The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  Civil rights groups, unions, and religious organizations were still working all around Washington to secure votes. Jane O’Grady, a lobbyist for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers, escorted union leaders from around the country to the Longworth and Cannon office buildings to meet with congressmen and secure their votes. Outside of Washington, religious organizations were focused on pressuring Republican representatives from midwestern congressional districts. The churches educated local congregants in Nebraska, Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, and other midwestern states on how to pressure members. In Indiana, the campus minister of Purdue University, Ernest Reuter, organized a statewide campaign to pressure Charles Halleck. Presbyterian ministers frequently met with Halleck to tell him of their “deep concern with the unequal and often unjust treatment of our Negro brothers in our free society.”29

  Civil rights activists had obtained commitments to support the legislation from 220 legislators, but they could not be certain that all of them would keep their word. Movement leaders focused on holding these legislators to their promises, not just to vote for the bill, but also to be stalwart in voting against amendments that would damage it. Joseph Rauh, a founder of the ADA and a prominent civil rights and labor lawyer, and Clarence Mitchell launched an “all-out lobbying effort with their congressmen friends.” Rauh and others from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights told their members to come to Washington as soon as possible.30 Members of the Democratic Study Group met daily in the office of the New Jersey Democrat Frank Thompson to count votes, devise strategy, and make sure there was constant pressure on moderate Democrats to live by promises they had made to move the bill intact to a favorable vote.

  Johnson was also at work for the bill. He told James Webb, the administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, that Charles Halleck was asking what the White House could do for him. Halleck had raised the issue of a grant for Purdue University, a major research institution that was located in his district. Webb agreed to talk to Halleck directly and to award Purdue over $700,000 to construct a building as well as some research grants. “The net effect, Mr. President,” Webb said, “is that if you tell him that you’re willing to follow this policy as long as he cooperates with you, I can implement it on an installment basis. In other words, the minute he kicks over the traces, we stop the installment.” Johnson was pleased.31 When he wanted to, Halleck could be a ruthless leader who was known for threatening to withdraw financial or other party support from any member who defied him on a bill. With Halleck firmly on his side, the president was in a much stronger position to count on Republican votes. As a consequence of his receipt of presidential pork, Halleck did keep Republicans relatively united in an alliance with northern Democrats to defeat a number of amendments, mostly from southerners, that aimed to undermine political support for the legislation.

  Once Halleck’s support had been secured, Congressman McCulloch remained the key player in the GOP. He had staked his reputation on this bill when he helped move it through Judiciary, and he had no intention of watching it be dismantled on the floor. On February 7, the Arkansas Democrat Oren Harris tried to weaken the bill with an amendment that removed the section that authorized the federal government to cut off funds to state and local programs that were practicing racial discrimination, a provision that had originally been pushed by New York’s congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Republicans immediately cried foul. McCulloch announced that if this change was made to the legislation, he would withdraw his personal support from the bill, which would surely trigger an exodus of Republicans who looked to McCulloch as their touchstone for what was acceptable when it came to changes in the legislation. McCulloch’s opposition was enough to kill Harris’s amendment.32

  Civil rights proponents beat back every amendment the conservative coalition proposed until, on February 8, Howard Smith proposed an amendment that added the word “sex” to Title VII, the provision of the bill that prohibited workplace discrimination on the basis of race, national origin, ethnicity, and religion. Looking slyly over the rims of his glasses, he offered his House colleagues a discussion of gender equality. He referred to a letter from a constituent who complained about an “imbalance” between the number of women and the number of men living in the United States. He read letters from women upset about gender discrimination, including a Nebraskan who complained about the “surplus of spinsters” and the fact that the government had “killed off a large number of eligible males” in wars.33

  Though cynically conceived, Smith’s amendment didn’t come out of left field. A skillful network of female lobbyists had been fighting for decades to broaden support for their amendment on Capitol Hill. The judge had been a longtime supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. Many other conservatives also supported equal rights for women; it was an issue that commanded strong support from upper-class, privileged, educated white women in the South. Some politicians, including Smith, hoped that by appealing to women, they could gain their support in the fight to maintain racial segregation in the region and create a buffer constituency against the votes of new immigrants who had come to American cities at the turn of the century. The amendment would also negate protective labor laws that had been established to specifically protect female industrial workers.34

  Gender equality was also a liberal issue. Feminists in the labor movement had been lobbying for the federal government to take steps to prohibit gender discrimination in hiring. A report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women, released in 1963, emphasized the need to open opportunities for women in the marketplace through executive action and legislation.35

  Of course, Howard Smith’s aim in offering his amendment wasn’t really gender equality. His proposal was an ingenious poison pill that would expand the power of a federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, far beyond what the administration or the House Judiciary Committee had proposed. Smith expected that this expansion would be unacceptable to moderate Republicans and Democrats in both the House and the Senate, who would choke on the pill and either back away from their support of the entire legislation or, at a minimum, insist on the excision of the section that would establish the EEOC.

