An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

  More immediately, at least for Kennedy’s prospects in 1952, the head of the Boston branch of the NAACP, Silas Taylor, was hostile to him because of Taylor’s long-standing alliance with two older Democrats, Representative John McCormack and former mayor James Michael Curley of Boston, both of whom held Kennedy in minimum high regard. So Kennedy cultivated other black figures, and his campaign subtly adapted its overall slogan—“Kennedy has done and will do more for us”—to conclude, “will do more for more of us.” And that year, Kennedy did organize two teas for black women. On Election Day, his large margins in the black wards helped him beat Lodge by seventy thousand votes, despite the fact that Dwight D. Eisenhower carried Massachusetts in the presidential race.

  No sooner did he arrive in the Senate, however, than Kennedy began treading gingerly on civil rights. The Senate of that day was “the only place in the country where the South did not lose” the Civil War, as the New York Times correspondent William S. White put it, and Kennedy took due note. Kennedy’s first known speech on Brown v. Board of Education came in February 1956, nearly two years after the decision was handed down, when he endorsed it in principle in an address to the Young Democratic Club of New York, but made no mention of how the Supreme Court’s ruling should be enforced. For Kennedy was already nursing an ambition that would require support far beyond the Yankee precincts of his home state: a shot at the 1956 vice presidential nomination.

  That July, in an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Kennedy declared that Congress had no role whatever to play in the implementation of the Brown ruling. But his usual verbal fluidity failed him when he was asked if the Supreme Court was moving too fast. “No, I don’t think—they came to a decision in 1954, it was unanimous and it is the law,” he said. Then, equivocating, if not floundering, he added, “I don’t think—I am not a lawyer—and I don’t think any critique—if you are for the decision, you might say it is high time they did it, and if you are against it, you say they are intervening in political matters.” The following month, at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, the presidential nominee, Adlai Stevenson, surprised the delegates by leaving the vice presidential selection up to them, and Kennedy and his forces quickly mounted a vigorous bid. Senators Estes Kefauver and Albert Gore of Tennessee sought the prize as well, but neither man had much support in the South. Both of them had refused to sign the so-called Southern Manifesto, a document of commitment to segregation in the wake of Brown. So Kennedy, with his equivocal approach, was able to win surprising support in the South, endearing himself to powerful politicians in the region who could help a young man on the move. In the end, Kefauver won the vice presidential nomination, but Kennedy was delighted at the inroads he had made. He was also aware of the price he had paid. He confided to his old family friend Arthur Krock, “I’ll be singing Dixie for the rest of my life.”

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  IN FACT, WHEN IT came to civil rights, Kennedy struggled to square his short-term objectives with his presidential aspirations. In his 1956 book Profiles in Courage, a collection of essays about eight United States senators who did the right thing even when doing so was not politically convenient, Kennedy himself had called Reconstruction “a black nightmare the South could never forget.” One of the men he lionized in the book was Congressman (later Senator) Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar of Mississippi, who had promoted the resumption of normal federal-state relations and the withdrawal of Union troops from the South after the war. By contrast, Kennedy painted Charles Sumner, the abolitionist and radical Republican senator from Massachusetts whose own seat he held, as a brittle, unreasonable advocate of harsh Reconstruction policies.

  But when the Eisenhower administration’s omnibus civil rights bill came before the Senate in 1957, Kennedy knew he had no choice but to support it, given his past stands on the issue.

  The two most controversial sections of the 1957 bill were a provision (known as Part III) allowing the attorney general to file suit to enforce constitutional rights, including school desegregation, and a proposed additional provision requiring that local voting registrars accused of barring blacks from the polls be entitled to a trial by jury. On both measures, Jack Kennedy—acutely mindful of his own presidential prospects—once again sought to avoid controversy.

