The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act

by Risen, Clay

  Still, Kennedy was not deaf to his advisers’ entreaties. On February 28, he surprised even his close colleagues with a lengthy statement on civil rights that outdid all previous utterances in its moral seriousness.92

  Kennedy began by examining, he said, “how far we have come in achieving first-class citizenship for all citizens regardless of color, how far we have yet to go, and what further tasks remain to be carried out.” Just weeks after he had refused to discuss Martin Luther King Jr.’s demand for a second Emancipation Proclamation, he addressed King’s point directly: “That Proclamation was only a first step—a step which its author unhappily did not live to follow up, a step which some of its critics dismissed as an action which ‘frees the slave but ignores the Negro.’ Through these long one hundred years, while slavery has vanished, progress for the Negro has been too often blocked and delayed.”

  He ran through a litany of problems caused by discrimination. It hampers, he said, “our economic growth by preventing the maximum development and utilization of our manpower. It hampers our world leadership by contradicting at home the message we preach abroad. It mars the atmosphere of a united and classless society in which this Nation rose to greatness.” But these reasons, he said, were largely beside the point. “Therefore,” he said, “let it be clear, in our own hearts and minds, that it is not merely because of the Cold War, and not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination, that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity. The basic reason is because it is right.”

  Somewhat hyperbolically, the president claimed that “in the last two years, more progress has been made in securing the civil rights of all Americans than in any comparable period in our history.” Still, he conceded, “pride in our progress must not give way to relaxation of our effort. Nor does progress in the Executive Branch enable the Legislative Branch to escape its own obligations.”

  To that end, the president recommended a series of proposals: expedited voting rights lawsuits, temporary voting referees to monitor elections in counties where there were suits pending and where less than 15 percent of the black population was registered, uniform registration requirements, encouragement to pass a constitutional amendment banning poll taxes, an extension of the Civil Rights Commission, and technical assistance for school districts trying to desegregate. He also reintroduced his filibustered bill from 1962 to make the completion of sixth grade sufficient evidence of a voter’s literacy to obviate a test at the registrar’s desk.

  The message was notable for several reasons. Kennedy was the first president, in fact one of the first national politicians, to say explicitly that ending racial discrimination was a moral issue. That alone, said Wilkins, was enough to give hope that the president would act more forcefully in the coming year. Kennedy had “finally recognized the need for legislative action,” he said. “I’m not sure whether we had reached him or whether all those inside agitators down South had gotten his Yankee dander up, but he was beginning to move.” Whitney Young, the head of the National Urban League, agreed, calling it “the most comprehensive statement on this complex and sensitive subject ever in our time by a chief executive.” Nevertheless, Young added, the statement did fall short. “There is no legislation recommended in the area of racial discrimination in employment to strengthen the program of the President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity.” A skeptical Martin Luther King Jr. praised the message simply as “constructive.”93

  To judge by the Southern Democrats’ reaction, though, Kennedy had just fired the opening salvo of the second Civil War—Richard Russell claimed that the proposed legislation threatened “almost every phase of social and racial relations.” But among the civil rights community, Kennedy’s proposal fell flat. Even the ADA, no friend of the Republicans, declared that their civil rights proposals “have caught the Administration off guard. In each area of civil rights the Republican proposals have greater comprehension than the administration’s recommendations.” Indeed, “in contrast with the Republican package, the President sent an eloquent civil rights message to Congress but accompanied it with minimal proposals.”94

  The Republicans gleefully shot holes in the proposal, too. Lindsay called it “thin.” Nelson Rockefeller, a likely contender for the GOP presidential nomination in 1964, noted that the president’s message included only five of the twenty-eight recommendations made by the Civil Rights Commission in its report earlier that month. The Kennedys, choosing to hear what they wanted, interpreted silence as apathy. “There wasn’t any interest” in the bill, Robert Kennedy complained. “There was no public demand for it. There was no demand by the newspapers or radio or television.”95

  A few days after Kennedy sent his message, Joe Rauh met with several fellow civil rights leaders in New York. As they commiserated over what they considered unnecessary timidity on the president’s part—Rauh later said the message represented “such an inane package of legislation as to make the civil rights movement feel that it wasn’t worth going for”—his comrade in arms and the NAACP’s head lobbyist, Clarence Mitchell, walked in the door. He was carrying a sheaf of congressional bills under his arm—Republican bills. At least someone’s trying to get the ball rolling, Mitchell said, chuckling. With a Democratic president and large Democratic majorities in both houses, the chances of a Republican-authored bill passing, on civil rights no less, were vanishingly small. “If you need to be cheered up with bills like that that can’t go anywhere,” said Rauh, “you’re in pretty bad shape.”96

  It appeared, said King, “a melancholy fact that the administration is aggressively driving only toward the limited goal of token integration.” And yet King held out hope that forces of action within the White House—or even within Kennedy himself—would draw out the president soon. “It would be profoundly wrong to take an extreme position either way when viewing the administration.”97

  King wrote those words in an article for the Nation in March 1962. By the end of the year he was much less sanguine—the literacy test bill had failed, the housing executive order was a bust, and Kennedy seemed even less interested in civil rights legislation than the year before. Meanwhile, King’s Albany campaign had failed spectacularly, with King and his supporters in jail and the Kennedy team praising the nonconfrontational strategy of the Albany police. If Washington was ever to take civil rights seriously, King realized that dark winter, it would take a new, much riskier strategy on the part of the movement.

