The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (38 page)

Several outside groups had their own networks that they coordinated with the department. Irwin Miller and Robert Spike had agreed to create a network of clergy around the South to push for compliance, while the Potomac Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, organized lists of Southern editorial writers, business organizations, and civic groups. The institute used those contacts to build local ad hoc organizations to generate positive press coverage and an accepting business climate for desegregation—a grassroots effort that proved critical in communities that were wary of direct federal pressure.
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In each case, the networks provided both a tool for pushing acceptance in local communities and a source of intelligence on potential hot spots—in early June, for example, Luther Holcomb, the executive director of the Greater Dallas Council of Churches, passed on word that two local restaurants, the Lucas B&B and the Piccadilly Cafeteria, had said they would not comply with Title II.
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The overriding message passed through the networks, the planners at the April 1 meeting agreed, would focus on the bill’s inevitability. For one thing, they communicated that, unlike after
Brown
, the federal government was intent on enforcing the legislation. At the same time, by pressing the idea that desegregation was a fait accompli, the planners were also taking advantage of the fact that many business owners wanted to desegregate, but did not want to be the first to do it, for fear that white customers would shun them for other, still-segregated facilities. If the department, through its various networks, could spread the word that the region was going “all in” at once, then desegregation might go more smoothly.

On the same
day the Senate took up the bill, just a few blocks away from the Justice Department at the Statler Hilton, some eighty leaders from seventy-four member organizations of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights met for their own all-day strategy session. Although they were largely shut out of the backroom negotiations, these groups had their own plans for the bill. They emerged with a long schedule of campaigns and events meant to raise public awareness and ratchet up pressure on the Senate. Each group had its own plan. Every morning, an hour before the Senate opened, a minister would lead a prayer service at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, an art deco pile of a building just a block east of the Capitol. Other groups, like the B’nai B’rith Women, scheduled “adopt a senator” write-in campaigns to Southern Democrats. Still others announced plans to bring their members to Washington to meet with their senators: the NAACP would bring representatives from 190 chapters to Capitol Hill; the AFL-CIO announced an upcoming conference in Washington that would see two hundred members descend on the capital. Humphrey, not wanting to isolate the civil rights groups completely, put in an appearance that turned the meeting from a strategy session to a pep rally. “I am so conditioned morally, physically, psychologically, the fight can go on for ten years and I won’t run out of steam,” he told the crowd. Humphrey expected the same level of commitment from his fellow Democrats. When a staff member told him that Senator Dale McGee of Wyoming had to leave early one day to have dinner with his family, Humphrey replied, “He better make up his mind whether he wants to be a father or a senator—he can’t be both.”
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As it had done during the House debate, the LCCR also organized gallery watchers to remind the senators that the public was watching and to act as an early warning system in case the Southern Democrats announced a sudden quorum call. “The success in maintaining packed galleries during the House debate was an appreciable factor in the victory there,” wrote Violet Gunther, one of the three paid LCCR staffers, in a memo to member organizations. “We must do the same in the Senate.” She drew up a schedule and distributed it among the organizations, with each one responsible for supplying manpower for one- or two-hour increments during each session. And the LCCR brought back Jane O’Grady and her raiders, who acted as the tip of the civil rights whip system, rounding up errant senators to meet quorum calls.
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On the same day as the meeting at the Statler, Mary Parkman Peabody, the seventy-two-year-old patrician mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was one of several people arrested in St. Augustine, Florida, for trying to integrate the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge. Peabody had arrived in town a few days before as part of a wave of activists, most of them much younger than she, who heeded the call by Robert Hayling, a local civil rights leader, to make the historic city the movement’s next battleground. Tensions had been simmering in St. Augustine since sixteen protesters had been arrested during a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter the previous year. In September 1963, Hayling was beaten by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members and then charged with assaulting them. Rather than shrink in retreat, he had redoubled his efforts, and by early the next year had become a national cause célèbre in the black media. Hayling had spent the latter part of February and on into March traveling up and down the East Coast trying to attract volunteers—above all, Martin Luther King Jr. At first King demurred, referring Hayling to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Florida operation. King knew from hard-won experience that poorly planned campaigns, no matter how heartfelt, could only sap the strength of his organization. Still, he recognized the value of the St. Augustine campaign for its potential impact on the civil rights debate in Congress, and he supplied Hayling with a steady stream of SCLC lieutenants to help organize demonstrations and sit-ins (and, this being an oceanfront community, “wade-ins” at segregated beaches, too).
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Still, it was the big three religious faiths that provided the most organizational heft during the filibuster. No one else could match their manpower, organizational cohesion, or passion. Beginning in March, students, seminarians, and congregations flowed into Washington, marching, attending services, writing letters, and meeting, when they could get a few minutes, with senators. “You couldn’t turn around where there wasn’t a clerical collar next to you,” recalled Rauh.
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Under the ecumenical aegis of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, an intelligence network was established to monitor each senator who had yet to commit on the filibuster and to bring pressure on them when they least expected it. When Senator Roman Hruska, a Republican from Nebraska, flew home on weekends, he would encounter one or another of the state’s prominent religious leaders at the airport—a coincidence made possible thanks to the help of Robert Kutak, his administrative assistant, who tipped off the LCCR whenever his boss headed home. Likewise, John Cronin, who was leading the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s efforts on the bill, called a bishop in South Dakota to help lobby Karl Mundt; the senator soon found himself meeting with a local priest with whom he had been close friends in high school.
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Across the country, but particularly in the Midwest, the fight for the civil rights bill was transforming formerly quiet, ordinary people into vocal full-time activists for racial equality. Ministers would sermonize about the bill on a Sunday morning, then ask their congregants to stick around for a letter-writing session. Senate staffers began to expect a surge in mail on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as those letters, posted first thing Monday morning, arrived in Washington. At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, a campus minister named Ernest Reuter organized Project Leadership Organization, a clearinghouse for training and information about the bill that linked together churches, temples, and campus ministries. “We in the Middle Western and Rocky Mountain states will hold the balance of power in this matter,” he wrote in a letter announcing the project. “Because the issue is not as critical for us as it is for the old South and the Eastern states we have a responsibility to take a stand on an issue which surely divides the nation.” Reuter had already played a key, unheralded role in pushing Charles Halleck closer to the bill. By the time the filibuster was in full swing, he and countless others had created a spontaneous culture of civil rights, evanescent and fragmentary but powerful in its moment. Of all the forces and personalities that coalesced around the bill, perhaps none was more critical to its passage than the network of religious organizations and their army of adherents.
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In early April, following Humphrey and Kuchel at the Senate lectern were the paired title captains from each party, who held forth with their own soup-to-nuts explanations for their assigned sections of the bill. Attendance in the Senate dwindled rapidly as the debate fell into a call-and-response pattern in which a Democrat would rise to explain a title, after which a Republican would give almost the exact same set of points in his own words. Occasionally a Southerner would cross-examine the speaker, like the time Sam Ervin, from his desk piled high with law books, questioned Kenneth Keating for two hours after the New York Republican gave his defense of Title I. But that was the extent of the excitement, such as it was. Vermont’s Norris Cotton often could be spied sleeping at his desk. But at least he bothered to show up. “At no time were there more than six senators on the floor,” noted the correspondent E. W. Kenworthy in the
New York Times
. Mudd, who sat in the gallery between filing stories, recalled that “the scene was one of minor, routine floor speeches: the almost empty chamber, the solitary speaker with a stack of documents on his desk and the ever present legislative assistant at his elbow, the presiding officer signing his mail, and the dumbfounded tourists who filled and refilled the galleries every fifteen minutes.”
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Almost as soon as the debate started, the bill’s leaders began to worry what would happen once their speeches, and the Southern Democratic attacks on the bill, had run their course. By “the 20th of April we should be face to face with the question of where to go next,” wrote the Senate secretary, Frank Valeo, to his boss on April 9. Valeo reported that thirty-eight senators, including Dirksen, were dead set against cloture, and another eleven were strongly leaning against it. If he was right, the pro-civil-rights senators had an enormous amount of convincing to do, and no real plan for accomplishing it.
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A bigger problem was simply meeting quorum calls. The Southerners raised the question constantly, often several times a day. On Wednesday, April 1, just two days after the debate began, it took an hour and a half for the civil rights forces to wrangle enough senators to the chamber to make a quorum—a success made possible in part by Arkansas senator William Fulbright, a moderate Southerner who opposed the bill for political reasons back home but did what he could to help out its supporters. “The civil rights quorum machine continues to creak and sputter along,” noted the bipartisan civil rights newsletter on April 3. “It took 53 minutes to make one quorum call on Thursday and 44 minutes to make the other one. This doesn’t break Wednesday’s record for all deliberate speed, but it comes close.”
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The next day the Southerners struck gold. On Saturday, April 4, the civil rights forces failed to muster a quorum; just 39 senators answered the call, including a mere 23 Democrats. Of those who did not appear, 44 backed the bill, including three Democratic title captains, Warren Magnuson of Washington, John Pastore of Rhode Island, and Edward Long of Missouri. Humphrey was furious. In an emergency meeting of Democratic senators after the Senate was forced to recess, Humphrey demanded to know where the missing members were, then sent each of them an angry telegram ordering them to return to the capital immediately.

