Conservative senators also aimed to arouse opposition to the bill on the part of working-class northern Democrats by warning that the legislation would result in racial quotas in the workplace. They called attention to a ruling by the Illinois Fair Employment Practices Commission that ordered the Motorola Corporation to hire an African American man who had failed an employment test the commission decided was unfair, on the grounds that it disfavored “culturally deprived and disadvantaged groups.” Businesses throughout Illinois had protested the decision, and the New York Times columnist Arthur Krock had written that Title VII of the civil rights bill would make this the law of the land. “If Congress approves the pending measure,” he wrote, “with Title VII included, and the constitutionality of this section is affirmed by the Supreme Court . . . [t]hen a Federal bureaucracy would be legislated into senior partnership with private business, with the power to dictate the standards by which employers reach their judgments of the capabilities of applicants for jobs, and the quality of performance after employment, whenever the issue of ‘discrimination’ is raised.”49 Liberal Democrats responded that the bill would not require businesses to hire a certain number of African Americans. “Contrary to the allegations of some opponents of this title, there is nothing in it that will give any power to the Commission or to any court to require hiring, firing, or promotion of employees in order to meet a racial ‘quota’ or to achieve a certain racial balance,” Humphrey said. “That bugaboo has been brought up a dozen times; but it is nonexistent.”50
Civil rights supporters were still worried about whether these kinds of arguments would scare off undecided senators, particularly as they watched George Wallace campaign in the 1964 Democratic primaries. On April 7, Wallace surprised many observers by winning over 260,000 votes in the Wisconsin primary. The outcome made it clear that the racial tensions of the South were also swirling around in some northern constituencies at the time that Democratic leaders were lobbying for Senate votes on the civil rights bill. Administration officials dismissed Wallace’s showing as insignificant, but Senator Dirksen captured the sentiment of others when he noted that “it is an interesting commentary on the depth of feeling the people must have on civil rights when a candidate from the old Confederacy can invade a northern state” and win this number of votes.51
ORGANIZING LIBERALS, OUTFLANKING CONSERVATIVES
The Montana senator Mike Mansfield had worked as a young man in the copper mines of Butte, taught history at the University of Montana, entered the House of Representatives in 1942, and succeeded Lyndon Johnson as Senate majority leader in 1961. He handled his caucus in a laid-back manner, as it had been done before Johnson centralized operations under the majority leadership. Rather than strong-arming his members, Mansfield liked to collect as much input as possible from them and then try to craft bills that would win broad support. His strategy had not worked very well when Kennedy was in the White House, and Johnson believed it made the civil rights bill more vulnerable to the aggressive tactics of the southerners.
With Johnson sidelined in the White House and Mansfield proving to be a weak leader, the liberal legislators, still smarting from previous losses on civil rights, had committed themselves to good organization and coordination with the liberal interest groups. They wanted physically and emotionally to wear down the southerners who were engaged in the filibuster, to force each of them to spend a maximum number of hours speaking on the floor, and to increase the pressure on uncommitted Republican senators to vote in favor of cloture. The liberals would be in constant contact with every senator to make sure that no side deals were cut that involved endorsing revisions that would weaken the bill. While southerners publicized their arguments against civil rights to the media, liberals reminded reporters what King and his allies had been fighting for.
Senator Humphrey’s teams were called the Civil Rights Corporals’ Guard. Each team was responsible for handling any negotiations that took place about specific parts of the bill and for responding to southern attacks on the Senate floor about particular issues. The leaders of the civil rights teams were Warren Magnuson of Washington for public accommodations; Philip Hart of Michigan on voting rights; Joseph Clark of Pennsylvania on the equal employment commission; Paul Douglas of Illinois on school desegregation; Edward Long of Missouri on the Civil Rights Commission; John Pastore of Rhode Island on proposed restrictions on federal funds to segregated programs; and Thomas Dodd of Connecticut on some additional minor provisions. Senator Dirksen assigned Minority Whip Thomas Kuchel to head the GOP effort on the Senate floor. Kuchel was a liberal Californian who had come under vicious attack from the far-right John Birch Society for his moderate views on race. The Republican captains, all the senior liberal wing of the party from the Northeast, were Jacob Javits and Kenneth Keating of New York, Clifford Case of New Jersey, and Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania.
Humphrey and Kuchel made certain there was a clear line of communication between the White House and Congress. Every morning the liberal leaders met with the administration officials Larry O’Brien and Mike Manatos from the Office of Legislative Liaison to coordinate the responses they would offer to opponents’ speeches on substantive issues and thus shape public opinion through press reports on the “debate” in the chamber. The meetings were also preparation for any negotiations that might arise among senators—about issues, for example, like the federal employment commission—where deals could be made that would commit senators to support cloture. Finally, the meetings were the central processing mechanism for vote counting—where each senator stood on cloture and strategies for identifying colleagues who might be persuaded by a personal call from the president or a visit from representatives in the civil rights movement.
