The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (3 page)

Truman and the federal government were not the only ones pressing civil rights in the postwar era. States and cities were active as well, particularly in the industrial North. In March 1945, New York State passed the Ives-Quinn Act, which vested a fair employment commission with cease-and-desist powers, modeled on the National Labor Relations Board. That body in turn became the basis for similar state-level agencies across the country. In 1949 states enacted more civil rights laws than ever before; by the turn of the decade, eight of them had their own employment discrimination laws.
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But the burst of activism in the 1940s was short-lived. Truman’s words, however heartfelt, were just words, and after his paper-thin victory in the 1948 election, and a failed campaign to reform the Senate’s filibuster rules, there was almost no chance of seeing those words turned into deed. Truman and his allies in Congress submitted a sheaf of civil rights bills anyway—including measures against the poll tax and lynching—only to see them defeated, one by one. In May 1950 Southern senators even filibustered an FEPC proposal that made compliance strictly voluntary. Nor were the state and municipal laws a clear sign of success: many were voluntary, staffed by unpaid or part-time officials, given meager legal recourse, and starved of funding—in other words, window dressing for cities with growing populations of black voters.

And for every step forward, it often seemed like there was at least one step back. On Christmas Day 1951 the Florida NAACP coordinator, Harry T. Moore, and his wife were assassinated, two of scores of black activists killed in the wave of violence and intimidation that crashed over the South in the late 1940s and early ’50s.
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It did not help that most of official Washington preferred to ignore civil rights during the 1950s. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, though hardly a defender of Jim Crow, believed that aside from protecting voting rights and enforcing court orders, the federal government had no obligations in the field. And the Democrats, after adopting an aggressive civil rights plank in their 1948 platform—and seeing a sizable chunk of the South bolt for the Dixiecrat ticket—beat a broad retreat at the next election, adopting a much weaker plank and nominating Alabama senator John Sparkman, a segregationist New Dealer, to run as vice president alongside Adlai Stevenson, the governor of Illinois.
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Stevenson was joined by such public moralists as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, who called on liberals to slow their civil rights activities because the South had made “steady progress in racial justice” and it would “be a calamity if this progress were arrested by heedless action.” Southern moderates had succeeded in convincing liberals like Niebuhr that the region’s advances were real but fragile, that the South was particularly sensitive to pressure or criticism from the outside, and too much noise from liberal Democrats could kill off those buds like an early April frost. Such realism and practical moderation were the new watchwords, said Eleanor Roosevelt: “It means going ahead one step at a time in accordance with the realities, and the priority of importance.” Niebuhr and Roosevelt were not being callous; they did in fact believe strongly in civil rights. But like most Americans in the 1950s, they also believed that the postwar spirit of centrist consensus, right-thinking liberalism, and steady, pro-growth economic policies would soon alleviate, if not eliminate, America’s racial shortcomings.
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And in any case, the liberals argued, there was little point in pushing for civil rights legislation when there was no chance of it passing. The experiences under Truman were seared into the liberal brain. The Southerners had batted away bill after bill with brutal, effortless efficiency. The caucus had held a full nelson on the American legislative process for decades, but never was it more effective than in the 1950s. Under the leadership of Georgia senator Richard B. Russell, the Southerners—who by 1963 were technically bipartisan, having added Texas Republican John Tower to their caucus in the 1962 midterms—were the true masters of the Senate. They controlled the majority of the Senate committees, including Judiciary, Armed Services, and Finance, giving them almost total control of the flow of legislation through the upper chamber.

Southern politicians and voters alike understood the overarching value of seniority in Congress, and they made sure their elected officials had a lock on it. Turnover in their ranks was rare, brought on only by death or the occasional retirement.”
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Though many Southern senators would develop individual interests—Russell and his Louisiana colleague Allen Ellender were both foreign policy wonks—their primary commitment remained the preservation of the intricate web of laws and customs that kept whites and blacks separate and unequal. Over the years they had beaten back bills to make lynching a federal crime, to end the poll tax, and to loosen literacy test requirements; in all, 120 bills had died either in the Judiciary Committee, overseen by Mississippi senator James Eastland, or under the withering fire of a full-on filibuster since the end of World War II.
