The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (21 page)

Washington more or less shut down on the day of the march. A baseball doubleheader that day between the Washington Senators and the Minnesota Twins was postponed. Hundreds of businesses closed shop, and thousands of white suburbanites stayed home from work (Congress, however, decided to stay in session). “At ten o’clock the city was so empty that it looked as if a plague had struck it,” wrote the
Washington Post
the next day. The city had 2,934 police officers on hand, as well as 303 police reserves, 335 firemen, and 1,735 National Guardsmen at the ready. Across the Potomac, 4,000 Army soldiers stood on alert in Virginia. Douglas had strong-armed labor leaders, who provided the sound system, to arrange a kill switch; during the speeches a Justice Department official stood at the side with a 78 of Mahalia Jackson singing “Got the Whole World in His Hands,” ready to switch off a rabble-rousing speaker.
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And yet nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, the march was the apogee of the civil rights movement. More than two hundred thousand people, twice as many as expected, came to Washington, from as far away as Los Angeles. Primarily African American, the crowd also included rabbis, white union leaders, and more than sixty-five members of Congress. All three TV networks covered it, with CBS showing it in its entirety, with field reports from correspondent Roger Mudd. As throngs of people came into town on buses and trains—one man arrived on roller skates from Chicago—civil rights leaders visited, by appointment, with Mansfield, Dirksen, Halleck, Speaker John McCormack, and House Majority Leader Carl Albert. They pressed for a strengthened civil rights bill, especially one with an FEPC added, but the lawmakers remained noncommittal.
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Despite the promotional emphasis, in the weeks leading up to the march, on the civil rights bill, many of the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial focused on economic justice. “We know that we have no future in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty,” Randolph said. Reuther, speaking later, said the civil rights bill was a “meaningful first step” but one that needed to go further and address “the job question.” The bill will fail in its intentions, he said, “as long as millions of American Negroes are treated as second-class citizens and denied jobs.” And even Wilkins declared: “We want employment and with it we want the pride and responsibility and self-respect that goes along with jobs.”
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The crux of these speeches—a call for jobs and economic justice, and a critique of the civil rights bill for failing to address them—was overshadowed by King’s historic address near the end of the program. Yet that speech, aside from its rhetorical might, served a different purpose: though ending on a hopeful vision—a “dream that all men are created equal”—and full of praise for “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” its substance was much more critical. A century after Abraham Lincoln signed a “promissory note” with the Emancipation Proclamation, King declared, “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.” The march, he said, represented blacks’ demand that the country make good on that note.
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King’s speech was the last major address of the day. The event ended at five o’clock with a benediction from Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, and hundreds of thousands of feet moved back to their buses, cars, and trains. Cleve Howell, a butcher from New York, rested on the grass south of Union Station, waiting for his train. “I hope those guys over there got the message,” he said, motioning toward the Capitol.
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While the crowds headed home, the march’s leaders made their way to the White House for an hour-long meeting with the president. Though Kennedy had endorsed the event more than a month before, he had refused requests to meet with the leaders beforehand, not wanting to get too close to an event that he still feared could blow up in the administration’s face. Kennedy greeted them heartily—“I have a dream!” he said, arms open, as they entered—and then dived into an update on the bill’s progress. At one point Randolph asked for a glass of milk; the president, remembering his manners, ordered sandwiches for his tired guests. Randolph then pressed the president to strengthen the civil rights bill by adding an FEPC, playing on many of the concerns Kennedy had been playing on all summer: youth unemployment, delinquency, school dropouts. Reuther, speaking next, asked for Title III—a big request, he admitted, but then the march demonstrated just how big the movement for civil rights change was. “We’ve put together the broadest working legislating coalition we’ve ever had,” he said. Kennedy demurred, saying he was already fighting a tough battle over his current bill. Strangely out of tune with the moment, he recommended that blacks follow “the Jewish example” of community self-improvement rather than relying on the government.
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Ignoring that last comment, Wilkins and Randolph insisted that things in Congress were better than the president assumed, and that he was underestimating his own moral power. “Nobody can lead this crusade but you,” Randolph said. But Kennedy’s mind was in a different place; he was concerned that Republican support would collapse, since the party was intent on making inroads in the South. And where was the business community, which he had hoped would rally behind the bill? King suggested the president invite Dwight D. Eisenhower to endorse the bill, which the president agreed to do—but through a panel of religious leaders, not himself. The meeting ended shortly after six, the leaders going away with nothing save a few nice group photographs.
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The immediate coverage of the march fell into two categories: acclaim for the speeches and the orderly beauty of the crowd, and hard-nosed analysis of its impact on the civil rights bill.
Rally
impact
on
congress
still
doubtful
, read a typical headline, in the
Washington Post
. The march was wonderful, the article said, “but, on the record anyway, the limited commitments they brought back from the Capitol were substantially those they had already had.”
Time
magazine was even harsher: “From the Capitol Hill leaders, and from the President and the Vice President, the visitors got polite words—and polite refusals. And as they left Washington they knew that there would be no FEPC, no authority for the Justice Department to step into every sort of civil rights case. Most frustrating of all, they knew that the public accommodations section of the administration’s package was quite unlikely to pass the Senate.” Even years later, key figures in the bill’s journey, including Nicholas Katzenbach, said they didn’t believe the march made a difference.
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This was more than a matter of jaundiced memory; a sense of frustration with the march’s legislative payoff pervaded the movement as well. In an after-action report, the LCCR wrote: “In their round of morning meetings with the heads of Congress and their late afternoon meeting with the President, the leaders of the March occasionally had the frustrating sense of traveling in circles. The meetings were cordial and helpful. But the feeling remains no one is ready to follow the splendid example set by more than 200,000 marchers and take the first bold step toward strengthening the measure.”
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Such pessimism, though understandable, missed the larger point of the march. As a spectacle captured magnificently by TV, it demonstrated to the countless millions of white Americans who knew the movement solely by the images from Birmingham that the nation’s blacks came in peace. Very few of those viewers then turned immediately to their writing desks to pen a letter to Congress supporting the bill. But in the months to come, they would be more open to the follow-up appeals delivered by their ministers, less interested in the anti-civil-rights propaganda spilling forth from CCFAF, and more likely to sign a petition or even, eventually, to write a letter in support of the bill. The march, in other words, set a tone of moral optimism, a context that drove the politics of the bill long after the event had faded into history.

