The Fierce Urgency of Now

by Julian E. Zelizer

  So, despite the success of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Congress had done nothing to end the widespread discrimination in housing. African Americans were still at the mercy of a complex network of real estate agents, property developers, and homeowners who wanted them excluded from most neighborhoods.

  President Johnson wanted to pass legislation that would prohibit discrimination against African Americans who had enough money to buy or rent a home, no matter what neighborhood the dwelling was in. The law would ensure that they could make the deal or get the lease regardless of the color of their skin; government and private lending institutions would be required to provide equal financial assistance to African Americans and to eliminate redlining and all other practices that resulted in residential segregation. The president saw this as an essential building block of the Great Society: “Employment is often dependent on education, education on neighborhood schools and housing, housing on income, income on employment. We have learned by now the folly of looking for any single crucial link in the chain that binds the ghetto. All the links—poverty, lack of education, underemployment and now discrimination in housing—must be attacked together.”

  Given how entrenched residential discrimination was throughout the nation, the prospects for passing President Johnson’s third civil rights bill were slim. Unlike the other two civil rights bills Congress had passed, the housing provision directly affected northern Democrats who had been integral to the liberal coalition and midwestern Republicans who had partnered with the president in 1964 and 1965. When Johnson’s commitment to racial justice had angered southern Democrats, he was compensated with increased support in northern states. The reverse would not be true. Senator Sam Ervin, who had long been an enemy of civil rights, said, “For the first time we have a bill which proposes that other than Southern oxen to be gored.”19

  Johnson knew that many white working- and middle-class Democrats in northern cities would see an end to segregated housing as a threat to their property values and their local schools. “The phrase open housing is hurling a pack of dynamite with the fuse sizzling,” one African American writer said.20 Polls showed that a majority of Americans did not support legislation that guaranteed the right of African Americans to buy a house in any neighborhood.21

  Ending housing discrimination, the special assistant Sherwin Markman wrote to the president, was a “loser in Congress.”22 In both the House and the Senate, there was resistance to tackling race relations so close to the midterm elections, especially after members had already been asked to cast many controversial votes. Many representatives who had played key roles in the success of earlier civil rights bills, Attorney General Katzenbach reported, were “very cool” this time around.23

  Johnson was not deterred by the lack of enthusiasm. On April 28, 1966, he sent Congress his proposal for an omnibus bill that included a provision to end housing discrimination—Title IV, which covered all rentals and sales of new and existing homes and prohibited an owner from refusing to enter into an agreement on the basis of the race of the person seeking to inhabit a property—and also provisions to end discrimination in the selection of juries, to empower the attorney general to initiate desegregation suits in education and public accommodations, and to provide more protection for civil rights workers.

  Southerners didn’t like the provisions dealing with juries and education, but the bill wasn’t going to get their votes anyway. What mattered was how intense the negative response to the housing provisions would be from northerners.

  The first indication came from the midwestern Republicans who had reliably partnered with Johnson on civil rights in 1964 and 1965. Republican leaders always began negotiations by expressing skepticism, no matter what the proposal was, with the aim of increasing their leverage over specific provisions in a bill, but this time their staunch objections to Title IV seemed genuine. Senator Dirksen, who was up for reelection in 1968, immediately declared that the proposal was unconstitutional and that it would not pass. “If you can tell me what in interstate commerce is involved about selling a house fixed on soil or what federal jurisdiction there is, I’ll eat the chimney on the house,” Dirksen said. As members of the southern caucus huddled in their quarters to decide on their strategy, Dirksen made it clear that he would not support cloture.24 His opposition was a huge problem because, as Bryce Harlow, a veteran political adviser and lobbyist, explained, “the entire apparatus can be summed up in one word—Dirksen.”25 Congressman William McCulloch, the other key player on the Republican civil rights team, announced that the country was not prepared for a third civil rights bill of this magnitude.26 What McCulloch really meant but could not say explicitly was that the housing provision in the civil rights bill was unacceptable because it directly threatened the material interests of northern constituencies, including his own.

