The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (15 page)

There was a more contentious debate over whether to include a program of vocational training and, even, public jobs for millions of unemployed African Americans. Blacks had been by and large excluded from the public works programs of the New Deal, and many veteran New Deal liberals—Lyndon Johnson, for one—saw both a chance to right that wrong and an opportunity to take otherwise idle workers off the street. One such advocate was G. Mennen Williams, a former Michigan governor who was now the assistant secretary of state for African affairs (an heir to the Mennen personal care products fortune, Williams was known to friends and reporters as Soapy). In a memo to Sorensen on June 15, Williams predicted a wave of violence that summer without the “immediate institution of public works and, if necessary, work relief measures, to help absorb the unemployed and school leavers.”
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Williams’s memo keyed into a complex discussion that had been going on for months within the administration. Kennedy was not a New Deal liberal; he preferred expansionary tax and trade policies over blunter, more direct tools such as public works as the best way to boost long-term employment. Privately, though, Kennedy recognized that efforts to boost economic growth would not do much to help the most marginalized workers, at least in the next few years. In September 1961 he had won passage of the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act, which included money to develop training programs for at-risk youth. And he already had Walter Heller, the head of his Council of Economic Advisers, working on plans for a major antipoverty bill, which he hoped to introduce in early 1964.
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As Heller’s research was demonstrating—and as several high-profile books at the time, such as Michael Harrington’s
The Other America
, were documenting—the poverty and jobs problem was much too large to address in an already enormous civil rights bill. Still, as late as June 18, the day before the president was to submit his bill, O’Brien and Sorensen wrote a memo to Kennedy urging him, during a final review of the bill with congressional leaders, to discuss the possibility of Senators Mansfield and Dirksen cosponsoring a jobs program to be considered parallel to the civil rights bill. News of such conversations leaked to the press, who reported that Kennedy was planning a “?‘huge’ job training and vocational education to his civil rights legislative request”—according to Senator Hubert Humphrey, with a price tag of up to $1 billion.
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Even as the drafting process advanced, the Department of Justice team was plotting its strategy for getting the bill through Congress. The need to win over Republicans was clear—but so, too, was the need to mollify liberals, who were likely to push back hard on a bill that left out both Title III and FEPC. On June 14, Burke Marshall sat down with members of the Democratic Study Group, a collection of liberal congressmen created in 1959 to organize and amplify their often-marginalized voices in an institution run by hardheaded realists like Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. Marshall was only partly successful in persuading them to back the bill; they agreed to support the newly added Title VI, the withholding of funds, but the only leader to come out in support of the bill in its entirety was Representative Richard Bolling of Missouri.
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Robert Kennedy, at a later meeting with the group, was no more successful. The DSG wanted to pursue the “strong-weak” strategy that had produced successful legislation in 1957 and 1960: load up a bill in the House with all sorts of seemingly valuable planks, then use all but a few of them as trading chips as it passes through the two chambers, picking off key votes along the way by agreeing to drop or water down particular planks. But the administration did not trust the liberals; it worried that liberals, especially among Republicans, would allow the bill to sink, then blame the administration. Katzenbach, who was at the meeting with Kennedy, told the DSG members: “We needed a law with a workable public accommodations section, not a Christmas tree that would never become law.” Again Bolling came around, but otherwise, Katzenbach said, it was a “long, somewhat inconclusive conversation.”
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When Soapy Williams
sat down to write his memo about impending urban violence to Sorensen, he was not speculating—in the days after Medgar Evers’s murder, nearly forty cities saw major demonstrations. Indeed, the slaying caught the nation’s attention like no single civil rights murder since the lynching of Emmett Till eight years earlier. Whites were terrified, blacks were galvanized. On June 12, nearly four hundred people marched against segregation in Savannah, Georgia, telling the mayor he had forty-four hours “to give us our freedom.” Five were injured that same day during a riot in Cambridge, Maryland, while three were hurt at a protest at a hospital construction site in Harlem. In Boston on June 11, forty protesters packed into a school board meeting room to call for an end to de facto school segregation in the city, while in Los Angeles on June 12, a burning pot of oil was thrown through a store window during the third day of protests against discrimination in that city.
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Things were particularly tumultuous in Washington. On June 14, thousands of marchers, backed by the NAACP, crowded in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, holding signs reading “Whose Side Are You On?” and “Freedom Now!” Then they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, heckled along the way by Nazis wearing gorilla suits. The marchers ignored them. Outside the District of Columbia building, city commissioner Walter Tobriner promised a crowd of hundreds that the city would enact a fair housing law “no later than this session.” He also promised to pursue a fair employment law. “Waiting as long as you have,” he said, “I, too, would be out there with you and not where I stand.” The crowd cheered.
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Crowds then gathered at the Department of Justice building, where protesters demanded to meet with the attorney general. After twenty minutes, Robert Kennedy appeared, met by boos, a few cheers, and signs reading “Let Negroes Work in the Justice Department,” “Don’t Play Politics with Human Rights,” and “Why an Almost Lily White Justice Department? It’s not Easter.” Kennedy, whom the
New York Times
, in its coverage of the protest, described as “smiling” but “obviously irritated,” told the crowd that there was no discrimination at the department—even though, as he well knew, only a tiny fraction of the department’s attorneys were black. “Any individual can come in here and get a job if he is qualified.” Diffidently, but bravely, he added, “I’m not going out and hire a Negro just because he’s not white.”
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The most dangerous confrontations occurred in Jackson, in the wake of Evers’s assassination. During a hundred-person march on June 13—in violation of a county court injunction against demonstrating—some eighty people were arrested and three injured, including a white professor from nearby Tougaloo College (John Salter, the same one who had been beaten by a white mob on May 28) and a fifteen-year-old girl. That afternoon Marshall received a frantic call from Thelton Henderson in Jackson. The black community was about to boil over. He told Marshall that he spoke with three black men with guns, one of whom said, “If they come up to me, I’ll shoot their brains out.”
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The next day the city granted black leaders their request for a parade permit, and on June 15 thousands attended a funeral service for Evers at the city’s Masonic temple, including Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche. Afterward, though, some five hundred people braved three-digit heat to march through downtown, surrounded by police, chanting “Shoot, shoot!” Rocks were thrown, arrests were made. It seemed that a riot could break out any minute. Just then a voice shouted, “My name is John Doar, and I am from the Department of Justice.” Out stepped the lanky Department of Justice lawyer, in shirtsleeves and a skinny black tie. Doar, who had made a specialty of dropping into racial hot spots around the Deep South, appeared seemingly from out of nowhere. “Medgar Evers would not have wanted it this way,” he shouted. Miraculously, the crowd and the police backed down.
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Evers was a veteran, and he was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington. Robert Kennedy was one of the two thousand people in attendance, but his brother stayed at the White House. President Kennedy did, however, invite Myrlie Evers and her children to the Oval Office afterward, where he posed for a photograph and gave the boys PT-109 tie clasps.
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Americans awoke on
June 20 to headlines in their local newspapers announcing President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. He had submitted it, along with a lengthy message, to Congress the day before, after one last Justice Department drafting session that had Schlei, Harold Reis, and Sol Lindenbaum making last-minute adjustments until two in the morning. The message both echoed and amplified the urgency of his TV address eight days earlier. “I am proposing that Congress stay in session this year until it has enacted—preferably as a single, omnibus bill—the most responsible, reasonable and urgently needed solution” to the civil rights issue. “It will go far toward providing reasonable men with the reasonable means of meeting these problems, and it will thus help end the kind of racial strife which this nation can hardly afford.”
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But while Kennedy’s June 11 speech focused on the moral imperative of action, his message to Congress was couched in a concern over racial violence and disorder—reflecting the Evers murder, the nationwide protests, and the general fear that things would only get worse in the summer months. Tellingly, the bill did the same: despite extensive debate during the drafting period, there was nothing about employment, nothing about job training; the bill’s planks focused exclusively on the pressing demands of demonstrators, and Southern demonstrators in particular. It was designed to have an immediate, concrete impact on the issues of the moment in the South, and leave for later the long-term problems facing black Americans in the rest of the country.

