The Bill of the Century: The Epic Battle for the Civil Rights Act

by Risen, Clay

  On July 17, Satterfield wrote a long memo explaining his vision for CCFAF—and what it would take to make it happen. It needed office space close to Capitol Hill and a research staff. It needed a list of senators vulnerable to the committee’s message, and background files on each of them. It needed to line up expert witnesses to testify at congressional hearings. It needed to prepare pamphlets and ads attacking the bill, as well as “slogans or cartoons or posters available to be placed in all forms of businesses.” It needed to hire a ghostwriting service to tailor its message to different constituencies—pamphlets that depicted the bill as a threat to unions would go out to labor leaders, while pamphlets focused on its unconstitutionality would go to lawyers. It needed mailing lists, which it could get by drawing on Satterfield’s extensive network of contacts in the legal, business, and right-wing communities. And finally, the committee needed lists of newspaper editorial pages around the country—but particularly outside the South, and above all in the Midwestern and mountain states. All he needed to make it happen, Satterfield wrote, was $100,000 for the next six months.74

  Beginning in July, Satterfield held a series of off-the-record breakfasts in Washington and Chicago to raise support for CCFAF. The first, on July 11, took place at the Mayflower Hotel. Likely out of respect for Satterfield, seventy-five representatives from the Chamber of Commerce, the American Bar Association, and other interest groups were represented, but none agreed to join the effort (the meeting in Chicago, according to John Synon, CCFAF’s staff director, was an even bigger flop—intended to address the region’s leading lawyers, it was attended only by a handful of far-right-wingers).75

  Fortunately for Satterfield, he had a few deep-pocketed and influential friends, many of them outside the South. William Loeb III, the publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union-Leader and an outspoken supporter of various right-wing causes, agreed to chair the committee, with James Kilpatrick, the editor of the Richmond, Virginia, News Leader and a frequent contributor to National Review, as vice chairman. And while CCFAF was officially funded by the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission, that agency was primarily a conduit for business interests eager to defeat the bill but wary of drawing attention to themselves. Chief among them was Wickliffe Preston Draper, a reclusive New York industrialist deeply involved in the eugenics movement. Over the course of the next year, Draper provided $215,000 of the committee’s total $300,000 budget, sent through anonymous transfers from his bank account in Manhattan to the Mississippi state treasury; the sovereignty commission then drew on treasury funds to pay for Satterfield’s work. Thanks to Draper, while the bill’s supporters may have greatly outnumbered its opponents on Capitol Hill, Satterfield’s group suddenly had a sizable war chest to do real damage to it.76

  Though President Kennedy, Celler, and Mansfield all promised publicly that the subcommittee hearings would go quickly and that the bill would be in the Senate by the end of the year, internally the president had started to apply the brakes.

  Kennedy had other priorities in Congress besides civil rights, after all, most notably the tax cut, and early on he and his team made the strategic decision to get the tax cut out of the way before the civil rights bill got to the Senate. The reasoning was simple: if civil rights came first, the Southern Democrats could essentially hold the tax cut hostage by filibustering until the 1964 election loomed, forcing the White House into making concessions; moreover, even if the civil rights bill did get through in time, the fight would likely have soured so many Southerners on the administration that they might oppose the tax cut just to spite the president. It could even be a problem for the bill in the House, should the president begin to push hard for civil rights too early.

  In a phone call with the president soon after the tax bill was introduced, Wilbur Mills of Arkansas, the Southern Democrat overseeing the bill as chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, warned, “If we are not careful we can get traded out of house and home on most any kind of legislation that comes up between now and the time the House acts on civil rights.”