Then, on the following Tuesday, he and Mansfield hauled thirty of the wayward senators into a meeting, where they were seated in rows facing a table with the two leaders, plus Magnuson and Phil Hart of Michigan. Mansfield and Humphrey proceeded to lecture their colleagues like scolding parents, with Mansfield playing the disappointed father. “May I say in all frankness that I do not relish the job to which you have elected me,” he said. “I am not pleading or begging for cooperation or understanding. I am telling you that I cannot do the job unless you meet me halfway or more than halfway.” Humphrey then took over, saying that from then on he was going to keep a quorum duty roster and that the senators had to report to him whenever they planned to be away from the Capitol.
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The quorum failure did more than anger Humphrey; it uncovered tensions among the senators and raised questions about whether they could hold together against the Southerners’ near-millenarian filibuster. Senator Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania complained out loud, during a meeting of pro-civil-rights senators and staffers that morning, that Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island, one of the truants, “should be kicked in the ass for going off to the beach for two weeks.”
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That same day brought a bombshell from Wisconsin: George Wallace, the bantamweight segregationist governor of Alabama who was running for the Democratic presidential nomination, had won a third of the vote in the state’s primary, or some 266,000 ballots. Governor John Reynolds Jr. had said before the election that even a hundred thousand votes for Wallace would be a disaster. The national Democratic Party immediately went into crisis mode, spinning the vote as an aberration, a result of Republicans crossing over to skew the poll results. But the magnitude of Wallace’s victorious nonvictory overwhelmed all excuses: the voters in what was assumed to be a safely moderate state had turned out in droves to endorse a racist demagogue for president.
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