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

by Risen, Clay

  That seemed to snap the president out of his momentary doubt, and he dived back into the discussion. What about doing something on job discrimination, he said, like the FEPC proposal that liberals had been hawking since the end of World War II? Here Johnson, despite his earlier call to swing for the fences, recommended pragmatism. “I think you ought to try to get what you send up there,” he said. “FEPC never made much progress in the House.” In the end, Kennedy decided to merely endorse the idea of an FEPC, which had been included in several Republican and Democratic bills already under consideration in Congress.

  Kennedy still wanted to do something on employment. Though his efforts to pitch the tax cut as a quasi-civil-rights measure that spring had come across as maladroit marketing, he did believe that helping blacks could not stop at civil rights laws alone. He was already quietly developing ideas for a more direct assault on long-term unemployment and poverty, ideas that would only reach fruition long after his death, as Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty. But he also recognized that the country was in no mood for civil rights legislation, a major tax cut, and a massive antipoverty measure. At one point he turned to Louis Martin and asked, “What’s the mood of the country and what should we do about it?”57

  As Martin recalled, “I told them that they were concentrating on Birmingham and what was happening there but they also had to worry about the possibility of riots in Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and New York.”

  To his surprise, Vice President Johnson nodded his approval. “Louis is right,” he said. Martin, feeling the wind at his back, said the president should include a Works Progress Administration for the cities, to the tune of $1 billion. “We’ve got a tremendous number of young unemployed kids who have no hope for the future,” he said.

  The attorney general laughed. “Well, we might think about a half a billion,” he said.58

  Instead, Kennedy settled for a pair of measures proposed by Secretary of Labor Willard Wirtz that he could take unilaterally—mandating that unions involved in government contract work desegregate their apprenticeship programs, and conducting a thorough search of the laws on federal employment to make sure they did not contain discriminatory measures. The meeting wrapped up, and the consensus was to announce the bill on June 4.

  But Johnson had much more to say. On the Saturday before the meeting he had asked O’Donnell for a fifteen-minute meeting with the president, but the appointments secretary, O’Donnell—who hated Johnson, and whom Johnson both despised and feared as the sort of Ivy League elite he had battled his entire career—had said no.59

  Instead, over the next several days Johnson spoke to as many of Kennedy’s inner circle as he could about his concerns on the bill. On June 3 he got Ted Sorensen on the phone. Johnson was worried that Kennedy was diving into the fight without a plan of attack. “He’s already tried out this literacy bill by this shooting-from-the-hip business,” he said. “Hell, they messed around there four or five days, had a little perfunctory vote and said it was hypocritical and disgraceful. Didn’t you think so?”60

  “Last year?” Sorensen asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I think we could have done better.”

  “Sure we could have, sure we could have.” This time had to be different. The president needed to start with a “Gettysburg” speech somewhere in the South—Johnson suggested San Antonio or Jackson, Mississippi—that would make the moral case for legislation; doing so might win over some Southern whites, and it would let the nation’s blacks know he was firmly on their side. “We got a little pop gun, and I want to pull out the cannon. The president is the cannon.” Kennedy also needed to force Republicans to back his bill by threatening to tar them as anti-civil-rights in the next election. With the GOP in his pocket, Kennedy could go to the Southern Democrats and say, “Now here we got to do it either in the streets or in the courts. And they’re going to do it in the streets. I can’t sit idly by, and what do you recommend, senator?”

  Of equal importance was making a moral commitment to blacks, especially because, in Johnson’s eyes, the bill faced a rough path toward passage, and might not pass at all. If it failed, blacks needed to know the president had tried his best. In any case, “I don’t think the Negroes’ goals are going to be achieved through legislation,” he said—“what Negroes are really seeking is moral force.”