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Even the two civil rights acts passed under the Eisenhower administration—one in 1957, one in 1960—proved to be more demonstrations of Southern power than successes by their opponents. The debate over the 1957 act centered around its third section, or title, which gave the attorney general the power to file suit against the denial of constitutional rights. The bill was introduced in 1956 and easily cleared the liberal-leaning House of Representatives. But when it reached the Senate, on the last day before Congress adjourned for the year, it was diverted to the Judiciary Committee at the behest of Lyndon Johnson, then the majority leader, who wanted to make the liberals cool their heels until he could devise a strategy for getting some form of the bill through. The bill was revived in 1957—and almost immediately set upon by Russell, who charged that Title III was “a potential instrument of tyranny and persecution” that could be used “to jail, imprison and mistreat American citizens.” And Russell had a point: Title III was technically an amendment to an existing part of the federal code that allowed the president “or such person as he may empower for that purpose,” including the attorney general, to use the military to enforce civil rights. In other words, Title III would give the attorney general not just legal power over the South, but military power as well.
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But even without Russell’s damning insight, the bill was guaranteed a haircut; Johnson, wanting a token civil rights bill under his belt for a future presidential run, had worked out a deal with Russell to whittle the bill to a nub, then allow it to pass. In short order, Title III was axed, and another provision, which allowed the Justice Department to sue over a denial of the right to vote, was weakened by the addition of a requirement that cases be tried in front of a jury—which, in the South, meant white defendants would inevitably be judged by all-white juries.
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President Eisenhower signed the bill on September 9, 1957, but the civil rights community had long since disowned it. “It has been the advocates of segregation and of white domination who have won the major triumph,” said Senator Douglas. Many blamed Johnson for trimming the bill so closely, a suitable trophy for his own career but of little use to its intended beneficiaries. “I was so mad at Johnson I was speechless, for gutting the bill so much,” said the civil rights lawyer and activist Joe Rauh.
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But others were less pessimistic. Though the bill did not amount to much in substance, symbolically it was a breakthrough. Even before the bill passed, the
New York Times
predicted that its passage would “result in a more or less permanent coalition of Republican and Democratic liberals to act as a slight counterbalance to the conservative coalition . . . Both the political as well as the social demand for better race laws has reached a point where they can no longer be ignored.” Many supported the bill not because of what it did, but what it made possible. “All of a sudden you started hearing it all over the place: ‘We’ve got to break the virginity,’” recalled Representative Richard Bolling, a liberal Democrat from Missouri. “You heard guys saying things about ‘once they do it the first time, it won’t be so hard to get them to do it the next time.’”
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But that “next time” did not arrive for a long time. Almost immediately, journalists and activists were predicting a wave of new civil rights legislation in 1958. When nothing happened that year, the
New Journal and Guide
ran a headline predicting new laws expected when congress convenes in ’59. That article appeared on December 27; just over two weeks later, Eisenhower said he would not support civil rights legislation during the coming year, save for an effort to strengthen voting rights.
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That bill, when it did arrive, amounted to little more than a weak echo of the 1957 act. Though it took sixteen months to work its way through Congress, in its final form the Civil Rights Act of 1960 merely allowed courts to appoint voting referees—glorified observers, really—and required the preservation of voting records. “It is almost certain that this bill, again designed ostensibly to give southern negroes the ballot, will enfranchise only a handful of the thousands who are voteless today,” wrote the
Washington Post
.
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On the floor of the Senate, the bill’s supporters wallowed in self-pitying theatrics. After Arkansas senator John McClellan boasted that “we have repelled, for the time being at least, vicious assaults on the rights and liberties of our people,” Senator Joseph S. Clark Jr. lamented: “The roles of Grant and Lee at Appomattox have been reversed.” Turning to Richard Russell, he said, “Dick, here is my sword. I hope you’ll give it back to me so I can bend it into a plowshare.” Clark then read “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” as Russell looked up in a silent gloat at the galleries.