Once or twice a week, Clarence Mitchell, Joseph Rauh, and Andrew Biemiller joined the morning meetings. Attorney General Robert Kennedy became the main public voice for the legislation; even though he and Johnson hated each other, the president hoped the move to include liberals would insulate him from attacks by northern Democrats. Deputy Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Burke Marshall represented the Justice Department in the daily operations. Katzenbach was the key man for the administration.52
Responding to quorum calls was one of the procedures by which southerners and liberals tried to wear each other down every day; it was the dry stuff of the legislative process that mattered greatly on Capitol Hill. According to the Constitution, the Senate needed a quorum to conduct all its business—in 1964, fifty-one senators—but this requirement was more honored in the breach. There were rarely that many senators in the chamber, even during this filibuster debate, but if any senator requested a quorum call, fifty-one members had to be in the chamber by the time the roll call finished, or the official business day came to an end. Otherwise, the official day continued until the chamber had disposed of the issue at hand. This mattered during a filibuster because by rule every senator was permitted to make no more than two speeches in one official day. If the official day did not end, southerners had to extend their filibuster speeches to compensate for their small numbers. To force the southerners to do as much exhausting speechifying as possible—especially because Mansfield had decided to let the senators take a break at night—it was incumbent on the liberals to be ready to scramble into the chamber in force at very short notice.
When, in the fifth week of the filibuster, liberals failed to muster a quorum, Humphrey quickly moved to make sure it didn’t happen again. He created a phone list that would enable him to instantly contact a sufficient number of senators who had agreed to be on call. Liberal organizations also helped make sure their allies responded to each southern trick. On April 13, a group of U.S. senators from both parties went to the Washington Senators’ home opener with President Johnson, who threw out the first pitch. Between the third and the fourth innings, at around 2:20 p.m., there was an unusual public address announcement: “All U.S. Senators are reque
sted to return to the chamber.” The legislators were caught off guard; they thought there had been an informal agreement that southerners would not call for a quorum during the game. Senator Humphrey, who was becoming increasingly frustrated with the filibuster, jumped up from his seat.53 With so many politicians piling out of the stadium to get back to the Capitol, one fan joked, “It’s a good thing they didn’t ask for the Representatives too, or the stadium would be half empty.”54 The only person not surprised by the announcement was Senator Russell. He remained comfortably in his seat as the game resumed.
Most of the other senators in attendance ran out of the gates and directly into the four limousines that the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights had sent to the stadium as a precaution against the precise trick the conservatives were trying to pull. The baseball fans made the mile drive in a little more than eight minutes. “We have returned!” boasted Humphrey to his colleagues. The supporters of civil rights made the quorum call just after 2:30.55 It was a win for the liberals in the Senate, but without a quorum of senators rooting them on at the ballpark, the Senators lost 4–0 to the Los Angeles Angels.
During these months, civil rights supporters continued to drum up constituent pressure on uncommitted senators to vote for cloture. Simply the threat of a civil rights protest at home could be a powerful influence on a senator in the context of what had been going on in 1963 and 1964. It was evident to all how extreme the positions of the southerners were; no moderate senator wanted to be publicly associated with them. The Congress of Racial Equality talked about mobilizing its supporters in Illinois, the home state of Everett Dirksen. As the minority leader, Dirksen was the only senator who could deliver enough Republican votes to obtain cloture. Although he had made public statements in support of a bill, most legislators and civil rights activists believed that the minority leader was doing little or nothing to stop the filibuster in March or April. James Farmer said his organization would bring marchers directly to the post offices so they could mail letters to Dirksen in support of the bill. He also said that protesters would set up shop right outside the senator’s home in Pekin to shine the media spotlight on how he was obstructing progress in the Senate by passively supporting the filibuster. Though CORE did not follow through outside his home, which was primarily occupied by his elderly mother-in-law, it did hold demonstrations in Chicago and other parts of the state. Dirksen warned that he would not be intimidated. “If the day ever comes,” he said, “when under pressure of picketing or other devices I shall be pushed from the rock where I stand to render a judgment against my convictions, my justification in public life will have come to an end.”56 Despite his bluster, the Senate minority leader was affected by the commotion that the protesters were generating within his electorate. He came to accept the necessity and inevitability of legislation that would prohibit racial segregation.
