The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  The next day, Mansfield and Dirksen informed reporters there was a deal. Dirksen acknowledged that the legislation included a trigger that would automatically prohibit discriminatory tests in states where registration was low.

  Everyone told the president he had to make a public statement about the need for voting rights legislation. “The public knows you are for the enforcement of civil rights. The Deep South knows it; that is why it went for Goldwater,” Harry McPherson wrote to the president. The public, he added, had the “deepest sense of outrage” it had ever felt on civil rights. Even the White House counsel Abe Fortas, he said, who was a “reasonable man,” now supported sending troops into Selma. McPherson felt that the “public wants you to express your own, present, sense of outrage.”105

  The president set up a meeting with the congressional leadership to discuss the situation. He had persuaded Speaker McCormack to extend him an “impromptu” invitation to appear before a joint session of Congress, the first of its kind since 1946. His personal appearance before Congress would indicate this was a national emergency, which was the only other time such speeches were made, except for the State of the Union address. Though Dirksen warned that they should not create a situation where opponents could say that the president “scared” Congress into passing a bill, the Senate minority leader concurred that the public needed to hear about what the government was going to do about the situation they were seeing.106

  On March 15, Johnson appeared before a joint session of Congress to deliver a historic speech on voting rights. The chamber was filled with an overflow crowd of members lined up in the aisles. The speech began at 9:00 p.m. The legislators listened attentively to every single word, waiting to hear how the president would rally the nation behind this bill. Their first applause would not come until five minutes into the speech, after which they would not stop cheering as they interrupted him with thirty-nine ovations.107

  Johnson placed Selma within a long struggle for freedom that began with the American Revolution. He spoke about “man’s unending search for freedom” that had been on display in Lexington and Concord, at Appomattox, and now in Selma, Alabama. Johnson said that the time had come to act. “This time, on this issue, there must be no delay, no hesitation and no compromise with our purpose.” The president argued that no “constitutional issue” was involved, because “the command of the Constitution is plain. There is no moral issue. It is wrong—deadly wrong—to deny any of your fellow Americans the right to vote in this country. There is no issue of States rights or national rights. There is only the struggle for human rights.”

  Johnson, who called African Americans the heroes of this struggle, ended with a dramatic proclamation. Embracing the rhetoric of the civil rights movement, he declared, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And, we shall overcome.”

  As Johnson uttered the rallying cry of a civil rights movement that was still seen as radical in the eyes of many white Americans living in the South, Richard Goodwin recalled, “There was an instant of silence, the gradually apprehended realization that the president has proclaimed, adopted as his own rallying cry, the anthem of black protest, the hymn of a hundred embattled black marchers. Seventy-seven-year-old Congressman Manny Celler—a lifetime of vigorous, often futile, fights for freedom behind him—leaped to his feet, cheering as wildly as a schoolboy at his first high school football game. Others quickly followed. In seconds almost the entire chamber—floor and gallery together—was standing; applauding . . . some stamping their feet. Tears rolled down the cheeks of Senator Mansfield of Montana. Senator Ellender of Louisiana slumped in his seat.”108

  The president sent his proposal to Congress on March 17 based on what Dirksen, Katzenbach, and Mansfield had agreed upon. Predicting eighty votes in the Senate, Katzenbach assured the president that the trio would be able to push back against liberals who sought to expand the scope of the bill.109 Dirksen made it clear to his colleagues and to voters that he favored the bill, so there was little doubt that southern Democrats would be unsuccessful if they attempted to mount a filibuster. Polls showed that 76 percent of the nation supported a bill. Even 49 percent of the white southerners polled between March 18 and March 25 stated that they were in favor of legislation.110

  The pressure from the grass roots did not abate. The same day Johnson sent his proposal to Congress, Judge Johnson issued a decision stipulating that another march in Selma could move forward and that state and local police authorities had a responsibility to protect the marchers. On March 21, a small group that included King and John Lewis started another march from Selma to Montgomery that lasted four days. President Johnson, who didn’t trust Wallace to keep the peace, federalized the Alabama National Guard and sent in federal marshals to maintain order. By the time the protesters gathered for a rally on their final day in Montgomery, there were almost twenty-five thousand of them, including numerous celebrities. The media captured in vivid detail the entire dramatic event.

  Back in Washington, the floor debate in the Senate took some unexpected turns. Whereas the biggest challenge for Johnson with civil rights in 1964 had been the conservative coalition, now the main challenge emanated from liberals who wanted more, believing this would be their best opportunity ever to obtain a sweeping measure (just as with Medicare). Massachusetts’s senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy, the youngest brother of the deceased president, pushed for an amendment that would create a national prohibition on the use of poll taxes in federal, state, and local elections. On January 23, 1964, the states had already ratified the Twenty-fourth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1962, which banned the poll tax in federal elections. Only four states—Alabama, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia—still collected a poll tax, though provisions allowing poll taxes remained on the books of twenty-seven state and local governments.111 But liberals now wanted Congress to ban the use of poll taxes in state and local elections as well. The reason the poll tax angered activists, besides the fact that it symbolized the era when southerners had overturned Reconstruction, was that it was still imposed in local elections; Sheriff Clark was elected by voters who paid a poll tax. Congress, said Roy Wilkins, needed to “sweep the last vestiges of voting discrimination into the sea.”112

  The Justice Department strongly opposed Kennedy’s proposal. Katzenbach argued that including a federal ban on poll taxes, which could not be easily categorized as a device that was explicitly meant to discriminate on the basis of race—poor whites were also affected, and poll taxes were imposed in states where very few African Americans lived—could open the legislation up to constitutional challenge down the road. Johnson told liberals in numerous conversations that he didn’t like the poll tax either but that every lawyer had agreed that prohibiting these mechanisms through legislation was unconstitutional.

