The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (4 page)

And while the postwar economic situation for blacks was rising in absolute terms through the 1950s and early ’60s, they were falling further behind whites in every corner of the country. Again, early gains proved elusive: median black household income rose from below half to about 60 percent of that of white families in the early 1950s—and then began to taper off over the following decade. As late as 1966, the legal scholar Michael Sovern lamented in a report for the Century Foundation: “Perhaps the most poignant evidence of the Negro’s subordinate role in our economy is the extent to which Negro newspapers regard as newsworthy the opening of the most ordinary jobs to members of their race.”
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Within the movement itself, by the early 1960s the mood was one of frustration. “I think 1962 was perhaps the lowest moment for the civil rights movement during the Kennedy years,” said NAACP president Wilkins. Enormous energies had been unleashed, milestones seemingly achieved. Yet the energies were spent to little end. The
Brown
decision was a landmark in American judicial history, but what seemed like the goal for so long—the end to legal segregation—turned out to be just the beginning.
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Even outside the South, progress was uneven at best. James P. Davis, a black state legislator from Kansas City, Kansas, told of a car trip his family took to North Dakota, which took him across Kansas and into Nebraska. As long as they remained in his state, the Davises could not find service at a single restaurant; as soon as they crossed into Nebraska, where discrimination in public accommodations was illegal, they had no problem. (Davis and a colleague then led a successful campaign to get a similar accommodations law passed in Kansas.)
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Such progress was unpredictable; in early 1963, four years after the predominantly rural, conservative state of Kansas opened up its public accommodations, the middle-class, liberal Chicago suburb of Oak Park refused to desegregate its symphony—because, the president of the symphony association said, “Nothing is integrated in Oak Park, you know.”
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Time and again, behind the headlines of progress one could find complications, reversals, standstills, and only the occasional step forward. In February 1960, four black students in Greensboro, North Carolina, took seats at a Woolworth’s lunch counter and asked for service. When the wait, staff ignored them, they remained in their seats until closing time—and in doing so launched a new wave of sit-ins. Black protesters across the country copied and adapted the “-in” model for their own purposes: wade-ins at segregated swimming pools, kneel-ins at segregated churches, play-ins at segregated parks. The Greensboro action also inaugurated a surge of student and youth activism that would resonate through the black movement—and deep into white culture as well. The next year black students and other activists boarded buses for the Freedom Rides through the South, enduring violence and arrests as they passed deeper into the region and, eventually, forcing intervention by a reluctant Kennedy administration. Largely as a result, in September 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy issued new rules banning segregation in interstate travel—though even that was a small accomplishment, since it simply added federal muscle to a six-year-old ban by the Interstate Commerce Commission.
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Indeed, such signs of progress were valuable largely for their symbolism. The Kennedy rules were intended to signal that the administration supported black demands for freedom of movement around the country, without offending the administration’s Southern Democratic allies. The 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts symbolized congressional intent to protect black voting rights, but as substance they meant little. As the
Cleveland Call and Post
, a black newspaper, wrote in a September 1961 editorial, “At the present rate of progress, without the help of new and stronger federal laws, it could well be another century before all of the barriers erected by Southern states against Negro voting are shattered.”
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Complicating things further was the fact that there was no single, unified civil rights movement, but many: there were the establishment organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League; the Southern, religiously inflected groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC); the brasher groups of students and other young people, like the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC); and the urban, radical outfits like the Black Muslims. And those were just at the national level; at the state, local, and neighborhood level, a constellation of civil rights groups focused on specific goals using specific methods—picketing segregated work sites, keeping their children out of segregated schools, and boycotting segregated department stores.

