There was little hope that the governor of Alabama would protect the demonstrators. George Wallace, one of the most important figures in southern politics, had built his early career around progressive economic policies but had been elected governor in November 1962 on a promise to protect racial segregation. He had become adept at channeling white anger to his political advantage, and he had no sympathy for Martin Luther King.
Kennedy wanted to secure some kind of arrangement that would minimize tensions and violence in Birmingham. He sent Burke Marshall, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, to meet with local government officials, local businessmen, and civil rights leaders. Marshall was a former antitrust lawyer whose low-key approach to negotiations had worked well in previous tense situations. The president hoped that mediated discussions could end the crisis. He was encouraged when Marshall struck a tentative agreement between the civil rights leaders and the business and government leaders that provided for Birmingham to desegregate washrooms and certain other public facilities.
Within days, however, all hope for the voluntary agreement went up in smoke. On May 11, white racists firebombed the home of Martin Luther King’s brother, the Reverend A. D. King, and a motel King frequently used as his headquarters. Riots erupted in Birmingham’s African American neighborhoods. On May 13, Kennedy was ready to federalize the Alabama National Guard and prepared army troops to enter the city if necessary to restore order. But it was King who calmed the situation by persuading local residents to stop the rioting. Tensions in Alabama smoldered, just one inevitable event away from bursting into flames again.
KENNEDY FINALLY PROPOSES A STRONG CIVIL RIGHTS BILL
After two years of violent clashes, imprisonments, and deaths, President Kennedy met with his advisers on May 20 and 21 to consider proposing a new civil rights law to decisively end segregation in the South. The president had considered the Senate Republicans’ March proposal in light of the situation in Alabama and concluded that if he didn’t propose a stronger bill, the protests would escalate and the response from white southerners would become more dangerous. Republicans would again seek support among liberal Democrats for their own bill, which might well succeed in the wake of the spreading violence. It seemed likely that if he didn’t act, Congress would move forward without him. The civil rights movement had generated enough pressure for action from congressional liberals in both parties and from a growing number of moderates, including the party leadership. The president still didn’t believe he could get the Senate to pass a bill, but he and his advisers were convinced that by proposing some adequate legislation, they might get King and the other leaders to stop the demonstrations, ease the pressure, and end the violence. Given that the GOP had made proposals, it seemed possible that a bill could move through the House.
On June 3, the congressional pressure for legislation became even more intense when a group of House Republicans introduced a revised bill that included everything they had proposed in January plus a provision that outlawed segregation in public accommodations, including stores, restaurants, and theaters. The Republicans were willing to propose the measure that President Kennedy had thus far avoided.
The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee was the New York congressman Emanuel Celler, one of the few powerful senior liberals in the chamber. His committee had jurisdiction over law enforcement agencies and the administration of justice, and this included civil rights legislation. The bill would also have to survive the Rules Committee to get to the floor of the House. If it did get there, the bill would have to be bipartisan. “If this is not warfare, I don’t know what is,” Lyndon Johnson told Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen. “They’re arresting them by the thousands; they’re killing them by the dozens.” The president, he said, needed to get “Republicans in on this thing” if they were going to pass a bill in the House and eventually the Senate.47
As the legislative process moved deliberately forward, there was another confrontation in Alabama. On June 11, Governor George Wallace stood on the steps of the Foster Auditorium of the University of Alabama and blocked two African Americans, Vivian Malone and James Hood, from entering the building to register, despite a court order based on Brown v. Board of Education that prohibited the university from denying admission to African Americans. Earlier in the day, President Kennedy had federalized several units of the Alabama National Guard. Malone and Hood, escorted by guardsmen, returned to the auditorium, were allowed to enter, and were registered.
On the same day, in Washington, D.C., President Kennedy met with the Senate minority leader, Everett Dirksen, and the House minority leader, Charles Halleck. He told them that the situation in Alabama confirmed the need to pass civil rights legislation. If African Americans did not get legislation that guaranteed their rights, the protests would continue to provoke still more violent responses from white southerners until the entire situation escalated beyond control.48 If Congress passed legislation and abolished legally sanctioned segregation, southerners would have no choice but to comply, and civil rights activists would be able to draw down their protests, or so Kennedy hoped. He also hoped he could get the Republican leaders, who were seeing support for legislation growing within their caucus, to work with him on a bill that would satisfy liberals and moderates in both parties.
At 8:00 p.m, just hours after the Republicans had gone, Kennedy introduced to the nation the new proposal he would soon send to Congress.49 Americans watching their televisions could see that his demeanor was quite different now from what it had been when he had presented his weak bill at the end of February. Gone was the cool and dispassionate president so many Americans had become accustomed to seeing. They saw instead a leader bursting with emotion and determination. Kennedy said, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue. It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.” He warned that “redress is sought in the street.” In the final moments of the thirteen-minute speech, Kennedy looked up from his text and seemed to be speaking impromptu. With passion in his voice, he reminded the nation, “Today there are Negroes unemployed, two or three times as many compared to whites, inadequate education, moving into the large cities, unable to find work, young people particularly out of work, without hope, denied equal rights, denied the opportunity to eat at a restaurant or a lunch counter, or go to a movie theater, denied the right to a decent education, denied—almost today—the right to attend a state university even though qualified.”