  The real estate industry mobilized against the legislation in a lobbying blitz that matched the intensity of the AMA’s vicious attacks on Medicare. In the case of Medicare the threat was socialized medicine; in the case of housing the threat was to destroy the financial security of families. Home builders and realtors had no stomach for federal regulations that would alter the property arrangements they had developed to protect white consumers from African Americans who wanted to live among them. The last thing they wanted was legislation that would cause housing prices to fall in forcibly integrated neighborhoods. Testifying before Congress, representatives of the real estate industry said they opposed granting the federal government more power to regulate home contracts and did not think “forcing” African Americans to live in white communities was the best path toward racial integration. “We suggest that this is not cause for rejoicing on the part of more than 30 million home owners,” Alan Emlen of the National Association of Real Estate Boards said, “each of whom must have assumed that their right to own property carries with it the right to dispose of it to the persons of their choice.”27 The National Association of Real Estate Brokers (NAREB) flooded local communities throughout the North with propaganda about how the legislation would destroy their most cherished investment and bring crime, and possibly incidents like those in Watts, to their communities. Many suburbanites accepted these principles, that a “man’s home is his castle” and individuals have the right to do as they wish with their property. As one California housewife, who was married to a real estate agent, said, “Watts is no concern of mine. It’s none of my business and should be none of my Congressman’s business. Let the Watts Congressman worry about Watts; my Congressman should worry about me and my neighbors.”28

  The lobby was working well. Congressional mail was arriving in legislators’ offices, with about a hundred opponents for every one supporter by the start of summer.29 The situation was so volatile that even one of the most liberal subcommittees of Judiciary, one of the most liberal committees in the entire House, couldn’t make any progress on Title IV. Chairman Celler eventually reported the bill to the full committee without making any recommendations about Title IV. The prospects for the bill in the full committee did not seem good.

  The bill might have died there had not Charles McC. Mathias of Maryland proposed a compromise. Mathias was a Republican and a Yale Law School graduate who had been a strong supporter of civil rights since his election to the House in 1960.30 His proposal was to limit the range of housing and rental stock that the new law would cover in order to ensure that at least some regulations passed. His plan exempted the sale of owner-occupied homes where real estate agents were not used in the sale—this provision became known as the Mrs. Murphy rule—and smaller buildings that were occupied by owners with rooms for rent. Everyone else in the real estate business, including mortgage lenders, builders, realtors, and brokers, would be bound by the law that banned discrimination in the sale or rental of property on the basis of race. If proponents of the legislation could say they were leaving individual owners alone, Mathias believed there was a
better chance of moving the bill through the House. McCulloch liked the proposal and urged his colleague to speak with Celler. On June 24, Mathias and McCulloch discussed the proposal with Celler and Katzenbach. All agreed it might work.

  As soon as the press started to report on the Mathias compromise, civil rights leaders understood that it would mean that many of the nation’s homes, including a majority of those in the suburbs, would not fall under the regulations. They expressed their displeasure with the revision, though they realized that the chances of passing the original proposal were nil.

  Meanwhile, Mathias tried to rally other Republicans behind his compromise. He warned that staunch and public Republican opposition would enable Democrats to claim they were once again the party of civil rights. Even if Republicans could win support among white working-class northern voters—which was far from a sure bet, because many of these voters remained deeply appreciative of New Deal and Great Society programs that provided them with economic relief and opportunity—African Americans would continue to defect from the party of Lincoln. If Democrats cobbled together support for a bill, no matter how watered-down it might be, the GOP would supplant the Dixiecrats as the chief opponents of racial progress. Mathias received encouragement from three moderate Republican governors—Nelson Rockefeller of New York, George Romney of Michigan, and Bill Scranton of Pennsylvania—and New York’s liberal Republican mayor, John Lindsay.

