The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  But the Court rulings and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were not enough. Registration rates for African Americans in the Deep South remained extremely low. In Louisiana, 32 percent of African American voters were registered; in Alabama, 19 percent; and in Mississippi, 6 percent.77 Johnson wanted Congress to empower the federal government to supersede state and local laws that prevented African Americans from voting. As he told Martin Luther King, voting rights “will be the greatest breakthrough of anything not even excepting this ’64 act, I think the greatest achievement of my administration.”78

  Johnson was confident that when he sent his proposal to Congress, most Republicans, all of whom had seen Goldwater vote against the Civil Rights Act and get buried under an electoral landslide, would support it. As one liberal Republican explained, “Republicans have nothing to gain from being for a civil rights bill, but they have everything to lose by being against one.”79 A month after the election, without any public fanfare, Johnson had instructed Nicholas Katzenbach, who was slated to become the next attorney general, to move forward with drafting a voting rights proposal. Johnson told Katzenbach he wanted to have a “simple, effective” method of getting African Americans registered to vote.80

  Johnson had told civil rights leaders he wanted to pass voting rights legislation—but not right away. He was confident the Eighty-ninth Congress would pass a strong law, but first he wanted to use his huge new congressional majorities to pass education and health-care bills, and he wanted to do this in January, before initiating what he expected to be a lengthy congressional debate over voting rights.

  The leaders of the civil rights movement were not happy with this approach. They didn’t want to wait any longer and risk losing the opportunity they felt they had earned. The desegregation of public facilities had been a major victory, but if they somehow failed to secure basic voting rights, their legislative gains could be reversed, as they had been after Reconstruction. For civil rights leaders, waiting meant that the civil rights movement could lose the momentum it had gained from the Civil Rights Act and from the election. Roy Wilkins, executive director of the NAACP, called on Democrats and Republicans to support the idea that the “Federal Government must assume an expanded and even more vigorous role in removing the unconstitutional barriers to Negro voting.”81 Martin Luther King Jr. appealed to Johnson’s self-interest by emphasizing the electoral rewards that could accrue to the president and the Democratic Party from a voting rights bill. “The only states that you didn’t carry in the South, the five Southern states, have less than 40 percent of the Negroes registered to vote,” he told the president. “It’s very interesting to notice. And I think a professor at the University of Texas in a recent article, brought this out very clearly. So it demonstrates that it’s so important to get Negroes registered to vote in large numbers in the South. And it would be this coalition of the Negro vote and the moderate white vote that will really make the new South.”82

  Sensing Johnson’s intransigence on scheduling an early push for voting rights, King switched his strategy from pressuring the executive to pressuring Congress. The civil rights movement mobilized the grass roots to issue what King believed was the most effective threat: there would be a “march on the ballot boxes by the thousands” if Congress did not act on legislation. “We are not asking,” King warned. “We are demanding the ballot.”83

  He was not bluffing. King and other members of the SCLC traveled to Selma, Alabama, in January to draw national attention to local protesters organized by SNCC who had been conducting marches to demand full voting rights. Selma, which had served as a center for Confederate manufacturing during the Civil War, was a natural place to highlight the issue of voting rights. “Selma is a city that’s had the most oppressive history against Negroes in the South,” said King’s assistant Andrew Young.84 More than half the population was black, but only 2.1 percent of eligible African Americans were registered to vote.

  Selma’s sheriff, James Clark, was another Bull Connor—a perfect foil for the civil rights movement. He inspired fear in almost everyone he confronted, and he delighted in bullying his opponents. He liked to say that civil rights activists needed to “overcome me.” He had a preference for military-style garb, and he wore mirrored sunglasses and a button that said, “NEVER!” King anticipated that attacks on unarmed marchers in Selma would win national sympathy for their cause, and that was exactly what happened. When Clark violently jabbed his billy club right in the neck of Annie Lee Cooper, who had been waiting in line for hours to register to vote, the fifty-four-year-old woman turned around and punched him. The sheriff fell to the ground. As Clark’s men held her down to the ground, the embarrassed sheriff got back on his feet and brutally beat her with his nightstick, leaving wounds on her face. Photographs of the attack and the victim appeared in newspapers across the country.85

  Congress felt the pressure. Clarence Mitchell, the lobbyist for the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the Illinois senator Paul Douglas, who was threatening to propose his own bill, met with the Senate majority whip, Russell Long of Louisiana, to hear his thoughts on voting rights legislation, and they were pleasantly surprised to find that Long, who had participated in the 1964 filibuster, was in an affable mood and indicated he would support the use of federal examiners to enroll voters in states where 40 percent of African Americans were not registered to vote.86

  President Johnson was outraged by the violence against African Americans in Selma and saw the growing sentiment in Congress to act. He knew the Eighty-ninth Congress favored voting rights, and now he understood that he could reconstitute the bipartisan coalition that had ended the filibuster against the Civil Rights Act and also stop a filibuster before it began. Before sending a proposal to Congress, he instructed Katzenbach to contact Everett Dirksen secretly and see if they could work out an agreement on the framework of legislation. It was clear that the bill would easily pass in the House. Johnson predicted that Dirksen would get on board, and if he did, the legislation would also sail through the Senate.