By the early 1960s, these frustrations and competing energies threatened to undermine the fragile unity of the movement. At the national level, at least, a fragile alliance bound together the mainstream organizations. But many of the secular, establishment leaders, like Wilkins of the NAACP and Whitney Young of the Urban League—men most effective in the banquet halls and Capitol Hill offices of Washington, men who had worked for decades to build a national movement—felt challenged by, and a bit envious of, the upstart success of the Southern-focused, religious Martin Luther King Jr. and his even younger comrades-in-arms in SNCC. “We talked of the need to coordinate our work, not duplicate it or divide our forces, but except for some good results on voter education and registration in the South, we were not really pulling together,” Wilkins said later. King and SNCC eschewed politics for bearing moral witness; forcing confrontation with segregation in its rawest, ugliest form, they felt, was the only way to effect real change. And yet even then there was tension—the impatient students in SNCC saw King, a few years older, but a generation apart, as too square, too self-conscious, too focused on his own moral righteousness; behind his back they called him “Da Lawd.” To his face they paid fealty to his organizing prowess, but the rifts—regional, generational, theological—kept the different strands of the movement from cohering into a national force.
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One thing, maybe the only thing, almost everyone in the movement could agree on was the need for presidential leadership. And so perhaps the biggest frustration of the early 1960s came from the White House. On July 15, 1960, less than forty-eight hours after John F. Kennedy won the Democratic nomination for president and less than a day after he announced Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, the two men sat down in the Rendezvous Room of the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles with a klatch of the party’s leading black officials, organized by Representative William Dawson of Chicago. The group, already wary of Kennedy’s lily-white background and Johnson’s spotty civil rights history, rained questions on the duo. Much of the skepticism focused on Johnson. “How can you account for the fact that Senator Johnson is perhaps a symbol against the sit-ins?” asked a convention delegate from Detroit. The Reverend E. Franklin Jackson, of Washington, D.C., asked, in reference to the special session of Congress that Johnson would oversee, as majority leader, when he returned from the convention: “What assurance can you give us that we will get some help from Senator Johnson in the next six weeks? That’s when we are going to need it, if the Negro is going to get any help.”
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Kennedy asked them to follow him in implementing the strong civil rights plank that, just days before, the party had written into its platform. “What we are interested in is the support of all those who support the platform,” the candidate said. “What we are interested in is the program. It was written by people associated with me. In the final analysis I bear the responsibility.” The next day, Kennedy’s words were there for all to read on the front page of the
New York Times
.
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They were words Kennedy came to regret. He had just committed himself to carrying out the most extensive civil rights program adopted by either of the two main parties since 1948—a program that, given the power of the Southern Democratic bloc, was virtually impossible to achieve. Among other things, it called for an end to literacy tests and poll taxes; a requirement that school districts submit detailed desegregation plans to begin no later than 1963, offering technical compliance to do so; full Title III powers for the attorney general; a fair employment practices commission; and an end to discrimination in federally assisted housing programs—all under “the strong, active, persuasive, and inventive leadership of the President of the United States.”
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But rather than backing down, Kennedy doubled down. On October 7, during his second debate with Vice President Richard M. Nixon, Kennedy said that Americans were entitled to know “what will be the leadership of the president in these areas to provide equality of opportunity for employment. Equality of opportunity in the field of housing, which could be done in all federal-supported housing by a stroke of the president’s pen.” Less than three weeks later, at the instigation of his advisers Louis Martin and Harris Wofford, he called Martin Luther King Jr.’s wife, Coretta, after her husband had been sentenced to prison in Georgia. The call was just a gesture, and widely interpreted as a campaign move; nonetheless it was welcomed, especially since it stood in contrast to the actions of the Nixon campaign, which had decided to stay removed from the issue. The call was of a part with Kennedy’s act-fast charisma, the force of his language, and the energy of his campaign, all of which seemed to promise the world to African Americans.
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“When John F. Kennedy became President later that year,” recalled NAACP president Roy Wilkins, “everyone expected him to come in and tear up the pea patch for civil rights.” He just had to—after all, it was the black vote in places like Chicago, and thus Illinois, that made the difference in key states; without it, Richard Nixon would become president. In September, Kennedy had asked Senator Joseph Clark and Representative Emanuel Celler to develop legislation to implement the Democratic platform on civil rights in 1961.
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Disappointment, when it came, was swift and severe. “Within ten days of the election, Clarence Mitchell had taken careful readings around Washington and found that Kennedy had no intention of beginning his new administration with a full-scale legislative program for civil rights,” recalled Wilkins. Kennedy may have owed his election to the black vote, but he and his advisers believed he would owe his legislative success to the Southern Democrats in Congress.
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Kennedy was not ignorant or callous about civil rights; he simply saw it for what it was: a morally important issue that was almost impossible, politically, to address. One early incident reveals much about his thinking. On February 10, 1961, three weeks after Kennedy, in his inaugural address, implored his “fellow citizens of the world” to “ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man,” he sat down with a three-man delegation from Americans for Democratic Action to discuss how to pursue the “freedom of man” at home. The ADA was the leading organization on the anticommunist left, led by such liberal luminaries as Adlai Stevenson, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Reuther, and Joe Rauh—the last of whom, one of the leading liberal lawyers in Washington, was among the three meeting with Kennedy that day.
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First to speak was Robert Nathan, a New Deal economist who had chaired the ADA in the 1950s. He argued that in order to jump-start the national economy—a recession that had begun in April 1960 was just coming to an end that February, though no one in the room yet knew it—the federal government needed to spend an additional $50 billion, even though doing so would boost the deficit by over 60 percent. Kennedy laughed. “Bob, I want you to keep this up,” he said. “It’s very helpful now for you to be pushing me this way.” Though hardly an intellectual himself, Kennedy loved engaging with them, challenging them, drawing from them. Meetings like this were fun for him, and fun for men like Nathan, who enjoyed trading urbane banter with the leader of the free world.

Then it was Rauh’s turn. “Well, Mr. President, I hope that the spirit with which you have treated Bob’s pressure from the left, on the issue for which he speaks for the ADA, will go equally for the issue on which I speak for the ADA: civil rights.”

The smile dropped from the president’s face. “Absolutely not,” Kennedy said. “It’s a totally different thing. Your criticism on civil rights is quite wrong.”

Rauh was stunned. “Oh shit,” he thought. “Nothing is going to happen. How did we let this happen?” He withdrew, and the conversation moved on.

But later, reflecting on the incident, Rauh realized that something more was going on in the president’s head. Kennedy was not naïve, nor was he unaware of how meager his “achievements” really were. “It seems pretty clearly,” Rauh told an interviewer later, “that it was a kind of guilty conscience because he felt that he wasn’t doing enough in there, that this was a moral issue.”

Over the next several months Wilkins and Rauh sent Kennedy numerous proposals for executive orders on employment and housing, but with nothing to show for it. Wofford, Kennedy’s civil rights adviser, did the same—though after a while, he was told not to expect any follow-up to his memos. After Kennedy failed to sign an executive order banning housing discrimination, as he had promised to do in the debate with Nixon, with the “stroke of the presidential pen,” thousands of people took part in the “Ink for Jack” campaign, inundating the White House mail room with pens.
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