An awkward moment. After a pause, and without breaking his mirthless smile, Nixon casually invited King to meet with him in Washington upon his return. Ethel Payne, the pioneering black journalist, wryly noted, “Eight thousand miles away from Washington and even more from Montgomery, Alabama, Rev. King and Vice-President Nixon met here and agreed to hold a conference in the nation’s capital on the crisis in the South.”5
In the previous months King had become the face of the African American civil rights movement. The boycott of public buses in Montgomery had dragged on for a long, difficult year. But in November 1956 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the ruling of a federal three-judge panel in Browder v. Gayle that declared segregation of public buses unconstitutional. When this decision was implemented just before Christmas 1956, allowing blacks to sit anywhere they chose on buses in Montgomery, white vigilantes unleashed a wave of violence, tossing dynamite into the homes of civil rights leaders and blowing up their churches. King’s home was hit by a drive-by shotgun blast. Integrated buses were struck by gunfire; a pregnant woman was grievously injured in both legs while riding in a bus across town. On January 10, 1957, the home of King’s fellow minister Ralph Abernathy, as well as three churches, were damaged by bombs.6
King had sent open telegrams to Eisenhower, Nixon, and Attorney General Brownell decrying the violence and beseeching the White House for help. “A state of terror prevails” across the South, he declared. He asked the president to use his “immense moral power” by coming to the South, making a major speech, and condemning these acts of violence. King sent a pointed message to Nixon questioning why, having conducted a “fact-finding” mission to Austria to examine the plight of Hungarian refugees fleeing Soviet repression, he would not also come to the South to examine the repression of American citizens there.7
These appeals did not receive a sympathetic welcome in the White House. When asked about King’s plea in a press conference on February 6 Ike said, “[I have] a pretty good and sizable agenda on my desk every day, and as you know I insist on going for a bit of recreation every once in a while. . . . I have expressed myself on this subject so often in the South, in the North, wherever I have been, that I don’t know what another speech would do about the thing right now.” In an act of astonishing bad taste, he then departed Washington for 10 days of turkey shooting at the Humphrey plantation in Georgia. Knowing that Eisenhower was in the South, King sent another telegram, asking the president to make a statement denouncing the eruption of violence against blacks. Eisenhower again refused.
But the national press noticed. On February 18, 1957, Time magazine put a handsome portrait of King on its cover and published an admiring story about the Montgomery boycott: “Across the South—in Atlanta, Mobile, Birmingham, Tallahassee, Miami, New Orleans—Negro leaders look toward Montgomery, Alabama, the cradle of the Confederacy, for advice and counsel on how to gain the desegration that the U.S. Supreme Court has guaranteed them. The man whose word they seek is not a judge, or a lawyer, or a political strategist or a flaming orator. He is a scholarly, 28-year-old Negro Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.” There could be no ignoring him now.8
On that celebratory day in early March in Ghana, as Nixon shook King’s hand, he told the young pastor he had read the Time story and enjoyed it. But King represented a serious political challenge to Nixon and Eisenhower. Here was a man who now stood at the head of a powerful social movement, a movement capable of mobilizing millions of people and shining a bright light on America’s history of racial segregation and violence. Above all, King’s very presence in Ghana revealed the profound hypocrisy of America’s policies on race: while the U.S. government acclaimed the birth of freedom in Ghana, it still barred blacks and whites from attending school together, riding buses together, or eating together. Nixon understood all this in a flash and swiftly wriggled away from King’s firm handclasp. But Nixon, and his president, could not run from the issue of civil rights any longer. In 1957 civil rights dominated American politics, and the whole world was watching.