  Part III was the enforcement mechanism at the heart of the bill, and it was considered crucial by all the leading civil rights groups whose support Kennedy had enjoyed. Meanwhile, the southerners fulminated against it as Reconstruction redux, with a northern-dominated federal government dictating to southern states how to run their affairs. In the end, Kennedy voted for Part III, but only after Eisenhower himself had withdrawn his support for it, thus dooming the provision and making Kennedy’s vote a completely safe symbolic statement. The jury trial amendment was more complicated. Civil rights groups saw it as a poison pill—a way to assure that all-white southern juries would continue to acquit any local official accused of discrimination. But practical-minded backers of the bill—including Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader—saw it as the best way of placating the southerners and avoiding a filibuster. Kennedy had been inclined to oppose the amendment, but after making a point of consulting with three prominent Harvard Law School professors—who told him that while the amendment would unquestionably weaken the bill, half a loaf was better than none—he voted for it. Once more, he paid a price for his equivocation, as the New York Times’s James Reston took him to task for his “11th hour change of heart.” Vice President Richard Nixon offered a scathing assessment when the amendment passed: “This is one of the saddest days in the history of the Senate. It was a vote against the right to vote.”

  Nevertheless, Kennedy understood that even the defanged bill was “a turning point in American social and political thought,” as he said in a speech before the vote on the jury trial amendment. “It represents an almost universal acknowledgment that we cannot continue to command the respect of peoples everywhere, not to mention our own self-respect, while we ignore the fact that many of our citizens do not possess basic constitutional rights.” And Kennedy sought to keep good relations with such civil rights leaders as Roy Wilkins, the NAACP president, whom he had run into in the Senate restaurant a few days after the vote. In an exchange of notes he initiated, Kennedy later told Wilkins that he could not understand why he was being singled out from among the nearly three dozen non-southern senators who had also voted for the jury trial amendment. Wilkins’s answer was direct: he was the only one running for president.

  Barely two weeks after final passage of the bill, on September 24, President Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops to Little Rock, Arkansas, after violent demonstrations erupted over the integration of Central High School there. Kennedy’s support for this action was tepid, and scarcely a month later, he undertook a mission of his own in Dixie, arranging a meeting with Governor James P. Coleman of Mississippi, whose support he was courting. After a speech in Jackson, Kennedy stayed up late into the night, drinking and talking politics with Coleman and the state’s two senators, James Eastland and John Stennis. Kennedy hoped such contacts would help him in 1960, but the meeting with Coleman caused him a more immediate political problem as 1958 rolled around: He faced reelection in Massachusetts, where his pollster Lou Harris’s private surveys showed his black support slipping, and his Republican opponent, Vincent Celeste, was running on a strong civil rights platform, accusing Kennedy of selling out to the southern barons. Just as the campaign was heating up, Roy Wilkins of the NAACP began a period of prolonged public criticism of Kennedy in a speech in which he summoned the image of the senator embracing Governor Marvin Griffin of Georgia, one of the country’s most rabid segregationists. When Kennedy protested that no such meeting had ever occurred, Wilkins replied that he had simply meant to suggest the possibility of one, given the meeting in Mississippi.

  Kennedy now worked with his advisers to fashion a series of civil rights proposals that could be presented as a campaign program, includi
ng support for the abandoned Part III of the 1957 bill, revision of the Senate’s filibuster rule, and support for antibombing legislation that would impose new federal penalties on whites engaging in antiblack vigilantism. Kennedy had taken another important symbolic step of his own in December 1957: he became the first member of Congress from any New England state to hire a black staff member, Virginia Battle, who became a secretary in his Boston office. The campaign printed thousands of pamphlets with Battle’s face on the cover, detailing Kennedy’s civil rights record. Such efforts paid off, and Kennedy won reelection with an increased share of the black vote. Roy Wilkins wrote to congratulate Kennedy, calling his civil rights record “one of the best in the Senate with only our disagreement on the jury trial thing as a debit.”

  But by the summer of 1959, Kennedy’s courtship of southern support for his presidential bid got him in hot water again when he invited Alabama’s segregationist governor, John Patterson, to breakfast at his Georgetown home. Jackie Robinson, a staunch Republican, was so incensed that he refused to pose for a picture with Kennedy at a New York dinner. And in November, when Kennedy wrote to Martin Luther King for the first time, introducing himself and asking for a meeting, King didn’t even bother to reply.

