Kennedy: The Classic Biography (91 page)

The President did not regard this as a Federal problem only. With the Vice President and Attorney General he had met with union leaders and businessmen—theater owners, restaurant operators, department store executives and others—asking them to drop racial bars in employment and service. On June 9 he had asked the nation’s mayors, gathered in conference in Honolulu, to improve their practices and ordinances.

But his first Civil Rights Message in February, 1963, had already signaled a shift in his thinking about civil rights legislation. That message called for an expansion of the role of the Civil Rights Commission, enabling it to serve as a clearinghouse for information and assistance to local communities. It called for technical and economic assistance to school districts in the process of desegregation. It called for a variety of improvements in the voting rights laws: abolishing literacy tests for those with a sixth-grade education, prohibiting the application of different standards to different races and speeding up the registration of voters in contested areas. It spoke up strongly for equal rights in all areas and reviewed the steps taken under executive authority. The message was not in response to any crisis or particular pressure but a product of the President’s own initiative and a part of his regular legislative program. It was well received by Negroes, who were listening. It was virtually ignored by the Congress and the rest of the country, who were not listening.

But by June 11 the country was listening—and the bills previously proposed were insufficient. Unlike the situation prevailing in 1961 and 1962, public interest in civil rights legislation made Congressional passage appear at least possible. For several weeks the White House and Justice Department had been preparing a new package. The” President’s decision to go ahead definitely on a sweeping bill had been made on May 31, over the opposition of some of his political advisers who saw both Congressional and electoral defeat. Democratic leaders were being consulted. Republican support was being rounded up. The details of the program had not yet been concluded. No address to the nation had been written. But the President at the last minute decided that June 11 was the time and 7
P.M.
the hour.

Having assumed that the tranquil resolution at Tuscaloosa that afternoon would make a speech unnecessary, I did not start a first draft until late in the afternoon or complete it until minutes before he went on the air. There was no time for a redraft. “For the first time,” said the President to me in my office afterward, “I thought I was going to have to go off the cuff.” He did, in fact, wholly extemporize a heartfelt conclusion.

But in a larger sense the June 11 speech had been in preparation by the President himself for some time. It drew on at least three years of evolution in his thinking, on at least three months of revolution in the equal rights movement, on at least three weeks of meetings in the White House, on drafts of a new message to Congress, and on his remarks to the mayors June 9 as well as on the February Civil Rights Message. An opening reference to the University of Alabama provided the springboard. The announcement of new legislation provided the substance. But the moving force of that address was the unequivocal commitment of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, his office and his country “to the proposition that race has no place in American life or law.”

Warning of the “rising tide of discontent that threatens the public safety,” he stressed that the nation’s obligation was to make this “great change…peaceful and constructive for all.” He outlined the legislation he would send to the Congress, but stressed that “legislation cannot solve this problem alone. It must be solved in the homes of every American.” He paid tribute to those cooperating citizens, North and South, who acted “not out of a sense of legal duty but out of a sense of human decency.”

This was not, he said, a sectional issue, nor a partisan issue, nor even “a legal or legislative issue alone.”

It is better to settle these matters in the courts than on the streets, and new laws are needed at every level. But law alone cannot make men see right.

We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution….

Now the time has come for this nation to fulfill its promise…. We face a moral crisis as a country and as a people. It cannot be met by repressive police action. It cannot be left to increased demonstrations in the streets. It cannot be quieted by token moves or talk. It is a time to act…. Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.

No President had ever before so forcefully recognized the moral injustice of all racial discrimination, and no President could ever thereafter ignore his moral obligation to remove it.