II
At the outset of his second term in office Eisenhower remained deeply ambivalent about the role the federal government should play in advancing civil rights. On November 14, 1956, while he was preparing with Jim Hagerty for his first postelection press conference, Eisenhower discussed the implications of the Supreme Court’s decision the previous day to uphold the ruling in Browder v. Gayle that declared unconstitutional the racial segregation of passengers on public buses. He spoke with some bitterness about the topic. The notes of the meeting, taken by his secretary Ann Whitman, reveal his continuing doubts:
President said that in some of these things he was more of a “States Righter” than the Supreme Court. He fears that by some steps the country is going to get into trouble, and the problems of the Negroes set back, not advanced. He referred to the schools—said how could the Federal Government inforce a ruling applying to schools supported by state funds. Said could have a general strike in the South. Feels that even the so-called great liberals are going to have to take a second look at the whole thing. He may say that the Supreme Court does not refer its decisions to him for approval or study. . . . President said that eventually a District Court is going to cite someone for contempt, and then we are going to be up against it.9
These remarks bear careful consideration, as they open a window into the real Eisenhower. We hear his devotion to the principle of states’ rights. We hear his belief that enforcement of the federal antidiscrimination law as enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution would actually harm black Americans more than it would help them. We hear him distancing himself from the Supreme Court, whose chief justice he had appointed. We find him anxious about a clash he rightly anticipates between federal courts and local customs. Eisenhower remained a social conservative, a man unused to change, wary of challenging hierarchy. These comments tell us much about where he stood on the great social and moral issue of his time as he began his second term in office.
And yet—and here is the real story—Eisenhower overcame his limitations. Despite his deep-seated aversion to social movements and to the increasingly urgent demands for action on civil rights, he presided over two enormously important developments that would shape the history of race in America. He lent support to Attorney General Brownell’s strenuous efforts to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1957; and he used the power of his office to enforce court-ordered school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, overcoming the resistance of the demagogic governor, Orval Faubus. Eisenhower may at times have been an unwilling combatant in these struggles, yet in the end he did act, and decisively, to advance the progress of civil rights.10
Why did Eisenhower, so wary of the civil rights cause, find himself in the surprising role of abetting it? For one thing, there was the promise of a glittering electoral prize in black votes. Eisenhower received 40 percent of the African American vote in 1956—a higher percentage, by far, than any Republican presidential candidate between 1932 and today. (Nixon would win 32 percent in 1960, but since then Republican presidential aspirants have managed to garner on average only 9.6 percent of the black vote.) While black voters nationally remained sympathetic to the legacy of the New Deal and to the memory of Franklin Roosevelt, Eisenhower started to make inroads into this constituency. He just about doubled his share of the black vote from the election of 1952. More striking than these national numbers, however, were the results in the South. In Atlanta, Ike won 85 percent of the black vote in 1956, whereas in 1952 he had attracted only 30 percent. In Richmond, Virginia, he won 73 percent of the black vote in 1956 against only 22 percent four years earlier. All across the South the swing of black voters away from the Democrats toward Eisenhower’s Republican Party was striking: in cities such as Charleston, Raleigh, Memphis, Nashville, New Orleans, Tampa, Houston, Mobile, and Knoxville, African American voters switched parties. Of course the raw totals were tiny: legal chicanery as well as outright intimidation and brut
ality kept most southern blacks away from the polls. Yet the pattern was clear: those few African Americans who could vote in the South were moving decisively away from the Democratic Party.11
Eisenhower attracted these voters not because of his strong stance on civil rights. To be sure, he had accumulated a significant record of progress since 1953, but he did not emphasize it in the 1956 campaign. Rather, black voters in the South turned away from the Democratic Party because of its ferocious hostility to Brown. In the two years since the Court’s decision, white southern Democrats had openly taken up the cause of white supremacy by signing the Southern Manifesto. In this charged political climate, GOP strategists believed, modest progress on civil rights might win over blacks to the Republican Party for a generation.12