  The amendment had natural momentum. Ten out of eleven female members of the House rose to support it. “We outlast you,” said the New York Republican Katharine St. George. “We outlive you. We nag you to death. So why should we want special privileges? We want this crumb of equality.” Without the inclusion of Smith’s amendment, said the Michigan Democrat Martha Griffiths, “white women would be at the bottom of the list in hiring . . . It would be incredible to me that white men would be willing to place white women at such a disadvantage.”36

  Understanding the complex politics at hand, the Oregon Democrat Edith Green, an ardent supporter of women’s rights who had for a long time been fighting for a law that would mandate equal pay for equal work, made the tough choice to direct the administration’s campaign against the amendment. One colleague later recalled, “She was probably the most powerful woman ever to serve in the Congress. On any important legislation, such as women’s rights or education or dealing with minorities or poor people, she could switch people’s votes on the floor through the power of her intellect and her ability to persuade.”37 Green had concluded that the gender equality amendment could jeopardize civil rights. She told her colleagues she knew she would be “called an ‘Uncle Tom,’ or perhaps ‘Aunt Jane’” for her vote but that, while there was terrible discrimination against women, “there has been ten times, maybe a hundred times, as much humiliation for the Negro woman, for the Negro man and the Negro child, yes, and for the Negro baby who is born into a world of discrimination.”38

  Despite Green’s opposition, the amendment survived. Southern Democrats were joined by Republican opponents of the EEOC and a few liberal Democrats in supporting Smith’s amendment, which carried by a vote of 168 to 133. The final language in the bill prohi
bited discrimination in hiring on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or “sex.”

  The House had swallowed the pill, but the bill still didn’t die. Both the administration and Howard Smith had miscalculated the political impact the amendment would have. Liberal Democrats who had opposed inclusion of the amendment for fear it would hurt the bill finally supported the legislation with “sex” added to Title VII. Most moderate Republicans were ultimately unwilling to vote against a civil rights bill whose time had come. They also assumed that Senator Dirksen, who opposed the creation of a federal commission with strong power to deal with employment discrimination, would insist on severely weakening, if not eliminating, the EEOC as part of any final deal with Johnson. As a result, a prohibition on sex discrimination became part of the bill.

  On February 10, 1964, two days before Lincoln’s 155th birthday and slightly more than a century after he issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the House passed the civil rights bill by 290 to 130. The bill received the support of 152 Democrats and 136 Republicans. The main source of opposition was predictable. Ninety-one Democrats voted against the bill, 88 of whom were from states in the Old Confederacy, and 35 Republicans joined them in opposition, 10 of whom were the rare breed of southern Republican.

  The supporters of the bill burst into applause after the final vote and surrounded Emanuel Celler to congratulate him. Understanding that Republicans would be pivotal in the Senate, Celler quickly reminded his colleagues to thank Congressman McCulloch for all his work.

  But proponents of civil rights understood that victory celebrations were premature. The big test for civil rights had never been the House; it would come in the Senate, where the odds were far less favorable. The southerners in the Senate had the filibuster.

  THE FILIBUSTER BEGINS

  Normal Senate procedure was for the bill to be reported to the Judiciary Committee, where the chairman was James Eastland, another of the southern segregationists. Of the 120 measures related to civil rights that had been sent to the Judiciary Committee over the past ten years, only the 1957 bill reached the floor, because Johnson and Dirksen had agreed to circumvent the committee.39 It was always within the power of the majority leader to send a bill directly to the floor rather than to a committee, but it was rarely done. The majority leader was always a long-serving senator who had benefited from the rules of seniority that gave committee chairmen their power and was invested in supporting the traditional way the Senate did business. In this case, however, Johnson was able to persuade Majority Leader Mike Mansfield to make an exception to the usual practice because the civil rights bill was so important. Mansfield received support in doing this from a bipartisan coalition of thirty-four Democrats and twenty Republicans who voted to support the move.

  As soon as the bill reached the Senate floor, Johnson tried to make sure that time was on the side of civil rights proponents. He announced to the Democratic and Republican leadership that he wouldn’t care if the Senate conducted no business other than the civil rights bill until the end of the year. The message to southern senators was that they would be unable to force his hand on compromises simply because the White House wanted the Senate to move on to other business. Southerners knew that Johnson had an ambitious agenda he planned to send to Congress, but he had already pushed through the one bill he urgently needed Congress to pass before the election—the tax cut—and now he had made it clear he was willing to wait on the rest.

  The strategy of the members of the southern caucus was to delay a vote on the civil rights bill as long as possible; there was always a chance that something would break their way. For the time being, they had enough votes (nineteen)—along with the minimum of fifteen Republicans they assumed would join them—to sustain a filibuster. The wild card in obtaining cloture would be twenty to twenty-five conservative and moderate Republicans whose votes were needed to reach sixty-seven. Until civil rights proponents secured their sixty-seven votes for cloture, there were things that could happen that would put pressure on them to agree to major compromises to the legislation. Violent civil rights protests could start to turn public opinion away from the cause of racial justice. Non-southern Democrats might begin to see the movement as a threat rather than a moral crusade. An international crisis, like the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, could quickly divert public attention away from the civil rights legislation. President Johnson, despite his grandiose rhetoric, might become restless that Congress could do nothing to move forward with other items on his legislative wish list. Southerners would be making speeches constantly during their filibuster; perhaps they would say something that would change some Republican votes from for the bill to against it. All these possibilities imperiled the legislation.