  Senator Ted Kennedy, considered a lightweight compared with his brothers, directed an unexpectedly effective campaign push for the poll tax amendment, with the support of his brother Robert, the recently elected New York senator, and almost succeeded. Ted Kennedy felt it was essential to eliminate the “oldest and most infamous of the barriers to voting in the South.”113 The Kennedy brothers proved to be an effective team. Ted tried to persuade colleagues by bombarding them with legal arguments from some top Harvard scholars who disagreed with Katzenbach. Robert relied on tougher tactics, directly warning wavering liberal senators that he would consider their vote on the poll tax amendment to be a statement as to how they felt about him and that if he was ever in the White House—which seemed quite possible to many Democrats who believed he would challenge Johnson in the 1968 primaries and stood a good chance of winning—he would not forget how they voted.114

  In the end, senators rejected the amendment by a narrow vote of 49 to 45. Kennedy signed on to the legislation, into which a compromise provision, designed by Mansfield and Dirksen, had
been added, which allowed the attorney general to investigate the use of poll taxes in state and local elections if a specified number of complaints were made.

  A few southern Democrats and conservative Republicans—led by Bourke Hickenlooper, who was still aiming to supplant the ailing Dirksen as leader of the Senate Republicans—also chimed in with proposed amendments that aimed to weaken the legislation. But they didn’t have much fuel in their tank. Senator Russell, the mastermind of the southern caucus, was absent for most of the discussion, himself in treatment in the Walter Reed Hospital for a severe attack of emphysema. As E. W. Kenworthy wrote in the New York Times, “Southerners themselves have always recognized that, of all discriminations practiced against the Negro, the denial of his right to vote was the least defensible . . . Although the Southerners had protested bitterly through the debate that the bill was unconstitutional and that it was particularized and punitive legislation, many gave the impression they were not reluctant to have the issue settled.”115

  The filibuster against the Voting Rights Act, which went on for twenty-four days, was brief in comparison to the sixty-day filibuster in 1964 and was primarily theater. Mansfield allowed southerners to make their statements, and their dramatic last stand, so they could demonstrate to their constituents that they understood and shared their opposition to the bill. He didn’t want to destroy the southerners; he knew that when Congress moved beyond civil rights issues, their votes could be useful to the Democratic Party.

  The Senate voted for cloture by 70 to 30 on May 25 and then passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965 by 77 to 19. Thirty Republicans voted in favor of the bill; the only two GOP dissenters were the southerners Strom Thurmond and John Tower. The conservative Republicans Bourke Hickenlooper, Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, and Wyoming’s Milward Simpson, all of whom had voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, voted in favor of voting rights. The southern Democrats too were split. Tennessee’s Al Gore and Ross Bass and Texas’s Ralph Yarborough broke with their colleagues and changed their votes of the previous year. The conservative coalition had finally splintered on the rock of civil rights.

  While the Senate was finishing its deliberations, so was the House, where the forces of liberalism were even stronger in their demands. The majority leader, Carl Albert, reported that in the Democratic Study Group, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, and the House Judiciary Committee there was a strong consensus that the bill should include a ban on the poll tax.116 The Judiciary Committee filed its report on the Voting Rights Act on June 1 and included the prohibition the Senate had voted down. Congressman Celler rejected the idea that the poll tax ban threatened the bill and dismissed the constitutional arguments against taking bolder action. Although Judge Smith tried to hold up the bill in the Rules Committee, warning that “many Communists, subversives, fellow travelers, and others of doubtful loyalty to their country have attached themselves to this movement,” Celler used the threat of the twenty-one-day rule to force Smith to let the committee vote on the bill.117 Johnson warned Martin Luther King that time was precious and asked him, Farmer, Young, and others to come to Washington to speak with McCormack and Mansfield and “tell ’em what you want them to do.”118 In this case, the civil rights forces were divided. King didn’t think it was worth endangering the bill over the amendment, but there were enough civil rights leaders and liberal Democrats in the House who were saying something very different. As a result, the administration’s proposal, with a prohibition on all poll taxes tacked onto it, sailed through the House on July 9 by 333 to 85.

