Read The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act Online
Authors: Clay Risen
Hill replied, “Oh, there were all kinds of laws in England, and the people of America rebelled against and opposed many of the laws of England.”
“But they never rebelled against the English common law. They rebelled against abuses of the English common law. At any rate, I thank the senator from Alabama.”
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The debate was also marked by small instances of the old Senate comity coming through. There was an element of pragmatism in their day-to-day relations: an opponent on one bill might one day be an ally on another. They were something like major-league baseball players: opponents, but also professionals who could separate the competition from the people behind it.
All of which explains an episode between Virginia’s Willis Robertson and Humphrey. At the end of a particularly grueling day of debate, Robertson approached Humphrey at the dais and offered him a Confederate battle flag lapel pin. Humphrey accepted it, then praised Robertson’s “eloquence and his great knowledge of history and law” and thanked him “for his wonderful . . . gentlemanly qualities and his consideration to us at all times.” Robertson then returned the compliment, saying, “If it had not been for the men from Wisconsin and Minnesota, when Grant finally came down into Virginia, we would have won.” The two then left the floor for Humphrey’s office to have a drink.
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While the phony filibuster spun out on the floor, the pro-civil-rights Democrats and Republicans were still getting used to working together behind the scenes. At a meeting of the Democratic floor leaders—Humphrey, along with Phil Hart of Michigan, Paul Douglas of Illinois, and others—the senators discussed indications that the Republicans were still planning to introduce strengthening amendments in order to embarrass the Democrats, who would have to vote against them to protect the bill. And one Senate staffer, reporting on a conversation the day before with Kuchel’s senior aide Stephen Horn, said that the Republican whip remained uncommitted to funneling amendments through the leadership—which in turn could lead to a flood of unwanted amendments being voted on before the leadership could decide how to respond to them. At the same time, many Republican staffers were wary of Democratic entreaties. As Horn noted on March 18, rumors of an impending cloture vote “might be a Lyndon Johnson attempt to embarrass the Republicans since we would be shy the 25 votes the GOP needs to deliver cloture. Those votes will be available five or six weeks from now, but not if the vote is held now.”
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Finally, on March 26, just before the Senate left for its Easter recess—and with, by coincidence, both Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, the Black Muslim leader, observing from the gallery—the Southern Democrats yielded. The phony filibuster had already lasted much longer than the four or five days Russell had promised Mansfield; on March 23, Humphrey had even kept the Senate in session until 10:15
p.m.
, a taste of what was in store for Southern Democrats when the real filibuster began. Not all of the Southerners agreed to give in; in a meeting the next morning, only seven out of twelve voted to let the bill proceed. The rest wanted to force a cloture vote. But Russell knew they would probably lose that vote, setting a bad precedent to go into an even more stressful and much longer one. Though the names in each column were unrecorded, it is likely that the losing votes came from firebrands like Thurmond and Ervin, who opposed the bill with blind hatred and, more important, feared that any weakness on the bill would make them fodder for an attack from the segregationist right back home.
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Once the Southern Democrats announced they would stop what they euphemistically called their “extended debate,” the Senate voted by 67 to 17 to take up the bill. It was both a victory and a warning. The Southern move had been rare and aggressive, and one might have expected at least a few fence sitters to join with the civil rights forces. After all, voting to take up the bill was not an endorsement of it, or even a vote for cloture on the main filibuster yet to come. But the bill’s supporters won just 67 votes, the bare minimum they would need to beat the upcoming filibuster. If they could not do better, the bill was dead.
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As soon as the vote was finished, Morse moved again to take up the bill, supported, this time, by Dirksen. Again, the vote was closer than Humphrey and his team would have liked—50 to 34. The bill was moving forward, but it could well be headed for defeat. As Russell intoned after losing the vote to take up the bill, “A battle has been lost. We shall now begin to fight the war.”
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The members of the United States Senate slogged their way to the Capitol on the morning of Monday, March 30, through a freak early spring blizzard that dropped five inches of snow on Washington. In the middle of the storm, just outside the massive edifice, stood CBS News correspondent Roger Mudd. A D.C. native and a rising star on CBS’s national news reporting staff, Mudd had made a name for himself covering such seminal events as the March on Washington and the Kennedy state funeral. In early 1964, Fred Friendly, the new president of the network’s news division, had suggested that Mudd cover the filibuster in a one-man, flood-the-zone campaign, “not only on the evening news with Walter Cronkite but also on each of the network’s four other TV newscasts and on seven of the network’s hourly radio newscasts,” Mudd later recalled. “My initial reaction was less than enthusiastic. It sounded more like a flagpole-sitting stunt.”
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Still, Mudd was a good soldier, which was how he ended up standing in the blowing snow on Capitol Hill that morning. “This is not what you’d call a typical Eastern Monday in Washington—the snow, the cold, the frozen forsythia and the chilled cherry blossom buds, and inside the Senate wing, we are about to embark on an historic civil rights debate,” he began his broadcast, his dark hair poking above his winter coat. “Leading off today will be the generalissimo of the pro-civil-rights forces, Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota.”
The camera then panned to the Senate majority whip, bareheaded in a thin 42-long raincoat that was several sizes too big for him, the sleeves all but covering his hands. When Humphrey had arrived at the Capitol, CBS News director Bill Smalls had asked him to step aside to speak with Mudd before he disappeared into the building. Humphrey demurred, saying he needed his jacket. Smalls, thinking fast, offered him his, even though he was much taller. And so the senator about to lead the most important fight of his life, and one of the most important in the long history of the Senate, found himself on national television, shivering in the snow in an ill-fitting coat.
