The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act (6 page)

Kennedy got started on this last step before the sun had even set on his inauguration day. As he watched the parade passing in front of the review stand outside the White House, he noticed that the Coast Guard contingent was completely white. Afterward, he found Richard Goodwin, one of his new special assistants, and ordered him to see why. “Within a few months the Coast Guard Academy was integrated,” Goodwin recalled.
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Kennedy demanded similar action across the executive branch. Louis Martin, the vice chairman of the Democratic National Committee and the man Kennedy trusted beyond all others on racial issues, kept a list of what he called “superblacks”—three hundred of the most qualified people of color he could find, in a variety of professions—so he could be ready to feed black candidates for any position that came open. And at least at first, the demand for such names was insatiable. “Everyone was scrambling around trying to find himself a Negro in order to keep the President off his neck,” recalled Roy Wilkins.
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Yet over time the zeal for hiring blacks tapered off. In a March 1963 memo to the president, special adviser Ralph Dungan wrote: “Our effort to recruit outstanding Negroes to fill a representative number of policy level appointive posts in the Administration has had only limited success to date. Moreover, Negro leaders in recent months have publicly registered their disappointment with the slow rate of progress of this Administration.”
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It is easy to look back at Kennedy’s first two and a half years and condemn his performance on civil rights. And there is no doubt he could have done more. But probably not much: until mid-1963, civil rights was not a pressing moral imperative in the eyes of the national leadership. It was one problem among many, and a much more intractable one. Kennedy had a well-stocked plate of priorities, some of his choosing—a big tax cut, a new Housing and Urban Development Department—and some not, like the crises in Berlin and Cuba. All of these required the unified support of the Democratic Party, support that could fall apart if he pushed civil rights too aggressively.

Kennedy had little more success with executive orders. On March 6, 1961, he signed Executive Order 10925, which created the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity and gave it the power to investigate the hiring practices of government contractors and, at its discretion, terminate contracts where discrimination was found. The committee, led by Vice President Johnson, was a big improvement on its previous iteration under the Eisenhower administration, which had lacked any sort of enforcement powers. And it was significantly more active: in its first year it addressed 1,306 cases, more than the number of cases (462) that Eisenhower’s committee had dealt with in seven years.
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But the Johnson committee shone only by comparison. The committee rarely pursued punitive action; instead, through a program called Plans for Progress, it engaged leading contractors to create internal programs to root out discrimination and promote fair hiring practices. But these were companies with huge budgets, educated workforces, and relatively progressive leadership, and they were glad to get positive PR from the government for pursuing policies they would have undertaken anyway, if they had not already. And the Plans for Progress were completely voluntary, with little oversight by the Johnson committee to make sure the plans were actually put into practice.
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As a result, though Johnson had his staff issue regular press releases touting every new company engaged under Plans for Progress, actual progress was halting. A 1963 study by the Department of Labor found that twenty-five thousand of the federal government’s thirty-five thousand contractors did not have a single black employee.
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Kennedy’s other major civil-rights-related executive order was a 1962 edict on housing discrimination, the subject of his audacious presidential debate statement about what a “stroke of the Presidential pen” could achieve, and the cause of much public embarrassment ever since. The idea was to ban discrimination by housing developers and sellers who received federal assistance, either through tax breaks, subsidies, or mortgage guarantees. And it was something Kennedy clearly wanted to do—he had Nicholas deB. Katzenbach, then head of the Office of Legal Counsel in the Justice Department, write up a draft order in the fall of 1961.
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But the realities of presidential politics soon intervened. Kennedy had other priorities that fall that would be hurt by spending political capital on housing: among other things, he wanted to create a Department of Housing and Urban Development, a testy subject for Southerners and one they would likely oppose if Kennedy riled them up with an order on housing. After a long beachfront walk at Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, with his brother Robert, Kennedy told Katzenbach to stand down, and the order went on the back burner. It did not matter: Congress rejected the HUD proposal anyway (the department was finally created by President Johnson in 1965).
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The experience also revealed for Kennedy the soft underbelly of civil rights support. Even as open-housing advocates pressed him for action, civil rights Democrats in the North were telling him that housing was off-limits. Of course, he did not need politicians to tell him that: over the course of several nights in July 1951, some four thousand white residents of Cicero, Illinois, had attacked an apartment building into which a single black family had moved; eventually Governor Adlai Stevenson had to send in the Illinois National Guard. The Cicero riot was not the first of its kind; nor was it the last—housing integration set off scores of violent episodes across the industrial North throughout the 1950s.
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By the early 1960s, the issue was positively radioactive—any politician who advocated open housing risked a drubbing at the polls. That explains why Larry O’Brien, Kennedy’s White House congressional liaison, found himself on the receiving end of a scream-filled phone call from Representative Martha Griffiths in September 1962. Griffiths, who represented a suburban Detroit district, was a reliably liberal representative, but she wanted nothing to do with housing: she said she had a team from her office traveling the district asking what was topmost on voters’ minds, and the fear that blacks might move into their neighborhood dominated. The president, she demanded, “just couldn’t issue that order before the election or we would be dead, politically.” O’Brien received similar calls from similarly liberal representatives like James O’Hara, another Detroit-area congressman, and Leonor Sullivan, who represented St. Louis.
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Kennedy decided to wait until after the midterm elections to sign the housing order, and even then he had it written in a way to minimize its actual impact. It only applied to primary sales, and it was strictly prospective—sales of existing homes did not count. Although it ostensibly applied to all housing that benefited from federal assistance in any way, it explicitly excluded those backed by federal mortgage insurance, the main way in which the federal government interacted with the housing market. As a result, the order affected only about 25 percent of new housing construction—hardly the sort of bold, pathbreaking action Kennedy had implied would occur with a stroke of his pen. And even then, Kennedy dragged his feet on implementation: it was not until early April 1963 that a committee was formed to put the order into effect.
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The one bright spot in Kennedy’s early civil rights forays came in the one place where many in the movement did not place much hope: the Department of Justice and its Civil Rights Division. The office had been created by the 1957 civil rights act—and promptly forgotten. Robert Kennedy had other ideas, though: a well-staffed division, he realized, could bring significant dividends at little political cost to his brother.

