Read The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act Online
Authors: Clay Risen
That week was not entirely full of good news, though. Late at night on Sunday, June 21, three civil rights workers went missing in rural Mississippi. The state was the site of “Freedom Summer,” a months-long campaign by students from around the country, in coordination with local civil rights workers, to register black voters and offer classes on protecting their constitutional rights. Their disappearance made national news. Daily updates on the search for the men, or their bodies, hung over the last weeks of the civil rights bill.
Then next day Speaker John McCormack told reporters he expected the bill to reach the president’s desk by July 4. Charles Halleck, still trying to regain some of his lost credibility with the GOP rank and file, needlessly lashed out at his fellow congressman, saying that putting the bill in Johnson’s hands on Independence Day would turn a bipartisan bill into a tool for presidential aggrandizement (as if Johnson needed it), and he insisted that it be signed no later than July 2. Johnson’s people had already been thinking along the same lines, but in reverse. They wanted the bill signing televised, with maximum coverage in the papers. July 4, they realized, was a holiday, when all but the most serious followers of the bill would tune out for barbeque and fireworks. Better, said Johnson’s aide Bill Moyers, to sign it on July 2.
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That is, of course, assuming the bill’s backers on the Rules Committee managed to pry it out of Smith’s hands. On the morning of June 30, they put their plan into action. As soon as Smith opened the hearing, Ray Madden, a liberal Democrat from Minnesota, announced that a majority of the committee wanted to finish testimony by 5:00
p.m.
, then vote by the end of the day. When Smith balked, the committee went into executive session—no reporters or observers allowed—and voted 7 to 4 against Smith. “The country wants action on this bill, not more discussion,” Celler said afterward.
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At five o’clock, the committee went back into executive session and voted 10 to 5 to grant the bill a rule and send it to the House floor. Then Richard Bolling moved to have Madden, not Smith, craft the rules for debating the bill on the House floor, citing House bylaws that if a chairman opposed a bill, a majority of the committee could replace him. Smith, who had sat on the committee for decades, was crestfallen. “I have never in all that experience,” he said, “had any member of this committee make the motion made by the gentleman from Missouri today.”
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But his plaint went unanswered. The rule was granted, and two days later Madden called up the bill on the House floor. After a round of speeches—including two by McCulloch and Celler that drew standing ovations—Madden moved the bill to a vote. It passed 289 to 126. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was off to the White House, about to become law.
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On the evening of July 2, 1964, just five hours after the House passed the final version of the Civil Rights Act, two hundred fifty people gathered in the East Room of the White House to watch Lyndon Johnson sign it into law.
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This was by far the biggest night of Johnson’s presidency since he addressed Congress a few days after Kennedy’s assassination, and he and his staff had spent the previous week cramming like college students to make it perfect—not just for the dignitaries inside the East Room, but for the millions of people who would watch the ceremony on television. It was the first signal accomplishment of the Johnson administration, and a promise of more to come if voters chose him in four months. In the course of a half dozen major revisions—and countless minor ones—speechwriters Horace Busby and Bill Moyers went back and forth over whether the address should come before or after the signing, over how much Johnson should mention God, over how sensitive he should be toward the South.
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While the White House staff debated, the bill moved through its final motions in the House. On the morning of the second, after the Reverend Bernard Braskamp had opened the session by reading an apt passage from Leviticus (“Proclaim liberty throughout the land, unto all the inhabitants thereof”), Smith had taken one last shot at slowing the bill. He began by declaring that the fifteen minutes of debate established by Madden’s rule was unfair, given how much the bill had evolved. But he reserved his real ire for the changes that he had always feared the bill represented, changes that were now wholly evident in the host of students and civil rights workers arriving in Mississippi for Freedom Summer. “Hordes of beatniks, misfits, and agitators from the North, with the admitted aid of the Communists, are streaming into the Southland on mischief bent, backed and defended by other hordes of Federal marshals, Federal agents, and Federal power,” he declared—a grossly insensitive comment, given the national attention focused on the three CORE workers who had recently disappeared in Mississippi. Nevertheless, when Smith finished, the Southern Democrats applauded, and Emanuel Celler came over to his desk to shake his hand.
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Not all Southern Democrats in the House opposed the bill this time around, though. Several had had an election-year change of heart. One, Charles Weltner of Atlanta, had voted nay when the bill first came through the House but announced on the floor that morning that he had decided to vote yea this time (three Republicans did as well). The thirty-six-year-old first-term member represented the New South that the region’s liberals, black and white, hoped would emerge with the bill’s passage: a native Georgian who had attended Columbia Law School and returned home with a worldview much more cosmopolitan than that of the average white Southern politician. Men like Weltner (Richard Fulton of Nashville was another) represented urban, biracial communities, and they were well positioned—and forward-looking enough—to respond to an upsurge in black voting power.
On the floor, Weltner said that he had always agreed with the bill’s goals, but he had voted against it the first time because he had reservations about its means of enforcement. Still, he said, with the final version before him, he had to make a decision. “What then is the proper course? Is it to vote ‘no,’ with tradition, safety—and futility?” he asked. “Change, swift and certain, is upon us. And we in the South face some difficult decisions. We can offer resistance and defiance, with their harvest of strife and tumult . . . or we can acknowledge this measure as the law of the land.” The Old South was crumbling, and a New South, so long proclaimed but never fulfilled, was finally here. “Finally, I would urge that we at home now move on to the unfinished business of building a New South. We must not remain forever bound to another lost cause.” When he finished, Northern Democrats erupted in a standing ovation; his fellow Georgians sat in silence. After the session, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a fellow liberal son of the Peach State, called Weltner with congratulations. (Weltner won his reelection bid that year, but withdrew from his 1966 race after the state Democratic Party insisted that he sign a “loyalty” oath to support the pro-segregationist Lester Maddox for governor.)
