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

by Risen, Clay

  Still, Mudd was a good soldier, which was how he ended up standing in the blowing snow on Capitol Hill that morning. “This is not what you’d call a typical Eastern Monday in Washington—the snow, the cold, the frozen forsythia and the chilled cherry blossom buds, and inside the Senate wing, we are about to embark on an historic civil rights debate,” he began his broadcast, his dark hair poking above his winter coat. “Leading off today will be the generalissimo of the pro-civil-rights forces, Democratic senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota.”

  The camera then panned to the Senate majority whip, bareheaded in a thin 42-long raincoat that was several sizes too big for him, the sleeves all but covering his hands. When Humphrey had arrived at the Capitol, CBS News director Bill Smalls had asked him to step aside to speak with Mudd before he disappeared into the building. Humphrey demurred, saying he needed his jacket. Smalls, thinking fast, offered him his, even though he was much taller. And so the senator about to lead the most important fight of his life, and one of the most important in the long history of the Senate, found himself on national television, shivering in the snow in an ill-fitting coat.2

  Though he put on a brave face for the camera, Humphrey’s uncomfortable appearance hinted at a growing concern among supporters over the civil rights bill’s prospects. That same day, Humphrey sent a memo to his assistant John Stewart in which he worried that “we are beginning to lose the public relations battle on the civil rights issue.” Among other things, he said, the CCFAF ads “are having their effect. I don’t mean to say the public has swung over against civil rights, but we are losing some ground.” He even mused darkly on the prospects for widespread racial violence in the coming summer: “There is a sense of bitterness and open rioting which is going to kick back and could very well precipitate small Algerias all around the country.” The answer lay in getting the bill through as fast as possible, to demonstrate that change was possible through the system. But to do that, the civil rights bill needed a massive public relations campaign of its own, drawing in religious leaders, doctors, and business people. “I don’t think we can wait another day.”3

  It is significant that Humphrey left out the civil rights groups and labor from his list. From his perspective—one shared by Katzenbach and the Department of Justice—those proponents were doing more harm than good to the bill. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, had been talking about mass protests against the filibuster and had called on the Democrats to scuttle the bill if the Republicans demanded weakening amendments. Humphrey worried about how such public pronouncements would play once the delicate negotiations with Dirksen began. Dirksen was no friend of the civil rights lobby: the previous autumn, he and Clarence Mitchell had had a famous falling-out in which Dirksen had kicked Mitchell out of his office for daring to challenge his civil rights bona fides. And liberal organizations would be no help when it came to winning over Midwestern Republicans. Humphrey, at Katzenbach’s request, had already frozen out the LCCR from almost all the daily meetings held by the civil rights senators and their staffs, a move that infuriated Rauh and Mitchell.4

  Meanwhile, Humphrey and Kuchel had put together a plan for the first several days of debate. They knew that the country’s attention, thanks to Mudd, would be focused on the filibuster for a time and then taper off—and they intended to own that time, not cede it to the South or the civil rights groups. They assigned each of the major titles to a Democrat and a Republican, each of whom was to prepare an extended, point-by-point explanation of the title. The marathon of speeches would begin with lengthy addresses from Humphrey and Kuchel themselves. By the time the Southerners began to speak, they hoped, the country’s focus would be elsewhere—after all, even a congressional debate as pivotal as the one about to begin was, in its day-to-day details, still a congressional debate. High drama it was not.

  The Senate was scheduled to take up the civil rights bill as soon as the session opened. But there had been an earthquake in Alaska the previous Friday—the most severe ever recorded in American history, killing 143 people and flattening communities across the south central part of the state. President Johnson persuaded Humphrey and Mansfield to take up the question of disaster relief first, the better to win points with Western senators who felt a regional connection to the beleaguered state (Johnson also lent Alaska’s two senators the use of Air Force Two to return home).5

  Humphrey finally rose at 1:30. The gallery was filled with onlookers, but the chamber was close to empty. The bill, he said, was simply a matter of fulfilling the promises set out in the Constitution. He then set aside his speech, all fifty-five pages of it, and took up a Bible. He read from Matthew 7:12: “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them, for this is the law and the prophets.” Setting down the book, he intoned, “It is to fulfill this great admonition—this is what we are trying to do in this bill.”6

  Humphrey announced that he would refuse to answer any questions, since “I want to keep this short.” He then spoke for three hours and twenty-six minutes. Kuchel’s speech was significantly shorter than Humphrey’s—it went for just an hour and fifteen minutes. “No American can read the thousands of pages of testimony which have been taken in field hearings all over the our land by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights without being greatly impressed with the work of law and of the heart which still remains to be accomplished,” he said.7

  By the time Kuchel finished, just a handful of senators sat in the chamber, most of them signing letters and doing other miscellaneous office tasks. Gallery gawkers must have felt their expectations rapidly deflate as the senators shifted around the floor: these were not the exciting theatrics of national politics they had come expecting. But this was the way of Senate politics—to a great extent, what happened on the floor was the least important part of the civil rights battle.