  Chapter 2

  “A National Movement” to Enforce National Laws”

  The momentum on civil rights changed at 1:00 p.m. on May 2, 1963, when the doors of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, burst open and dozens of schoolchildren poured forth into the warm spring sunlight, singing “We Shall Overcome.” Wyatt Tee Walker, the executive director of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the strategic visionary behind the protests, sent the children out in waves; a dozen here, a score there, coursing in different directions through and around Kelly Ingram Park, a block-size plaza southeast of the church. Hundreds of onlookers, having heard rumors of the march, were gathered around the park, as was a sizable chunk of the Birmingham police department.1

  The children were marching without a parade permit, and officers immediately corralled them into waiting police vans. But the children kept coming. When an officer saw Fred Shuttlesworth, a local preacher and one of the Birmingham movement’s leaders, standing on the side, he shouted, “Hey Fred, how many more have you got?”

  “At least a thousand!” Shuttlesworth replied.

  “God almighty.”

  Shuttlesworth was hardly exaggerating. By the time the day’s marches were over, three hours after they had begun, the police had run out of wagons and were resorting to school buses. Six hundred children were taken to jail.

  The next day the marches resumed, and the police returned, this time with the fire department, fire hoses, and dogs. The marchers were hit with a light spray from the hoses a
t first, but when a determined core of them refused to retreat, the police captain in charge ratcheted up the streams to full blast, a hundred pounds of pressure. Many ran but several children did not budge. When the retreating children saw their fellow marchers’ example and turned around, K-9 units came at them with dogs.2

  That afternoon Martin Luther King Jr. sent a telegram to the president. “Will you permit this recrudescence of violence in Birmingham to threaten our lives and deny our rights?” he asked. Kennedy did not respond, at least not that day. But he was watching, like the rest of the world. Photographers had snapped hundreds of pictures of German shepherds, their teeth sinking into young boys and girls. It made him “sick,” Kennedy told an aide. And Kennedy was not alone. “A snarling police dog set upon a human being is recorded in the permanent photoelectric file of every human being’s brain,” said CBS News correspondent Eric Sevareid.3

  The planning for the Birmingham campaign had begun at a meeting of the SCLC leadership in early January near Savannah, Georgia. King was licking his wounds from the failed Albany protests, but eager to apply the lessons learned. The consensus was to try again, but this time to do so in a way, and a place, that guaranteed a violent response by the police—and promised immediate national exposure. “What I did in Birmingham I learned in Albany,” Walker later said.4

  And yet at first, the Birmingham movement sputtered, precisely because those lessons were not applied. The protests, consisting mostly of lunch counter sit-ins, were to begin in early March. But when the mayoral election, pitting the virulently segregationist commissioner of public safety Eugene “Bull” Connor against the relatively moderate lieutenant governor Albert Boutwell, went into a runoff, the movement’s leaders decided to postpone.5

  Meanwhile, events elsewhere threatened to upstage the Birmingham campaign before it began. In Greenwood, Mississippi, police attacked voting rights protesters with dogs, even as dozens of news photographers snapped pictures that would appear the next day on newspaper front pages nationwide, including the New York Times—under a photograph of the congressional Republican leaders who had just introduced a sheaf of strong civil rights proposals.6

  Greenwood failed to generate the federal response that King was hoping would come from such a vicious display of raw state racism. At an April 2 press conference, Robert Kennedy, while admitting that “the laws are not adequate” to deal with the Greenwood crisis,” said, “I don’t think legislation per se is going to eliminate this problem for the United States.” And President Kennedy, when asked about the protests at an April 3 press conference, responded noncommittally: “There has been a denial of rights, which seems to me evident, but which the court must decide.”7

  That same day, just 65 of the 250 or so people on Walker’s “arrest list”—those willing to go to jail as a result of their protest activity—showed up in the church basement of A. D. King, Martin Luther King Jr.’s brother. The problem was timing: Boutwell had won the runoff, but Connor had refused to accept the vote, forcing the election into the courts. Although Shuttlesworth called the moderate Boutwell nothing more than a “dignified Connor,” the city’s black elders urged restraint until the court ruling. Nor were they eager to see Shuttlesworth and King succeed. Shuttlesworth was already well known around town as the “Wild Man of Birmingham,” a verbally and tactically aggressive, at times reckless activist, while they saw King as an outsider who flew in from his home in Atlanta when he was not touring the country speaking and raising funds. The pressure came from outside as well: Burke Marshall called King and urged him to delay the protests, reporting that Robert Kennedy had deemed them “ill-timed.”8

  After King and his deputy, Ralph Abernathy, were arrested on April 12 for violating an injunction against parading handed down the day before, eight local moderate religious leaders wrote a lengthy letter to the Birmingham News calling the protests extreme, “unwise’’ and ‘‘untimely.” A few days later King began scribbling a response on scraps of paper that he smuggled out to his lawyer, and which would come to be celebrated as the “Letter from Birmingham Jail.”9

