Read The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act Online
Authors: Clay Risen
At the outset
of 1963, few expected anything more than token federal action on civil rights, and even then no one expected it to pass. Civil rights supporters had seen too many promising advances—the 1954
Brown
decision to end school segregation, the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts—fail to deliver. President Kennedy had paid scant attention to civil rights as a domestic policy issue, and he was expected to do the bare minimum necessary to secure the black vote before the 1964 election. Just over a year later, President Johnson sat down in the East Room of the White House and signed the most sweeping single piece of legislation passed by Congress since the end of the Civil War.
The bill did have its shortcomings—it left alone things like de facto school and housing segregation, and it paid short shrift to voting discrimination; in fact, less than nine months after Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he and the Senate Democrats introduced a separate bill to address voting discrimination more fully, culminating in the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Nor did it address the problems facing blacks aside from discrimination, like the lack of well-paying jobs in urban areas or the low levels of educational attainment in African American communities, problems that may have been rooted in racism but would not be solved simply by its eradication.
Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Act is a monument to the capacity of American democracy to tackle knotty, long-standing social and political problems through peaceful, reasonable means. Particularly at a time when, in the early twenty-first century, Americans despair over partisan gridlock and uncompromising political positions, the passage of the act offers an example of what the country’s legislative machinery was once capable of, and what it may well be able to achieve again. The act did not solve American racism, something the country is still dealing with—and may never fully overcome. But it moved America forward to an extent that no one, at its outset, could have expected. How that happened is the subject of this book.
The guests began to line up outside the Southwest Gate of the White House in the early evening of February 12, 1963. The temperature, barely above zero all day, was dropping fast. The queue, eleven hundred invitees long, moved slowly; women shivered in their cocktail dresses, men popped their suit collars. They had come from all corners of the country—Atlanta, Chicago, Texas—but few grumbled at the inconvenience. They were about to be received by President and Mrs. Kennedy themselves before proceeding to a lavish reception in the East Wing.
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The event, an hour-long reception to mark Lincoln’s birthday during the centennial year of the Emancipation Proclamation, had brought together a nearly comprehensive roster of the nation’s black leadership: college presidents, ministers, and civil rights leaders rubbed elbows with government officials and black entertainers. Howard University president James Nabrit was there; so was Sammy Davis Jr. The poet Langston Hughes filed in, as did NAACP president Roy Wilkins.
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Well-stocked bars and an extensive buffet—shrimp creole, curried chicken, roast turkey, tongue—kept the guests occupied while they waited to have their photographs taken with the president. Others danced to the sounds of the Marine Corps band. “It would be impossible for any reporter to name all the ‘big shots’ who were there,” wrote an unnamed “special correspondent” for the
New Journal and Guide
, a black newspaper from Norfolk, Virginia, “simply because he could not possibly have seen them all in the mass of humanity that flowed in and out of a dozen corridors and ballrooms.”
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To many observers, the function was a blatant, brilliant attempt by Kennedy’s Democrats to co-opt the legacy of Abraham Lincoln, the nation’s first Republican president and the man whose memory still brought millions of black voters to the GOP. Lincoln’s birthday had long been a high point in the party’s political calendar, a day when Republican legislators headed home to their states and districts to trumpet their successes and lambast their opponents. This year was no different: at a reception in Binghamton, New York, Senator Jacob Javits attacked the Kennedy administration as “stand pat” and “lacking in impulse and the momentum to innovate.” But while reports of similar criticism filtered back into the nation’s leading newspapers, they were drowned out by coverage of the White House event. “Pity the poor Republicans!” chided
Jet
magazine. “Once they had a day for themselves—Lincoln’s birthday. Now the Dems have snatched this away.”
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But the real political theater—darker, cynical, less interested in the morality of civil rights than its political advantages and risks—played out behind the scenes. Kennedy, aware of how racial discrimination in America was hurting the country’s global image, had stormed into office promising to make real progress on civil rights, only to drop the issue before even taking office. But by late 1962, Kennedy’s inner circle had begun to take seriously the liberals’ warning that inaction on civil rights could hurt the president in the 1964 election. The black vote had arguably put him over the top in 1960, and he would need it again in his run for reelection, especially if he were pitted against a liberal Republican like New York governor Nelson Rockefeller. To win over blacks, his advisers said, the president had to do something high profile and substantive to show that he took civil rights seriously.
Not everyone in the White House agreed. Kennedy had a broad agenda—tax cuts, space exploration, urban renewal, education—all of which, they calculated, could be derailed by a divisive campaign for civil rights legislation. So far, Kennedy, while sympathetic on civil rights, seemed to concur. He had offered a milquetoast voting rights bill in mid-1962 that had withered under a Southern filibuster, and he had signed a weak executive order banning discrimination in new homes built with federal subsidies—at the time a small fraction of the nation’s housing stock. Kennedy made clear that those measures were as far as he would go for the moment.
The complaints against Kennedy were legion: not only had he failed to send major civil rights legislation to Congress, as he had promised to do in his campaign speeches, but by appointing a series of federal judges with demonstrated racist proclivities (as a sop to Southern Democrats), he had in fact made the situation worse for blacks in the South. W. Harold Cox, whom Kennedy appointed in June 1961 to the Southern District of Mississippi, was a particular embarrassment, given to using gross racial epithets on the bench. (In 1964 Cox would dismiss charges against all but two of the men indicted for the murder of three civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi.) Some black journalists even spoke of a political revolt against the Democratic Party. “President Kennedy will impose a great strain on his Negro supporters and on Democratic left wingers in general if he bypasses civil rights action in the coming session of Congress,” wrote the
Chicago Defender
, a black newspaper.