  When the Judiciary Committee first voted on the bill on June 28, a majority rejected the Mathias amendment, though a majority also rejected a proposal to eliminate Title IV from the bill. The following day, the committee voted on a revised version of Mathias’s amendment that exempted land that was to be sold for housing development, excluded certain sales by religious and educational institutions, and expanded the original exemption from one- to four-family homes. In the final hours, the Maryland congressman had done a good job selling his plan behind closed doors. The committee passed Mathias’s amendment 21 to 13. Four Republicans voted in favor of the final bill; 6 Democrats voted no, including the Michigan Democrat John Conyers, who would become a founder of the Congressional Black Caucus in 1969. Conyers believed the revised Mathias compromise would render the program ineffective.31

  Sitting in his oversize leather chair, Emanuel Celler, who was usually the person in the room demanding the boldest legislative proposals, told reporters that the compromise was essential because “sometimes you’ve got to stretch your feet according to the blanket.”32

  Members of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights gathered to decide whether or not to support the bill. Most of them criticized the Mathias amendment for severely weakening the legislation, but finally most of them said either they would support the compromise, which would help the Democratic leadership capture Republican votes in the Senate, or they would remain silent.33

  The situation on the House floor was volatile. The National Association of Real Estate Brokers sent out a secret bulletin imploring its members to tell representatives to reject the compromise. The Washington office of the NAREB urged every local branch to “telephone, wire or write [its] Representative in the House to vote to strike Title IV [the housing provision] from the bill.”34

  The political situation in the North continued to deteriorate. President Johnson watched nervously as the tensions within Democratic constituencies worsened throughout the summer, with the midterms just a few months away. Civil rights activists, calling for fair housing and improved conditions in the cities, confronted police and white mobs in the streets. The opposition to fair housing in states outside the South was much more ferocious than Johnson had anticipated it would be, and he had expected ferocious opposition. Many working- and middle-class Democrats saw the urban street clashes as disorganized mob violence, quite different from the scenes they had watched in 1964 and 1965 of orderly, peaceful men, women, and children under attack from police with fire hoses and snarling dogs. It was one thing for liberal northern Democrats to see police clashing with African American demonstrators in Birmingham, quite another thing to see King and other civil rights leaders marching in Chicago and the surrounding suburbs to demand fair housing.

  “We will march until every white man in the area votes—Republican,” announced the civil rights activist James Bevel.35 In one of the Chicago marches, white hecklers violently attacked the African American protesters. “I wish I were an Alabama trooper,” chanted some of the whites. “Oh, how happy I would be, for if I were an Alabama trooper, then I could kill niggers legally.”36 In Waukegan, Illinois, a city of about forty thousand people located forty miles from Chicago, rioting lasted three nights. In a two-square-mile area, eighty were arrested and many were injured. Six people returning from church were burned after someone threw a gasoline bomb into their car. The rioting took place just five blocks from a residence where the president’s daughter Luci Johnson Nugent was visiting for the weekend. The city’s pugnacious mayor, Robert Sabonjian, blamed the unrest on “scums, animals, winos, and junkies” whose actions were instigated by radical agitators. The mayor invoked an emergency curfew to reestablish the peace.37 In Dayton, Ohio, violence erupted after a thirty-nine-year-old African American named Lester Mitchell was killed outside his house by three white men in a pickup truck.

