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A graduate student at the University of Miami confessed that he was "just a little relieved to see the bridegroom is so white. I guess it would have been different if he had been a real black buck." Certainly elements of old-style racism tinged the reaction, especially in the South. Many standpatters have argued that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations have wanted nothing so much as the "mongrelization of the races." To them, the Rusks are knowing agents of this conspiracy. Yet the response was muted almost everywhere. Although sex is the most emotional racial bugaboo, an Atlanta advertising man pointed out that last week's cries of anguish were far fewer and quieter than in 1963, when Charlayne Hunter, who had helped integrate the University of Georgia, married the son of a prominent white Georgia family. Many parents in all parts of the country, projecting themselves into a situation of a Negro Montague or a white Capulet, could fear for their children's happiness. But they also had to realize that young Americans today are determined to set their own life styles, regardless of parental dictates.
"Affair of State." Most newspapers, North and South, played the story heavily but straight. Front-page pictures and reports were the rule, and most headlines reported the bridegroom's race. But editorials on the subject were scarce, although the Richmond News Leader called mixed marriages "eccentric" and said that "anything that diminishes his [Rusk's] personal acceptability is an affair of state." New York Post Columnist Harriet Van Home was sympathetic, commenting that "the intimate joys and sorrows of public figures must inevitably become the common gossip of the marketplace."
Negro leaders tended toward restraint. Some of the extreme militants, who actively oppose interracial romance, nattered a bit. Many others, such as Martin Luther King, preferred to view the match as a personal affair. "Individuals marry," said King, "not races." The Rev. James Woodruff of St. Anselm's Episcopal Chapel in Nashville, Tenn., observed: "Most people were surprised. They feel she was a pretty lucky girl to get such a promising young man. I feel that way too." At the A. Philip Randolph Institute in New York City, headquarters of the intellectual Bayard Rustin, the comment for publication was "mazel tov." Institute staffers also parodied more militant Negroes by remarking: "Tokenism again! She only married one Negro."
Some prominent Negroes saw the wedding as an event of major social import. James Meredith proclaimed it "perhaps the most significant thing to date in Government to affect in a favorable way the racial situation in the Linked States." "To me," said John Johnson, publisher of Ebony, "the marriage is a measure of America's maturity, and it might help us in the eyes of the world." Judge Vaino Spencer, a Los Angeles municipal court judge who viewed the marriage both as a Negro and a woman, observed: "That two young, attractive, well-educated people, both from such nice families, should be able to marry today with their parents present is a very special thing. It shows a tremendous change in attitude on the part of people from both groups."