  The Senate debate over civil rights began on March 30, 1964. “You can almost hear the roll of the drums at Bull Run, Gettysburg and Appomattox as the Senate wheels into line for a civil rights engagement 100 years overdue,” wrote Robert Albright in the Washington Post.40 The galleries were packed with civil rights advocates who had gathered as the self-appointed eyes and ears of the nation. One network, CBS, had assigned a reporter, Roger Mudd, to stand in a Capitol corridor, receive reports from staffers inside the Senate chamber, and transmit special reports throughout the day via CBS TV and radio and on the Evening News.41

  Hubert Humphrey kicked off the deliberations with a stirring three-and-a-half-hour speech in which he depicted the debate about civil rights as the great moral struggle of the era. He evoked the African Americans and white Americans who had been physically beaten by southern police as they risked their lives trying to force the nation to confront the racial injustice at the heart of American democracy. He noted that there were many hotels in Charleston, South Carolina, that allowed guests to bring in dogs but prohibited African Americans, and he reported that, according to government data, an African American college graduate could expect to earn less than half the salary of a college-educated white American.42 “The time has come for America to wash its dirty face and cleanse its countenance of this evil [racial discrimination] . . . The Negro no longer can be told, ‘There is your place, and stay here.’ They won’t take it anymore and they shouldn’t. They are sick of it.”

  The southerners who opposed the bill also saw civil rights as a moral cause, but they had entirely different criteria of right and wrong. In their minds, civil rights advocates were radical agitators who wanted to destroy wholesome southern communities, where white Americans and African Americans lived separate from each other, as ordained by God. Southern senators believed they were the last defense against a world where African Americans and white Americans in Georgia and Alabama and South Carolina would be compelled by federal law to eat in the same restaurants, sleep in the same hotels, and get haircuts from the same barbers, against the wishes of all moral people of both races.

  In support of his vision, Russell had organized his small, fierce army of eighteen southerners and one Republican—the Texas senator John Tower, who had won the seat Johnson had vacated in 1960—into three “platoons,” each of which would be on watch, holding the floor and debating a particular section of the legislation, for a ten-hour period. Mansfield had decided not to keep the Senate in continuous session (it would adjourn every evening at 10:00 p.m.); each platoon member would have to filibuster for about four hours a day without a break.43 The senator who was speaking could not leave the chamber, even to go to the bathroom, during his term, or the filibuster would officially come to a close. Russell assigned a trusted senator to serve as a captain for each platoon: Lister Hill of Alabama, Allen Ellender of Louisiana, and John Stennis of Mississippi. “We intend to fight this bill with all the vigor at our command,” Russell told a group of reporters after leaving a forty-five-minute closed-door meeting with his army.44

  On most days, a filibuster was not fun to watch. A speaker would address a sparsely populated chamber and read a speech written for him by aides, or perhaps some margin
ally relevant published material. On one afternoon, Richard Russell demonstrated how ridiculous the discourse could become when he came to the defense of the African American boxer Cassius Clay, who had changed his name to Muhammad Ali after joining the Nation of Islam. Clay had been forced to vacate his heavyweight title by the World Boxing Association for agreeing to a rematch with Sonny Liston without the permission of association officials. Russell said that the boxing officials were guilty of practicing the same intolerance that was the subject of the civil rights agitation.45 Government attempts to regulate discrimination were, in Russell’s view, a “slippery slope” that would inevitably lead to regulations to protect African American boxers who changed their names.

  The chamber usually looked like an ornate ghost town. Although Mansfield had called off all committee business while the debate over the civil rights bill was taking place, so that senators would have no excuse if they were absent, most of them didn’t make it anyway. There wasn’t even a quorum present during much of the first week of debate. On one afternoon, a senator slept in the front row as one of the civil rights captains responded to some of the southern attacks in a voice that was barely audible.46

  The only energy in the chamber was in the inflammatory rhetoric of the southerners, filled with dire warnings about how the legislation would destroy the constitutional fabric of the nation. In previous debates, southerners had emphasized the dangers of miscegenation and the likely degradation of the white race, but now they stuck mainly to constitutional arguments, which they believed might win them broader support than the arguments based on racist ideology they had employed in the past.47 They also warned that the legislation would restrict freedom of choice in personal association and infringe on the rights of persons to do as they wished with their private property. Senator Eastland predicted that the bill would bring the nation back to “Stalin, Khrushchev, Nasser, Hitler, and a dictatorship.” Senator Hill discussed dining arrangements. If “Mr. Jones wishes to go out to dinner with people of another race he is free to do so . . . If Mr. Smith wishes to go to dinner with people of the same race he likewise may do so free of any official restraint and may select an eating place for that purpose . . . This bill, however, would deprive Mr. Smith of his present freedom; it would do this by forbidding any eating place from serving clientele of one race only.”48