  For Johnson, it was a matter of timing, of waiting until the situation was right for the bill. Sorensen said he was worried that the South was “hot enough” and felt immediate action was needed. But Johnson disagreed. The tax bill had to pass first, for one thing, or else it would become hostage to the Southern Democrats’ delay tactics. In his typical folksy idiom, Johnson said, “I’d move my children on through the line and get them down in the storm cellar and get it under lock and key, and then I’d make my attack.”

  Moreover, the administration needed to get a firm sense of how many votes it had behind the bill, “and we can get them a whole lot better before the message than we do afterwards.” Just as important as getting favorable senators on board was sitting down with Richard Russell to find out the Southern Democrats’ game plan, and what Russell thought of the bill. “I would make them show every card they got,” he said.

  When the bill hit the Senate, Johnson said he would employ the same hardball tactics he had used with the 1957 and 1960 bills, particularly round-the-clock sessions. “This crowd, they’re experts at fighting this thing and we’re not prepared for them,” he said.

  The call with Sorensen was also a chance for Johnson to air personal grievances against the rest of the administration. He did not like being cut out of the planning process so far—“I don’t know who drafted it,” he said, “I got it from the New York Times”—and he particularly resented Robert Kennedy’s commando raids into the PCEEO: “Bobby came in the other day to out Equal Employment Committee and I was humiliated.”

  But Johnson ended on a positive note. “I don’t want to spend a week telling these newspaper reporters why I disagree, and I never do,” he assured Sorensen. “So whenever he wants” my advice, “why, I’m available.”

  Sorensen had barely said a word, and it’s not clear from the transcript that he was really listening. “Well, I’ll pass all this on to him, you can be sure,” Sorensen said, hanging up.

  Johnson also tried to get an audience with Robert Kennedy, but the attorney general brushed him off by sending Schlei in his place. The two met on June 4 in the vice president’s office on Capitol Hill, a palatial suite that he had secured from his successor as Senate majority leader, Mike Mansfield. “He was undoubtedly somewhat unhappy that he was talking to me instead of to somebody else,” recalled Schlei. Nevertheless, the pair spoke for forty minutes—or, rather, Johnson did; Schlei listened and tried to get in an occasional word, almost wholly without success. “He certainly did talk,” Schlei recalled later. “To this day I couldn’t tell you whether he had hold of my lapels or not. He may have. He absolutely poured out his soul. He really—he must have been four inches away from me really telling it to me like he thought.”61

  Johnson’s main concern, Schlei reported, was timing. The Kennedys had done a good job developing the bill, but they had not given enough thought into the basic mechanics of getting it passed. “He said that the legislative proposal would be disastrous for the president’s program and would not be enacted if submitted now,” Schlei wrote afterward in a memo to Robert Kennedy. Johnson emphasized that he was not against the bill, but that he thought the White House needed a better plan. Critical to any effort, he said, was getting the Republicans on board, particularly the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen. He should run the bill by Richard Russell, who would oppose it but give his honest assessment of its flaws, and the House parliamentarian, to make absolutely sure it would go to the Judiciary Committee. Finally, Kennedy should take his campaign to the South by making a major speech in each of the states on the moral importance of non-discrimination. He even had a place in mind to sta
rt: a new NASA facility in Mississippi, where Kennedy should declare that anyone willing to send black soldiers to fight “for this flag”—at which point, Schlei recalled, Johnson grabbed the small American flag standing on his desk—should be willing to support the civil rights bill. Then, and only then, should the legislation go to Capitol Hill.

  While it is unclear whether all of Johnson’s advice made it to the Oval Office, the president was willing to act on some of his vice president’s recommendations. In a memo to Labor Secretary Wirtz and Anthony Celebrezze, the secretary of health, education and welfare, he reported that “the vice president feels, on the basis of his experience with the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, that the Federal Government should and could be doing much more to relieve Negro unemployment by additional and intensive job training programs for the unskilled the illiterate and those on public welfare.” To that end, Kennedy instructed the two to review existing programs and proposals to see if more could be done. Kennedy also met several times with congressional leaders, from both sides of the aisle, to sound out their feelings on civil rights legislation. Moreover, while the exact reasons were never explained, the president decided to put off announcing his proposal for several days—a decision that may well have reflected Johnson’s advice to spend more time preparing the political groundwork.62