Despite the passion in Kennedy’s speech, Vice President Johnson didn’t think the president had done enough to maximize the chances for passing a civil rights bill. He had not lobbied Congress prior to the public announcement; he had left Johnson out of all the internal deliberations about the proposal; and he had never asked his vice president, a longtime leader in Congress, to be a liaison there on behalf of the bill.50
On June 19, Kennedy sent his proposal to Congress. It was by far the boldest civil rights legislation yet proposed by a president in the twentieth century. The legislation prohibited imposing a literacy test in any federal election on any American with a sixth-grade education. It also allowed the attorney general to file suits to desegregate schools. The most significant part of the proposal prohibited discrimination on the basis of race in public accommodations, including restaurants, recreational areas, hotels, motels, and all other retail businesses. The legislation would also cut federal funding to programs that discriminated based on race.
The constitutional grounding for the law was the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law to all citizens. Burke Marshall, the head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, had persuaded Kennedy that the interstate commerce clause of the Constitution, which had already been used to outlaw child labor and enact minimum wage laws, should also be cited as support for the legislation because it would give the government a stronger legal position from which to defend the law whe
n southerners opposed it, as inevitably they would, by claiming it violated states’ rights.
Though civil rights groups had demanded the creation of a permanent federal employment commission, Kennedy felt that such an action would cost the bill too much support from key elements of the coalition whose support was necessary for passage. Moderate Republicans had strongly opposed any measure that allowed the government to intervene in the affairs of business. Southern Democrats had adamantly protected their racially segregated labor market since the New Deal days, when they forced FDR to exclude key parts of the southern workforce from Social Security and other benefits. Realizing they might very well lose on the issue of segregation, southerners were desperate to block any federal disruptions of the economic foundation of their region, which relied on cheap African American labor.
As Congress considered the legislation, Kennedy asked civil rights protesters to agree to a moratorium on “unruly tactics or pressures” that could diminish support for the bill in Congress, but civil rights leaders refused the president’s request to cool it. Bayard Rustin, a well-known proponent of nonviolent civil disobedience and a key ally of King’s in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and A. Philip Randolph, a labor leader who in World War II had persuaded FDR to issue an executive order banning discrimination in the defense industries by threatening a march on Washington, along with representatives from the AFL-CIO, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the National Council of Churches, and other civil rights, religious, and labor groups, revived an old tactic. A march on Washington would be a “living petition” that would “place the national human rights problem squarely on the doorstep” of the federal government. Despite some worries that protests would become violent and undermine progress toward legislation, the march, which took place on August 28, was a peaceful gathering of 200,000 people, who heard a series of stirring speeches in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Martin Luther King proclaimed, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.”
After the rally concluded, President Kennedy met with the top civil rights leaders—Dr. King, A. Philip Randolph, Whitney Young, and Roy Wilkins—and labor’s Walter Reuther at the White House. Kennedy had scheduled the meeting after the rally rather than before, so it could be canceled if the march turned violent. Because the march had gone so well, the civil rights leaders were beaming with confidence as they walked into the White House. When they entered the Oval Office, Wilkins said, “We think today’s demonstration, if it did nothing else, . . . showed that people back home, from the small towns, big cities, the working people, men who gave up two days’ pay, three days’ pay, . . . who flew from Los Angeles at $300 round-trip to come here. It means that they and not Martin Luther King or Roy Wilkins or Whitney Young or Walter Reuther have dreamed up this civil rights business.” Emboldened by the display of solidarity they had just presented to America, they urged the president to allow the House Judiciary Committee to broaden the legislation. In particular, they suggested that he support the creation of a permanent federal employment commission and a grant of greater powers to the Justice Department to fight racial discrimination. Walter Reuther said that through this march, “We’ve put together the broadest working legislative coalition we’ve ever had. And we’re going to work, not only on the Hill, but we’re going to be able to mobilize the grassroots support back home in critical congressional districts where a fellow has to be persuaded.”
