The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (40 page)

Three days later, at a meeting with the Senate leadership, Mitchell blew up over the proposed changes. “If we let the Dirksen amendments prevail, it will be a disaster,” he declared. “There will be a Negro revolution around the country.”
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Humphrey chuckled, trying to defuse the situation. “We don’t plan on letting them pass,” he said. “Don’t break out in a sweat, Clarence. I believe we should analyze the Dirksen amendments and then move to table them.”

Humphrey’s jocularity notwithstanding, the rift between the civil rights forces in Congress and those outside it was widening. Encouraged by Johnson’s insistence that the bill pass intact, no matter how long the filibuster ran, Rauh, Mitchell, and others refused to accept Humphrey and Kuchel’s cloture strategy. “The Leadership Conference is united in thinking that a cloture discussion is unwise,” Rauh said at a meeting with Humphrey and several Senate staffers on April 16. “Cloture means compromise. There should be no cloture until the votes are counted.” Instead, they insisted that Humphrey and Mansfield start to get tough, extending the Senate’s hours and enforcing the rules on speech times.
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“To date, the South has the advantage,” Mitchell said at the same meeting. “We are not winning, not because we are not strong but because we are gentlemen.”

Humphrey pushed back. “We will have to plan on cloture,” he said. “Nobody won a war [by] starving the enemy. We must shoot them on the battlefield.”

“You are shooting your friends if you trade with Dirksen,” retorted Mitchell.

Now it was Humphrey’s turn to erupt. “Unless we are ready to move in our clothes and our shavers and turn the Senate into a dormitory—which Mansfield won’t have—we have to do something else. The President grabbed me by my shoulder and damn near broke my arm. He said, ‘I’d run the show around the clock.’ That was three weeks ago. I told the president he is grabbing the wrong arm.”

The pressure was clearly getting to the majority whip, who then segued into his own lament. “I have the Senate wives calling me right now asking, ‘Why can’t the senator be home now?’ They add, ‘The place isn’t being run intelligently.’ Sometimes I’m working for longer hours. The president says, ‘What about the pay bill? What about poverty? What about food stamps?’ Clarence, we aren’t going to sell out. If we do, it will be for a hell of a price.”

Then, before Mitchell or Rauh could respond, another quorum call was announced. “I’d better answer the quorum bell,” Humphrey said, and shuffled off.

Through the middle and end of the month, a general malaise had set in over the bill’s leadership. “The filibuster,” wrote John Stewart, Humphrey’s aide, “was beginning to erode the confidence and ethos of those supporting the bill.” The filibuster meant no other Senate business could proceed, and even Northern liberal Democrats were beginning to tire of it. Some began to suggest that they should go ahead and take a vote on cloture, just to see what would happen—even though the most realistic vote counts showed that fewer than sixty senators would support ending the debate.
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At the same time, compromise with Dirksen seemed out of reach: though on April 11 he announced that he had whittled his list of amendments from seventy down to fifteen (and from forty on Title VII to just ten), he retained the biggest ones, including a rule allowing state FEPCs to supersede the federal body and to bar the commission from filing its own suits. He did, however, drop his demand for a two-year delay in implementing Title VII.