  Kennedy, trying to play off Mills’s suspicion, replied, “I’m not worried about civil rights in the House. If it doesn’t pass, it doesn’t pass.” By mid-July, Celler had agreed to the administration’s demand that he slow down the pace of his committee’s hearings, and not make any enemies with the Republicans in the process.77

  Around the same time, Hubert Humphrey came to Celler with yet another reason to go slow: given that Senator Eastland chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, it was unlikely that he would be inviting the bill’s supporters to testify on the Senate versions of the bill. Therefore, Humphrey hoped that Celler could do the next best thing and hold thorough hearings in the House. Doing so would also preempt what everyone knew would be the Southerners’ first line of attack: to have the bill sent to Eastland’s committee, where it could be held indefinitely, at the chairman’s discretion. With an extensive hearing in the House, the bill’s backers in the Senate could argue that it did not need yet another spin in a committee.78

  Despite the administration’s strategy of backing the version of the bill introduced in the House, the Senate still conducted its own hearings, in two different committees: the president’s bill, sponsored by Mansfield and Warren Magnuson, went to the Commerce Committee, chaired by Magnuson himself, while the other two bills—the Dirksen-Mansfield alternative, with Title II removed, and the Title II–only version—went to Eastland’s Judiciary Committee.

  The administration’s bill was off to a bad start. Despite predictions by Senate civil rights leaders that it would immediately garner 50 cosponsors, by mid-July it had only 47—just three short of the goal, but in a game of inches, where each vote up to 67 was critical, those three made an immense, and dispiriting, difference. On June 27, Bobby Baker, the secretary of the Senate and a man second only to Lyndon Johnson in his grasp of the upper chamber, wrote a frightening memo that concluded: “It is virtually impossible to secure 51 Senators who will vote for the President’s Bill”—let alone 67. He did offer a slight hope, saying that the odds of passage were fifty-fifty if the bill’s supporters could win over Dirksen and two other key conservative Republicans, Bourke Hickenlooper of Iowa and George Aiken of Vermont. If they could not, though, the result would be disaster, not just for the bill but for Kennedy, too. “The president could very easily lose the election if we fail to secure passage of the bill.”79

  Meanwhile, in public opinion polls taken after the bill was announced, Kennedy’s popularity ratings had dipped below 50 percent for the first time since he came into office, a coincidence that many read as a sign of national public aversion to civil rights. To the White House, such polls made the Senate hearings all the more important: since they were much higher-profile than those in the House, they might feed positive coverage for the bill in the press.80

  The Commerce Committee hearings opened on July 1, and Robert Kennedy took the stand the next day. This time he was prepared, and it was a good thing: Senator Winston Prouty, a conservative Republican from Vermont, asked him such extensive and detailed questions into the constitutional background of the bill that at one point Kennedy quipped, “I feel like I’m taking my bar exams.” Strom Thurmond then grilled him for two more hours, during which the senator gave the attorney general a pocket-size Constitution and suggested he read it. “Bobby didn’t know whether to laugh or cry,” said a Justice Department aide later.81

  The next two weeks of hearings passed uneventfully, though the newspapers trumpeted a tense exchange on July 10 between two sons of the South: Thurmond, a former South Carolina governor and one of the bill’s most adamant opponents, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a Georgia farm boy who had gone on to a Rhodes Scholarship and an illustrious diplomatic career. Thurmond accused Rusk of endangering American foreign policy by testifying on behalf of a bill tinged with communist ideas and asked him what he thought of the demonstrations around the country. “If I were denied what the Negro citizen is denied,” R
usk said, “I would demonstrate.”82

  Such testimony, though, was relegated to the inside pages of most newspapers; rhetorical fireworks aside, it meant little to the substance of the bill. But the papers could not ignore the committee’s July 15 witness, Alabama governor George Wallace. Despite overseeing the crackdown on demonstrators in Birmingham and standing on the losing side of the schoolhouse door in Tuscaloosa, Wallace was enjoying a moment of national celebrity. To some he was a grotesque joke; to others he was merely a curiosity, an articulate, obviously intelligent defender of an immoral social order. To a growing number of Americans, though, he spoke to an inchoate fear of government overreach—a fear he played with great skill that day.