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  IN THE END, KENNEDY would win the Democratic presidential nomination not with the southern delegations, whose support ultimately went to Lyndon Johnson, but by defeating the liberal Hubert Humphrey. Humphrey was one of the Senate’s most avid supporters of civil rights, but Kennedy dispatched him in primaries in West Virginia and Wisconsin, and then won the support of big northern states like Pennsylvania at the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles in July 1960, where he chose Johnson as his running mate. His campaign that autumn would depend on both the southern support he hoped Johnson could bring and the strong backing of black voters. In his quest for the latter, he enlisted the help of a new adviser, Harris Wofford, a bright young law professor at Notre Dame who had begun writing occasional speeches for Kennedy while still a staff lawyer at the Civil Rights Commission.

  One day that August, Kennedy spotted Wofford on the street in Georgetown and gave him a lift to his Senate office on Capitol Hill. “Now, in five minutes, tick off ten things a president ought to do to clean up this goddamn civil rights mess,” Kennedy demanded. Wofford had plenty of suggestions, first among them that a president could, with one stroke of a pen, sign an executive order barring discrimination in federally assisted housing. That idea quickly became a staple of Kennedy’s speeches, repeated in just those words in a way that would come back to haunt him.

  Meantime, Wofford became the head of a special “Civil Rights Section” at Kennedy headquarters, courting black voters in a range of concrete and symbolic ways. Among the section’s priorities was a voter registration campaign, which it organized through churches and not the Democratic National Committee, so it would be nonpartisan and could be financed by tax-exempt funds. Kennedy spoke out in favor of the lunch counter sit-ins that had begun in Greensboro, North Carolina, declaring, “It is in the American tradition to stand up for one’s rights—even if the new way to stand up for one’s rights is to sit down.” To help deal with reporters, Kennedy hired Andrew Hatcher, a former journalist then serving in state government in California and an old friend of the campaign press secretary, Pierre Salinger. When a hotel at a campaign stop in Paducah, Kentucky, refused a room to Simeon Booker, the black correspondent for Jet magazine, Kennedy moved his entire entourage to other lodging. Finally, on October 11, the campaign convened a daylong conference in New York City on “Constitutional Rights”—a name chosen to avoid offending southern sensibilities—where Kennedy pledged not only legislative but executive action “on a bold and large scale,” and added: “This is a moral question, it is upon the president the central responsibility will bear.”

  But none of these carefully plotted actions could compare to the impact of a single, spur-of-the-moment decision Kennedy would make with regard to an event he could not have planned: the arrest of Martin Luther King on October 19, as he sought to be served in the restaurant of Rich’s department store in Atlanta. It was Wofford who set the chain of events in motion, by calling (on his own initiative) his friend Morris Abram, a leading liberal lawyer in Atlanta, who got in touch with the city’s progressive mayor, William Hartsfield. Hartsfield promptly announced—to the shock of the Kennedy campaign—that in response to personal intervention from Kennedy, he had worked out a deal for King’s release, in exchange for a thirty-day moratorium on further demonstrations while a desegregation plan was formulated.

  For public consumption, the Kennedy forces insisted they had merely made a general inquiry into the facts of the case. But when a Georgia judge ruled that King’s arrest at Rich’s had violated his probation on an earlier charge of driving with an out-of-state license and sentenced him to four months’ hard labor in a state prison, the candidate himself reached out to Georgia’s governor, Ernest Vandiver, and made a secret deal: if Kennedy would refrain from publicly criticizing the judge’s ruling, Vandiver would lean privately on the judge to reverse it. Robert Kennedy, who was his brother’s campaign manager, also later spoke with Vandiver, and then with the judge himself.