The Kennedy commitment was designed to preserve the fabric of our social order—to prevent the unsatisfied grievances of an entire race from rending that fabric in two. But it also stirred deep antagonisms. In Jackson, Mississippi, a few hours after Negro leaders had hailed Kennedy’s talk as a second Emancipation Proclamation, one of their number, Medgar Evers, was assassinated. On Capitol Hill the following day a special caucus of Southern Senators vowed to block any civil rights legislation. A routine expansion of Area Redevelopment, expected to pass comfortably, was defeated in the House by a five-vote margin with fifty-four Southern Democrats voting against it. Republicans talked openly of a Northern white “backlash” that would down both Kennedy and his civil rights bill.

But the President had not pledged his prestige and power either lightly or suddenly. His concern had deepened as the crisis heightened. His strategy had altered as the selective approach—emphasizing executive power and voting rights—proved insufficient. His obligation was not to the Negroes but to the nation. Just as he had believed in earlier months that the best interests of the nation required him to avoid a losing, bruising legislative battle, so now he believed that the national interest required him to try. Not content with a bill and a speech, he immediately resumed the hard, practical job of creating the political, legislative and educational climate that would transform the bill into law and the speech into a new era of racial justice.

THE KENNEDY CIVIL RIGHTS BILL

On June 19 President Kennedy sent to the Eighty-eighth Congress the most comprehensive and far-reaching civil rights bill ever proposed. It codified and expanded the pattern his executive actions had already started. It was accompanied by a message as forceful as his June 11 manifesto. It was to differ only slightly from the Civil Rights Act enacted by that Congress the following year. But it was different in several respects from the bill we had first discussed with Justice the previous month.

With the backing of the Vice President, a Community Relations Service had been added to work quietly with local communities in search of progress. (Negro Congressmen had urged that the words “mediation” and “conciliation” had an “Uncle Tom” air about them and should be stricken from the title.) The Vice President, once the decision was final to go ahead with a bill, had also strongly backed the President’s addition to the message of new and supplemental programs for job training, vocational education and literacy skills. Added at the suggestion of Congressional leaders was a broad authorization to withhold Federal funds from any program or effort that practiced racial discrimination—thus denying to obstructionist or irresponsible Congressmen their familiar practice of offering nondiscrimination amendments to programs they hoped to defeat. By leaving the cut-off discretionary, the President sought to avoid terminations which punished Negroes for white violations.

The President, aware of the emotions surrounding the initials FEPC, decided finally to omit it from the bill but to endorse a pending FEPC measure in his message. In addition, his Committee on Equal Opportunity under the Vice President was to be given statutory authority and increased jurisdiction.

The two principal features of the bill, in addition to those proposed back in February, had been included from the outset of our discussions:

1. The first was a ban on discrimination in places of public accommodation—including hotels, restaurants, places of amusement and retail stores—with a “substantial” effect on interstate commerce (thus excluding what came to be known as “Mrs. Murphy’s boardinghouse”). This kind of discrimination more than any other had been the object of Negro sit-ins, pickets and demonstrations. Like Lincoln’s Proclamation taking slaves away from owners, this proposal was condemned as a violation of property rights. But the President reminded the Congress that “property has its duties as well as its rights.” (Two years earlier in Paris, he had expressed anger and chagrin upon learning that the two dark-skinned domestics who accompanied him, after being served their meals in a private dining room of their own at the Quai d’Orsay Palace by liveried footmen in wigs and knee breeches, had then crossed the Seine to visit a French lady’s maid of their acquaintance, only to be turned away at the hotel door because of their color.)

2. The second basic provision gave authority to the Attorney General to seek desegregation of public education on his own initiative when a lack of means or fear of reprisal prevented the aggrieved students or their parents from doing so. This was the essence of the old Title III supported by Senator Kennedy in 1957 but stricken from that year’s bill before passage. A lack of adequate education is one root of other Negro problems, the President said, and the implementation of the Supreme Court’s decision cannot be left solely to those who lack the resources to bring suits or withstand intimidation. “The pace is very slow. Too many Negro children entering segregated grade schools at the time of the Supreme Court’s decision nine years ago will enter segregated high schools this fall, having suffered a loss which can never be restored.”