Once again, Kennedy treated his visitors to a review of the legislative realities he believed the White House was facing. He walked them through the state delegations in the House and counted votes to prove that the bill had only between 158 and 160 Democratic votes. He explained that they would need 60 Republican votes in the House and 20 to 25 Republican votes in the Senate or they could not pass the bill. When Randolph heard the president’s analysis, he replied, “It’s going to take nothing less than a crusade to win approval for these civil rights measures.” He suggested that only Kennedy would be able to lead such a crusade. Kennedy said that the measure would have a better chance if it was coming from the grass roots and congressional pressure. If it came from the president, opponents would be able to make Kennedy the issue, which would be easier for them than arguing against civil rights. The president told the leaders that they, and congressional Democrats, would have to lead the effort to rally support for the bill. Even at this point, Kennedy was hedging his commitment to civil rights legislation.51
CHAIRMAN CELLER’S MOVE
The civil rights movement had pushed Kennedy into proposing legislation, and movement leaders would continue to organize pressure on legislators who were deliberating the bill, but liberals understood that the legislative process confronted them with several crucial points at which conservative opponents could kill the legislation or severely water it down. First the House Judiciary Committee had to draft and report a bill to the House Rules Committee, which then, if it voted to put the bill on the calendar, would determine the rules for the floor debate. If the bill survived the Rules Committee process, then the House would have to pass the bill subject to amendments. If passed, the bill would be delivered to the Senate, where the Judiciary Committee would debate the measure and decide whether to report it to the floor. Finally, the full Senate would debate the bill and vote on it, but only if civil rights proponents could gather the sixty-seven votes they needed to end the inevitable filibuster. If there were major discrepancies between the House bill and the one the Senate passed, the legislation would go to a conference committee—a panel of representatives from the House and the Senate—who would try to find a compromise between the two versions of the bill that their respective chambers would then have to vote to approve.
It appeared that the first stage of the process would be the easiest for civil rights proponents. The House Judiciary Committee was one of the few committees that comprised a sizable group of liberal to moderate legislators and a truly liberal chairman. But even here the administration would need bipartisan support. The Judiciary Committee had thirty-five members—twenty-one Democrats and fourteen Republicans—but because eight of the Democrats were southerners who supported the Jim Crow status quo, only thirteen Democrats could be counted on to support the bill in the committee. Chairman Celler and the other liberals would need five Republicans to join them for a majority to report out the bill.
Congressman Celler was a longtime proponent of civil rights. Although he was much older than the postwar liberals—the Brooklyn-born German Jew had been elected to Congress before FDR became president—he was a leader and mentor to them. He had become chairman of the House Judiciary Committee in 1949 and had handled the 1957 and 1960 civil rights legislation in the House. The bill that Kennedy had sent to his desk in June was one he had been waiting to push for many decades. The modest and diminutive chairman did not physically intimidate people, but when it came to legislating, no one was tougher or more skilled at using the procedures of the House to pursue his objectives and outsmart his opponents. He would be more than comfortable limiting, or completely blocking, the participation of his conservative opponents on the committee and punishing any legislators who caused him problems by withholding his support for measures they might need his support to get passed.
All the liberals on Judiciary took their committee work seriously, but Chairman Celler had been around long enough to know that nothing—except perhaps the filibuster on civil rights—was inevitable when it came to congressional politics. At a minimum, they all wanted to draft Kennedy’s proposal in the strongest language possible so that when the bill reached the tougher stages of the process, they would have staked out the best possible position from which to negotiate. They worried that President Kennedy and his brother would undercut them by signaling to conservative Democrats who opposed civil rights that the president was willing to compromise too much of w
hat was most important in the legislation.
President Kennedy was in fact willing to compromise; he knew he needed bipartisan support, starting in the Judiciary Committee. Without informing anyone, the administration had already privately secured the support of the ranking Republican on the committee. Over the July 4 holiday, Kennedy’s man Burke Marshall had traveled to Piqua, Ohio, where William McCulloch maintained his home and district office. McCulloch, whom one reporter described as a “wispy little man from small town Ohio,” was a solid midwestern fiscal conservative with a safe House seat. As the ranking Republican on Judiciary, he possessed substantial institutional power to reward Republicans who were loyal to him and therefore could deliver a significant bloc of votes on civil rights. Conservatives greatly respected him, because on most issues he stood to the right. He opposed most federal programs, including aid to education, and was a staunch defender of gun rights and school prayer. He was known in Washington for his insistence on discipline in spending; he was one of the rare legislators who didn’t always try to get pork for his district.52
The most important thing about McCulloch was that he had a long record of pushing for strong legislation to end racial injustice. He had become sympathetic to the civil rights cause while practicing law in Jacksonville, Florida, where he represented a predominantly African American clientele and saw firsthand the consequences of racial discrimination. After serving in World War II, he had returned to Piqua, where he participated in a campaign by the NAACP to end segregation in local restaurants, a brave move for a lawyer who hoped to succeed in politics in a strongly conservative district. Though only about 2.7 percent of his constituents were African Americans, the congressman believed federal legislation was necessary to protect voting rights and achieve racial integration.53 In 1956, nine years after his election to the House, he had supported the bill that culminated in the 1957 Civil Rights Act, although his version had been much stronger than what Johnson and the Senate ultimately passed. McCulloch was also working with a sympathetic House Republican caucus, as the multiple bills introduced between January and March demonstrated. Kennedy and Marshall knew that McCulloch could bring them the Republican votes they needed on the Judiciary Committee.
The Fierce Urgency of Now Page 6