississippi senator John Stennis, leader of the Senate's segregationist bloc, considered Johnson a loyal ally and a good friend. Lyndon Baines Johnson was flattered and sent Stennis a warm note pledging to always reciprocate the friendship. John F. Kennedy and Burke Marshall were lone wolves in the legal community on the question of federal enforcement. If local law enforcement personnel and officials interpreted the law as they saw fit, then, Marshall concluded, this created "a law enforcement problem to which there is no satisfactory answer." Mississippi teetered on the brink of anarchy, and local officials were doing nothing to stop the process.
