by Risen, Clay
But here was another problem. On an uncontroversial matter, the process would be fairly straightforward: assuming the president’s party is in control of Congress, he would get the chairman of the relevant committee to sponsor the bill. But in this case, that man was James Eastland of Mississippi, the head of the Judiciary Committee and an implacable segregationist. So Mansfield would have to do it himself.
Mansfield, however, had already decided that his best position was one of nonpartisan impartiality, the better to win over Republicans and, perhaps, a bravely errant Southerner (Ted Sorensen, in a June 14 memo to the president, had wondered if “any Southerner be persuaded to be a ‘Vandenberg’?”—a reference to the Michigan Republican senator who had broken ranks with his party’s isolationist wing to help create the United Nations). Therefore, Mansfield, through McPherson, insisted that he introduce the bill in conjunction with Everett Dirksen, the Senate minority leader.2
This presented a third problem. Dirksen supported civil rights legislation—except Title II, the public accommodations provision and the heart of the bill. He had said as much at a bipartisan leadership meeting at the White House on June 13.
The solution, Mansfield and his lieutenants decided, was to split the bill into two parts, one containing everything except Title II and another comprised solely of Title II. Mansfield was so sensitive to Dirksen’s position, and so convinced that Dirksen held the key to the bill’s success, that he refused White House entreaties to sponsor the Title II bill himself. “My sponsorship of the public accommodations portion of the legislation may well jeopardize passage of the remainder of the legislation, which, even in itself, is not by any means assured of 67 votes at this point,” Mansfield wrote in a pointed memo to the president. In the end, the majority leader and the president compromised. Mansfield introduced the administration’s bill, then cosponsored a version of the same bill, minus Title II, with Dirksen. Finally, Mansfield enlisted Washington’s Warren Magnuson, who had risen from an itinerant farmhand to become one of the Senate’s most respected liberals, to introduce the Title II–only bill.3
While the three Senate staffers hashed out Mansfield’s strategy, a mile away at the White House the Kennedy team kept busy with the president’s interminable series of interest group meetings. On June 13 he met with some two hundred labor leaders. On June 17 he met with an equally large number of religious leaders, drawn from an ecumenical roster—rabbis, Catholic priests, Southern Baptists, black preachers. The latter meeting took an awkward turn when Kennedy asked for comments and was confronted by the Reverend Albert Garner of Lakeland, Florida, the president of the ultraconservative American Baptist Association. “Our people religiously feel with moral convictions that racial integration that would lead to intermarriage is against the will of their creator,” Garner said. Kennedy was caught by surprise; rather than push back, he dodged, saying, “I think the question of intermarriage is really a question removed from what we are concerned with. That is a matter for the individuals involved.” Still, the meeting was a success, if only because Kennedy used the occasion to announce the creation of a religious advisory committee, under the leadership of J. Irwin Miller, the Indiana industrialist and National Council of Churches chairman.4
Meanwhile, halfway between the White House and Capitol Hill, the Justice Department drafting team was continuing to rework the bill. Though its core parts were in place, two more titles were added after Kennedy’s June 11 speech. The first was an idea that had been floating around Congress since the late 1950s: a federal civil rights mediation service, which would parachute into nascent trouble spots before they got out of hand. The addition was partly political. It was thought that Southern Democrats would support a plank that put voluntary, nonbinding mediation between Jim Crow businesses and the hard force of federal law.5
The other plank was equally political but aimed at the other end of the spectrum. For years now, Representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr. of Harlem, a fiery and controversial black politician, had appended “Powell amendments”—requirements that whatever the program was, it could not be implemented in a discriminatory manner—to various pieces of domestic legislation, in essence turning otherwise innocuous bills into civil rights proposals, which Southern Democrats would then turn on. The amendments made for good protest theater, but the consequence was a lot of very angry, otherwise pro-civil-rights legislators, who saw their bills sandbagged—and there was little they could say in response, lest they be tarred as anti-civil-rights. Several of them came to Robert Kennedy and Norbert Schlei demanding that they add a universal Powell amendment to the bill, applying a nondiscrimination requirement to all federal programs, so that Powell would finally shut up.6