  At the same time, there were attempts by different White House staffers to pare back the bill. On June 8, Martin arrived at the attorney general’s office to learn that a movement was afoot to pull the public accommodations title from the bill. Martin went ballistic. “Listen, you are worried about unrest,” shouted the tall, bespectacled, usually jovial Martin. “You’re worried about civil anarchy. But what’s the trigger? One of the triggers is this business about public accommodations. That was the thing in North Carolina when the students sit in whenever blacks are refused service. That immediately causes anger and there is absolutely nothing we can do with a civil rights bill if we don’t address it.” Robert Kennedy and the other men in the room were speechless. But Martin was not finished. “I have a daughter, and there is an Italian restaurant not too far from my house. I understand they don’t want any black customers. If my daughter is turned down by that guy, I’m going to take a gun and shoot him. And as old as I am, if I feel that way about it, what do you think about young blacks?” The public accommodations title stayed in the bill.63

  Martin’s ire was reflected in the headlines, which were reporting daily on the latest flare-up in the South, this time in Jackson, Mississippi. The state capital was a boomtown, having gone from just 22,000 people in 1920 to 144,000 in 1960, thanks in part to a profitable but ultimately misbegotten effort to find oil under its loamy soil. Like Birmingham, Jackson also had a large and woefully oppressed black population, one that by the spring of 1963 was pushing hard against the strictures of Jim Crow. Unlike Birmingham, though, Jackson was largely an NAACP town, thanks to the work of Medgar Evers, the head of the state chapter. A varsity college football player, Army veteran, and insurance salesman, Evers had been haunted by the violent power of Jim Crow racism ever since, as a child, he saw the mutilated body of a friend of his father’s left to lie limp after he was murdered by a white mob. Evers managed to knit together a delicate alliance of NAACP moderates, old-line ministers, and action-oriented students, a potent mix that his bosses in New York hoped to use to their advantage in their turf war with the SCLC.64

  The NAACP national leadership had watched with envy as King took over and then took national the Birmingham movement; the association had spent the previous fifteen years assiduously building a robust Southern membership, and it worried that King was poised to co-opt it, with Jackson being an obvious next target. Gloster Current, the NAACP’s director of branches, had told Evers to “hit hard” in Jackson as soon as the crisis in Birmingham was over, and the Mississippian had spent much of May leading a boycott of downtown stores and in negotiations with the mayor, Allen Thompson. The mayor eventually agreed to a tentative partial desegregation deal at the end of May, then quickly disowned it on May 28.65

  That same day the first sit-ins began. Four black students and a white professor from nearby Tougaloo College sat down at a Woolworth’s lunch counter. A white mob set upon the protesters, insulting them, pouring condiments on them, and eventually beating three of them, including the professor, in the face. The police stood by and did nothing, though one of the beaten protesters was later charged with disturbing the peace. A photo of the assault appeared on the front page of the New York Times the next day.66

  Evers announced a “massive offensive” in response. Over the next several days Jackson became a reprise of the Birmingham action. Nineteen picketers were arrested on May 29. The next day hundreds of black students poured out of Lanier Junior and Senior High School carrying flags and singing, “We want freedom.” A line of sixty police officers stopped them and said they were parading without a license. When the demonstrators refused to move, a cop hit one of them in the thighs with his nightstick, crumpling him to the ground. They were then led to trucks and hauled off to a hastily erected hogpen of a prison. In all, some five hundred were arrested that day; the next day, another hundred were taken in, including NAACP president Roy Wilkins, who had flown in to advertise his organization’s leadership in the Jackson movement. In the melee Thelton Henderson, a black Department of Justice official, there to observe, was arrested as well. A few days later someone threw a gasoline bomb into Evers’s carport, but it did not explode.67