The march had other knock-on effects. Above all, it helped unify a still-fractured civil rights coalition. Though Reuther himself had never wavered in his support of civil rights or the groups leading the fight, many in the UAW and AFL-CIO, including its president, George Meany, did. Thanks in part to the bitter fight with the NAACP over discrimination within the garment and building trades unions, Meany had refused to endorse the march, and he stonewalled Reuther when the UAW president tried to press his case. Before the march, with Meany on the sidelines, it was an open question as to how much support Reuther could command from other member unions, let alone the rest of his leadership and the rank and file. Afterward, the flood of goodwill for King and the civil rights cause effectively isolated Meany and gave Reuther a veritable blank check for pushing the bill with union resources over the coming year.

The march also spurred groups that were already involved to go further. Victor Reuther, one of Walter’s brothers and the UAW’s liaison to the NCC and other religious groups, was inspired by the march and created a planning committee to organize lobbying teams to spread across the Midwest, advocating for the bill. A few days after the march, a conference on the bill sponsored by the NCC opened in Lincoln, Nebraska, drawing 110 people from thirteen states; on September 12, another 900 people met in Des Moines, Iowa, to kick off a months-long multistate campaign for the bill. From there, four-person teams—composed of a theologian, a legislative expert, a representative from SNCC or SCLC, and a coordinator—spread out across the Midwest, organizing letter-writing campaigns, recruiting ministers to advocate for the bill in their sermons, and visiting representatives and senators home from Washington. According to Hamilton, between June and December 1963, the NCC’s Committee on Race and Religion spent $185,000 on lobbying for the bill and on efforts to desegregate churches—or $1.4 million in 2013 dollars.
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In fact, lobbying for a stronger bill had begun well before the first marchers arrived in Washington that August morning. On June 7, even before the bill was introduced, the AFL-CIO’s head lobbyist, Andrew Biemiller, sent the White House a memo outlining labor’s position on it, focused primarily on the need for an FEPC. “The package is inadequate,” the memo read. The bill “is a patent compromise in a no-compromise situation. All-out fights are made on all-out measures. How is the public to understand that the Administration is going to make an all-out fight when it starts with a half-way measure?”
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The memo landed at the White House like a bomb. “That afternoon I get a call from Meany in Italy,” Biemiller recalled. “He said, ‘What kind of a memo did you leave with Jack Kennedy today?’” Meany told him Kennedy wanted to see Biemiller immediately. Biemiller hurried to the White House, and soon found himself face-to-face with the president. “It was one of the most painful meetings I’ve ever been in in my life,” he said. “Jack Kennedy insisted we were going to kill the bill. He said, ‘Now mind me, I’m not opposed to it as a separate piece of legislation. But I don’t see it’s important as these other things are. And I can’t go with you.’”
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The administration continued to resist as the summer progressed. “F.E.P. continues to be a major problem,” reported Katzenbach to Robert Kennedy on August 19. “Larry O’Brien is meeting with Biemiller this morning and asking him to show us that the necessary Republican votes to pass F.E.P. as part of the omnibus bill are finally committed as a condition for administration support.”
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The White House was doing more than sticking to its bipartisan strategy: it was also increasingly concerned that the white public was turning against the bill. Despite the warm fuzzy feelings around the March on Washington, polls showed that many, sometimes even most, whites thought Kennedy was moving too fast on the bill. More disturbing were the reports of a nascent white backlash against civil rights in general among the Northern white working class. Wayne Hays, a Democrat who represented the industrial Steubenville, Ohio, area, told Justice Department lawyer William Geoghegan that his mail was running nearly 100 percent against the legislation. The issue, he reported, was jobs. “Many of them seemed to have the impression that the legislation has something to do with providing more job opportunities for Negroes, and since unemployment is still high in the Steubenville area this causes some alarm among White voters who are unemployed or whose job future is precarious,” Geoghegan wrote. Another aide, John Bartlow Martin, returned from visiting his family in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Oak Park with a similar report, though this time focused on housing—and beliefs that the White House wanted to make it possible for blacks to move into white neighborhoods.
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On top of all of that, the White House was playing defense on a recent Pentagon order to restrict soldiers’ access to segregated facilities off-base and to permit them to march in civil rights demonstrations—moves Kennedy agreed with, but which were handled ineptly and gave the Southern Democrats a platform from which to accuse the president of politicizing national defense. With a looming election the next year, it is no wonder the administration held back—and in some cases, like a Justice Department indictment of nine protesters in Albany, Georgia, seemed to be working against any faint pro-civil-rights image it might have acquired.
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