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Kennedy wasn’t alone in looking beyond civil rights; the country in general seemed to have let the issue slip from its consciousness. In an article that spring for the
Nation
, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote that 1962 was “the year that civil rights was displaced as the dominant issue in domestic politics.” Despite the violent clashes in October 1962 over integration at Ole Miss, “there was a perceptible diminishing in the concern of the nation to achieve a just solution to the problem.” Part of the blame “must be laid to the administration’s cautious tactics,” King wrote. “Even in the shadow of Cuba, such issues as trade legislation and tax reform took the play away from civil rights in editorial columns, public debate and headlines.” But it was also the unintended consequence of Kennedy’s sunny New Frontier promise: who wanted to dwell on an intractable problem when the nation seemed to be moving forward, fast, in almost every other pursuit? The nation was moving forward, but it was leaving black Americans behind.
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Civil rights leaders continued to push for further action. The president’s administration overlapped with the centennial of Lincoln’s, and among other things King had been lobbying Kennedy to issue a “Second Emancipation Proclamation,” to come one hundred years after the first. He had even sent the president a suggested text, much revised after internal debates among King’s advisers, in May 1962. Though this final version was short and unremarkable, even then it was too strong for the cautious Kennedy. The president did not respond.
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Still, as the new year began, Kennedy agreed that something needed to be done. He fastened on to an idea put forth by two members of his inner circle, his in-house intellectual Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Louis E. Martin, the deputy chairman of the Democratic National Committee: rather than a pithy statement that would upset the president’s allies among both the Southern conservatives and the racial liberals, why not a social event, pegged to Lincoln’s birthday? There had never been anything like it, Martin said, a fact sure to push the black press into positive coverage. At the same time, it would not leave a trace—managed correctly, the white press would ignore it, and a few days later it would be forgotten by all but the attendees. Tellingly, only one momentary crisis marred the evening in the president’s eyes: at one point Kennedy saw Sammy Davis Jr. with his Swedish wife May Britt, who was white. “Who invited them?” he fumed at his aides. The couple was a hot item in the press, both for their celebrity status and, much more so, their differing skin tones. If a photographer caught the president with them on film, the resulting coverage could stick him on the front page—and in the middle of the “race issue” the president had sought so assiduously to avoid. Kennedy ducked and weaved around the crowd, and managed to avoid the pair completely—at least when the cameras were around.
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Kennedy may have won points with some members of the black elite with the Lincoln Day cocktail hour, but those with a sharp political eye knew the event was a distraction, a PR stunt. Even
Jet
magazine, which otherwise fawned over the White House’s attention on Lincoln Day, issued a warning to Kennedy at the end of its coverage of the reception: “The VIPs appreciate the hospitality but for the rest of the year they’ll be quietly paying for the air tickets, the clothes, and the hotel reservations. The brother who didn’t get to see the inside of the White House wants some civil rights relief.”
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Missing from the crowd that night were three civil rights leaders who would do more than most to shape the remaining months of Kennedy’s term: A. Philip Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and the patriarch of the civil rights movement; Clarence Mitchell, the chief lobbyist for the NAACP; and Martin Luther King Jr. himself. All three had declined the invitation in polite protest of the administration’s weak record on civil rights. While many of the guests inside the White House were flattered by Kennedy’s hour of attention, these three took it as a challenge: if the president offered shrimp creole in lieu of efforts to address racial injustice, they would find new ways to make the political system turn in their direction. By that point King was already well into his plans for a mass demonstration in Birmingham, Alabama. Randolph was beginning to formulate his own demonstration plans, this time for a rally in Washington that summer. And Mitchell was brainstorming ideas for forcing the White House to act on civil rights legislation. By the year’s end, these three, acting separately, would combine to push the White House and Congress toward civil rights legislation more sweeping than anyone at the president’s reception that cold February evening could have predicted.
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Seasoned civil rights leaders were used to disappointment. Though the 1950s and early ’60s were later remembered for a string of incremental civil rights victories, the era was a series of frustrations for those who lived through it. It is striking to consider that on the eve of the Civil Rights Act, civil rights as a cause was in every way stymied, compromised, and ignored by the government and large swaths of the American public.
The postwar years had started out optimistically. Though Franklin D. Roosevelt had hardly been a close friend of the civil rights movement, his administration had taken a few small but important steps to help blacks, most notably a series of executive orders during World War II that created and strengthened the Fair Employment Practices Commission. That body, which was intended to root out employment discrimination in companies with government contracts, enjoyed mixed success. But after almost a decade of New Deal legislation that largely excluded blacks at the behest of Southern legislators, the FEPC showed that Roosevelt was not completely ignorant or unmoved by the plight of African Americans, and it offered hope that more action might soon follow.
His successor, Harry S. Truman, at first built on and seemed to exceed his predecessor’s commitment to helping blacks. In June 1947 he stood in front of a civil rights rally at the Lincoln Memorial, 10,000 strong, to declare “new concepts of civil rights . . . not the protection of the people against the government, but the protection of the people by the government.” That October his Civil Rights Committee issued a landmark report, “To Secure These Rights,” which laid out the case for government action against discrimination and outlined a federal infrastructure to do it, including the creation of a Civil Rights Division in the Department of Justice, a permanent Civil Rights Commission, and a joint standing committee on civil rights in Congress. And in July 1948, Truman issued both Executive Order 9980, which established a fair employment practices office within the Civil Service Commission to monitor discrimination within the federal government, and Executive Order 9981, which banned discrimination in the armed forces.
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