by Risen, Clay
King’s speech was the last major address of the day. The event ended at five o’clock with a benediction from Benjamin Mays of Morehouse College, King’s alma mater, and hundreds of thousands of feet moved back to their buses, cars, and trains. Cleve Howell, a butcher from New York, rested on the grass south of Union Station, waiting for his train. “I hope those guys over there got the message,” he said, motioning toward the Capitol.94
While the crowds headed home, the march’s leaders made their way to the White House for an hour-long meeting with the president. Though Kennedy had endorsed the event more than a month before, he had refused requests to meet with the leaders beforehand, not wanting to get too close to an event that he still feared could blow up in the administration’s face. Kennedy greeted them heartily—“I have a dream!” he said, arms open, as they entered—and then dived into an update on the bill’s progress. At one point Randolph asked for a glass of milk; the president, remembering his manners, ordered sandwiches for his tired guests. Randolph then pressed the president to strengthen the civil rights bill by adding an FEPC, playing on many of the concerns Kennedy had been playing on all summer: youth unemployment, delinquency, school dropouts. Reuther, speaking next, asked for Title III—a big request, he admitted, but then the march demonstrated just how big the movement for civil rights change was. “We’ve put together the broadest working legislating coalition we’ve ever had,” he said. Kennedy demurred, saying he was already fighting a tough battle over his current bill. Strangely out of tune with the moment, he recommended that blacks follow “the Jewish example” of community self-improvement rather than relying on the government.95
Ignoring that last comment, Wilkins and Randolph insisted that things in Congress were better than the president assumed, and that he was underestimating his own moral power. “Nobody can lead this crusade but you,” Randolph said. But Kennedy’s mind was in a different place; he was concerned that Republican support would collapse, since the party was intent on making inroads in the South. And where was the business community, which he had hoped would rally behind the bill? King suggested the president invite Dwight D. Eisenhower to endorse the bill, which the president agreed to do—but through a panel of religious leaders, not himself. The meeting ended shortly after six, the leaders going away with nothing save a few nice group photographs.96
The immediate coverage of the march fell into two categories: acclaim for the speeches and the orderly beauty of the crowd, and hard-nosed analysis of its impact on the civil rights bill. Rally impact on congress still doubtful, read a typical headline, in the Washington Post. The march was wonderful, the article said, “but, on the record anyway, the limited commitments they brought back from the Capitol were substantially those they had already had.” Time magazine was even harsher: “From the Capitol Hill leaders, and from the President and the Vice President, the visitors got polite words—and polite refusals. And as they left Washington they knew that there would be no FEPC, no authority for the Justice Department to step into every sort of civil rights case. Most frustrating of all, they knew that the public accommodations section of the administration’s package was quite unlikely to pass the Senate.” Even years later, key figures in the bill’s journey, including Nicholas Katzenbach, said they didn’t believe the march made a difference.97
This was more than a matter of jaundiced memory; a sense of frustration with the march’s legislative payoff pervaded the movement as well. In an after-action report, the LCCR wrote: “In their round of morning meetings with the heads of Congress and their late afternoon meeting with the President, the leaders of the March occasionally had the frustrating sense of traveling in circles. The meetings were cordial and helpful. But the feeling remains no one is ready to follow the splendid example set by more than 200,000 marchers and take the first bold step toward strengthening the measure.”98
Such pessimism, though understandable, missed the larger point of the march. As a spectacle captured magnificently by TV, it demonstrated to the countless millions of white Americans who knew the movement solely by the images from Birmingham that the nation’s blacks came in peace. Very few of those viewers then turned immediately to their writing desks to pen a letter to Congress supporting the bill. But in the months to come, they would be more open to the follow-up appeals delivered by their ministers, less interested in the anti-civil-rights propaganda spilling forth from CCFAF, and more likely to sign a petition or even, eventually, to write a letter in support of the bill. The march, in other words, set a tone of moral optimism, a context that drove the politics of the bill long after the event had faded into history.
The march had other knock-on effects. Above all, it helped unify a still-fractured civil rights coalition. Though Reuther himself had never wavered in his support of civil rights or the groups leading the fight, many in the UAW and AFL-CIO, including its president, George Meany, did. Thanks in part to the bitter fight with the NAACP over discrimination within the garment and building trades unions, Meany had refused to endorse the march, and he stonewalled Reuther when the UAW president tried to press his case. Before the march, with Meany on the sidelines, it was an open question as to how much support Reuther could command from other member unions, let alone the rest of his leadership and the rank and file. Afterward, the flood of goodwill for King and the civil rights cause effectively isolated Meany and gave Reuther a veritable blank check for pushing the bill with union resources over the coming year.