  The context of these confrontations had also changed because of a real split in the civil rights leadership. New young leaders, frustrated with the limitations of what Congress had achieved and what King and other senior figures were prepared to ask for, were using much bolder rhetoric about how to achieve racial progress—rhetoric that scared many white Democrats. In June 1966, Stokely Carmichael, the new leader of SNCC, on a march to register African American voters, was arrested in Greenwood, Mississippi. Addressing a crowd after being released, Carmichael warned that he would not return to jail. He said, “We want black power!” His supporters responded that they wanted black power too. The speech, when it was broadcast on all the TV news programs, shocked and stirred Americans who were hearing such rhetoric for the first time. “We have to raise questions about whether or not we do need new types of political institutions in this country,” Carmichael later said in a different speech, “and we in SNCC maintain that we need them now. We need new political institutions in this country. Any time—any time Lyndon Baines Johnson can head a Party which has in it Bobby Kennedy, Wayne Morse, Eastland, Wallace, and all those other supposed-to-be-liberal cats, there’s something wrong with that Party.” Opponents of the fair housing legislation connected the clashes in the cities to the black power movement; they suggested that radical leaders were encouraging protesters to be extreme in their demands and their tactics.

  The housing bill exacerbated racial tension that already existed in some cities over the Community Action Program’s funding of so-called radical activists who attacked mayors and Democratic machines. Representative Roman Pucinski warned that civil rights activists were now undermining support for the party and destroying entire neighborhoods.38 “Go into Chicago today in any home, any bar, any barber shop,” said Pucinski, a labor-backed Democrat who had supported the civil rights bills in 1964 and 1965 and who endorsed Mathias’s compromises on the housing provision, “and you will find people are not talking about Vietnam or rising prices or prosperity. They are talking about Martin Luther King and how they [African Americans] are moving in on us and what’s going to happen to our neighborhoods.”39 Pucinski was a seven-year congressman whose Illinois district was 99.7 percent working-class white ethnic Democrats—the other three-tenths of a percent were mostly Asian Americans. He was facing a challenge from a Republican alderman named John Hoellen, who was making open housing his central campaign theme. Hoellen had become a national poster child for the white backlash against civil rights; he had famously attacked the Wright Junior College in Chicago when some professors had assigned students to read Another Country by the African American writer James Baldwin; Hoellen deemed the book’s treatment of race relatio
ns too radical, and he persuaded the Chicago City Council Committee on Schools to condemn the decision to require that students read the book. That was child’s play compared with the way he attacked the housing bill.40 “The major issues for the 11th district voters,” Hoellen said, “involve the property rights and the community rights of almost a half-million citizens.”41 The Democrat Cecil King of California pointed out how his state had passed a fair housing law in 1963 and overturned it one year later as a result of a backlash against the policy. “This is about all a politician needs to know—regardless of his own feelings,” King explained. “And the conduct of those people in Watts hasn’t helped.”42 Freshman Democrats were most vulnerable to white backlash; many of them had been elected by traditionally Republican voters who couldn’t bear to pull the lever for Goldwater. “It’s just not worth sacrificing my political hide,” one midwestern Democrat complained. “And, particularly, since it looks like the Senate might kill it off anyway.”43

  Chicago’s mayor, Richard Daley, predicted that the open-housing protests could end up knocking out of Congress the very politicians upon whom civil rights organizations had depended for their landmark victories in 1964 and 1965. He said that Democratic congressmen who had voted for civil rights were now “getting hell at home” while “Republicans are standing on the sidelines laughing at them.” As a prime example, he pointed to Senator Paul Douglas, who was falling into a “serious trap” against Charles Percy. Douglas, an icon of liberalism, was facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from the self-made millionaire Republican who looked as if he’d been cast by Hollywood for the Senate. “He was,” Douglas recalled, “just the candidate for suburbia and middle-class youth: a kind of Horatio Alger hero in a Brooks Brothers suit.”44 Percy could attract moderate voters who were scared about the turbulence on the streets but not ready to side with right-wing conservatism. He was a liberal Republican who supported civil rights but could still distance himself from Johnson’s record. If the civil rights bill enabled a Republican to defeat a Democrat with the impeccable liberal credentials of Douglas, a politician who had carried the flame for civil rights, Daley said, “What do we accomplish?” He felt that the protests were “ruining the Democratic ticket for November.”45 In other states, Daley feared that the backlash could be even worse and could elect conservative Republicans.