Dirksen finally introduced the proposed changes on the Senate floor on April 16, but as was the case with all the amendments to the bill, he did not “call it up” for a vote. He also promised an additional amendment on Title VII, to be revealed in a few days. But even with the pared-back sheaf of amendments, one unnamed “prominent Democrat” told Robert Albright of the
Washington Post
, “The big question remaining is whether the price is too high.”
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Humphrey told the attendees at the daily strategy sessions in his office, surrounded by charts and calendars and duty rosters (as well as a mounted deer head, a gift from Johnson), that he was still hoping to go for a cloture vote by mid-May. “I will try to find the maximum number of votes we can get,” he said. But to get there, he added, more noise from senators and outside groups alike was necessary: there needed to be “a barrage of propaganda” to demonstrate to the public “that the business of government is held back because some people cannot vote.”
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Humphrey was also banking on the possibility that Johnson would yet arrive to work his legislative magic. “Knowing the president,” he told the
Washington Post
, “I expect him to work miracles. He has a mystery kit of legislative remedies.”
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But Johnson was having mixed success at best. His speeches and press conferences were as strong and clear as anyone could have hoped, giving a much-needed shot in the arm to weary senators. But his backroom arm twisting was going nowhere. On April 10 he called West Virginia’s Robert Byrd, a longtime ally but a bitter civil rights opponent. He begged Byrd to support the bill, for Johnson’s sake. “You’re with me! You’re with me! You’ve got to be with me,” he implored.
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Byrd was not moved. “No, my convictions are against the bill.”

Johnson tried a different tack. It was what he, the president, wanted, and wasn’t that reason enough? After all, this was an election year. “It’s going to be rougher if I don’t pass that bill.”

“No, it won’t either.”

“Yes it will. Are y’all going to beat it?” the president asked, referring to the Southern Democrats, with whom Byrd caucused on civil rights.

“I hope to hell we beat it,” Byrd said. “We’re going to do all we can for Lyndon Johnson. We don’t need that bill. You know, you know I’ll carry the weight where it’s needed.”

“Yeah, I know that.”

“But not on this.”

“I know that.”

Johnson hung up in dismay.

Fortunately, the president was not the only one pushing the hard sell on the bill. Early in the debate, Humphrey had told Mitchell and Rauh that “the secret of passing the bill is the prayer groups.” All through April they had been pouring into the city, a holy crusade of theology students, ministers, rabbis, and churchgoers of all ages, many coming not to lobby so much as to “bear witness,” to add to the critical mass of people in the capital that in their sheer numbers insisted that the Senate act. “Washington has not seen such a gigantic and well-organized lobby since the legislative days of the Volstead Act and the Prohibition amendment,” said Richard Russell, in a mix of frustration and awe. “Groups of ministers from all over the nation arrive in relays . . . As these people undertake to make a moral issue of the pending question, the politicians are having a field day sanctimoniously moralizing over what is essentially a political question.” One veteran AFL-CIO lobbyist, impressed with the coordination and influence of the church groups, said as soon as he got home he would “go out and buy me a stand-up white collar.”
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Perhaps the most impressive display of pious activism began on April 19, when three seminary students from New York—one Catholic, one Protestant, and one Jewish—gathered in front of the Lincoln Memorial and stood there for several hours. They held a banner that read, “Night and Day as witness to our common effort to help secure Justice and equal rights for all our citizens by passing the Civil Rights Bill as it came from the House.” After a few hours, they were relieved by another trio, who stood for a few hours. And so on, for days, then weeks, on until the end of the filibuster.
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The effort, called the Theology Students’ Vigil for Civil Rights, was the brainchild of three young clergymen: Brother Jude Molnar, a tall, blue-eyed Franciscan monk; Jonathan Levine, a student at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City; and Tom Leatherwood, a student at Union Theological Seminary, catty-cornered from JTS across Broadway. “The idea started in New York, among the future ministers at Union,” Molnar told a reporter from the
New Yorker
. “They simply crossed the street and enlisted the future rabbis, and then they invited the candidates for the priesthood down here to join them.”

Every few days a rented car picked up new students in New York and drove to the Church of the Holy Comforter in Washington. Soon young clergy from seventy-five schools around the country were arriving under their own steam, bunking on air mattresses in the basement of the church rectory. A sign on the wall gave simple instructions: “Students should stand in silence facing the monument. At midnight the group leaving the vigil should spend a few minutes standing directly before the statue of Lincoln. We are not promoting, debating, or pushing, only witnessing. This is basically a silent prayer vigil, conducted by theological students of all three faiths working together on civil rights.”