At first Kennedy, afraid of overloading the bill, was resistant, even when Representative James O’Hara of Missouri, a liberal ally, passed him a bill that he had already drafted to create just such a requirement. But on the weekend before the bill was introduced, Kennedy called O’Hara at home and asked him to draft a Powell plank to add to the bill. O’Hara called his secretary and had her meet him at his office, where he dictated a new version and had it in the attorney general’s hands by 1:00 p.m. This new plank, which came to be known as Title VI, gave the president the power to cut off funds to a state or local program that used them in a discriminatory manner.7
There was also an extensive discussion over whether to add something about jobs—an FEPC, or else a training and public works title. But the sense inside the drafting room was that such a title would be a step too far for a bill that was already an enormous gamble. If the Republicans were wary of a bill banning discrimination in public accommodations—a law that was limited to the South, where the Democrats held sway—how would they feel about a bill that reached into the offices of their corporate allies and told them how to run their hiring practices? And yet fair employment had been a central demand of the civil rights movement for decades; it was impossible not to do something. “We were all conscious of the fact that some kind of provisions with respect to fair employment were terribly important and also in the almost, I think actually unanimous opinion of everyone who was involved in this, impossible to enact,” recalled Nicholas Katzenbach. And so, at the last minute, another compromise was reached: Kennedy would explicitly endorse FEPC legislation that was about to be taken up by the House Education and Labor Committee and sponsored by James Roosevelt, a liberal California representative (and son of Franklin Roosevelt). The drafters hoped such a gesture would pacify civil rights groups, though as Katzenbach admitted, “it was window dressing.”8
There was a more contentious debate over whether to include a program of vocational training and, even, public jobs for millions of unemployed African Americans. Blacks had been by and large excluded from the public works programs of the New Deal, and many veteran New Deal liberals—Lyndon Johnson, for one—saw both a chance to right that wrong and an opportunity to take otherwise idle workers off the street. One such advocate was G. Mennen Williams, a former Michigan governor who was now the assistant secretary of state for African affairs (an heir to the Mennen personal care products fortune, Williams was known to friends and reporters as Soapy). In a memo to Sorensen on June 15, Williams predicted a wave of violence that summer without the “immediate institution of public works and, if necessary, work relief measures, to help absorb the unemployed and school leavers.”9
Williams’s memo keyed into a complex discussion that had been going on for months within the administration. Kennedy was not a New Deal liberal; he preferred expansionary tax and trade policies over blunter, more direct tools such as public works as the best way to boost long-term employment. Privately, though, Kennedy recognized that efforts to boost economic growth would not do much to help the most marginalized workers, at least in the next few years. In September 1961 he had won passage of the Juvenile Delinquency and Youth Offenses Control Act, which included money to develop training programs for at-risk youth. And he already had Walter Heller, the head of his Cou
ncil of Economic Advisers, working on plans for a major antipoverty bill, which he hoped to introduce in early 1964.10
As Heller’s research was demonstrating—and as several high-profile books at the time, such as Michael Harrington’s The Other America, were documenting—the poverty and jobs problem was much too large to address in an already enormous civil rights bill. Still, as late as June 18, the day before the president was to submit his bill, O’Brien and Sorensen wrote a memo to Kennedy urging him, during a final review of the bill with congressional leaders, to discuss the possibility of Senators Mansfield and Dirksen cosponsoring a jobs program to be considered parallel to the civil rights bill. News of such conversations leaked to the press, who reported that Kennedy was planning a “?‘huge’ job training and vocational education to his civil rights legislative request”—according to Senator Hubert Humphrey, with a price tag of up to $1 billion.11