  Despite the bill’s challenges in the Senate, its supporters knew that success would present its own set of problems. A decade earlier, the Brown decision had spurred “massive resistance” across the South, with some school districts shutting down entirely to avoid having to admit black children. Racial violence spiked, and the strictures of Jim Crow tightened. Politicians across the region encouraged defiance; in Little Rock, Arkansas, it took federal troops to force compliance.

  And so on April 1, the day after the Senate took up the civil rights bill, several top officials at the Department of Justice gathered to plot out how to best ease the bill’s implementation. Just as the Justice Department had coordinated with outside groups to generate support for the bill, it was now looking to those same groups to pave the way for its acceptance by Southern society. Louis Oberdorfer, the deputy attorney general for the tax division and a native of Birmingham, had spent the last nine months building an ad hoc network of concerned civic and business leaders in the South. They were grouped into interest and industry groups: lawyers, industrialists, motel owners—each had its own committee.

  Julius Manger Jr., one of the nation’s most powerful hotel magnates, took a particular interest in leading his industry on desegregation; afterward he wrote a moving personal account about his conversion from civil rights apathy to activism at one of President Kennedy’s conferences during the summer of 1963. Manger spent countless days in the spring of 1964 traveling around the South, persuading local hotel and motel owners to accept desegregation. “In Charlotte and Savannah we had a larger investment in our hotel and motel properties than anyone else,” he wrote. “In both of those cities, therefore, I was able to say to other hotel and motel owners that I was not just asking them to do something and then going to walk away, but that actually we had a bigger investment to lose than they did.” Thanks to Manger’s leadership, scores of Southern communities were ready to accept, if not welcome, the bill when it went into effect. Oberdorfer later called Manger “one of the unsung heroes of the civil rights era.”8

  Several outside groups had their own networks that they coordinated with the department. Irwin Mill
er and Robert Spike had agreed to create a network of clergy around the South to push for compliance, while the Potomac Institute, a liberal think tank in Washington, organized lists of Southern editorial writers, business organizations, and civic groups. The institute used those contacts to build local ad hoc organizations to generate positive press coverage and an accepting business climate for desegregation—a grassroots effort that proved critical in communities that were wary of direct federal pressure.9

  In each case, the networks provided both a tool for pushing acceptance in local communities and a source of intelligence on potential hot spots—in early June, for example, Luther Holcomb, the executive director of the Greater Dallas Council of Churches, passed on word that two local restaurants, the Lucas B&B and the Piccadilly Cafeteria, had said they would not comply with Title II.10

  The overriding message passed through the networks, the planners at the April 1 meeting agreed, would focus on the bill’s inevitability. For one thing, they communicated that, unlike after Brown, the federal government was intent on enforcing the legislation. At the same time, by pressing the idea that desegregation was a fait accompli, the planners were also taking advantage of the fact that many business owners wanted to desegregate, but did not want to be the first to do it, for fear that white customers would shun them for other, still-segregated facilities. If the department, through its various networks, could spread the word that the region was going “all in” at once, then desegregation might go more smoothly.

  On the same day the Senate took up the bill, just a few blocks away from the Justice Department at the Statler Hilton, some eighty leaders from seventy-four member organizations of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights met for their own all-day strategy session. Although they were largely shut out of the backroom negotiations, these groups had their own plans for the bill. They emerged with a long schedule of campaigns and events meant to raise public awareness and ratchet up pressure on the Senate. Each group had its own plan. Every morning, an hour before the Senate opened, a minister would lead a prayer service at the Lutheran Church of the Reformation, an art deco pile of a building just a block east of the Capitol. Other groups, like the B’nai B’rith Women, scheduled “adopt a senator” write-in campaigns to Southern Democrats. Still others announced plans to bring their members to Washington to meet with their senators: the NAACP would bring representatives from 190 chapters to Capitol Hill; the AFL-CIO announced an upcoming conference in Washington that would see two hundred members descend on the capital. Humphrey, not wanting to isolate the civil rights groups completely, put in an appearance that turned the meeting from a strategy session to a pep rally. “I am so conditioned morally, physically, psychologically, the fight can go on for ten years and I won’t run out of steam,” he told the crowd. Humphrey expected the same level of commitment from his fellow Democrats. When a staff member told him that Senator Dale McGee of Wyoming had to leave early one day to have dinner with his family, Humphrey replied, “He better make up his mind whether he wants to be a father or a senator—he can’t be both.”11

  As it had done during the House debate, the LCCR also organized gallery watchers to remind the senators that the public was watching and to act as an early warning system in case the Southern Democrats announced a sudden quorum call. “The success in maintaining packed galleries during the House debate was an appreciable factor in the victory there,” wrote Violet Gunther, one of the three paid LCCR staffers, in a memo to member organizations. “We must do the same in the Senate.” She drew up a schedule and distributed it among the organizations, with each one responsible for supplying manpower for one- or two-hour increments during each session. And the LCCR brought back Jane O’Grady and her raiders, who acted as the tip of the civil rights whip system, rounding up errant senators to meet quorum calls.12

