The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  These liberal interest groups and others used various tactics to push Congress to pass bills that would strengthen unions, protect civil rights, offer assistance to the cities, provide health insurance to the elderly, and more. They distributed to their members and to journalists compilations of how congressmen and senators voted on important issues and grouped them—liberal, moderate, or conservative—so that constituents would be aware of where their representatives stood. At election times, these organizations provided campaign assistance and advice to candidates they supported. The AFL-CIO’s Committee on Political Education worked with the political departments of state and local chapters to endorse certain candidates, to distribute campaign material, and to conduct voter registration drives. The union leaders had the ability to persuade a large portion of their fifteen-million-person membership, which was heavily concentrated in northern states, to campaign for, and vote for, AFL-CIO-backed candidates.18 Most of these organizations also hired talented lobbyists; two were Andrew Biemiller, who worked for the AFL-CIO, and Clarence Mitchell of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. Both men had spent their careers in liberal networks, knew how Congress worked, and became permanent fixtures in the Capitol. Biemiller was a former Wisconsin congressman who had been involved in socialist politics in the 1930s. Mitchell was a longtime political operative, primarily as a lobbyist for the NAACP. Both men believed that passing legislation was the best way to achieve social justice. “When you have a law,” Mitchell said, “you have an instrument that will work for you permanently. But when you branch out on a separate line of direct action, you may wind up with nothing.”19 These lobbyists constantly tried to pressure legislators to vote for liberal measures by presenting arguments in favor of a bill and by mobilizing or threatening to mobilize union members to create political pressure in a legislator’s constituency. In an era when no cameras were allowed on the floors of Congress and most legislative deliberations were closed to the public, the lobbyists and their staffs informed their constituencies about what their representatives in Congress were doing on their behalf.

  While liberal congressmen and lobbyists worked Washington, grassroots activists stumped for liberal legislation everywhere around the nation. They pressured local, state, and federal government officials, and they pressured President Kennedy to throw the weight of the presidency behind the legislation they wanted to pass. Foremost among the liberal activist organizations was the civil rights movement.

  THE PRESSURE INCREASES FOR CIVIL RIGHTS

  Liberal Democrats in Congress believed that President Kennedy would use the bully pulpit to promote legislation on better health care and aid to education, both core issues in his campaign, but they were skeptical about how hard he would be willing to fight for legislation to achieve racial equality, and they were pessimistic about the results, even if he did push. Civil rights leaders were unwilling to assume that the president, or any other politician in Washington, would push hard enough for civil rights, and they were determined to force the issue with grassroots protests and massive lobbying in Washington to build pressure on Congress.

  By the early 1960s, the civil rights movement had been gaining strength for many decades. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was formed in 1909, in response to a wave of lynching and segregationist laws in the South. The organization focused primarily on getting judicial remedies for racial injustice; an example was the 1936 case that resulted in the desegregation of the University of Maryland’s Law School. During World War II, it was the demands of African American leaders that impelled the federal government to create the Fair Employment Practices Commission to prevent employers from discriminating based on race when hiring factory workers for wartime production. Many of the 125,000 African American soldiers who returned from World War II became involved in local protests. These men, who had fought for democracy in segregated units against the Nazis and the Japanese, were in no mood to tolerate discriminatory practices at home.

  In the 1950s, the NAACP mounted court challenges to laws that upheld segregation, and it secured its biggest victory in 1954, when the Supreme Court, in Brown v. Board of Education, ruled that school segregation was illegal. State Department officials also pressured the executive branch to be more proactive on civil rights in light of the Soviet Union’s use of stories about racial conflict in the United States as part of its cold war propaganda. The horrible treatment of African diplomats near Washington, D.C., had long been an embarrassment to the U.S. government.20 At the local level, activists were starting to mobilize protesters. The 1955–1956 bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, was launched after the NAACP member Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white passenger. The boycott brought the city to a standstill and captured international attention. In 1957, white resistance to the integration of Little Rock Central High School in Arkansas forced President Eisenhower to send federal troops into the state to protect black students. That same year, the charismatic preacher Martin Luther King Jr. formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which organized against segregation at the local level and pressured Congress to enact national legislation. While the national NAACP was reluctant to embrace street action and mostly focused on fighting Jim Crow through the courts, some local affiliates worked throughout the 1950s to encourage the use of sit-ins to protest racial segregation. They organized networks of southern African Americans and trained them to conduct civil disobedience and political protest. After four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University started a sit-in to resist their treatment at a segregated lunch counter in the Woolworth’s department store in Greensboro in 1960, the protests spread throughout colleges in the South, resulting in the formation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

  During the early 1960s, dramatic acts of civil disobedience rocked the South, catapulting civil rights to the forefront of the national consciousness and moving non-southern legislators in Congress to support civil rights with greater force and conviction.