A host of other proposals had been suggested to the President, but he was looking for a law, not an issue. This Congress and future Congresses could amend and improve his effort. He wanted a package unencumbered by any provisions that went beyond the clearly legal, reasonable and necessary—because he wanted it to pass.

He was asking Congress to swallow a pill many times larger than those it had previously refused to swallow. This was no grandstand play for a lost cause or a political effort. He was not interested in a “moral victory” on a legislative issue—he wanted a legislative victory on a moral issue. Despite the odds and despite the opposition, he set out to get the best bill possible at the earliest time possible. The thrust of his argument was that the country could take no other course, that the Congress had no other choice and that the Republicans—upon whose votes House Rules Committee and Senate cloture approval depended—had no higher obligation.

The basic legislative tactics remained relatively unchanged from our May discussions. One omnibus bill, which included the February proposals as well as the new ones, would be sought instead of several separate measures. Bipartisan sponsorship would be sought to the extent possible—resulting in Democrat Mansfield’s introducing the whole bill and simultaneously cosponsoring with Republican Dirksen the same bill minus the public accommodations sections (to which the Republican leader was opposed). The President had considered delivering the message in person before a joint session, but the June 11 speech made that unnecessary. His objective was passage of the bill that year without any loss of priority to the tax-cut bill. Faster economic growth would provide far more jobs for Negroes than FEPC, and a new recession would hit Negroes hardest of all. There was little point, said the President, in gaining entrance to a lunch counter “if you didn’t have a dime for a cup of coffee.” One out of every seven Negro teen-agers in the labor force was unemployed, a source of both frustration and friction; and his economic measures could not be set aside as irrelevant to the racial crisis.

The one tactical paragraph of his message which received as much careful attention as the portions dealing with legislation concerned the problem of continued Negro demonstrations. Southerners and Republicans warned that further pressures would surely defeat the bill. Negroes warned that they would not give up their chief weapon. They talked of a “massive march” on the Senate and House galleries. The President—as stern in the message as he had been in his private talks with Negro leaders—was careful not to decry the value of peaceful demonstrations:

But as
feelings have risen in recent days
, these demonstrations have increasingly endangered lives and property, inflamed emotions and unnecessarily divided communities. They are not the way in which this country should rid itself of racial discrimination.
Violence is never justified; and, while peaceful communication, deliberation and petitions of protest continue, I want to caution against demonstrations which can lead to violence.

This problem is now before the Congress….
The Congress should have an opportunity to freely work its will.
[The italicized portions were personally added by the President to the final draft.]

I…ask every member of Congress to set aside sectional and political ties, and to look at this issue from the viewpoint of the nation. I ask you to look into your hearts—not in search of charity, for the Negro neither wants nor needs condescension—but for the one plain, proud and priceless quality that unites us all as Americans: a sense of justice.

The President did not rely on eloquence alone. “It is clear,” he had written to Eisenhower June 10, “that such a measure cannot pass either house without substantial bipartisan support.” He kept Eisenhower—who was sympathetic but not enthusiastic about the legislative approach—fully informed. Along with the Vice President, he consulted frequently with the leaders of both parties, once with Republican leaders Dirksen and McCulloch alone to brief them on the need for the bill and its details. Bob Kennedy and Burke Marshall held a series of Capitol Hill briefings to which all Democratic Senators, and all but the Deep South Congressmen, were invited. The decision to send a bill, the President stressed to each group, was final, but their comments and suggestions for its contents were welcome. While he would not drop the public accommodations section as Dirksen preferred, or extend it still further under the Fourteenth Amendment as other Republicans preferred, he included the Fourteenth Amendment as additional constitutional grounds and accepted other GOP suggestions for improvement. Assistant Attorney General Norbert Schlei and I reviewed the bill with Dirksen and other Republicans before it was printed in final form. The Illinois Senator, accepting “an idea whose time has come,” proved to be constructive and cooperative.