The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (50 page)

On the evening of July 2, after Johnson had signed the bill, Bill Moyers found his boss in a state of “melancholy.” According to Moyers, Johnson then uttered what has become the single most famous line associated with the Civil Rights Act: “We just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.” The line has come to symbolize Johnson’s political savvy, his recognition of the high political price the Democrats would pay for the bill, and his foresight into the future of the American South.
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Moyers’s anecdote gets to a fundamental truth about all landmark legislation: the larger and more pathbreaking it is, the higher its opportunity costs. There can be little doubt that the Civil Rights Act helped cleave the South from the Democratic Party. But this was a process that was already well under way and would have continued with or without the bill. The Northern Democrats did not suddenly “get” civil rights religion in 1963, nor did the South wake up to the realization that its beloved Democratic Party was moving away from it on July 2, 1964. At the presidential level, the South had been voting Republican since Eisenhower won four states of the former Confederacy in 1952. By 1964, John Tower had been in his Texas senator’s office for two years; Republicans had run competitive, if losing, congressional and state-level races in several Deep South states; and Strom Thurmond was on the verge of bolting the party after serving as a “Democrat in Name Only” for several years. And the white South was, despite its occasional populism, always Republican in spirit, if not allegiance: with just a few cities speckled across a rural, religion-soaked population, it better resembled the Republican heartland of small Midwestern towns than it did the industrialized urbanism that had long dominated the Democratic Party. Moreover, the South was always more wary of activist government than the modern Democratic agenda could safely allow—and not just because of race, though certainly that was a key driver of its suspicions. As Robert Penn Warren wrote in 1955, “I remember another lawyer, hired by another group: ‘Hell, all Southerners are Republicans at heart, conservative, and just don’t know they’re Republican.’” The Civil Rights Act, to the extent that it made a difference in the Southern realignment, simply added fuel to a fire that had been burning for decades.
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But there is another, more significant cost paid by the authors of the Civil Rights Act that needs examining. For a variety of reasons, they repeatedly considered and rejected the possibility of including substantial measures to combat economic inequality as well as discrimination. Some felt it was too much to ask for in any single piece of legislation; and, besides, the pressing issue of the moment (to them) was Jim Crow, not the largely Northern ghetto. In the end they argued, unconvincingly, that Title VII’s ban on employment discrimination would eventually provide sufficient opportunity for blacks to climb out of poverty. But it is one very good thing to remove a man’s shackles; it is another very pernicious thing to insist that, having done so, he should be able to compete with men who have spent their entire lives in freedom. The Civil Rights Act would not erase the legacies of a century of enforced black poverty on its own. In his book
A Thousand Days
, a memoir-cum-history of the Kennedy administration, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote, “To the Negroes of the North the rights it offered were those they nominally possessed already. And to the heart of the now boiling Northern unrest—to the frustrations in the black ghettos of the cities—it offered nothing.” The very notion of civil rights legislation, as it had come to be understood in Washington, “had little to say to the unemployed, undereducated, untrained Negroes wandering aimlessly down the gray streets of Harlem or Watts, to boys and girls in their teens abandoned by their fathers and adrift in a desolation of mistrust and corruption, to the hoods and junkies and winos and derelicts.”
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Neither Kennedy nor Johnson was blind to this fact—nor were many members of Congress, nor were their administrations. As Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz said in a speech in Chicago on the same day Johnson signed the act, “The plain fact is that freedom and groceries are both important, and neither is enough without the other.” Kennedy had already been planning a major push against poverty for his second term, and Johnson picked up that flag and kept marching. In a May 1964 commencement speech at the University of Michigan, Johnson outlined his plan for a “great society” initiative that “demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time” through federal programs to improve education, urban areas, rural communities, and job opportunities. A year later, at Howard University, he said, “It is not enough just to open the gates of opportunity. All our citizens must have the ability to walk through those gates. This is the next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights. We seek not just freedom but opportunity. We seek not just legal equity but human ability, not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact and equality as a result.”
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These two speeches announced and outlined the Great Society, and in particular the War on Poverty. And yet those grand initiatives, though they achieved much, were nowhere near large enough to approach, let alone resolve, the problem of black economic inequality. With fewer and fewer jobs available in the inner cities, with crime rates rising and the quality of schools plummeting, the administration’s efforts amounted to little more than pilot programs, single sorties when a full-on assault was required.

In the end, the Civil Rights Act was aimed explicitly and exclusively at the South, largely because its supporters believed that was the only way to win over enough votes from non-Southern skeptics. And they may have been right. But what they did not consider was the amount of political capital they would have to spend to get any bill through Congress, and what the opportunity cost of spending that capital on a region-specific, rights-focused piece of legislation would be. Nor did they sufficiently appreciate the struggles facing blacks outside the South, either because of direct, explicit discrimination or the lingering effects of slavery and racism. In a tragic counterpoint to the triumph of July 2, two weeks later, Harlem and parts of Brooklyn erupted in three days of rioting. The violence was touched off by the police shooting of an unarmed black teenager, but it also gave vent to black anger over unemployment, police brutality, school and housing discrimination, and poor city services in minority neighborhoods. Similar rioting broke out in South Central Los Angeles the next year, Cleveland the year after, Newark and Detroit in 1967, and in more than a hundred cities, including Washington, Baltimore, and Chicago, after the April 4, 1968, assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Each riot had its unique flashpoint, but each followed a similar pattern of looting and destruction that spoke to the depths of black frustration with ghetto life. There is no saying whether an even larger Civil Rights Act, with provisions to address issues such as housing discrimination and the job market, could have prevented the violence. The point is that their occurrence underlined the failure of Congress, at the critical moment, even to try.