  On May 4, 1961, just four months after Kennedy’s inauguration, the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), under the leadership of James Farmer, dispatched interracial teams of young activists south from Washington, D.C., on Greyhound and Trailways buses. The first wave of these Freedom Riders passed through North Carolina and Virginia in an ominous calm, but in Alabama they encountered violent responses. Approximately six miles outside of Anniston, a white southerner tossed a firebomb onto a bus. The mob attacked the passengers as they escaped the flaming bus. In Birmingham, Alabama, the police, under the leadership of the commissioner of public safety, Eugene “Bull” Connor, refused to protect the riders as they were beaten with baseball bats, tire chains, and iron pipes by a mob of Klansmen.21 “Negroes and whites will not segregate together,” declared the man who controlled the police and who, as one of only three elected officials in Birmingham, had the authority to appoint temporary justices who controlled the court system. Connor was the law in Birmingham.

  The FBI was not helpful to the protesters. Its director, J. Edgar Hoover, had little sympathy for the civil rights cause. His main concern was finding out how many communists were working in the movement’s leadership circles. The FBI director also depended on his connections with local southern law enforcement authorities to work on other sorts of crimes. He did little to force local police authorities to take any actions they didn’t want to take. The protesters were standing alone.

  The White House kept the movement at arm’s length during Kennedy’s first few months in office. The president believed the Freedom Riders were aggravating tensions in the South to a level that would be unproductive; he did not want to be pressured into pushing for legislation he did not believe he could get passed; and he worried about a backlash against civil rights if some supporters in Congress believed the violence in the South was being provoked by grassroots activism rather than by racists determined to stop any progress toward endi
ng Jim Crow. Kennedy asked his adviser Harris Wofford, an early supporter of civil rights and a friend of Martin Luther King Jr.’s, “Can’t you get your goddamned friends off those buses? Tell them to call it off! Stop them!”22

  Kennedy’s concern about racial injustice was genuine, but it was profoundly attenuated by political considerations. He was disgusted by the savage police attacks and sympathetic toward demands that the racial status quo had to change, but he was willing to take only small steps to address conditions that were now being seen on television news reports in the homes of more Americans every day. Kennedy had made gestures of support toward the movement in the past; shortly before his election he had called Coretta Scott King when her husband, who had been arrested in Georgia after a protest, was in prison. The call, which many of his advisers had strongly discouraged for fear it would cost him crucial southern votes, won Kennedy some respect among African American leaders who heard about it, and from King himself, who appreciated that the senator had taken the risk to reach out to him. In the White House, Kennedy was sometimes willing to take small steps toward promoting racial equality. He issued an executive order in March 1961 that created the Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity to investigate discriminatory practices in employment by businesses receiving federal funds and to encourage better practices. Vice President Johnson was put in charge of the committee, which had little actual power. It was soon clear that these presidential actions were not responsive to the magnitude of the racial crisis that was boiling up in the South.

  Some of Kennedy’s reasons for restraint in addressing racial issues could be found in his view of the history of civil rights on Capitol Hill. When he looked there, he saw only discouraging prospects for the present and the future. Between the end of Reconstruction and 1956, every single civil rights bill had been killed in a congressional committee or by a filibuster.

  When Congress finally started to pass bills, they were deemed unsatisfactory by all parties. In 1957, the violent confrontation over school desegregation in Little Rock, Arkansas, had persuaded President Eisenhower to propose civil rights legislation. Many congressional Republicans supported him; they felt that supporting civil rights was the moral thing to do, and they also believed it would be good politics; if they seized the initiative on civil rights, they could win African American votes in swing states. As Robert Caro has recounted, Lyndon Johnson, who believed the government would sooner or later have to address the problem of racial inequality and who felt that the Senate needed to respond to its growing liberal bloc, devoted all his tremendous energy to brokering deals and forming voting coalitions to pass the bill.23

  The senior Georgia senator, Richard Russell, who was known as the most powerful man in the upper chamber at that time, was a masterful, soft-spoken parliamentary tactician and the person with the most sway over the Democratic caucus. He believed Lyndon Johnson was the only southerner who had a chance of becoming president, but only if he could get some credibility with northerners on civil rights. Russell was willing therefore to give Johnson some leeway to pass a bill as long as it was sufficiently weak to satisfy southerners. Leeway didn’t mean Russell would support such a bill; it only meant he wouldn’t go all out in his opposition if Johnson could find the votes to defeat a filibuster. To show Russell that he could put together support for such a bill, Johnson cut a deal with a group of western Democratic senators who had been seeking federal funds for the construction of a hydroelectric dam in Hells Canyon, on the Oregon-Idaho border. Johnson persuaded his southern colleagues, who had been adamantly opposed to sending federal money west, to vote in favor of the dam. In exchange, the western Democrats agreed to join with the southerners in voting against certain provisions of the civil rights bill that would be too radical for southerners to support.24