There were protests all over the country; in some places it wasn’t about influencing particular senators but about bringing ever more widespread media attention to the cause. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, CORE activists organized a sit-in at a segregated restaurant; more than fifty people, black and white, were dragged out by the police and sent to police headquarters. Thirty-five thousand people, the biggest integrated crowd in the history of the state, walked to Legion Field in Birmingham, Alabama, to hear the evangelical preacher Billy Graham, who had been a longtime opponent of segregation, on Easter Sunday. In St. Augustine, Florida, three hundred civil rights protesters, including Mary Parkman Peabody, the seventy-two-year-old mother of Governor Endicott Peabody of Massachusetts, conducted sit-ins at segregated movie theaters, hotels, and restaurants. After the police arrested Peabody for trespassing and conspiracy at the Ponce de León hotel, she refused to pay the bond and remained in jail for two nights. Because of her participation, the national media reported the story. “We are down here because as Christians,” Peabody explained, “we believe in the dignity and worth of every human being. Civil rights is the number one problem in this country. It is a problem in the North as well as the South.”57
Martin Luther King issued public warnings to the Senate that further delay in invoking cloture would mean bigger protests and possibly another march on Washington. He and other civil rights leaders brought their supporters to the city, to “dramatize this blatant use of legislative power” to block civil rights.58 The protests would make Dirksen, who understood that public opinion was now in favor of a bill, look like the main source of obstruction to racial justice.
Religious groups aligned with the civil rights movement were instrumental in keeping up pressure on the uncommitted senators to vote for cloture. In some of these constituencies, where there were few African American voters and legislators might have felt the issue with less urgency, religious leaders and institutions used their moral influence to press for equal rights. Religious institutions played a huge role in these communities. Congregants listened to their preachers, and legislators paid attention when spoken to. When these groups started to press midwestern Republicans to support the civil rights cause, the pleading had great effect. “The most important force at work today on behalf of civil rights is the churches—Catholic, Protestant and Jewish,” observed Senator Humphrey.59 The Commission on Religion and Race was an umbrella organization that coordinated religious pro-civil-rights protests. “The secret of passing the bill is the prayer groups,” Humphrey told Rauh and Mitchell. Humphrey told a reporter, “Just wait until [senators] start hearing from the church people.”60 In Iowa, the national Jewish organization B’nai B’rith convened a meeting of local Christian religious leaders with Senator Bourke Hickenlooper—an archconservative who thought of the civil rights bill as a dangerous aggrandizement of federal power that violated states’ rights—during which they persuaded him to support a vote for cloture so that the civil rights bill could at least be voted on. A Quaker did the same with the Kentucky senators, John Sherman Cooper and Thruston Morton.61 A phone call to the South Dakota Republican Karl Mundt from a priest and a bishop, one of whom had been his high school classmate, was important in persuading him to support cloture. “I hope that satisfied those two goddamned bishops [sic] that called me last night,” he said.62 The religious organizations also conducted letter-writing campaigns and organized events to raise awareness in many states. Clergy coordinated sermons on specific weekends to sell their message. Every week, religious organizations mailed information to church and synagogue congregants, urging them to write or call their senators. Ministers asked prominent local congregants to speak personally with their state’s senators.63 Senate staffers became accustomed to the huge volume of letters that would pour in on Tuesdays and Wednesdays from midwestern congregants who had heard their preachers speak over the weekend about the issue.64
They also came to Washington. On a rainy April 19, a group of Jewish, Protestant, and Catholic seminarians held a vigil at the Lincoln Memorial. They huddled together under umbrellas to talk about civil rights and to pray. They were the first contingent of a large group from seventy-five seminaries. Each contingent planned to spend twenty-four hours at a time at the memorial, during which the members would pray for two three-hour periods. They slept on air mattresses at the Church of the Holy Comforter and received food from various women’s organizations. They promised to stay in Washington until the Senate passed the House bill.65
Ministers and rabbis joined representatives from the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights in the Senate galleries to remind senators that they, and God, were listening to every word the legislators said. “You couldn’t turn around where there wasn’t a clerical collar next to you,” Joseph Rauh recalled.66
The southerners were losing the public relations war. On April 27, the pollster Louis Harris reported that Americans, including southerners, favored cloture by a margin of three to one and civil rights by two to one. The public accommodations section of the bill, which was the heart of the measure, received the strongest support from the public, a r
esult of the moral and political pressure applied by the civil rights movement and the strong support from organized labor, religious organizations, and the news media. Public support for the bill had increased in the course of the civil rights filibuster, from 63 percent of the nation favorable in November 1963, to 68 percent in February 1964, to 70 percent in April 1964.67 According to the polls, only 21 percent opposed Johnson’s position on civil rights, a notable decline from 30 percent in February 1964 and 50 percent in the fall of 1963.68
President Johnson tried to stay out of the public eye—he didn’t want to give opponents the chance to make the debate be about him rather than about racial equality—but he was nonetheless a gigantic presence behind the scenes. He frequently leaned on Humphrey and Mansfield to keep the pressure on uncommitted senators. He spent a lot of time literally counting votes, a job most presidents had left to staffers. Joseph Califano recalled that “Johnson would make call after call, hold meetings into the night, and count congressional heads.” He would ask Larry O’Brien to repeat to him exactly what senators had said so he could figure out for himself how firm their positions were.69
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