  Dirksen had supported the civil rights legislation of 1957, which was primarily a voting rights bill, and he was prepared to support a voting rights bill again. He had watched the dramatic struggles of the civil rights movement, had played a pivotal role in passing the 1964 legislation, and believed the time had come for the federal government to ensure that African Americans got real voting rights. “The right to vote,” Dirksen said in a television and radio address in Illinois, “is still an issue in this free country. There has to be a real remedy. There has to be something durable and worthwhile. This cannot go on forever, this denial of the right to vote by ruses and devices and tests and whatever the mind can contrive to either make it very difficult or to make it impossible to vote.”87 Dirksen understood that after Goldwater, Republicans were in an extremely vulnerable position, and he was determined to keep the party relevant. This meant, in Dirksen’s mind, staying out front on important issues. Voting rights was an important issue.

  The negotiations in Dirksen’s office proceeded, accompanied by the familiar rituals of deliberating, drafting, smoking, and drinking. Dirksen never lost an opportunity to stress his growing importance as a power broker; he often mentioned his most recent telephone conversation with Johnson and stressed his close collaboration with Katzenbach, next to whom he sat at the head of the conference table, to the consternation of Senator Mansfield, who sat on one side. While Dirksen postured and boasted, Katzenbach set the terms of the discussion. Johnson, Katzenbach said, wanted the legislation to have a trigger that would automatically suspend literacy and any other racially discriminatory tests in states where less than 50 percent of the population had registered or voted in the 1964 election. If there were at least twenty complaints in a specific political subdivision that voting rights had been violated, the attorney general could instruct the U.S. Civil Service Commission to send federal examiners into those areas to replace local examiners registerin
g voters and supervising federal, state, or local elections. The attorney general could also move forward if there were other indications that local officials were violating the Fifteenth Amendment. The final recommendation from the administration was that southern states be required to submit any changes they wanted to make in voting procedures, including locations of polling stations and the composition of districts, to the Department of Justice for preclearance. The states would have to prove that any change would not have a discriminatory effect. This rule would apply to any state, or any counties within a state, that had less than 50 percent of its population registered to vote in 1960 and 1964; Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Virginia were states in this category, as were some counties in North Carolina.88

  Where Dirksen and the administration disagreed was over the degree of power that should be delegated to the attorney general.89 In addition to the traditional aversion of the GOP to strengthening the attorney general, there were fears among Republicans that federal power over voting rights could be used for partisan purposes. Dirksen’s preference was to empower federal judges to appoint examiners to investigate accusations.

  On March 2, with the negotiations still secret, Dirksen publicly announced to reporters that he favored voting rights legislation. He predicted there would not be much of a filibuster. “There might be some talk on the floor,” he said, “but I wouldn’t put the filibuster tag on it.”90

  As the administration and Dirksen negotiated the remaining details, the protests in Alabama intensified. On March 7, approximately six hundred protesters gathered to march from Selma to Montgomery for voting rights. The protesters began their march by kneeling and praying for God to guide them “through a wilderness of state troopers.” They marched in double file across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River. When they reached the edge of the city’s business district, fifty helmeted troopers awaited them. “Turn around and go back to your church,” shouted one officer.

  The marchers couldn’t have turned around even if they’d wanted to. Sheriff Clark had stationed some possemen on horseback to surround them. When the activists knelt down to pray, the police and state troopers attacked them with nightsticks and electric cattle prods, fired tear gas at them, and, as the protesters scrambled to escape the chaos, charged at them a second time. “Get the Niggers off the streets!” one of the possemen yelled. Police horses trampled some of the wounded activists who were lying bloodied on the ground. “I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” the SNCC chairman, John Lewis, whose skull was fractured in the melee, told fellow activists.91 White spectators cheered the police as if they had just scored a touchdown.92

  The activists insisted they would not be deterred. Speaking at Brown Chapel AME Church before a group of about six hundred protesters, many of them covered with bandages and blood, one of Dr. King’s aides warned, “If we stop now, we go back to yesterday, but yesterday is too miserable to live. We can’t go back now.”93

  Americans watched these scenes on their television sets, most of them still black and white. ABC Nightly News interrupted its evening film, Judgment at Nuremberg, to cover the event live.94 The vivid television images of the protests and violence on “Bloody Sunday” brought the reality of racial violence into American living rooms with an immediacy words or still images in newspapers never had. Viewers saw the horrendous violence being inflicted on African Americans who were simply demanding what many considered a basic right in any democracy—the right to cast a ballot to choose their leaders. With each film clip broadcast on the nightly news, the anger and disbelief outside the Deep South grew.