Kennedy dismissed out of hand the suggestion that he hire Harris Wofford, the young Notre Dame law professor who had served as the president’s civil rights point man during the campaign—but who was also a close associate of several leading civil rights figures, an attachment that might bring charges of bias against the division. Instead, Kennedy chose Burke Marshall, an antitrust lawyer at the firm of Covington and Burling, to run the division. Aside from a teaching a few adjunct classes at Howard University’s law school, Marshall had no previous exposure to civil rights, and in temperament and philosophy—cerebral, staid, personally conservative—he was the furthest thing from a “movement” lawyer that Kennedy could find. Which is just what the attorney general wanted.
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Marshall rounded out a legal all-star team. Byron White, the deputy attorney general, was a Rhodes scholar, former professional football player, and future Supreme Court justice. Running the Office of Legal Counsel was another Rhodes scholar, Katzenbach, a University of Chicago law professor who had known Marshall as a teenager in suburban New Jersey and later preceded him as editor of the
Yale Law Journal
. Archibald Cox, a professor at Harvard Law School, became solicitor general. Louis Oberdorfer, who ran the tax division, was likewise a Yale law graduate who had clerked for Justice Hugo Black. They were later joined by John Douglas, yet another Rhodes scholar, who took over the Civil Division in mid-1963 and immediately assumed the task of coordinating the government’s role in the March on Washington.

These men, noted historian and Kennedy adviser Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., shared a set of overlapping experiences. Most had fought in World War II; Katzenbach, a navigator on a B-25 Mitchell bomber, was shot down over Italy in 1943 and spent two years in a POW camp. They had gone to the best schools, had clerked for appellate and Supreme Court justices, and had spent time in white-shoe law firms. The result, Schlesinger said, was “a common moral outlook” and a set of qualities—“integrity, judgment, drive, understatement, personal reserve”—that made their reserved natures a counterweight to the passion of the years to come.
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Robert Kennedy set the tone of his department’s civil rights stand almost immediately. In 1960, school officials in New Orleans had pleaded with the Eisenhower administration to endorse their desegregation plan, as a way of giving them desperately needed political cover in the face of vociferous, at times violent, opposition from white parents. The Republican president was silent, even after the state legislature threatened to restrict financing for the district should it proceed with its plans. But in February 1961, barely three weeks into its term, the Kennedy Justice Department took an existing federal suit and expanded it to demand that the state release hundreds of thousands of dollars for the New Orleans schools, money they needed for their desegregation plan. The legislature relented. And then a dam seemed to break: after hardly budging over nearly seven years after
Brown
, the South began to integrate its schools. Grudgingly, haltingly, and often in heavily urban areas where the risk of white resistance was relatively minor, to be sure—still, at the end of 1960, only 17 Southern school districts were desegregated, but by 1963, 166 were.
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The division also went on a hiring spree; though many of the best law school students set to graduate in 1961 had already accepted jobs elsewhere, Marshall and Kennedy were able to persuade several to change their minds, and by 1962 the division’s early successes had made it one of the hottest places to work in Washington. Meanwhile, the existing staff kept busy by filing fourteen new civil rights suits in 1961 and launching investigations or negotiations in sixty-one Southern counties. They would hold long strategy sessions in Kennedy’s enormous, chaotic office on the fifth floor of the Justice Department, with Brumus, the attorney general’s giant black Newfoundland, lying nearby, or out in the courtyard, where Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, had set up umbrellas and chairs. John Doar, Marshall’s assistant and a Republican holdover from the Eisenhower Justice Department, became a sort of civil rights fireman, showing up in small towns across the Deep South to meet with voting rights litigants and then file suit in the nearest federal courtroom.
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But even the success of the Civil Rights Division had its limits. The legal process laid out under the 1957 and 1960 acts was slow and unwieldy. There were not enough lawyers to file more than a token number of legal actions. More important, though, was the attitude among the men gathered around Robert Kennedy. Good, right-thinking men who would have liked to see Jim Crow disappear overnight, they were also prisoners of their own establishment thinking. They had been taught—at home, in college, at law school, in Washington—that as long as the system functions correctly, good will prevail. Like their president, these men did not at first grasp the realities of the black situation, did not understand the totality of the Jim Crow system, its imperviousness to logic, or Southerners’ willingness to employ violent means to block even the mildest advance of black rights. As a result, throughout the first years of the Kennedy administration, Marshall and others replied with seeming callousness to the demands of civil rights leaders and their political allies for federal intervention against bombing campaigns, assassinations, and police violence. In June 1962, a group of leaders from the embattled protest movement in Albany, Georgia, traveled all the way to Washington to plead for federal relief. John Doar told them point-blank there was nothing the Department of Justice could do. As one of Robert Kennedy’s aides, John Nolan, later told the journalist Victor Navasky, “We weren’t trying to solve the civil rights problems of the United States of America. We were just trying to keep people from getting hurt. We wanted to prevent bloodshed. They were lid-keeping operations.”
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