The march also spurred groups that were already involved to go further. Victor Reuther, one of Walter’s brothers and the UAW’s liaison to the NCC and other religious groups, was inspired by the march and created a planning committee to organize lobbying teams to spread across the Midwest, advocating for the bill. A few days after the march, a conference on the bill sponsored by the NCC opened in Lincoln, Nebraska, drawing 110 people from thirteen states; on September 12, another 900 people met in Des Moines, Iowa, to kick off a months-long multistate campaign for the bill. From there, four-person teams—composed of a theologian, a legislative expert, a representative from SNCC or SCLC, and a coordinator—spread out across the Midwest, organizing letter-writing campaigns, recruiting ministers to advocate for the bill in their sermons, and visiting representatives and senators home from Washington. According to Hamilton, between June and December 1963, the NCC’s Committee on Race and Religion spent $185,000 on lobbying for the bill and on efforts to desegregate churches—or $1.4 million in 2013 dollars.99
In fact, lobbying for a stronger bill had begun well before the first marchers arrived in Washington that August morning. On June 7, even before the bill was introduced, the AFL-CIO’s head lobbyist, Andrew Biemiller, sent the White House a memo outlining labor’s position on it, focused primarily on the need for an FEPC. “The package is inadequate,” the memo read. The bill “is a patent compromise in a no-compromise situation. All-out fights are made on all-out measures. How is the public to understand that the Administration is going to make an all-out fight when it starts with a half-way measure?”100
The memo landed at the White House like a bomb. “That afternoon I get a call from Meany in Italy,” Biemiller recalled. “He said, ‘What kind of a memo did you leave with Jack Kennedy today?’” Meany told him Kennedy wanted to see Biemiller immediately. Biemiller hurried to the White House, and soon found himself face-to-face with the president. “It was one of the most painful meetings I’ve ever been in in my life,” he said. “Jack Kennedy insisted we were going to kill the bill. He said, ‘Now mind me, I’m not opposed to it as a separate piece of legislation. But I don’t see it’s important as these other things are. And I can’t go with you.’”101
The administration continued to resist as the summer progressed. “F.E.P. continues to be a major problem,” reported Katzenbach to Robert Kennedy on August 19. “Larry O’Brien is meeting with Biemiller this morning and asking him to show us that the necessary Republican votes to pass F.E.P. as part of the omnibus bill are finally committ
ed as a condition for administration support.”102
The White House was doing more than sticking to its bipartisan strategy: it was also increasingly concerned that the white public was turning against the bill. Despite the warm fuzzy feelings around the March on Washington, polls showed that many, sometimes even most, whites thought Kennedy was moving too fast on the bill. More disturbing were the reports of a nascent white backlash against civil rights in general among the Northern white working class. Wayne Hays, a Democrat who represented the industrial Steubenville, Ohio, area, told Justice Department lawyer William Geoghegan that his mail was running nearly 100 percent against the legislation. The issue, he reported, was jobs. “Many of them seemed to have the impression that the legislation has something to do with providing more job opportunities for Negroes, and since unemployment is still high in the Steubenville area this causes some alarm among White voters who are unemployed or whose job future is precarious,” Geoghegan wrote. Another aide, John Bartlow Martin, returned from visiting his family in the middle-class Chicago suburb of Oak Park with a similar report, though this time focused on housing—and beliefs that the White House wanted to make it possible for blacks to move into white neighborhoods.103
On top of all of that, the White House was playing defense on a recent Pentagon order to restrict soldiers’ access to segregated facilities off-base and to permit them to march in civil rights demonstrations—moves Kennedy agreed with, but which were handled ineptly and gave the Southern Democrats a platform from which to accuse the president of politicizing national defense. With a looming election the next year, it is no wonder the administration held back—and in some cases, like a Justice Department indictment of nine protesters in Albany, Georgia, seemed to be working against any faint pro-civil-rights image it might have acquired.104
Fortunately for labor and its allies, the White House was not the only avenue through to the bill. Several members of the liberal majority on the subcommittee stood ready to strengthen the bill, including adding an FEPC; the only question was whether Celler would let them. All through July, the LCCR and its constituent groups had been pressuring Celler to open the bill to amendments in Subcommittee No. 5. He had signaled his openness to additions during hearings on July 24, when he said, “Don’t misunderstand me. I want to put everything I can in the bill.” Celler was always likely to let them have what they wanted—not only was he more liberal than the administration thought, but while he remained a Kennedy loyalist he seemed to chafe a bit at being treated like a “Daley Democrat,” a machine pol with no conviction of his own. “The impression downtown, at the Department of Justice, was that Emanuel Celler would do what he was told to do,” said his former aide Ben Zelenko. “He had been through a lot, and he bucked them.” Finally, at a meeting with Biemiller, Rauh, and several other LCCR representatives on July 31, Celler said he would agree to almost every item on the LCCR wish list: an FEPC, a robust Title III, a mandatory Title VI funds cutoff, and an unchallengeable presumption—not just a debatable assumption—that a sixth-grade education meant someone was literate enough to vote. He reiterated that commitment on August 7 in a speech to the NAACP, promising to include both FEPC and Title III in the bill.105