Even as the drafting process advanced, the Department of Justice team was plotting its strategy for getting the bill through Congress. The need to win over Republicans was clear—but so, too, was the need to mollify liberals, who were likely to push back hard on a bill that left out both Title III and FEPC. On June 14, Burke Marshall sat down with members of the Democratic Study Group, a collection of liberal congressmen created in 1959 to organize and amplify their often-marginalized voices in an institution run by hardheaded realists like Lyndon Johnson and Sam Rayburn. Marshall was only partly successful in persuading them to back the bill; they agreed to support the newly added Title VI, the withholding of funds, but the only leader to come out in support of the bill in its entirety was Representative Richard Bolling of Missouri.12
Robert Kennedy, at a later meeting with the group, was no more successful. The DSG wanted to pursue the “strong-weak” strategy that had produced successful legislation in 1957 and 1960: load up a bill in the House with all sorts of seemingly valuable planks, then use all but a few of them as trading chips as it passes through the two chambers, picking off key votes along the way by agreeing to drop or water down particular planks. But the administration did not trust the liberals; it worried that liberals, especially among Republicans, would allow the bill to sink, then blame the administration. Katzenbach, who was at the meeting with Kennedy, told the DSG members: “We needed a law with a workable public accommodations section, not a Christmas tree that would never become law.” Again Bolling came around, but otherwise, Katzenbach said, it was a “long, somewhat inconclusive conversation.”13
When Soapy Williams sat down to write his memo about impending urban violence to Sorensen, he was not speculating—in the days after Medgar Evers’s murder, nearly forty cities saw major demonstrations. Indeed, the slaying caught the nation’s attention like no single civil rights murder since the lynching of Emmett Till eight years earlier. Whites were terrified, blacks were galvanized. On June 12, nearly four hundred people marched against segregation in Savannah, Georgia, telling the mayor he had forty-four hours “to give us our freedom.” Five were injured that same day during a riot in Cambridge, Maryland, while three were hurt at a protest at a hospital construction site in Harlem. In Boston on June 11, forty protesters packed into a school board meeting room to call for an end to de facto school segregation in the city, while in Los Angeles on June 12, a burning pot of oil was thrown through a store window during the third day of protests against discrimination in that city.14
Things were particularly tumultuous in Washington. On June 14, thousands of marchers, backed by the NAACP, crowded in Lafayette Square, just north of the White House, holding signs reading “Whose Side Are You On?” and “Freedom Now!” Then they marched down Pennsylvania Avenue, heckled along the way by Nazis wearing gorilla suits. The marchers ignored them. Outside the District of Columbia building, city commissioner Walter Tobriner promised a crowd of hundreds that the city would enact a fair housing law “no later than this session.” He also promised to pursue a fair employment law. “Waiting as long as you have,” he said, “I, too, would be out there with you and not where I stand.” The crowd cheered.15
Crowds then gathered at the Department of Justice building, where protesters demanded to meet with the attorney general. After twenty minutes, Robert Kennedy appeared, met by boos, a few cheers, and signs reading “Let Negroes Work in the Justice Department,” “Don’t Play Politics with Human Rights,” and “Why an Almost Lily White Justice Department? It’s not Easter.” Kennedy, whom the New York Times, in its coverage of the protest, described as “smiling” but “obviously irritated,” told the crowd that there was no discrimination at the department—even though, as he well knew, only a tiny fraction of the department’s attorneys were black. “Any individual can come in here and get a job if he is qualified.” Diffidently, but bravely, he added, “I’m not going out and hire a Negro just because he’s not white.”16
The most dangerous confrontations occurred in Jackson, in the wake of Evers’s assassination. During a hundred-person march on June 13—in violation of a county court injunction against demonstrating—some eighty people were arrested and three injured, including a white professor from nearby Tougaloo College (John Salter, the same one who had been beaten by a white mob on May 28) and a fifteen-year-old girl. That afternoon Marshall received a frantic call from Thelton Henderson in Jackson. The black community was about to boil over. He told Marshall that he spoke with three black men with guns, one of whom said, “If they come up to me, I’ll shoot their brains out.”17