The simple fact is that in the early to mid-1960s, the federal government faced a unique moment—what the political scientists Robert Weisbrot and G. Calvin McKenzie call the “liberal hour”—when it was able to greatly expand its powers and purview over the nation’s political, economic, and social life. The moment was fleeting and would not return for a long time. The decisions made regarding which laws to push for, which programs to create, are difficult to question—given the urgency of the racial situation in mid-1963, Title II was rightly the most important thing on the federal agenda. And yet the decision to pursue purely legal change, and to leave economic relationships alone, says much about the intellectual and moral limitations of midcentury liberalism. For too many legislators, it really was enough to simply remove the chains from the black man’s hands.

And yet such criticisms—which are really just observations about the tragic logic of American politics—cannot diminish the historic achievement of the Civil Rights Act. It did not put an end to American racism, nor did it eliminate the unique challenges of African American life. But it did much to alleviate both, and it reoriented the country—both the government and the people—onto a path toward true racial equality. That point may never be reached, but thanks to the Civil Rights Act, the country has moved very far along. For all the bill’s lost opportunities and negotiated shortcomings, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 remains the single most important piece of legislation passed in twentieth-century America.

Acknowledgments

No one can write a book of serious historical research without the help of countless archivists and librarians. The people at the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the Kennedy Library and Museum, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, the Presbyterian Historical Society, the Center for Jewish History, the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Georgia, the Ohio State University, Wayne State University, the University of Montana, and the University of Buffalo deserve my deepest gratitude. I am especially indebted to Allen Fisher and his colleagues at the Johnson Library. Rodolfo Villarreal-Ríos at the University of Montana and Lindsey Patterson at the Ohio State University provided critical research assistance into the papers of Mike Mansfield and William McCulloch, respectively.

I also thank all the people who lent their time to speak with me about their experiences working on the bill, including Birch Bayh, Al Bronstein, John Doar, David Filvaroff, Nicholas Katzenbach, Robert Kimball, Roger Mudd, Jack Rosenthal, Lee White, and Ben Zelenko.

Adam Goodheart, the C. V. Starr Center for the Study of the American Experience, and Washington College were kind enough to give me a Frederick Douglass Fellowship in the spring of 2013, which supported me during the outset of my writing. Jeff Shesol and David Greenberg read parts or drafts of the book and provided me with invaluable feedback; for that I am very thankful.

My agent, Heather Schroder, gave me the initial impetus to pursue a book about the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and she later helped me shape my proposal and find it a home. Fortunately, that home was with Peter Ginna and the people at Bloomsbury Press, who helped turn my awkward manuscript into what I hope is a compelling narrative.

I would be remiss if I did not thank all of my coworkers at the
New York Times
op-ed department, who provided me with encouragement and inspiration.

Finally, to my family—Talia, Elliot, Joanna, Mom, Dad, Michael, and the rest: thanks for being there, and for putting up with me for all these years, and not just the ones when I was writing this book.

Bibliography

Author Interviews

Birch Bayh, Al Bronstein, John Doar, David Filvaroff, Jack Greenberg, Nicholas Katzenbach, Robert Kimball, Roger Mudd, Jack Rosenthal, Michael I. Sovern, Lee White, Ben Zelenko.

Archives

Center for Jewish History, New York, N.Y.

American Jewish Congress Papers

Dirksen Congressional Center, Pekin, Ill.

Everett M. Dirksen Papers

Lyndon B. Johnson Library and Museum, Austin, Tex.

Administrative History Files

Horace Busby Office Files

Legislation Background Files

Mike Manatos Office Files

Bill Moyers Office Files

Lawrence O’Brien Office Files

George Reedy Office Files

Presidential Statements

Reports on Enrolled Legislation

Reports on Pending Legislation

Vice Presidential Office Files

Lee White Office Files

White House Central Files

Henry Hall Wilson Office Files

John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston, Mass.

Robert F. Kennedy Papers

Burke Marshall Office Files

Victor Navasky Papers

Presidential Office Files

Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. Papers

Theodore Sorensen Office Files

Lee White Office Files

Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Emanuel Celler Papers

Leadership Conference on Civil Rights Papers

NAACP Papers

Joseph L. Rauh Jr. Papers

Mississippi Department of Archives and History Online Collection

Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission Papers

National Archives

House Judiciary Committee Papers

Ohio Congressional Archives, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio

William M. McCulloch Papers

Presbyterian Historical Society, Philadelphia, Penn.

National Council of Churches Archives

United Presbyterian Church Archives

The University of Buffalo Library—Special Collections, Buffalo, N.Y.

David B. Filvaroff and Raymond E. Wolfinger Civil Rights Act Papers

The University of California, Berkeley, Special Collections, Berkeley, Calif.

Harry Kingman Papers

Thomas H. Kuchel Papers

The University of Montana Archives and Special Collections, Missoula, Mont.