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Clark may have been milking the scene for melodrama, but he was not wrong. Despite increased racial activism across the South, things during the late 1950s, remembered as the early years of the “high tide” of the civil rights movement, were actually getting worse for blacks.

Take voting rights. Between 1940 and 1946, an estimated four hundred thousand blacks registered to vote in the South, bringing the total to some six hundred thousand. Returning black veterans had pushed against Jim Crow, and in a few places, Jim Crow stepped backward. But the white South soon recovered its stance and tightened the vise of segregation. In Louisiana the number of registered black voters dropped from 10 percent in 1956 to 6.9 percent in 1962. In Mississippi it went from 1.4 percent to 1.1 percent. According to a 1959 study by the Southern Regional Council, the number of registered black voters in eight Southern states dropped by nearly forty-six thousand between 1956 and 1958 alone.
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To be fair, the 1957 act did two important things: it gave the Department of Justice the power to sue over voting rights violations, and it elevated the department’s Civil Rights Section to division level, with a commensurate increase in funding and staffing. But while that looked like progress on paper, in practice it was a shuffle-step forward, wholly dependent on the men in charge at Justice. In October 1957 Herbert Brownell Jr., Eisenhower’s pro-civil-rights attorney general, resigned, replaced by William Rogers. Under Rogers the new Civil Rights Division became a backwater, at a time when working at Justice was already low on the wish list of ambitious young lawyers headed to the federal government. Between 1957 and 1964 the department brought a mere fifty-five suits under the 1957 and 1960 acts. And it could take years for a suit to work through the court system, leaving blacks with little real relief. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Emanuel Celler declared in January 1964 that “the right-to-vote section of the 1957 civil rights law has been a failure.”
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A similar story could be heard about education. In 1954 the Supreme Court handed down its decision in
Brown v. Topeka Board of Education
, ruling that school segregation was unconstitutional. But a year later, in the so-called
Brown II
decision, it ruled that school desegregation should proceed with “all deliberate speed,” be implemented by local school boards, and be overseen by district courts. While some border states and cities did in fact move ahead with desegregation plans, across much of the South,
Brown II
made the 1954 decision a dead letter. In the four years after the initial
Brown
decision, Southern states passed 196 statutes against school integration.
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As a result, by 1962, eight years after
Brown
, only 7.8 percent of black students in the South attended integrated schools. Of the 3,058 Southern school districts with both black and white students, only 972 qualified as even minimally desegregated, and 815 of those were in border states. Three Southern states lacked even a single integrated school district. The specifics were even more damning: while half of all blacks in the border state of Kentucky attended integrated schools, only 1 percent of blacks in North Carolina did. In Virginia, out of 217,000 school-age black children, only 533 attended an integrated school on the eve of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
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A different kind of school segregation, in some ways equally as insidious as the de jure system of the South, affected districts in other parts of the country. From Los Angeles to Chicago to the Boston suburbs, blacks were excluded from vast tracts of residential neighborhoods, even as they were subtly but blatantly discriminated against in the workplace. The result was de facto segregation, in which blacks and whites lived, worked, and studied separately—and because whites got the better-paying jobs, their neighborhoods and schools were significantly better off. As the historian Thomas J. Sugrue documented in his book
Sweet Land of Liberty
, as early as the 1920s, Northern blacks were launching sizable protest movements against de facto school segregation in places like Chester, Pennsylvania; Benton Harbor, Michigan; and Shaker Heights, Ohio. In tiny Hillburn, New York, black families boycotted the 1943–44 school year to protest school district lines that intricately divided whites and blacks. On October 22, 1963, as the Judiciary Committee debated the civil rights bill in the House of Representatives, nearly a quarter of a million black students boycotted school in Chicago to protest de facto segregation and unequal resources.
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