  On the same day as the meeting at the Statler, Mary Parkman Peabody, the seventy-two-year-old patrician mother of the governor of Massachusetts, was one of several people arrested in St. Augustine, Florida, for trying to integrate the Ponce de Leon Motor Lodge. Peabody had arrived in town a few days before as part of a wave of activists, most of them much younger than she, who heeded the call by Robert Hayling, a local civil rights leader, to make the historic city the movement’s next battleground. Tensions had been simmering in St. Augustine since sixteen protesters had been arrested during a sit-in at a Woolworth’s lunch counter the previous year. In September 1963, Hayling was beaten by a mob of Ku Klux Klan members and then charged with assaulting them. Rather than shrink in retreat, he had redoubled his efforts, and by early the next year had become a national cause célèbre in the black media. Hayling had spent the latter part of February and on into March traveling up and down the East Coast trying to attract volunteers—above all, Martin Luther King Jr. At first King demurred, referring Hayling to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s Florida operation. King knew from hard-won experience that poorly planned campaigns, no matter how heartfelt, could only sap the strength of his organization. Still, he recognized the value of the St. Augustine campaign for its potential impact on the civil rights debate in Congress, and he supplied Hayling with a steady stream of SCLC lieutenants to help organize demonstrations and sit-ins (and, this being an oceanfront community, “wade-ins” at segregated beaches, too).13

  Still, it was the big three religious faiths that provided the most organizational heft during the filibuster. No one else could match their manpower, organizational cohesion, or passion. Beginning in March, students, seminarians, and congregations flowed into Washington, marching, attending services, writing letters, and meeting, when they could get a few minutes, with senators. “You couldn’t turn around where there wasn’t a clerical collar next to you,” recalled Rauh.14

  Under the ecumenical aegis of the National Council of Churches’ Commission on Religion and Race, an intelligence network was established to monitor each senator who had yet to commit on the filibuster and to bring pressure on them when they least expected it. When Senator Roman Hruska, a Republican from Nebraska, flew home on weekends, he would encounter one or another of the state’s prominent religious leaders at the airport—a coincidence made possible thanks to the help of Robert Kutak, his administrative assistant, who tipped off the LCCR whenever his boss headed home. Likewise, John Cronin, who was leading the National Catholic Welfare Conference’s efforts on the bill, called a bishop in South Dakota to help lobby Karl Mundt; the senator soon found himself meeting with a local priest with whom he had been close friends in high school.15

  Across the country, but particularly in the Midwest, the fight for the civil rights bill was transforming formerly quiet, ordinary people into vocal full-time activists for racial equality. Ministers would sermonize about the bill on a Sunday morning, then ask their congregants to stick around for a letter-writing session. Senate staffers began to expect a surge in mail on Tuesdays and Wednesdays as those letters, posted first thing Monday morning, arrived in Washington. At Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, a campus minister named Ernest Reuter organized Project Leadership Organization, a clearinghouse for training and information about the bill that linked together churches, temples, and campus ministries. “We in the Middle Western and Rocky Mountain states will hold the balance of power in this matter,” he wrote in a letter announcing the project. “Because the issue is not as critical for us as it is for the old South and the Eastern states we have a responsibility to take a stand on an issue which surely divides the nation.” Reuter had already played a key, unheralded role in pushing Charles Halleck closer to the bill. By the time the filibuster was in full swing, he and countless others had created a spontaneous culture of civil rights, evanescent and fragmentary but powerful in its moment. Of all the forces and personalities that coalesced around the bill, perhaps none was more critical to its passage than the network of religious organizations and their army of adherents.16

  In early April, following Humphrey and Kuchel at the Senate lectern were the
paired title captains from each party, who held forth with their own soup-to-nuts explanations for their assigned sections of the bill. Attendance in the Senate dwindled rapidly as the debate fell into a call-and-response pattern in which a Democrat would rise to explain a title, after which a Republican would give almost the exact same set of points in his own words. Occasionally a Southerner would cross-examine the speaker, like the time Sam Ervin, from his desk piled high with law books, questioned Kenneth Keating for two hours after the New York Republican gave his defense of Title I. But that was the extent of the excitement, such as it was. Vermont’s Norris Cotton often could be spied sleeping at his desk. But at least he bothered to show up. “At no time were there more than six senators on the floor,” noted the correspondent E. W. Kenworthy in the New York Times. Mudd, who sat in the gallery between filing stories, recalled that “the scene was one of minor, routine floor speeches: the almost empty chamber, the solitary speaker with a stack of documents on his desk and the ever present legislative assistant at his elbow, the presiding officer signing his mail, and the dumbfounded tourists who filled and refilled the galleries every fifteen minutes.”17

  Almost as soon as the debate started, the bill’s leaders began to worry what would happen once their speeches, and the Southern Democratic attacks on the bill, had run their course. By “the 20th of April we should be face to face with the question of where to go next,” wrote the Senate secretary, Frank Valeo, to his boss on April 9. Valeo reported that thirty-eight senators, including Dirksen, were dead set against cloture, and another eleven were strongly leaning against it. If he was right, the pro-civil-rights senators had an enormous amount of convincing to do, and no real plan for accomplishing it.18