  Because there were two versions of the legislation, House and Senate conferees had to meet to reach a deal. “If the . . . [voting rights debate] drags on in Congress, you’ll see demonstrations on a level you have never seen before,” King warned.119 But Johnson prevailed. The conference committee eliminated the poll tax ban and retained the provision that provided for federal examiners. In the beginning of August, the House passed the conference report 328 to 74, and the Senate passed the measure 79 to 18.

  The final legislation contained almost everything that was in the deal reached by Dirksen and Johnson before the congressional deliberations began, including the automatic trigger that would require certain states to end discriminatory tests for voting and would enforce this by empowering the federal government to send examiners to register voters and monitor the polls. The bill also included the preclearance provision that required southern states to gain approval for any changes to their voting processes, with the agreed-to qualification that a three-judge federal district court in Washington had the power to free southern states from the restrictions if there was clear evidence that racial discrimination had not occurred for at least five years. Finally, the legislation created criminal penalties for any officials found to be infringing on voting rights.

  On August 6, Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Before the signing ceremony, he spoke to a crowd of colleagues, civil rights leaders, and reporters in the Capitol Rotunda. “Today is a triumph for freedom as huge as any victory that has ever been won on any battlefield . . . Today the Negro story and the American story fuse and blend . . . Under this act,” he said, “if any county in the nation does not want Federal intervention, it need only open its polling places to all of its people.” He held the actual signing ceremony in the President’s Room near the Senate chamber on a green-baize-covered walnut desk in the very place where President Abraham Lincoln, on the same date in 1861, had signed legislation that freed slaves whom the Confederacy had impressed into military service in the Civil War. This was the desk on which Johnson had signed the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 when he was the Senate majority leader. Following the ceremony, Johnson handed the first pen to Hubert Humphrey and the second to Senator Dirksen, thanking the Republican leader for his role in getting the Voting Rights Act passed.

  The effects of the legislation were immediate. Federal examiners were in place in Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi only four days after Johnson signed the law. By the end of August, they had listed 27,463 people who had been prevented from voting. It took only a few months before almost 250,000 new African Americans voters were registered.120

  THE CONGRESSIONAL TREATMENT

  The momentous education, health-care, and voting rights bills were just a few of the laws Congress passed in the first session of the “Fabulous Eighty-ninth Congress,” as Johnson liked to call it. The Immigration and Nationality Act ended the stringent quota system that had been instituted during the height of nativist sentiment in the 1920s. The Appalachian Development Act allocated federal funds to build a highway that would provide public jobs and generate economic development in one of the most economically depressed regions in the country. The Maine senator Ed Muskie’s pet project, the Water Quality Act, set national standards on water and created the Water Pollution Control Administration to monitor them. Congress passed 89 of the 115 proposals that the president had sent it.121 Speaker McCormack boasted, “It is the Congress of accomplished hopes. It is the Congress of realized dreams.”122 Johnson’s approval rating fluctuated between a stunning 60 percent and 70 percent throughout the year.

  Johnson’s insights and actions, his legislative experience, and his tactics had been crucial in getting the legislation passed. According to the reporter Richard Strout, “Rarely has one man so dominated Washington as President Johnson now does . . . Johnson is like an orchestra leader; a beachmaster on an invasion front, a traffic-control superintendent at a busy railroad front.”123

  In a different political environment, however, all Johnson’s vaunted methods probably would not have been enough to get so much important legislation passed. It took the huge House and Senate majorities the recent election had created, with their sizable liberal blocs, and the substantial reduction in the strength of the conservative coalition. The evisceration of Barry Goldwater had made Republicans more hesitant to embrace the principles of conservatism and more willing to accede to
Johnson’s aims. Even without Republican support, many of Johnson’s bills had strong majorities in the House and the supermajority of votes required to end filibusters in the Senate. In this environment, conservative committee chairs had little ability or incentive to obstruct bills; rules changes had abridged their power, and there was a good chance they would lose no matter what they tried to do. With so many liberals in both chambers, at least until the next election, Johnson pushed to pass legislation he knew would be impossible in other years. As Senator Ted Kennedy said of immigration reform, “It’s really amazing, a year ago I doubt the bill would have had a chance. This time it was easy.”124 The civil rights movement forced voting rights onto Johnson’s agenda at the most fertile time in thirty years for harvesting liberal legislation in Congress.

  Johnson was well aware that despite his legislative successes, there were serious threats to his Great Society. There was growing civil unrest in the cities—the summer of 1965 saw a bloody six-day riot in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, provoked by residents’ frustration with police brutality—that threatened to exacerbate white backlash against civil rights legislation and other programs perceived by some whites as race related. There would be more riots that would nurture a view of the Great Society as a cause of rather than a solution to urban violence. The Community Action Program had been causing problems in solidly Democratic northern cities; some mayors felt that unelected activists were gaining too much control over federal funds from the Economic Opportunity Act, particularly when the activists criticized the Democratic machines for failing to do enough to solve the problems of the poor. In San Francisco, left-wing activists played a prominent role in CAP. In Chicago, the Woodlawn Organization, a branch of the radical activist Saul Alinsky’s network, obtained money directly from the OEO when the city’s committee, controlled by allies of Mayor Richard Daley, rejected their proposals.125