Setting forth Negro expectations in an article in the Nation soon after Kennedy’s inauguration, King ascribed the “intolerably” slow progress in civil rights as much “to the limits which the federal government has imposed on its own action” as to the segregationist opposition. In the legislative area, he demanded that the President fight for a “really far-reaching” civil rights program with particular emphasis on the right to vote. In the area of executive action, he called on the President to “give segregation its death blow through a stroke of a pen”—especially by stopping the use of federal funds to support housing, hospital and airport construction in which discrimination was open and notorious. “We must face the tragic fact,” King said, “that the federal government is the nation’s highest investor in segregation.” Describing housing as “the most tragic expression of discrimination,” King laid special stress on the necessity for a housing order.
Confronted by such proposals, the new President faced a most difficult problem. He had at this point, I think, a terrible ambivalence about civil rights. While he did not doubt the depth of the injustice or the need for remedy, he had read the arithmetic of the new Congress and concluded that there was no possible chance of passing a civil rights bill. Moreover, he had a wide range of presidential responsibilities; and a fight for civil rights would alienate southern support he needed for other purposes (including bills, like those for education and the increased minimum wage, of direct benefit to the Negro). And he feared that the inevitable defeat of a civil rights bill after debate and filibuster would heighten Negro resentment, drive the civil rights revolution to more drastic resorts and place a perhaps intolerable strain on the already fragile social fabric. He therefore settled on the strategy of executive action. No doubt wishing to avoid argument and disappointment, he did not even establish an interregnum task force on civil rights.
He explained his position frankly to Wilkins, King and other Negro leaders. “Nobody needs to convince me any longer,” he told King, “that we have to solve the problem, not let it drift on gradualism. But how do you go about it? If we go into a long fight in Congress, it will bottleneck everything else and still get no bill.” So in March, with the Americans for Democratic Action delegation, Kennedy, after encouraging Robert R. Nathan to organize pressure for policies of economic expansion, listened to Joseph Rauh make the case for new legislation—voting rights, Title III, a permanent fair employment practices commission. Then he said with definiteness, “No. I can’t go for legislation at this time. I hope you have liked my appointments. I’m going to make some more, and Bobby will bring voting suits. And we’ll do some other things.” Rauh said, “You told Bob [Nathan] you would like some liberal pressure on the economic side. I take it you would also like some liberal pressure on the civil rights side.” Kennedy replied emphatically, banging his hand on the desk: “No, there’s a real difference. You have to understand the problems I have here.”
What was the difference? Undoubtedly he wanted to keep control over the demand for civil rights and this, unlike the demand for federal spending, might well, if stimulated, get out of hand. Rauh also thought that the President, precisely because he perceived civil rights as a moral issue, may have felt that criticism of the administration, which in the field of economic policy would seem a mere disagreement over tactics, might carry here a suggestion of deficient moral energy.
3. THE STRATEGY OF 1961
Kennedy thus began by hoping that a strong and declared presidential commitment to civil rights, accompanied by the appointment of Negroes to government posts and by vigorous action on behalf of Negro rights by the White House and the Department of Justice, would move things along fast enough to hold the confidence of the Negro community.
He seized a variety of small opportunities, beginning with the Coast Guard at the inauguration, to communicate his personal contempt for racial prejudice. When the Civil War Centennial Commission, of all bodies, planned segregated housing for its members during a session in Charleston, South Carolina, the President, very angry, arranged to have the meeting held at an unsegregated naval station. When Robert Kennedy, along with George Cabot Lodge, Charles Bartlett, Angier Biddle Duke and a number of others, resigned from the Metropolitan Club because of its discrimination against Negroes, the President told his press conference, “I personally approved of my brother’s action.” (Privately Kennedy said he did not see how anyone could stay in the club under those conditions; he was exceedingly scornful of liberals who retained their membership. How, he asked one night, could Senators—he named a couple—make speeches on the floor about civil rights and then retire to the Metropolitan Club for drinks and dinner? He thought that the younger people should get together and found a club of their own with decent practices. Jacqueline broke in at this point and said, “You might use the third floor of the White House.” Eventually Bartlett carried through the President’s suggestion and organized the Federal City Club.)
He issued a strong executive order against discrimination in federal employment and made a special effort to seek Negroes for high federal jobs. The designation as Housing Administrator of Robert C. Weaver, who a quarter-century earlier had been a member of the ‘black cabinet’ in the New Deal, placed a Negro in charge of the programs which, as King had observed, had such tragic implications for his race. George Weaver of the AFL-CIO became Assistant Secretary of Labor; two Negro newspapermen—Carl Rowan and Andrew Hatcher—were appointed respectively Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Pierre Salinger’s deputy in the White House; John Duncan became the first Negro Commissioner of the District of Columbia. In February Clifton R. Wharton, a Negro Foreign Service officer, was made ambassador to Norway, the first of a number of Negro ambassadors Kennedy would appoint. In October Thurgood Marshall was nominated to the Second Circuit Court, the first of five Negroes made lifetime judges in the Kennedy years (when he became President, there were only three Negro lifetime judges—William H. Hastie, whom Truman had named to the Third Circuit Court, and two on the customs courts). Requesting reports from all departments and agencies on Negro employment, especially in the higher grades, he was appalled by the result and instructed the cabinet in the spring of 1961 to take immediate steps to improve the situation. Harris Wofford, who was now his Special Assistant for civil rights, presided over a sub-cabinet group, intended to impress on all parts of the federal government their duty to use their full powers in the cause of equal opportunity. The joke in Washington was that every department was sending posses out to recruit Negroes in order to avert the wrath of the White House. The number of Negroes holding jobs in the middle grades of the civil service increased 36.6 per cent from June 1961 to June 1963; in the top grades, 88.2 per cent.