  “We daily see our government go to ridiculous extremes and take unheard of actions to appease the minority bloc vote leaders of this country,” Wallace charged in his opening remarks. “I resent the fawning and pawing over such people as Martin Luther King and his pro-communist friends and associates.” In the name of advancing blacks’ rights, he said, the bill “places upon all businessmen and professional people the yoke of involuntary servitude—it should be called the involuntary servitude act of 1963.” And while the bill was being hastily pushed through Congress in response to black-inspired violence, he said, if passed it would put the country “on the brink of civil warfare.” Like John Kennedy, Wallace was seemingly born for the TV camera, and he ended with one of his many memorable sound bites: “If you intend to pass this bill, you should make preparations to withdraw all our troops from Berlin, Vietnam, and the rest of the world because they will be needed to police America.”

  The committee, stunned into silence, asked him a few pro forma questions, then broke for recess. But he had made quite an impression; Clair Engle, a liberal California senator, said, “You have to admire the way he presents his case. He’s smart.” Wallace then joined Thurmond for lunch in the Senate cafeteria, where they made a point of chatting with the black waitstaff for the cameras.83

  Similar press attention was lavished on Robert Kennedy, who appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 20. This time he was better prepared. Eastland deputized Sam Ervin of North Carolina, a former state supreme court judge and a constitutional law expert, with examining the attorney general, which he did over the course of several days. Ervin promised to conduct his questioning “on the intellectual plane and not on the emotional plane,” but made clear from the outset that his real intention was grandstanding. Because this was the version of the bill with Title II removed, the focus of the discussion fell on Title I—the voting rights provisions—which Ervin charged was a gross invasion of each state’s power to determine its own electoral process.84

  After detailing examples of voting rights violations in the South, only to have Ervin fall back to states’ rights principles, Kennedy suggested that if Ervin would only take a tour through the region, he would see how routinely blacks’ voting rights are violated. “I do not have even 48 hours to spare from my fight to preserve constitutional principles and the individual rights of all citizens of the United States,” Ervin said indignantly. As it became clear that Kennedy was too well versed in the bill to be caught out in a mistake, Ervin fell back to a strategy of attrition, poking at minutiae in the hopes of catching Kennedy in some sort of trap. It was fruitless, but also exhausting. At one point during the multiday testimony Kennedy’s wife, Ethel, saw Ervin at a White House dinner. “What have you been doing to Bobby?” she asked. “He came home and went straight to bed.”85

  While the administration defended its bill in Congress, it was also trying to get ahead of the March on Washington. On July 17, President Kennedy, under pressure from his brother, reversed his earlier position and endorsed the event, figuring that it was better to try to influence it than to let it blow up literally on his doorstep. Robert Kennedy immediately assigned John Douglas, the head of the Civil Division, to oversee the administration’s involvement—including the development of contingency plans should things go wrong, from pulling the sound system plug in the event of an unexpectedly heated speech to calling in the police if violence broke out.86

  Though the march was originally planned to address “jobs and freedom,” to focus on both the civil rights bill and the knottier questions of black unemployment, as the summer progressed that second emphasis was increasingly forgotten. King, the standard-bearer for the Southern civil rights movement that was pushing so hard for the measures embraced by the Civil Rights Act, nevertheless remained adamant that the march remain centered on economic justice, “to arouse the conscience of the nation over the economic plight of the negro.” But Wilkins and Young, among others, who were more focused on the movement’s short-term goals, promoted the march as an “all-inclusive demonstration of our belief in the President’s program,” leaving aside the fact that the president’s program eschewed questions of economic justice. At the same time, they joined with Reuther in convincing Randolph and his deputy, the organizing genius Bayard Rustin, to move the events from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and to ditch plans for thousands of protesters to flock to Capitol Hill on the morning of the march to request meetings with their congressmen.87