  The primary intent of the 1957 legislation was to fortify the voting rights of African Americans. Only about 20 percent of eligible African Americans in the South were registered to vote at the time. The bill Johnson carved out of the original proposal assigned to local juries the job of deciding whether there had been violations of the law against depriving African Americans of voting rights. The fact that in the South blacks were never permitted to serve on juries virtually ensured there would be no convictions. Johnson also blocked a proposal, which liberals thought was essential, that would have given the attorney general the power to initiate suits to combat discrimination rather than requiring him to wait for private actors to bring suits. The provision would have freed African Americans from the responsibility—and personal risk—of pursuing redress on their own and placed that burden on the Department of Justice. But Republicans, including those who were supportive of civil rights legislation, and southern Democrats would not allow such a dramatic extension of federal power. At each stage in the deliberations, Johnson depended on the ad hoc coalition he had built around the Hells Canyon deal to extract concessions from liberals; they would have to go along, or there would be no bill at all.

  The severely watered-down compromise bill, which southerners forced northerners to accept through the filibuster, created prohibitions against the denial of voting rights and established the six-person federal Civil Rights Commission to investigate voting rights abuses and make reports to the president. The attorney general could seek court injunctions against violations of voting rights, though not against other kinds of racial discrimination. Federal judges could hear cases based on violations, though local juries would decide the cases. In short, Johnson and the southerners had rendered the bill toothless; the law that was passed gave the federal government very little power to enforce its provisions. The most important aspect of the legislation was that it was the first civil rights measure passed by Congress since Reconstruction and cleared the way, or so Johnson promised, for stronger legislation in the future. “We’ve shown that we can do it. We’ll do it again, in a couple of years,” Johnson promised reporters.25

  Liberals complained that the measure would have little effect. “I am fed up with the argument that the civil rights bill the Congress passed is better than no bill at all,” the Oregon senator Wayne Morse said. “I deny that premise.”26 Southerners of course complained that the bill did too much, that even this empty shell of prohibitions against voting discrimination established a reprehensible intervention by the federal government into matters that were constitutionally the business of individual states. The same dynamic recurred in 1960 when Congress moved to strengthen the 1957 voting provisions by giving the federal government more power to monitor voting practices at the local level. The legislation achieved only a small improvement in the law; it allowed federal referees, under the supervision of the Justice Department, to investigate local voting rolls. Enforcement of provisions that prohibited the restriction of voting rights would still be minimal under the bill; African Americans would still be prevented from voting, but the 1960 legislation, as mild as it was, passed only after a filibuster that lasted 125 hours and 16 minutes—until civil rights proponents agreed to a major compromise in the legislation. The photographs in newspapers of senators sleeping on cots during this filibuster, when Johnson insisted on keeping the Senate in round-the-clock sessions, vividly conveyed the efforts southern senators were willing to exert to prevent African Americans from enjoying their basic right to vote.

  The lessons from 1957 and 1960 were clear to President Kennedy, who had been in the Senate during both of these debates. Even mild civil rights proposals were guaranteed to encounter fierce political opposition from southern Democrats, who remained a potent and effective force. Battles over civil rights squeezed other important legislation off the congressional agenda. Proponents rarely obtained what they wanted, leaving liberals frustrated with continuing racial injustice protected by the filibuster and southerners enraged by the infinitesimal ground they had surrendered to civil rights.

  With all this history in mind, Kennedy didn’t want to put civil rights anywhere near the top of his legislat
ive agenda for 1961 or 1962. He agreed with a memo Harris Wofford had written during the transition period, in which his adviser had argued that the only real possibility for achieving progress on civil rights was by working through the judiciary and executive branches. Unless there was a reform of the filibuster rule to make it easier to achieve cloture in the Senate, Wofford had written, southern opponents would be able to block any meaningful civil rights measure that reached the Senate floor. If Democrats sought filibuster reform in 1961, Wofford added, “the Southern fight against this would inflict a serious wound to your other legislative prospects.”27 The history of civil rights and these ominous predictions at the outset of the term had a profound effect on Kennedy’s strategic thinking. Most civil rights activists believed it was essential to solve the racial crisis through congressional action, because only legislation forged out of national debate with bipartisan support could provide durable solutions to such massive social problems. Kennedy, for his part, didn’t think he could get this done, nor was he willing to try. Instead, he decided to do what he could through executive action, though this was a limited solution and a fragile one; it could easily be reversed by the next president.

  The president’s other concern was that if he tried and failed to legislate civil rights in his first year as president, he would have reduced his capacity to get Congress to pass what he saw as higher-priority legislation. His primary objective in 1961 was to pass a temporary, across-the-board tax cut that would boost demand and accelerate economic growth. He also wanted legislation that would provide health insurance to senior citizens. He expected that the conservative coalition would try to block all his domestic initiatives, but he hoped that by avoiding civil rights, at least early in his term, he would improve his chances of passing the rest of his proposals.