The next day the city granted black leaders their request for a parade permit, and on June 15 thousands attended a funeral service for Evers at the city’s Masonic temple, including Martin Luther King Jr., Roy Wilkins, and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate Ralph Bunche. Afterward, though, some five hundred people braved three-digit heat to march through downtown, surrounded by police, chanting “Shoot, shoot!” Rocks were thrown, arrests were made. It seemed that a riot could break out any minute. Just then a voice shouted, “My name is John Doar, and I am from the Department of Justice.” Out stepped the lanky Department of Justice lawyer, in shirtsleeves and a skinny black tie. Doar, who had made a specialty of dropping into racial hot spots around the Deep South, appeared seemingly from out of nowhere. “Medgar Evers would not have wanted it this way,” he shouted. Miraculously, the crowd and the police backed down.18
Evers was a veteran, and he was buried on June 19 in Arlington National Cemetery, across the Potomac River from Washington. Robert Kennedy was one of the two thousand people in attendance, but his brother stayed at the White House. President Kennedy did, however, invite Myrlie Evers and her children to the Oval Office afterward, where he posed for a photograph and gave the boys PT-109 tie clasps.19
Americans awoke on June 20 to headlines in their local newspapers announcing President Kennedy’s civil rights bill. He had submitted it, along with a lengthy message, to Congress the day before, after one last Justice Department drafting session that had Schlei, Harold Reis, and Sol Lindenbaum making last-minute adjustments until two in the morning. The message both echoed and amplified the urgency of his TV address eight days earlier. “I am proposing that Congress stay in session this year until it has enacted—preferably as a single, omnibus bill—the most responsible, reasonable and urgently needed solution” to the civil rights issue. “It will go far toward providing reasonable men with the reasonable means of meeting these problems, and it will thus help end the kind of racial strife which this nation can hardly afford.”20
But while Kennedy’s June 11 speech focused on the moral imperative of action, his message to Congress was couched in a concern over racial violence and disorder—reflecting the Evers murder, the nationwide protests, and the general fear that things would only get worse in the summer months. Tellingly, the bill did the same: despite extensive debate during the drafting period, there was nothing about employment, nothing about job training; the bill’s planks focused exclusively on the pressing demands of demonstrators, and Southern demonstrators in particular. It
was designed to have an immediate, concrete impact on the issues of the moment in the South, and leave for later the long-term problems facing black Americans in the rest of the country.
Kennedy’s bill, which became known as H.R. 7152, had seven titles. Three of them were holdovers from his earlier civil rights bill: a provision on voting, including federal referees, expedited lawsuits, uniform registration standards, and an assumption that anyone with a sixth-grade education was literate enough to vote; technical and financial assistance for school desegregation; and renewal of the Civil Rights Commission.
The most significant new title was the ban on discrimination in public accommodations, which it specified as hotels, restaurants, “places of amusement,” and retail stores. Most notably, the bill did not include a business size cutoff, an idea that had been bandied about in the early planning sessions as a way to draw in conservative Republicans. Enforcement of the title would depend on the aggrieved individual, who could file for a court order against an establishment if he or she felt discriminated against; if the owner refused to abide by the order, and a further step involving a government mediator failed, the complainant could file a lawsuit, which the attorney general could join. Equal access, Kennedy said in his message, “seems to me to be an elementary right. Its denial is an arbitrary indignity that no American in 1963 should have to endure.”
The bill also added to the education title by creating a “Title III for schools,” which allowed the attorney general to initiate or intervene in suits against school segregation. Until then, the cost of such suits had to be borne completely by individuals—a daunting task for the average black family in the South. The bill would also predicate technical and financial assistance on the existence of desegregation plans; in other words, it created a financial incentive for school districts that might otherwise be on the fence about desegregation to take the plunge.