  Wilkins and Young may have also been trying to moderate the march’s image in response to unceasing criticism and fear coming from Congress and the white public. The media, having helped spin the vicious police response to the Birmingham demonstrations as somehow a product of the black protesters’ own aggressive tactics, now bought their own hype about the risks involved in letting thousands of blacks march through the capital. Absent police violence, there was no reason to believe the event might get out of control. And yet, four days after the march was announced, the Washington Post editorial board, citing the events that spring in Birmingham, wrote with more than a touch of racial condescension that “leaders of the negro groups participating in the marches and demonstrations planned for Washington must be acquitted of any intention to introduce this sort of mobocracy. Nevertheless, it will greatly challenge their control and ingenuity to assemble a great crowd of some 100,000 people.” Speaking for many wary members of Congress, Robert McClory, a Republican from Illinois, said that the march “held little hope for accomplishing any substantial legislative ends,” and it “could even have quite the opposite effect.” The administration was hearing the same thing: after surveying dozens of House members in mid-July, Joe Dolan wrote to Robert Kennedy that “the presence in Washington, at any time prior to final action on the civil rights bills, of any substantial number of individuals lobbying for the bills will lose a goodly number of votes.”88

  Meanwhile, in the weeks leading up to the march, leading newspapers carried “man on the street” interviews with whites around the country, expressing general support for civil rights but overwhelming opposition to the march itself. “A lot of the sympathy I had before is being whittled away,” one schoolteacher in Pennsylvania told the Wall Street Journal. “I’ve always pushed for equal rights, but I don’t approve of this mass and mob thing.”89

  Washington more or less shut down on the day of the march. A baseball doubleheader that day between the Washington Senators and the Minnesota Twins was postponed. Hundreds of businesses closed shop, and thousands of white suburbanites stayed home from work (Congress, however, decided to stay in session). “At ten o’clock the city was so empty that it looked as if a plague had struck it,” wrote the Washington Post the next day. The city had 2,934 police officers on hand, as well as 303 police reserves, 335 firemen, and 1,735 National Guardsmen at the ready. Across the Potomac, 4,000 Army soldiers stood on alert in Virginia. Douglas had strong-armed labor leaders, who provided the sound system, to arrange a kill switch; during the speeches a Justice Department official stood at the side with a 78 of Mahalia Jackson singing “Got the Whole World in His Hands,” ready to switch off a rabble-rousing speaker.90

  And yet nothing of the sort happened. On the contrary, the march was the apogee of the civil rights movement. More than two
hundred thousand people, twice as many as expected, came to Washington, from as far away as Los Angeles. Primarily African American, the crowd also included rabbis, white union leaders, and more than sixty-five members of Congress. All three TV networks covered it, with CBS showing it in its entirety, with field reports from correspondent Roger Mudd. As throngs of people came into town on buses and trains—one man arrived on roller skates from Chicago—civil rights leaders visited, by appointment, with Mansfield, Dirksen, Halleck, Speaker John McCormack, and House Majority Leader Carl Albert. They pressed for a strengthened civil rights bill, especially one with an FEPC added, but the lawmakers remained noncommittal.91

  Despite the promotional emphasis, in the weeks leading up to the march, on the civil rights bill, many of the speeches at the Lincoln Memorial focused on economic justice. “We know that we have no future in a society in which six million black and white people are unemployed and millions more live in poverty,” Randolph said. Reuther, speaking later, said the civil rights bill was a “meaningful first step” but one that needed to go further and address “the job question.” The bill will fail in its intentions, he said, “as long as millions of American Negroes are treated as second-class citizens and denied jobs.” And even Wilkins declared: “We want employment and with it we want the pride and responsibility and self-respect that goes along with jobs.”92

  The crux of these speeches—a call for jobs and economic justice, and a critique of the civil rights bill for failing to address them—was overshadowed by King’s historic address near the end of the program. Yet that speech, aside from its rhetorical might, served a different purpose: though ending on a hopeful vision—a “dream that all men are created equal”—and full of praise for “the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” its substance was much more critical. A century after Abraham Lincoln signed a “promissory note” with the Emancipation Proclamation, King declared, “the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land.” The march, he said, represented blacks’ demand that the country make good on that note.93