Three important Republicans accepted this argument. Senate Minority Leader William Knowland, though an Old Guard conservative, had his eye on the governorship of California, and maybe even the presidency. To attain either post, he needed black votes. Nixon, also thinking about 1960, had heard the laments of black leaders like Clarence Mitchell, head of the NAACP in Washington, D.C., who said that “the Democratic Party has become the party of Eastland,” the viciously segregationist senator from Mississippi. Nixon envisioned using black votes to pull southern states out of the Democratic column in the next presidential election. And of course Brownell, the architect of the civil rights program, was determined to get on with the job. He had suffered deep humiliation in the Emmett Till case when he was unable to intervene to rectify a gross miscarriage of justice. So, despite Eisenhower’s continuing ambivalence, Brownell picked up the cause again and insisted that civil rights be placed at the top of the administration’s legislative agenda. On the last day of December, Eisenhower and Brownell met with key Republican congressional leaders to discuss his domestic priorities, and Brownell—not Eisenhower—made the pitch for civil rights. Knowland agreed to work for it, though he despaired of the “inevitable Southern filibuster.”13
As a result of these pressures, Eisenhower placed civil rights at the center of his State of the Union address, which he delivered on January 10, 1957. He reiterated the four-point proposal he had submitted to the previous Congress: (1) to create a bipartisan congressional commission to investigate civil rights violations; (2) to create a Civil Rights division in the Department of Justice under a new assistant attorney general; (3) to empower the attorney general to pursue contempt proceedings against anyone who violated civil rights stemming from the Fourteenth Amendment; and (4) to empower the attorney general to do the same in connection with a violation of voting rights as laid out in the Fifteenth Amendment. Brownell had succeeded in leading a reluctant president to embrace civil rights legislation by emphasizing the aim of protecting constitutional rights, especially the right to vote. How could that be controversial?14
Even with the backing of a popular president, however, civil rights legislation faced one enormous hurdle: the U.S. Senate. At the start of the 85th Congress in January 1957, the Democratic Party held a slim majority with 49 seats against the Republicans’ 47—unchanged from the previous Congress. Twenty-two of those Democratic senators came from the 11 states of the Confederacy, and at least 19 of them were dead-set against any civil rights legislation. Since many of those 19 men enjoyed the privileges of seniority and held committee chairmanships—Eastland ran the Judiciary Committee, for instance—it was an easy matter for the South to use the filibuster rules of the Senate to block any undesirable proposals. The Senate’s Rule 22—the cloture rule—required the support of three-fifths of the senators to close off debate and force a vote on a piece of legislation. That meant 38 senators, working together, could ensure that the Senate never even held a vote on a pending bill. Southern Democrats, allied with a handful of archconservative Old Guard Republicans and a few uneasy midwestern Democrats could stymie progress on civil rights legislation.
Nor did it seem likely that the leader of the majority party, Senator Lyndon Johnson of Texas, would help pass a civil rights bill. During his previous 20 years in public life, Johnson had opposed all proposals to strengthen civil rights protections. In his youth he had lived with and worked among Texas’s migrants, sharecroppers, and bone-weary farm laborers. In 1928 he taught Mexican American students at a local school in Cotilla. He may even have had personal empathy for the plight of minorities. But politically he had always stayed loyal to the abiding principles of the South: that race relations were best handled locally by people who “knew” the South and its ways, and that outsiders from the federal government had no legal right—and certainly no moral right—to compel the South to change. Johnson parroted these nostrums out of expediency: he knew that the way to augment his personal power in the Senate was to lead the southern caucus, and the southern caucus demanded strict adherence to this racial code. Johnson followed the rules.
However, LBJ’s political calculations changed after November 1956, for with the second defeat of Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic Party had lost its national leader. Harry Truman and Averell Harriman, the stalwarts of the New Deal and the Fair Deal, were yesterday’s men. John Kennedy, the junior senator from Massachusetts whose nomination speech on Stevenson’s behalf had electrified the 1956 Democratic Convention, and Hubert Humphrey, the 45-year-old tribune of progressivism from Minnesota—perhaps they were tomorrow’s men. But now, today, Johnson saw a vacancy at the head of the table, and he meant to occupy it.