Despite its aggressive push for a bigger bill, the LCCR did appreciate the limits of its advocacy. At a July 24 meeting, aides to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. urged them to try to push Representative James Roosevelt’s own FEPC bill, H.R. 405, to the House floor, bypassing the Rules Committee by means of an aggressive, risky tactic called “Calendar Wednesday.” Rauh, speaking for the rest of the LCCR representatives, said absolutely not—the risk was too great, and a failure could hurt Kennedy’s bill. Powell later said he would ignore them, and was only placated once Celler promised he would make sure H.R. 405 got added to the main bill.106
By late August, with the likelihood of a stronger bill increasing, Rauh ordered the rest of the LCCR lobbyists to ease up. It was time to play nice with the administration, because the subcommittee vote was only the first of many to come. “I recommend that the organizations of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and the additional cooperating groups accept the Justice position and its good faith as well,” he wrote in an August 30 memo.107
After more than a hundred witnesses and twenty-six hundred pages of testimony, Subcommittee No. 5 finished its public hearings in early August, and on the fourteenth it went into executive session. There, away from the public, the members would debate and amend the bill before voting on whether to send it to the full committee—and, eventually, to the House floor.108
In keeping with his promise to President Kennedy to hold off on the bill until the tax cut was safe, Celler dragged out the first several weeks of executive session meetings, allowing long-winded and somewhat pointless debate. Usually either Marshall or Katzenbach was present, and at the end of the day they would return to the Department of Justice and assign someone from Schlei’s drafting team to rework the bill accordingly—though most of the changes, especially those submitted by Republicans, were inconsequential. “They would often pursue at great length the meaning of a particular word or phrase searing for ambiguities, trying to point up poor draftsmanship,” David Filvaroff, one of the team members, recalled. “The burden which fell to the Department was to respond to these by memoranda or arguments which adequately met the arguments made or by coming up with new language which avoided the asserted, if often unreal, difficulties.”109
Celler waited until September 10, when the tax cut was on the House floor, to begin marking up the bill—reading the bill line by line, with committee members adding amendments, sometimes just single words, as they went along. By then the Department of Justice men, whose attendance at the executive sessions required the unanimous consent of the members, had been kicked out, after Representative Meader of Michigan raised an objection.110
Then they started to debate additions to the bill. Since the liberals dominated the subcommittee, the conservative Republicans could do little more than raise objections, but Celler did not want word to leak out that the bill was gaining strength before he was ready to announce it. And so he promised McCulloch and others that the votes were only tentative, that they would go back through at the end and reassess each addition before making the bill final. They raised little objection as the subcommittee approved Byron Rogers’s amendment to grant the attorney general the power to sue over denial of access to any public facility, including parks and pools. Nor did they object to Robert Kastenmeier’s expansion of Title II to cover all public accommodations, save for small rooming houses (even though it was an affront to McCulloch, who had just finished working on compromise Title II language with Katzenbach). And they raised hardly a hand against Celler’s addition of a new title that would allow federal appeals courts to review cases that segregationist federal judges on the district level had passed down to a state court, which presumably was even more hostile to civil rights.111
But the bill was weakened in other ways. McCulloch objected to the findings that prefaced the bill—and since they had been added primarily to ensure the bill went to the Judiciary Committee, they had served their purpose, and were duly dropped. But he also wanted to tighten the rules on voting in Title I. The way the bill was written, a voter who sued to get onto the rolls could vote immediately—even though the enhanced legal mechanisms that made such a suit possible, including intervention by the Justice Department, could only be summoned if evidence of widespread voter intimidation was found. But because such a determination could take months to complete, McCulloch feared the bill was putting the cart before the horse—that it made it easier for people to vote, including, potentially, those who should not be permitted, before the grounds for admitting them were established. He therefore proposed quarantining such votes until a three-judge panel could reach a conclusion.112
McCulloch also demanded that the words “and racial imbalance” be removed from Title III, which meant that technical and financial assistance could not go to s
chool districts trying to correct for de facto segregation—in effect limiting the bill’s education plank to Southern schools. Though the change significantly limited the bill, it was readily accepted by even the pro-civil-rights members, who knew well the growing political challenges that de facto segregation posed in their districts. (The revision echoed a change made by Justice Department attorneys in early August, when they had rewritten Title VI to explicitly exclude federal funds used to guarantee home loans, removing the threat of substantive federal action against housing discrimination.)113
As they proceeded, racial tensions continued to heat up as students went back to school. On September 5 a bomb went off at the Birmingham home of a local black leader, Arthur Shores; one man was killed and sixteen injured in the riot that ensued. That same day Governor Wallace, who had said he would not interfere with federal court orders to desegregate schools in his state, ordered state troopers to block black students from entering schools in Birmingham, Mobile, and Tuskegee. When a federal judge issued an injunction against the troopers, Wallace sent out the Alabama National Guard—which Kennedy then, for the third time that year, federalized. Finally, on September 10, Wallace gave in, saying, “I can’t fight bayonets with my bare hands.”114
