The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (16 page)

But if many on the president’s left were unhappy with the bill, so were many on his right. The Southerners, aware of the public attention already focused on the issue, were careful to avoid explicit defenses of Jim Crow segregation, let alone white supremacy. To hear them tell it, the question was wholly a constitutional one; the bill was an invasion of property and states’ rights, and a dangerous power grab by the federal government. Discrimination, they typically conceded, was a bad thing. But people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their property, including discriminate against blacks. Any law that infringed on that right was tantamount to communism—or, as the Southern Democrats never tired of repeating, slavery itself.

Many of their initial reactions telegraphed clearly the arguments they would be making throughout the bill’s long journey through Congress. Senator Eastland called it “the greatest single grasp for power by the Executive department that the nation has ever known.” Echoing accusations that liberals were merely playing on black frustrations to win votes—historically, not an entirely unfair charge—Senator Lister Hill of Alabama said, “Many of our most sacred rights, including the right to own and use private property have been laid on the altar of political expediency.” Senator Richard Russell of Georgia, the dean of the Southern Democrats, went further and tried to use Kennedy’s concern over easing tensions in the black community against him. “The president of the United States, instead of having offered his support to the local authorities, who were overwhelmed by these mass movements, has in essence offered aid and comfort to them by saying, ‘If you do not immediately pass a law, the situation will become much worse.’” And if the Southerners’ strategy was not clear enough already, Eastland tipped his hand on the inevitable filibuster by saying that Congress needed to allow “time for the implications of this program to soak in on the American people.”
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Not everyone was critical of the bill. It drew significant praise from establishment media outlets as a breakthrough piece of social legislation. The editorial board of the
New York Times
praised “the scope of the President’s program and its gravity of tone,” which “bespoke a sense of urgency and of high purpose that should help moderate the sectionalism and the partisanship that unfortunately are to be expected in the debate over his specific proposals.”
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And not all black leaders were critical of the bill. The editors of the
Atlanta Daily World
hailed the bill and called for a moratorium on “continued demonstrations, provocative incidents, inflammatory statements, threats and actions, which could be viewed as tools of force, in an area where we are trying to win the united action of so many purposeful segments of the nation.”
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Perhaps the most significant signs of support came from the Republican leadership in Congress. House Minority Leader Charles Halleck, despite pressure from many Republicans to play hardball with the president, said that his party “will move expeditiously and in a spirit of cooperation to get hearings started in the House Judiciary Committee on the civil rights proposals offered by the President today.” The Republican record on civil rights, he said, “has been unmatched for 100 years and as always our attitude on this issue is constructive.” Even Senator Barry Goldwater, a libertarian stalwart and likely contender for the 1964 presidential ticket, offered his qualified support, endorsing most of the bill but calling Title II “really objectionable.” Goldwater also criticized the president for not going further on Title VI, saying that funds should be automatically cut off to discriminatory programs, not just left to the president’s discretion.
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Praise for the bill was matched by skepticism over whether it could pass. E. W. Kenworthy of the
New York Times
, one of the better-connected reporters on the beat, wrote that while congressional leaders predicted that Kennedy’s bill would survive in some form, “they also agreed that he had virtually no chance of getting the authority he seeks to enforce desegregation of privately owned public accommodations,” thanks largely to the opposition from Senate Republicans. Even Jacob Javits, a professional optimist when it came to civil rights bills and their prospects on the Hill, predicted a “long, tough, hard fight ahead.”
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From the beginning, Kennedy understood that that fight would be fought as much outside Congress as within it. As he and his staff were putting the finishing touches on the bill, they also invited a group of about thirty civil rights leaders—including King, Rauh, Wilkins, Farmer, Walter Reuther, Whitney Young, Dorothy Height, and A. Philip Randolph—to the White House to discuss the legislation on June 22. Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Arthur Schlesinger were also in attendance. Before the meeting, Marshall and the Kennedys met with King sequentially and alone. They demanded that he cut all ties with two of his advisers whom the FBI—thanks to wiretaps on the men’s phones—suspected of being Communists. “I assume you know you’re under very close surveillance,” the president told him. King parried, asking for evidence. The president indicated that he would get it to him soon, then led King to the Cabinet Room.
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As Rauh later told the historian Taylor Branch, while the president and King were outside, the civil rights leaders had been maneuvering for the choice seats closest to the president, knowing that a good impression made that day could cement someone’s role as the movement’s point person at the White House. Wilkins and Reuther both wanted that job—but so did King, who had his lieutenant Walter Fauntroy save him one of the seats next to the president’s.
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King and Kennedy soon joined them, and the president began by talking strategy: the committees, the filibuster, the key players. To succeed, he said, the bill needed to draw in people outside the traditional civil rights supporters, including Midwestern, small-town Republicans, as well as filibuster-friendly senators from the newer, sparsely populated mountain and southwest states. To win them over, he said, would take careful calibration of the civil rights message—a not so subtle criticism of the planned march on Washington.
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At this point Young asked if it was true that Kennedy was opposed to the upcoming march, which had been officially announced just the day before. “We want success in Congress, not just a big show at the Capitol,” Kennedy said, tilting in his rocking chair. “Some of these people are looking for an excuse to be against us; and I don’t want to give any of them a chance to say, ‘Yes I’m for the bill, but I am damned if I will vote for it at the point of a gun.’ It seemed to be a great mistake to announce a March on Washington before the bill was even in committee. The only effect is to create an atmosphere of intimidation—and this may give some members of Congress an out.”

