The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  The president was also worried about his prospects for reelection in 1964. Like all Democratic candidates, Kennedy was dependent on southern votes, but after 1952 the South was not as solidly Democratic as it had once been. In 1960, Kennedy had barely defeated Vice President Richard Nixon in one of the closest elections in U.S. history, and his decision to select Lyndon Johnson as his running mate, a move that infuriated liberal Democrats who saw the Senate majority leader as a pillar of the conservative establishment, had been essential to Kennedy’s victory in Texas and in several other southern states. The president understood that his support in the region remained soft. After all, he had won only about 51 percent of the vote in Texas; many southerners didn’t trust him; and despite his moderate record in the Senate, conservatives still feared he was secretly more liberal than he admitted.

  Kennedy was sympathetic to those who were fighting against racial injustice, but he possessed neither the moral determination nor the political tenacity to go all out for a civil rights bill. He pushed back against the pressure many officials were putting on him to respond to the violence against the Freedom Riders with legislation. Kennedy’s brother Attorney General Robert Kennedy displayed very little sensitivity when he told the NAACP’s Thurgood Marshall, the lawyer who argued the Brown v. Board of Education case, “That’s the problem with you people. You want too much too fast.”28

  What civil rights activists wanted was legislation, and they wanted it now. They rejected Kennedy’s pragmatic logic, which had been used since Reconstruction as an excuse for federal inaction. The president was capable of vigorous efforts; they had seen him make them for other controversial domestic issues—health care for the elderly, for example, where he authorized a strong public relations strategy to pressure Congress. The perception that there would be no commitment from Kennedy only intensified the belief of civil rights activists that their program of protests and confrontations was the only way to get action from Congress.

  The relationship between Kennedy and civil rights leaders grew increasingly tense. James Forman of SNCC called the president a “quick-talking [and] double-dealing” politician.29 “The Kennedy civil rights strategy,” recalled Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who chronicled these events, “however appropriate to the congressional mood of 1961, miscalculated the dynamism of a revolutionary movement.”30

  Martin Luther King Jr. believed it was imperative for Congress to pass legislation that would outlaw racial segregation and protect the voting rights of African Americans. Kennedy, for his part, feared that if the public perceived him as being too close to King, he would be hamstrung politically. Initially, the administration refused to invite King to meet with the president in the White House.

  When a meeting finally took place, on October 16, 1961, it only served to widen the divisions between the White House and the movement. King’s invitation was conditioned on his keeping the meeting totally confidential. Before King saw the president, Kennedy’s adviser Harris Wofford informed the minister that one of his top associates, Stanley Levison, was an active operative in a Soviet spy network. Levison had been a Communist Party member until he quit in 1956, before he started to work with King, but the accusation that a Soviet agent had infiltrated the movement and the further implication that it would harm King’s credibility were clear attempts by the administration to use cold war hysteria to intimidate King. When, after a pleasant lunch with Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, King pressed Kennedy to fulfill his campaign promise to ban racial segregation, the president responded that he lacked sufficient congressional support to take such action.31

  The violence against the Freedom Riders in Alabama was just the beginning. There was violence in other southern states too, much of it in reaction to Department of Justice efforts to integrate public universities. Kennedy’s use of executive action to support court-ordered integration of specific universities had stirred extreme resentment in the South. The president’s handling of these crises during the summer of 1962 was in stark contrast to his handling of the Cuban missile crisis in late October, when he stood up to the Soviets. These dramatic events, watched around the world, resulted in an apparent victory for the United States and displayed to Americans a resolve that was missing from Kennedy’s dealings with the civil rights crisis. He had stood up to Khrushchev, but now he seemed to be standing by and allowing demonstrators to be brutally beaten when they asked for basic rights. Many Americans were appalled by the contradiction. Nor was Kennedy having success with his priority domestic legislation: health care for the elderly, a tax cut, and federal assistance for education were all bottled up in Congress.

  Nothing was getting done.

  But, largely in response to the demonstration and lobbying by the civil rights movement, the legislative environment had begun to change. With Kennedy’s agenda frozen and violence spreading in the southern states, Congress was feeling rapidly mounting pressure for civil rights legislation. There was a partisan dimension to this new wave of pressure. The competition to be the party of civil rights heated up in the House, where Republicans publicly accused the president of failing to keep his promises on racial equality. Most House Republicans were philosophically open to civil rights legislation and didn’t have to face a southern wing of their party that was dead set against such legislation. For more than a decade, Republicans had cultivated the idea that they were still the party of Lincoln and could gain partisan advantage by working for civil rights legislation while Democrats remained divided on the issue. The threat to Kennedy was that Republicans would ally with liberal Democrats, as they had done in 1956 and 1957, and get a bill to the floor. This would humiliate the president, disprove his analysis of the political realities, and allow Republicans to claim credit for any progress on civil rights.