  What happened next was Harris Wofford’s brainstorm: a simple, sympathetic telephone call from Kennedy to Coretta King, who was distraught when her husband was manacled and taken to a rural prison farm in the middle of the night. Wofford persuaded Kennedy’s brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, who had been active in civil rights work in Chicago, to broach the idea with the candidate. Because Shriver knew the campaign high command was certain to oppose any such move, he waited until he could speak to Kennedy alone. In a hotel room near O’Hare Airport, Shriver made the pitch. The candidate immediately embraced the idea and placed the call, telling Mrs. King simply that he knew she must be worried, and that he was thinking of her. When Bob Kennedy learned what had happened, he was livid. “Do you know that this election may be razor close and you have probably lost it for us?” he exploded at Wofford.

  Precisely the opposite proved true. The call got little attention in mainstream newspapers, but the black press played it big. Kennedy’s Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, had considered making a similar call himself but concluded it would be “grandstanding,” and he refused an entreaty from his most prominent black supporter, Jackie Robinson, to reconsider. Meantime, Wofford and Louis Martin, the black former newspaper publisher who was working as a Kennedy campaign adviser, produced a pamphlet for distribution in black neighborhoods—known as the “blue bomb” for the color of paper it was printed on. It described the case with the headline “‘No Comment’ Nixon vs. a Candidate With a Heart.”

  The pièce de résistance came when King’s father, the Reverend Martin Luther King Sr., who had previously announced that he could never vote for Kennedy because he was a Catholic, now warmly endorsed him. Kennedy’s own comment to Wofford was typically wry. “Did you see what Martin’s father said?” the candidate asked. “He was going to vote against me because I was a Catholic but since I called his daughter-in-law, he will vote for me. That was a hell of a bigoted statement, wasn’t it? Imagine Martin Luther King having a bigot for a father!”

  Then he added, “Well, we all have fathers, don’t we?”

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  EVEN BEFORE HE TOOK the oath of office, Kennedy offered vivid symbolic proof that the New Frontier would include a new place for black Americans. Harry Belafonte, Nat King Cole, Ella Fitzgerald, and Mahalia Jackson all performed at a glittering preinaugural gala organized by Frank Sinatra (though Sammy Davis Jr. had, of course, been barred because of his interracial marriage), and the great contralto Marian Anderson sang at the swearing-in. As Kennedy reviewed the inaugural parade, he noticed not a single black face in the Coast Guard contingent and immediately called one of his speechwriters, Richard Goodwin, who alerted the new Treasury secretary, Douglas Dillon, whose department was in charge of the fleet. That summer, the Coast Guard Academ
y hired a black instructor, and the next entering class had four black cadets. Soon enough, Kennedy would appoint more than forty black citizens to significant federal posts. He included Andrew Hatcher’s son Avery in Caroline Kennedy’s private White House nursery school, and he created, by executive order, a presidential Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, aimed at combating discrimination in the workforce and chaired by Vice President Johnson himself.

  Kennedy also accepted a recommendation from Harris Wofford and Louis Martin to add six significant words to his ringing inaugural address. He declared that the United States was “unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today, at home and around the world.” Those few words had the effect—however little noticed by most commentators—of making civil rights the sole domestic issue singled out in a speech otherwise largely devoted to foreign policy.

  But Kennedy did not adopt most of the lengthy list of recommendations Wofford had sent him on December 30, 1960, in a memo arguing that when it came to civil rights, “Our jet age ship of state has been flying on only one of its three engines—the Judiciary—while the Congress and the executive have been stalling.” Wofford warned that the black vote was “perhaps the most volatile of all the elements making up this year’s tight victory,” and added, “No one can predict when the Negro cup of bitterness and skepticism is going to overflow.” Wofford said that, while the decision would not be popular with civil rights groups and should not be advertised in advance, the president could probably get away without proposing civil rights legislation in 1961, but only if he went “ahead with a substantial executive action program.” Such a program, Wofford said, should involve a series of executive orders. These could include Kennedy’s campaign proposal to ban segregation in federally supported housing, together with moves to condition federal aid to education on nondiscrimination and an effort by the Justice Department to initiate lawsuits of the sort envisioned by the abandoned Part III of the 1957 Civil Rights Act, to force school desegregation in places where it was lagging.