  On May 30, King requested a meeting with the president and the attorney general to press his case for an executive order against segregation. But Lee White, instructed to keep the civil rights leader at bay, said no. That night, speaking with his advisers Stanley Levison and Clarence Jones (in a conversation picked up by FBI wiretaps placed on Levison’s phone), King said that the best way to follow up the success in Birmingham was to stage an enormous demonstration in Washington, one that would induce Kennedy to “really push” legislation.68

  Jackson was not the only place on edge. Protests of varying size were erupting across the South. On May 29, approximately three hundred blacks, including the Olympian Wilma Rudolph, sought service at a Clarksville, Tennessee, restaurant. On June 6 alone, 257 people were arrested in Tallahassee, Florida, and 278 in Greensboro, North Carolina. It was all the Department of Justice could do just to keep track of them: on May 27, Robert Kennedy sent a memo to Southern district attorneys asking them to note “any places where racial demonstrations are expected within the next 30 days.”69

  And John Kennedy had other parts of the civil rights picture to deal with. Since May 29 he had been meeting with a string of interest groups—governors, mayors, business leaders, women’s associations, clergy, lawyers—to convince them of the need for significant change on the racial front, not only in terms of immediate legislation but also on long-term problems like youth delinquency, school dropouts, and black employment. The president, the attorney general, and the vice president were present at most of the meetings, along with relevant cabinet members. By all accounts, Johnson was the star of the meetings. “Kennedy had made an intellectual appeal for the lawyers’ duty and so forth,” Morris Abram, a New York lawyer and civil rights activist, recalled. “There was no passion in any of it until LBJ took the podium. And he gave an impassioned speech about what kind of a country is this that a man can go die in a foxhole and can’t get a hamburger in a public restaurant. I would say he was by far the most effective fellow there. I was impressed by him.”70

  Each meeting was tightly tailored by Lee White to speak to the particular group’s concerns, but also to draw out of them ways they could contribute to civil rights progress. To the governors, Kennedy pitched the importance of local and state biracial committees. He told labor leaders that expanding black employment opportunities was the best way to reduce the risk of further violence. To the 250 clergy who gathered on June 17, he appealed to them to “recognize the conflict between racial bigot
ry and the Holy Word.” All told, between May 29 and June 22, Kennedy met with 1,558 people.71

  Though Kennedy’s and Johnson’s speeches at the meetings were more hortatory than concrete, and some of the participants later derided the meetings as trumped-up, pointless affairs, they got many of the attendees talking with each other, and within a month had spun off a half dozen advocacy groups and affinity networks that would play a critical role in organizing public support for the civil rights bill. Kennedy asked J. Irwin Miller, an Indiana industrialist and the first lay president of the National Council of Churches, to organize both a religious advisory group on civil rights and a committee of business leaders to push for the bill among the corporate community.72

  Kennedy was also pressing his case with Capitol Hill Republicans. On June 5 he met with Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, House Minority Leader Charles Halleck, and House Republican Whip Leslie Arends. Dirksen, to Kennedy’s surprise, was supportive; though he expressed reservations about certain aspects of the bill—most notably the public accommodations provision—he gave Kennedy his assurance that he would take the administration’s side against a likely Southern Democratic filibuster. That same day, the Senate Republican Conference released a statement announcing that it would “support further appropriate legislation required to help solve the problems of our Nation in the field of civil rights.”73

  Republicans in the House were less quick to rally to the Kennedy bill. Many members—and not just the liberals—supported legislation, and had been pushing for it since the beginning of the session. But the White House and congressional Democrats had largely ignored them, calculating that there were too few Republicans to pass the bill themselves and that there were enough Democrats to pass their own bill with minimal GOP involvement. At the same time, House Republicans doubted the administration’s resolve, especially when it came to omnibus legislation—many were still smarting from the experience of 1957, when they passed an expansive civil rights bill only to see Lyndon Johnson water it down in the Senate.