  On January 31, 1963, nine Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee, with the support of sixteen other Republicans in the chamber, introduced a civil rights bill.32 The bill would make the Civil Rights Commission permanent and grant it more power to investigate voting rights abuses. The attorney general would have the power to initiate suits on behalf of individuals denied admission to segregated schools. The bill would create a permanent commission to investigate job discrimination by businesses receiving contracts from the federal government. The Republicans also proposed that states not be able to use literacy tests for people who had at least a sixth-grade education. Finally, the bill instructed the Census Bureau to gather statistics on how many people voted in each state, to be used to determine where discrimination was taking place.

  Republicans criticized Kennedy for failing to make real the promises of equality that had been offered in the 1960 Democratic platform. The New York Republican John Lindsay said, “Despite the elaborate promises of 1960, the Democrats have not lifted a finger to give the country a meaningful civil rights bill.” Republicans closed ranks behind the proposal. It had the support of the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee, William McCulloch; the House Republican leader, Charles Halleck, an Indiana congressman who liked to describe himself as a “gut fighter”; and the House Republican Conference chairman, Gerald Ford. New York’s governor, Nelson Rockefeller, who was the voice of liberal northeastern Republicanism and a probable presidential candidate for 1964, accused Kennedy of having “abdicated virtually all leadership toward achieving necessary civil rights legislation.”33 The Republican National Committee used the traditional Lincoln Day celebration to make a direct appeal to African American voters who were frustrated with Kennedy’s lack of vigorous commitment.34 In the Senate, the Kentucky Republican John Sherman Cooper teamed up with the Connecticut Democrat Thomas Dodd to sponsor legislation similar to the House bill.

  The civil rights movement, with its conscious strategy of creating a crisis in the South, by broadcasting the brutality of southern segregation across the country and accelerating the partisan competition over civil rights, was doing what the liberal Democrats in Congress had failed to acc
omplish: it was pushing Kennedy, albeit slowly, toward legislation. Though the movement had yet to shake southern Democrats, its impact on northern and midwestern Republicans had changed legislative conditions and improved the chances that some kind of bill could emerge from the House Judiciary Committee. In response to the mounting criticism from Republicans, the president finally, on February 28, appeared on television to announce that he was proposing a civil rights bill. Displaying his characteristically cool TV demeanor, Kennedy said that racial equality was a right, and he called voting discrimination the biggest problem the government had to address. “Therefore, let it be clear,” Kennedy proclaimed, “in our own hearts and minds, that it is not merely because of the Cold War, and not merely because of the economic waste of discrimination, that we are committed to achieving true equality of opportunity. The basic reason is because it is right.”

  The president followed his dramatic declaration with several extremely modest proposals aimed more toward easing political tensions than addressing the serious problems at hand. One provision of the bill was to strengthen the voting rights laws by imposing tighter restrictions on the use of literacy tests in the South. Another provision would require temporary federal referees to make sure that African Americans could vote in states where there were pending legal claims by African Americans that their rights had been violated. Another provision would require the courts to expedite voting suits. There was also a minor measure to provide financial and technical assistance to local school districts that were still desegregating in response to the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Finally, Kennedy recommended extending the Civil Rights Commission, which gathered information on civil rights abuses, for another four years.

  The one measure that Kennedy did not propose was a prohibition on segregation in public accommodations. Kennedy feared that such a proposal would certainly torpedo any civil rights bill in the Senate. Besides southern Democratic opposition, Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader from Illinois, had supported a number of civil rights measures since the 1940s but opposed a ban on segregation because it would threaten property rights and business.35

  Two days later, Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee released a statement welcoming Kennedy’s “belated” announcement but were “disappointed” with the “timid and almost reluctant proposals” that had come from the White House. They pointed out that the bill did not empower the attorney general to bring civil actions against racial discrimination and would do almost nothing about discrimination in employment. McCulloch reminded reporters that the only civil rights bills to have passed Congress had done so under a Republican president and that most of Kennedy’s proposals were already in the bill Republicans had proposed a month earlier.36 Governor Rockefeller told a rally organized by the New York State Conference of the NAACP that the proposals came “two years too late” and didn’t achieve much of what had been promised in the 1960 Democratic platform.37 The Republican senators Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, along with six other Republicans, were bolder. The liberal Republicans proposed prohibiting discrimination in hotels and lodging facilities that were involved in interstate commerce, doing more to prevent voting discrimination, and creating a permanent federal commission to combat employment discrimination.38 The sponsors called on Democrats to support their proposal and work with them to pass bolder measures than the ones Kennedy had endorsed.39