To seize the mantle of party leader, to win the Democratic nomination for president in 1960, and then to transcend his Southern roots and become a truly national candidate, Johnson would have to conjure up a great deal of political magic. He would have to unite his own fractious party, bringing northern liberals and southern conservatives into at least a tolerable working relationship. He would have to lead them to accept compromises they were inclined to reject. And then, having brought about a degree of unity, he would have to pass new laws—starting with civil rights laws—that would earn him the respect of voters from across the nation. If he did all that, then maybe, just maybe, he could dream of taking the White House.
So Johnson’s future, if not the country’s, depended on passing a civil rights bill. To do that he had to solve two complicated puzzles. First, he had to take the bill that the administration wanted and draw out its teeth without making the surgery too painful for Eisenhower. Then he had to persuade his southern colleagues that a defanged civil rights bill should be allowed to come to the floor of the Senate for a vote. They did not have to vote for it, but they had to voluntarily stand aside and let others—mainly northern Democrats and moderate Republicans—pass the bill and make it the law of the land. His fellow southerners would thereby raise Johnson to such a level of national prominence that they could be assured he would become president—and all the more able to propitiate southerners with patronage from the Oval Office. In one of the great ironies of modern politics, the Texas senator, a longtime stalwart of southern intransigence, now planned to ride civil rights all the way to the White House.15
III
Although Eisenhower had announced his intention to submit a civil rights bill to Congress in January, various snares slowed it down. In February and early March, Congress took up the “Eisenhower Doctrine” request, which required congressional approval of military and economic aid to Middle Eastern states fighting communist aggression. That request did not pass until March 5. The president’s 1958 budget proposal also became an acrimonious topic in Congress, as Eisenhower sent in a budget asking for $72 billion in spending, including $4 billion for foreign aid—one of his passions. Conservatives in both parties whittled away at these numbers; the administration fought back; and not until the fall did Congress strike a budget deal.
Meanwhile the civil rights bill had to be reintroduced in the House of Representatives, hearings had to be conducted, and a new vote held. That finally occurred on June 18, 1957, when H.R. 6127 passed by a vote of 286–126, almost exactly the same tally that the civil rights
bill had won in 1956. That bill contained the four key provisions that Brownell had sought, and it now moved on to the Senate. Normally it would have died there, as it did in 1956. But this time Senate leaders connived to keep the bill out of Eastland’s Judiciary Committee. Knowland made a motion to place the bill directly onto the Senate calendar, a preliminary to its being debated. Knowland’s motion passed, its path cleared by LBJ who had marshalled just enough votes to ensure the bill would not be derailed into Eastland’s graveyard. Knowland and Johnson, though bitter foes, each had reasons to see the bill move forward, and so by the end of June the U.S. Senate looked likely to do something it had not done for the better part of a century: debate a civil rights bill.16
But from then on, progress slowed. In a telephone conversation on June 15 Johnson had tried to warn the president of the coming conflict. The majority leader told Ike that he wanted to work mainly on passing appropriations bills because the rest of the summer would be taken up “fighting” on the civil rights bill. “Tempers were already flaring,” he said, and “would be worse.” The country’s business was likely to be suspended while that debate roiled. Eisenhower didn’t seem to grasp why the bill would stir up controversy. He had repeatedly declared that his administration’s civil rights proposals were “moderate,” that they aimed chiefly to protect the right to vote as expressed in the Fifteenth Amendment. During the spring he repeated his view that the civil rights bill threatened no one: “In it is nothing that is inimical to the interests of anyone. It is intended to preserve rights without arousing passions and without disturbing the rights of anyone else.” To Johnson’s warnings of an impending battle Eisenhower replied that “he devised and approved what he thought was the mildest civil rights bill possible—he stressed that he himself had lived in the South and had no lack of sympathy for the southern position. He said he was a little struck back on his heels when he found the terrific uproar that was created.”17
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