Kennedy’s bill, which became known as H.R. 7152, had seven titles. Three of them were holdovers from his earlier civil rights bill: a provision on voting, including federal referees, expedited lawsuits, uniform registration standards, and an assumption that anyone with a sixth-grade education was literate enough to vote; technical and financial assistance for school desegregation; and renewal of the Civil Rights Commission.

The most significant new title was the ban on discrimination in public accommodations, which it specified as hotels, restaurants, “places of amusement,” and retail stores. Most notably, the bill did not include a business size cutoff, an idea that had been bandied about in the early planning sessions as a way to draw in conservative Republicans. Enforcement of the title would depend on the aggrieved individual, who could file for a court order against an establishment if he or she felt discriminated against; if the owner refused to abide by the order, and a further step involving a government mediator failed, the complainant could file a lawsuit, which the attorney general could join. Equal access, Kennedy said in his message, “seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure.”

The bill also added to the education title by creating a “Title III for schools,” which allowed the attorney general to initiate or intervene in suits against school segregation. Until then, the cost of such suits had to be borne completely by individuals—a daunting task for the average black family in the South. The bill would also predicate technical and financial assistance on the existence of desegregation plans; in other words, it created a financial incentive for school districts that might otherwise be on the fence about desegregation to take the plunge.

Finally, the bill would allow the president to cut off federal funds to local or state programs that practiced discrimination, create a statutory basis for the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and establish a federal mediation program, the Community Relations Service.

Kennedy’s message did not ignore the jobs question entirely. He claimed that his pro-growth program, centered on tax cuts and free trade, would boost black employment numbers, and he called on Congress to enact a forthcoming, unspecified education bill. He also requested that Congress put more money into vocational training programs, and he announced that he had directed Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz to ensure that federal apprenticeship programs were administered equally for all races. “Finally,” he wrote, “I renew my support of Federal Fair Employment Practices legislation”—which was news, since he had never publicly, directly endorsed such legislation, but was still small beer for those in and outside the government who had hoped for much more.

Joe Rauh, among others, was dismayed that the bill “contained the administration’s best estimates of what could be enacted, rather than what was needed.” James Farmer, the national director of CORE, called the bill weak and, like Rauh, demanded the addition of a robust Title III plank. At its national convention in Chicago in early July, the NAACP issued a statement that the bill was “inadequate to meet the minimum demands of the existing situation,” a point that Roy Wilkins tried to soften—but ultimately endorsed—on
Meet the Press
the following month. “It is incumbent upon the Negro population to keep asking for more,” he said. Indeed, that was the inspiration for the controversial upcoming “march on Washington,” in which tens or even hundreds of thousands of people would come to the capital for a day of protests and speeches—a plan that both the White House and Congress, not to mention the local District government, viewed with trepidation.
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