  Although they publicly praised the president, civil rights leaders were even angrier than before. They too thought Kennedy’s proposed legislation was meager and inadequate; it didn’t deal with racial segregation, nor did it truly protect voting rights. They had suffered through too much bloodshed to be satisfied with the president’s empty words and proposals. The Republicans were putting forward much bolder ideas. “The administration is missing the boat,” said CORE’s director, James Farmer. “Many Negroes are becoming disenchanted with the administration and will be inclined to vote for the Republican in the next election.”40 The White House offered what had become its rote response—that the president’s proposal was its best shot, given the current political situation in Congress. Southern Democrats were not likely to allow even this bill to succeed, according to Kennedy, and they certainly would not go for anything more, as the historical record proved. “We go up there with that,” Kennedy told his advisers, referring to a bolder bill that would have targeted racial segregation, “and they’ll piss all over us.”41

  Liberal Democrats were caught in a bind. They felt they needed to stand behind the president’s bill, even though Republicans were offering a much more attractive package. Yet the White House put very little effort into pushing its own bill forward, so both bills languished for the time being.

  Though Kennedy’s weak proposals had divided civil rights supporters and halted momentum for passage of a bill, Martin Luther King sensed that sentiment in Congress was becoming more favorable to his aims. He concluded that he needed to keep the struggle alive in the streets. King was as much a politician as an activist, and he was confident that direct protests could promote legislative action. He understood that confrontations with police and white racist citizens were the most effective way to generate the media attention and public sympathy he believed would be necessary to force legislation through Congress. His goal was not to sway officials in the southern states, who he did not believe would overcome their racism anytime soon, but to promote federal legislation that would guarantee African Americans their rights in the region. Civil rights demonstrations were his way of lobbying for votes in Congress.

  King moved now to orchestrate a series of bold and dramatic protests, which he named Project C, in Birmingham. He chose Birmingham because it was known as the most segregated city in the country. Department stores, schools, and almost all institutions were legally segregated by race. City officials had closed the public parks when a federal court ordered them to be integrated. African Americans could only expect to get the worst-paying jobs in the city.42 Birmingham was also the site of extreme racial violence against African Americans. Fifty bombings of homes in recent years had earned the city the name “Bombingham.” The police, under the control of Bull Connor, had a long history of brutality against African Americans. Now Connor promised an aggressive response against any civil rights protesters, whom he characterized as outsiders invading his city to cause trouble.

  King’s frank purpose for Project C—C for “confrontation”—was to get images into the national media. The nightly news shows of the three networks had been covering the civil rights movement throughout the early 1960s, broadcasting shocking film and pictures at a time when more and more Americans were buying television sets, which had become available only in the late 1940s. Newly developed portable cameras were allowing reporters to capture vivid photographs and film of the clashes in the streets as they happened.43

  The local civil rights leadership, under the direction of the pugnacious pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, who had escaped in 1956 when his house had been dynamited, was having trouble finding activists willing to engage in civil disobedience under the very dangerous conditions that existed in Birmingham. Although many were willing to be imprisoned for the cause, fewer were prepared to undergo the massive brutality they expected from counterdemonstrators wielding lead pipes and baseball bats and police swinging batons and powerful fire hoses.44

  King turned himself in to the police for having violated an order against staging a protest. While he was in jail, he wrote a letter about his belief that the moral law necessitated civil disobedience: “One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.” King pointedly turned the conventional political wisdom in Washington about pragmatism and incrementalism on its head. With Kennedy in mind, King warned that moderates posed a greater threat to racial progress than did white racist extremists. White moderates, King argued, continually insisted
on a slow timetable when they were the very people who had the capacity to win the support of large majorities. “For years now I have heard the word ‘Wait!’” King wrote. “It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This ‘Wait’ has almost always meant ‘Never.’” The letter was circulated among preachers and protesters involved in the movement, but the press, at least initially, didn’t pay much attention to it.45

  After he was released from jail, King decided to stage higher-stakes protests to continue bringing attention to Project C. He wanted to show the nation once and for all what conditions were like in the South; he believed it would take the most brutal images of oppression to move public opinion against the procedural power of the southern congressmen and fundamentally change the dynamics in Congress.

  On May 3, King and hundreds of activists, including schoolchildren, congregated at the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church for a march to downtown Birmingham. Connor had instructed his forces to make sure the protesters didn’t create trouble in the business district. When the children attempted to do so, the police sprayed them with fire hoses and attacked them with police dogs. The images, broadcast on television and printed in newspapers, were horrifying.

  President Kennedy told members of the Americans for Democratic Action that the photographs of children being attacked had made him “sick.” King was unrelenting. The images he was projecting on television and in newspapers could not be edited by local or national political leaders. Standing before reporters, he said, “I am not criticizing the President, but we are going to have to help him. The hour has come for the Federal government to take a forthright stand on segregation in the United States.”46