Meanwhile, in the Sylvan Theater, off to the southeast corner of the Washington Monument grounds, more secularly oriented students held a five-day “filibuster” for civil rights, giving speeches in favor of the bill. Dozens of other pop-up demonstrations took place throughout the spring, almost all in favor of the bill (the American Nazi Party tried to counterprotest the vigil at the Lincoln Memorial, but they were largely ignored and soon left).

As the filibuster ground on, hundreds of individual citizens—alone, in small groups, or as parts of large organizations—poured into the capital to join the fight for the bill. Among them were Harry and Ruth Kingman, a couple from Berkeley, California, who had made civil rights lobbying something of a post-retirement career. Harry Kingman was born in China to missionary parents and later played a season as first baseman for the New York Yankees. He spent thirty years as coach of the University of California, Berkeley, junior varsity baseball team, taking time out during World War II to work for the Fair Employment Practices Commission. Even after he returned to Berkeley, he remained active in Bay Area civil rights causes, and once he retired, he and Ruth began to make trips to Washington to advocate for federal legislation. (They even registered as lobbyists, refiling their paperwork every six months.)

The Kingmans played small but important roles during the debates over the 1957 and 1960 civil rights acts, and by 1964 they were well known around Capitol Hill. They became something like den parents for newcomers to the expanding circle of citizen lobbyists, holding parties at their apartment and helping acclimate people to the Senate’s arcane procedures. In an April 13, 1964, letter to Dean McHenry, the chancellor of the University of California, Santa Cruz, the Kingmans detailed the work they had done while the bill was before the House and later in the Senate when the filibuster began. They took turns sitting in the galleries, watching the activity on the House and Senate floors; they also ran their own personal whip system for the West Coast senators and congressmen, talking with them regularly to address concerns about the bill and keep tabs on any fence-sitters. And they added a personal touch to the organizing efforts: Ruth Kingman, an accomplished amateur painter, hung one of her works, a portrait of the March on Washington called “. . .  Have a Dream,” in the office of Berkeley representative Jeffery Cohelan, which activists were using as a base during the House debate, and another entitled “We Shall Overcome” in the office of Senator Clark.
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What emerged in the streets of Washington, in the church pews of the Midwest, in union halls and NAACP chapter offices that spring, was a biracial, robust culture of civil rights activism. As Levine told the
New Yorker
reporter, “I don’t know how much this demonstration is going to accomplish for civil rights, but I know what it’s doing for us.” It was a culture of protest but also of civic engagement, one that brought together black and white, secular and religious, young and old, conservative and liberal—a culture that would reverberate, even as it fractured, through the 1960s and beyond.

Arrayed alongside this outpouring of civic unity was another, more radical side of the civil rights community. Radicalism had always had a place within the black activist community, whether through religious groups like the Black Muslims, through the Communist Party, or through groups arrayed under the umbrella of black nationalism. Located primarily in the North and West, they fixated on issues largely outside the realm of the Southern movement: not voting rights or public accommodations, but housing discrimination, de facto school segregation, and job discrimination—issues that Northern liberals, even as they denounced Jim Crow, were loath to touch.

One hot spot of radicalism was the Brooklyn chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality. CORE was a national, nonviolent organization that had pioneered sit-ins and later started the Freedom Rides through the South. It was one of the largest mainstream civil rights groups, and its president, James Farmer, was usually included in meetings of black leaders with presidents and congressmen. But the Brooklyn CORE chapter had long been an outlier; aggressive and sectarian, led by a fiery Southern transplant named Isaiah Brunson, it kept white activists at an arm’s length while planning aggressive demonstrations meant to disrupt daily life around New York.
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In mid-April, the chapter released a bombshell announcement: unless the city introduced “a comprehensive program, by April 20th, which will end police brutality, abolish slum housing and provide integrated quality education for all—we will fully support and help organize a community backed plan to immobilize all traffic leading to the World’s Fair on opening day Wednesday, April 22.”
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