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In contrast, three Republicans—Charlotte Thompson Reid of Illinois, Bob Wilson of California, and Earl Wilson of Indiana—who had voted for the original bill voted against the substitute, saying that they had held their noses the first time in the hope that the Senate would improve the bill to their liking. Their reversals, however, were meaningless; just after 2:00
p.m
., the House voted overwhelmingly to send the bill to the president.
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That evening the White House brimmed with civil rights leaders, congressmen, their wives, and countless reporters, seated on gilt chairs waiting for Johnson to arrive. The only Southerners in the room were two liberal former governors, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, now the commerce secretary, and LeRoy Collins of Florida, whom the president was about to name as head of the new Community Relations Service.
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When Johnson strode into the room, Robert Kennedy was the first to rise in applause; Dirksen, to his left, and Humphrey beyond him, stood in turn. Under the soft glow of a baroque chandelier, Johnson coursed along the front row of the audience, shaking hands. He then sat at a desk, arranged perpendicular to the rows of seats to be directly in front of four TV cameras. Set in front of him on the desk were one hundred pens, standing upright in holders; behind him stood an American flag. In his hand Johnson held a single rumpled sheet of paper, which he smoothed several times on the desk before looking up at the camera.
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“I want to take this occasion to talk to you about what that law means to every American,” he began. The camera frame sat tightly around Johnson’s head—his brow, furrowed; his glasses, semi-rimless; his suit and tie, black. He spoke slowly, with a heavy helping of creamy Southern drawl. “One hundred and eighty-eight years ago this week a small band of valiant men began a long struggle for freedom,” he said. “They pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor not only to found a nation, but to forge an ideal of freedom—not only for political independence, but for personal liberty; not only to eliminate foreign rule, but to establish the rule of justice in the affairs of men.”
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Johnson had rarely invoked foreign policy as a justification for civil rights progress, but he did so that night. “Today in far corners of distant continents,” he intoned, “the ideals of those American patriots still shape the struggles of men who hunger for freedom.” Indeed, the growing conflict in Southeast Asia loomed over the opening of the address: “Those who founded our country knew that freedom would be secure only if each generation fought to renew and enlarge its meaning. From the minutemen at Concord to the soldiers in Vietnam, each generation has been equal to that trust.”
And yet, he went on, those generations of Americans fought for an ideal future in an imperfect and unjust present, when so many were denied the basic protections of the Constitution. “The reasons are deeply embedded in history and tradition and the nature of man,” he said. “We can understand—without rancor or hatred—how this all happened. But it cannot continue. Our Constitution, the foundation of our Republic, forbids it. The principles of our freedom forbid it. Morality forbids it. And the law I will sign tonight forbids it.”
Critically, before going into what the new law would do, he offered an extended defense. He rattled off the bill’s long journey to his desk—passing through long debates in both houses, along the way winning the endorsement of “tens of thousands” of religious, labor, civic, and civil rights leaders. It was a clear play to the legislation’s millions of opponents: like the bill or not, everyone could agree that it was the product of a thoroughly considered democratic process.
Johnson then went further, explaining what the bill did not do: “It does not restrict the freedom of any American, so long as he respects the rights of others. It does not give special treatment to any citizen. It does say the only limit to a man’s hope for happiness, and for the future of his children, shall be his own ability.” To that end, Johnson said he was nominating LeRoy Collins, a former governor of Florida, to head the Community Relations Service—a step that underlined the bill’s primary reliance on “voluntary compliance” and “the efforts of local communities and states.” The federal government would “step in only when others cannot or will not do the job.” The audience roared in applause.
Johnson ended with a stirring peroration, one of his rhetorical specialties:
My fellow citizens, we have come now to a time of testing. We must not fail. Let us close the springs of racial poison. Let us pray for wise and understanding hearts. Let us lay aside irrelevant differences and make our Nation whole. Let us hasten that day when our unmeasured strength and our unbounded spirit will be free to do the great works ordained for this Nation by the just and wise God who is the Father of us all. Thank you and good night.
The audience again exploded as people from the first few rows rushed to surround the president. Johnson immediately grabbed for the forest of pens before him, using each to draw a fraction of an inch of his signature before handing it off to a well-wisher. “The president seems to have mastered the art of just touching each pen to the paper,” said the correspondent Ed Herlihy in a Universal newsreel. Johnson had additional gifts for Dirksen and Humphrey: autographed copies of his signing speech. Johnson gave out so many pens that an aide had to go get more.
At one point the Reuther brothers—Roy, Victor, and Walter—saw Kennedy lingering sullenly at the back of the room. “Surely no one had contributed more to the moment than he,” Victor said later. Roy went over to the attorney general and dragged him by the arm to the president’s desk. “Mr. President,” he said, “I know you have reserved a pen for your attorney general.” But the warmth of the moment could not melt the disdain each man felt for the other. Johnson unceremoniously grabbed a handful and shoved them at Kennedy. “Give this one to Burke Marshall. Give this one to John Doar. You got any more now?” Just to underline his indifference, he gave Kennedy another pen on top. Kennedy silently accepted the pens, with a despondency not lost on others around him. This was a bill he had conceived with his brother and pushed through Congress using their strategy—and now his nemesis was getting the glory. “Our enthusiasm—that of Dr. King and myself—was sort of dampened by the sadness that we saw in Bobby’s eyes and the coldness with which the President obviously treated him,” said Walter Fauntroy, the Washington representative for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
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