  The shock in Washington was equally intense. Members of Congress, like other Americans, knew something had to be done about what they were witnessing. Speaker McCormack called the attacks a “disgraceful exercise of arbitrary power.” Michigan’s James O’Hara condemned the police action as “a savage action, storm trooper style, under direction of a reckless demagogue.” Unaware of how close the administration and Dirksen were to finishing a deal on legislation, Senator Joseph Clark, an advocate of voting rights since the 1950s, proclaimed that a bill was urgently needed and that he and other Democrats would sponsor their own bills if the president didn’t send them something soon. The House Judiciary chairman, Celler, said that if he didn’t receive word from the president “shortly,” then “I’m going to offer my own bill.”95

  “What the public felt on Monday,” said Johnson’s special assistant and counsel Harry McPherson, “in my opinion, was the deepest sense of outrage it has ever felt on the civil rights question.”96 Many southerners demonstrated their support for the protesters, outraged as well by what they had seen from the authorities in their region.97 The president denounced the “brutality” that had taken place when “Negro citizens of Alabama” simply tried to “dramatize their deep and sincere interest in attaining the precious right to vote.”

  The activists were not finished. James Forman of SNCC, who criticized King for having become too willing to compromise, planned a second march from Selma to Montgomery on March 9. The federal district judge Frank Johnson issued a temporary restraining order to stop the march, on the grounds that terrible violence might ensue and he needed some time to figure out a solution that would keep the marchers safe. Judge Johnson, an Eisenhower appointee who had made a number of important pro-civil-rights rulings and whom Governor Wallace derided as an “intigratin’, carpetbaggin’, scallawagin’, baldfaced liar,” was now presenting King with the choice whether or not to participate in a march that had been enjoined by a judge sympathetic to his cause.

  Johnson contacted Buford Ellington, the former governor of Tennessee, urging him to persuade Wallace to allow the march to take place.98 The president didn’t want to send in federal troops, concerned that he would trigger a fierce response from southerners who saw this as excessive federal intervention in their racist affairs. Privately, King was uncertain about having another march; he was fearful for his own life and the lives of the people he was leading. But the protesters would not stop; they moved forward. Bill Moyers told Johnson that King said he was under intense pressure from “left-wingers” who “will not let the day go by without some symbol, of a march” to establish the principle “to march.”99

  To prevent more bloodshed, King negotiated a deal with the administration and state police that the civil rights activists could walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, where the road to Montgomery began, say prayers, and then turn around and march back into Selma.

  On March 9, two thousand protesters crossed the bridge. King directed them through songs and prayer. After they had sung the anthem of the movement, “We Shall Overcome,” King headed back into Selma. Many in the crowd were furious when they realized that a deal had been cut, and this exacerbated the growing divisions inside the movement between the “established leadership” and younger activists who wanted more aggressive actions against racism. In Washington, Justice officials watched the events and “breathed a sigh of relief.”100

  The fragile situation took a bad turn later that day when one of the protesters, James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister from Boston, dined with some friends at Walker’s Café, an African American restaurant. After leaving the café, they got lost in an all-white neighborhood. Trying to find their way out, the men passed the Silver Moon Café, an all-white eatery that was popular with members of the Ku Klux Klan and filled with customers who didn’t like what they saw through the windows, ministers who had clearly been part of the protests. Reeb was grabbed by four white men yelling, “Hey, niggers. Hey, you niggers!”101 They beat him with a club and cracked his skull, hoping to let the white minister know what it actually felt like to be an African American living in the South. They succeeded in their goal. Reeb died two days later. Upon hearing the news, administration officials worried there would be total chaos on the streets in Selma and elsewhere.102

  With ea
ch report about the events in Selma, another member of Congress stepped forward to demand that Johnson send a bill to Congress. In the House, the Republican congressman William McCulloch claimed that had the administration acted earlier in proposing legislation, the protests, and the bloodshed, could have been averted. Now he and a group of House Republicans threatened to introduce their own bill. The president privately welcomed their threats and criticism because he believed their demands demonstrated to voters that voting rights was a bipartisan issue. At the same time, a bipartisan group of liberal senators, including the Democrats Paul Douglas, Philip Hart, William Proxmire, and Robert Kennedy and the Republicans Jacob Javits, Clifford Case, and Hugh Scott, announced that they would introduce their own bills in the Senate if Johnson continued to stall on sending legislation to Congress. There were still a few issues to work out with Dirksen. More important, the president was hoping he could hold off on sending the bill, even if for just a few weeks; the House was wrapping up its debate on the education bill, and the Ways and Means Committee was finishing its draft of Wilbur Mills’s proposed revision of the Medicare program.

  But Johnson’s timetable for legislation had been overtaken by events; the pressure from the civil rights protests and from inside Congress could not be resisted; he had to act. In the morning hours of March 11, after an arduous two-hour meeting, Katzenbach and Dirksen finally reached a deal. Dirksen, who felt compelled not to delay until the situation spun out of control, relented on the proposal to authorize the Justice Department to send federal registrars to enroll African Americans whose rights had been violated and agreed to the preclearance provision.103 Katzenbach agreed to a few minor technical adjustments, including calling the registrars “examiners,” to avoid a term that had been used during Reconstruction.104