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Though he put on a brave face for the camera, Humphrey’s uncomfortable appearance hinted at a growing concern among supporters over the civil rights bill’s prospects. That same day, Humphrey sent a memo to his assistant John Stewart in which he worried that “we are beginning to lose the public relations battle on the civil rights issue.” Among other things, he said, the CCFAF ads “are having their effect. I don’t mean to say the public has swung over against civil rights, but we are losing some ground.” He even mused darkly on the prospects for widespread racial violence in the coming summer: “There is a sense of bitterness and open rioting which is going to kick back and could very well precipitate small Algerias all around the country.” The answer lay in getting the bill through as fast as possible, to demonstrate that change was possible through the system. But to do that, the civil rights bill needed a massive public relations campaign of its own, drawing in religious leaders, doctors, and business people. “I don’t think we can wait another day.”
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It is significant that Humphrey left out the civil rights groups and labor from his list. From his perspective—one shared by Katzenbach and the Department of Justice—those proponents were doing more harm than good to the bill. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, had been talking about mass protests against the filibuster and had called on the Democrats to scuttle the bill if the Republicans demanded weakening amendments. Humphrey worried about how such public pronouncements would play once the delicate negotiations with Dirksen began. Dirksen was no friend of the civil rights lobby: the previous autumn, he and Clarence Mitchell had had a famous falling-out in which Dirksen had kicked Mitchell out of his office for daring to challenge his civil rights bona fides. And liberal organizations would be no help when it came to winning over Midwestern Republicans. Humphrey, at Katzenbach’s request, had already frozen out the LCCR from almost all the daily meetings held by the civil rights senators and their staffs, a move that infuriated Rauh and Mitchell.
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Meanwhile, Humphrey and Kuchel had put together a plan for the first several days of debate. They knew that the country’s attention, thanks to Mudd, would be focused on the filibuster for a time and then taper off—and they intended to own that time, not cede it to the South or the civil rights groups. They assigned each of the major titles to a Democrat and a Republican, each of whom was to prepare an extended, point-by-point explanation of the title. The marathon of speeches would begin with lengthy addresses from Humphrey and Kuchel themselves. By the time the Southerners began to speak, they hoped, the country’s focus would be elsewhere—after all, even a congressional debate as pivotal as the one about to begin was, in its day-to-day details, still a congressional debate. High drama it was not.
The Senate was scheduled to take up the civil rights bill as soon as the session opened. But there had been an earthquake in Alaska the previous Friday—the most severe ever recorded in American history, killing 143 people and flattening communities across the south central part of the state. President Johnson persuaded Humphrey and Mansfield to take up the question of disaster relief first, the better to win points with Western senators who felt a regional connection to the beleaguered state (Johnson also lent Alaska’s two senators the use of Air Force Two to return home).
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Humphrey finally rose at 1:30. The gallery was filled with onlookers, but the chamber was close to empty. The bill, he said, was simply a matter of fulfilling the promises set out in the Constitution. He then set aside his speech, all fifty-five pages of it, and took up a Bible. He read from Matthew 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets.” Setting down the book, he intoned, “It is to fulfill this great admonition—this is what we are trying to do in this bill.”
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Humphrey announced that he would refuse to answer any questions, since “I want to keep this short.” He then spoke for three hours and twenty-six minutes. Kuchel’s speech was significantly shorter than Humphrey’s—it went for just an hour and fifteen minutes. “No American can read the thousands of pages of testimony which have been taken in field hearings all over the our land by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights without being greatly impressed with the work of law and of the heart which still remains to be accomplished,” he said.
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By the time Kuchel finished, just a handful of senators sat in the chamber, most of them signing letters and doing other miscellaneous office tasks. Gallery gawkers must have felt their expectations rapidly deflate as the senators shifted around the floor: these were not the exciting theatrics of national politics they had come expecting. But this was the way of Senate politics—to a great extent, what happened on the floor was the least important part of the civil rights battle.
Despite the bill’s challenges in the Senate, its supporters knew that success would present its own set of problems. A decade earlier, the
Brown
decision had spurred “massive resistance” across the South, with some school districts shutting down entirely to avoid having to admit black children. Racial violence spiked, and the strictures of Jim Crow tightened. Politicians across the region encouraged defiance; in Little Rock, Arkansas, it took federal troops to force compliance.
And so on April 1, the day after the Senate took up the civil rights bill, several top officials at the Department of Justice gathered to plot out how to best ease the bill’s implementation. Just as the Justice Department had coordinated with outside groups to generate support for the bill, it was now looking to those same groups to pave the way for its acceptance by Southern society. Louis Oberdorfer, the deputy attorney general for the tax division and a native of Birmingham, had spent the last nine months building an ad hoc network of concerned civic and business leaders in the South. They were grouped into interest and industry groups: lawyers, industrialists, motel owners—each had its own committee.
Julius Manger Jr., one of the nation’s most powerful hotel magnates, took a particular interest in leading his industry on desegregation; afterward he wrote a moving personal account about his conversion from civil rights apathy to activism at one of President Kennedy’s conferences during the summer of 1963. Manger spent countless days in the spring of 1964 traveling around the South, persuading local hotel and motel owners to accept desegregation. “In Charlotte and Savannah we had a larger investment in our hotel and motel properties than anyone else,” he wrote. “In both of those cities, therefore, I was able to say to other hotel and motel owners that I was not just asking them to do something and then going to walk away, but that actually we had a bigger investment to lose than they did.” Thanks to Manger’s leadership, scores of Southern communities were ready to accept, if not welcome, the bill when it went into effect. Oberdorfer later called Manger “one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era.”
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