This was not what Kennedy’s guests wanted to hear, but they were hardly surprised—the president was already on record opposing the march. The first to respond was Randolph, the wise old man of the movement who had organized the first March on Washington, in 1941, then called it off after President Roosevelt agreed to create an FEPC for government contractors (the office was shuttered in 1946). Randolph had frequently gone back to the idea in the years since, and was the driving force behind the current plans. “The Negroes are already in the streets,” he said. “It is very likely impossible to get them off. If they are bound to be in the streets in any case, is it not better that they be led by organizations dedicated to civil rights and disciplined by struggles rather than to leave them to other leaders who care neither about civil rights or about nonviolence?”

Kennedy nodded. “This is true,” he said. “But now we are in a new phase, the legislative phase, and results are essential. The wrong kind of demonstration at the wrong time will give those fellows a chance to say that they have to prove their courage by voting against us. To get the necessary votes we have, first, to oppose demonstrations which lead to violence and, second, to give Congress a fair chance to work its will.”

Then Johnson chimed in to correct what he saw as a gross misunderstanding of Washington politics. It was not about protests in the streets, he said, or about pressure from lobbyists. “Not many votes are converted in the corridors,” Johnson said. “Most fellows vote for what they think is right and for what they think their states want. We have about 50 votes for us in the Senate and about 22 against us. What counts is the 26 or so votes that remain.”

Farmer, despite his public position against the bill, tried to take a middle ground. “We understand your political problem in getting the legislation through, and we want to help in that as best we can,” he said. “But the civil rights forces have their problems too. We would be in a difficult if not untenable position if we called the street demonstrations off and then were defeated in the legislative battle.”

King saw a chance to regain his hand after the president’s private scolding. “It is not a matter of either/or,” he said, “but of both/and. Take the question of the March on Washington. This could serve as a means through which people with legitimate discontents could channel their grievances under disciplined, non-violent leadership. It could also serve as a means of dramatizing the issue and mobilizing support in parts of the country which don’t know the problem at first hand. I think it will serve a purpose. It may seem ill-timed. Frankly, I have never engaged in a direct-action movement which did not seem ill-timed. Some people thought Birmingham ill-timed.”

“Including the attorney general,” joked the president.

Someone in the group brought up the need for the president’s bill to go further and include a Title III, to offer federal protection for demonstrators against local police brutality. But the president stonewalled. “Yes, but I know what Southern mayors and police chiefs will say,” replied Kennedy. “They will say that all they are doing is trying to maintain law and order. In any case, I don’t think you should all be totally harsh on Bull Connor. After all, he has done more for civil rights than almost anybody else.” Whether anyone laughed at the president’s gallows humor went unrecorded.

Kennedy shifted tone. “This is a very serious fight,” the president said. “The vice president and I know what it will mean if we fail. I have just seen the new Gallup Poll: national approval of the administration has fallen from 60 to 47 percent. We’re in this up to our neck.” It was bad enough to have to advocate for the bill in the first place; losing, after a long fight, would be a disaster. “A good many programs I care about may go down the drain as a result of this—so we are putting a lot on the line.”

The critical thing was to maintain good faith and communication between the civil rights movement and the White House and pro-civil-rights members of Congress. “I have my problems with the Congress; you have yours with your own groups,” Kennedy said. “We will undoubtedly disagree from time to time on tactics. But the important thing is to keep in touch.”

Kennedy then announced that he had to leave to get ready for a trip to Europe. Before he left, he said, “What seems to me terribly important is to get, and keep, as many Negro children as possible in schools this fall. It is too late to get equality for their parents, but we still can get it for the children—if they can go to school and take advantage of what educational opportunity is open to them. I urge to you get every Negro family to do this at whatever sacrifice.”

The men came away impressed with the president’s commitment. Rauh was struck by the contrast between the Kennedy he had just seen and the one he had dueled with at the ADA meeting two and a half years before. “It was a totally different attitude than he’d had in February of 1961,” he said. “He was prepared if necessary to sacrifice everything for the fight. It was a moral issue. It was a great speech he made to us. I felt from that moment he was terribly committed.” In fact, to put a finer point on his commitment, that same day the president issued an executive order giving the government the power to pull out funding from construction projects that discriminated against blacks, and he asked the Pentagon to consider closing military facilities near towns that practiced Jim Crow segregation.
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King, on the other hand, gave a statement afterward saying that the president had tried to get them to call off the march but that he and others had refused. “If there is a filibuster in Congress, we will have a nonviolent peaceful demonstration in Washington,” he said—in other words, a Birmingham-style campaign in Washington. “We feel a demonstration would help the president’s civil rights legislation, would help dramatize the issue.” King’s comments drew a distancing rebuke from Wilkins, who said the NAACP would have nothing to do with sit-ins in the capital. “I am not involved at the present moment” with the march plans, he said, a statement that was only technically accurate, and only for the time being.
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The civil rights leaders then repaired for lunch at Reuther’s suite at the Statler Hilton, where they pressured King to back off his plan for another Birmingham. Wilkins and Reuther wanted no demonstration at all, but “quiet, patient” lobbying. Eventually they persuaded King to agree tentatively on a straightforward, one-day march of the kind Randolph had long been advocating. But the lunch ended without a firm commitment from anyone.
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Still, the meeting with Kennedy bore significant fruit. It convinced the civil rights leaders, long and justifiably skeptical of the president’s intentions, that his drive for civil rights legislation was for real. It brought them together behind a specific, practical plan for the March on Washington. But above all, it generated a momentum to work together on pushing the civil rights bill, and to set aside, for the moment, the differences that had plagued them up until now—Reuther and Wilkins tacitly agreed to overlook ongoing tensions between labor unions and the NAACP, while the establishment civil rights groups agreed to work with King’s upstart SCLC to make the march a success. Forces both inside and outside the government were now aligned behind the civil rights bill; the question was whether they could agree on just how strong that bill should be.