  The letter was barely noticed at first, and probably would not have had much effect on the White House anyway. The Kennedys had extra reason to avoid confrontations in the South that spring. During his State of the Union address, the president had proposed a $13.5 billion tax cut as a panacea for the country’s problems: lingering unemployment, trade promotion, the deficit, and even racial tensions. But to win the bill, he had to bring over Southern Democrats, who often aligned with Midwest conservative Republicans against spending and tax cut measures, both of which they said would create unsustainable deficits. And Kennedy was already facing a civil rights dustup in Washington: on April 16 the Civil Rights Commission had submitted its study of segregation in Mississippi, recommending that the president should cut off federal funds to the state. Kennedy did his best to distance himself from the proposal, but the report was catnip for Southern politicians—Mississippi senator James Eastland called it “a monstrous libel.”10

  Things grew even more complicated on the night of April 23, when a white postal worker from Baltimore named William Moore, who had been on a peace march to deliver a letter to Mississippi governor Ross Barnett, was found dead on the side of a highway in northeastern Alabama, shot twice at close range. The next day, the president brought up the shooting at a press conference, unprompted. “We had outrageous crime, from all accounts, in the State of Alabama, in the shooting of the postman who was attempting in a very traditional way to dramatize the plight of some of our citizens, being assassinated on the road,” he said. “We do not have direct jurisdiction, but we are working with every legislative, legal tool at our command to insure protection for the rights of our citizens, and we shall continue to do so.” The killing drew the national reporters away from Birmingham, and it was unclear how many would return.11

  When King got out of jail, his movement looked to be in tatters. Only a few hundred people had been arrested, far fewer than at the same point during the Albany protests, and much of the country had turned its attention elsewhere. On April 19, Shuttlesworth had flown to Washington to meet with Burke Marshall and request federal intervention, but Marshall, while sympathetic, said not to expect anything. “I told him that there was no basis upon which the federal government could take any action at present,” Marshall wrote in a follow-up memo to Robert Kennedy.12

  The only way to get the federal government to act, King realized, was to take a dramatic step that would bring into sharp relief the everyday violence perpetrated against Birmingham’s blacks. Though skeptical at first, King eventually sided with James Bevel, an organizer from Mississippi in town to help with nonviolence training, who believed the choice was clear: send in the children.

  Two days after the “children’s crusade” began, Robert Kennedy ordered Marshall to go to Birmingham to meet with King. Marshall had already called King twice to get him to call off the latest stage in the protests, and the attorney general had publicly criticized them: “An injured, maimed, or dead child is a price that none of us can afford.” But other politicians were more forceful in their denunciations of the Birmingham police. Democratic senator Wayne Morse of Oregon said events like those in Birmingham presented “an infinitely greater threat to American freedom than Cuba”—tough words in a country still recovering from the shock of the missile crisis of October 1962.13

  Over the next few weeks, Marshall—along with the Justice Deapartment’s Joe Dolan and Louis Oberdorfer, a Birmingham native with close ties to the city’s business leaders—shuttled between Washington and Alabama, and in Birmingham from King and the moderate black leadership to Mayor Boutwell and various quarters of the white elites, many of whom were willing to make concessions to King. Marshall at first repeated his insistence that King call a truce until the court ruled on the Boutwell-Connor election. King said no, catching Marshall by surprise. Though Marshall insisted in calls back to Washington that King was “confused,” he be
gan to realize that only a broad settlement, involving the desegregation of Birmingham’s public accommodations, would end the crisis—and that to avoid replaying the same story in countless cities across the South, blanket federal legislation was needed.14

  It was precisely the reaction that King and his men were looking for. “Today I was in a room with one of the top men in the Justice Department, who paced the floor, couldn’t sit down, changed from chair to chair,” bragged Ralph Abernathy during a mass meeting on the night of May 6. “Day before yesterday we filled up the jail. Today, we filled up the jail yard. And tomorrow, when they look up and see that number coming, I don’t know what they’re gonna do!” The next night, after a long day that saw adult protesters hit back at the police with rocks and bricks, King said in a sermon, “The hour has come for the Federal government to take a forthright stand on segregation in the United States . . . I am not criticizing the president, but we are going to have to help him.”15

  Marshall’s fear of multiple Birminghams was not hypothetical. During the week following the beginning of the children’s marches, the White House watched nervously as dozens of demonstrations took place around the country. Many of them were held in sympathy with Birmingham—on May 9, fifteen hundred people marched in New York’s Times Square—but not all. On May 6, black students from the overwhelmingly black Lincoln High School in Englewood, New Jersey, caught national attention with a sit-in at the majority-white Cleveland High School across town to protest “the total failure of state and local officials to act in any useful way in the past two years to solve Englewood’s segregation crisis.” Over Memorial Day weekend, tear gas was used in six different cities, and on June 11, some 650 demonstrators shut down construction at an annex to a hospital in Harlem in protest against union discrimination.16