The President also combined a Committee on Government Employment with the Committee on Government Contracts, which had been headed by Vice-President Nixon in Eisenhower days, and established a single President’s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity under Vice-President Johnson. William S. White has written that Johnson “privately flinched” from the assignment, fearing that he would be blamed as a southerner if the Committee failed to meet expectations.* But Kennedy insisted, and Johnson, conceivably noting that the assignment would give him a chance to build a record where he had previously been regarded with mistrust, acquiesced. Actually, though Johnson had regularly voted against civil rights bills till 1957 and had even described Truman’s civil rights program in 1948 as “a farce and a sham—an effort to set up a police state in the guise of liberty,” this attitude reflected Texas politics rather than personal bias. The Vice President was wholly devoid of racial prejudice, took pride in the support he received from Negroes and Mexicans and wanted now to do his best for his fellow man. He summoned the heads of firms doing business with the government and urged them to join in Plans for Progress providing for the training and employment of Negroes. The deliberations of the Committee were on occasion contentious. Johnson tended toward the cajolery of business; oth
er members, especially the Attorney General and the Secretary of Labor, wanted more initiative and more action. But the record far surpassed that of the Nixon committee; and the experience undoubtedly enlarged Johnson’s knowledge of the problem and deepened his concern.
The Department of Justice, however, was the center of federal action and in the year of the Bay of Pigs, Laos, Berlin and test resumption Kennedy left civil rights policy pretty much to his brother. Robert Kennedy, like the President, had a clear sense of historic injustice and a strong feeling of political obligation; but he was relatively new to the problem. Yet, if some of his southern judicial appointments in 1961 were unfortunate, he rapidly showed his deep belief in the idea of equal opportunity. Discovering fewer than ten Negro attorneys in the Department, he laid on a special recruiting campaign and quintupled the number by the end of the year. He also had appointed at once—and for the first time in history—Negroes as United States Attorneys (in San Francisco and Cleveland). He enlarged the staff of the Civil Rights Division. Going to the University of Georgia for Law Day in May 1961, he bluntly told his audience (and was applauded for it), “We will enforce the law, in every field of law and every region. . . . If the orders of the court are circumvented, the Department of Justice will act.”
In Burke Marshall, the Assistant Attorney General in charge of the Civil Rights Division, Robert Kennedy had an aide whose passion for self-effacement could not conceal sharp intelligence, wise judgment and steely purpose. Kennedy and Marshall decided from the start that, before taking situations to the courts, they would first try to negotiate with local officials, thereby giving full respect to the federal system and full opportunity for local self-correction. Indeed, in the field of school integration, where they lacked authority to initiate suits, they had ordinarily no other choice. Marshall and John Seigenthaler, Robert Kennedy’s special assistant, accordingly visited a number of southern cities before school opening in the fall of 1961 In September schools were desegregated without violence in Atlanta, New Orleans, Memphis and Dallas. In Prince Edward County, Virginia, where white resistance to integration had closed all the schools, the Department of Justice sought court action to bring about their reopening.
The Department gave first priority, however, to voting rights. Many observers had concluded by 1960 that the franchise was the keystone in the struggle against segregation. Negro voting did not incite social and sexual anxieties; and white southerners could not argue against suffrage for their Negro fellow citizens with quite the same moral fervor they applied to the mingling of races in schools. Concentration on the right to vote, in short, seemed the best available means of carrying the mind of the white South. Then, once Negroes began to go to the polls, politicians would have to temper their views or lose their elections. The Department was not alone in regarding voting as, if not the key to civil rights, at least the indispensable conditions for the assertion of other federal rights. Though the NAACP still worried more about school integration, Martin Luther King, Jr., in November 1961, noting that the fight was taking place on many fronts—sit-ins, legal defense, educational opportunities—declared: “The central front, however, we feel is that of suffrage. If we in the south can win the right to vote it will place in our hands more than an abstract right. It will give us the concrete tool with which we ourselves can correct injustice.”
The denial of Negro suffrage had long been an accepted southern scandal. In at least 193 counties fewer than 15 per cent of eligible Negroes were permitted to register; in Mississippi this was true in seventy-four out of eighty-two counties. In thirteen southern counties not one Negro was on the rolls. The civil rights legislation of 1957 and 1960 had equipped the Attorney General with a measure of authority to intervene in such cases; but the Eisenhower administration had brought only ten suits and none at all in Mississippi. By mid-1963, however, Kennedy and Marshall had filed forty-two suits, eight of them in Mississippi. The Attorney General fully realized that winning suits would not make much difference if apathy, ignorance or fear still prevented the mass of Negroes from registering. Accordingly, in a behind-the-scenes effort reminiscent of the campaign to save the Bay of Pigs prisoners, the administration, with helpful assistance from the Taconic Foundation and collaboration from the Southern Regional Council, persuaded the leading Negro organizations to undertake a drive which in 1963 registered a considerable number of Negro voters across the South.
It was not easy, however, to keep the turbulence of civil rights in the ordered channels of due process, and there were other issues than voting and schools. In the spring of 1961 James Farmer and CORE sent out groups of ‘freedom riders’ to challenge segregation in interstate bus terminals—in their restaurants, waiting rooms, restrooms. The first band, led by Farmer himself, proceeded through the Carolinas and Georgia, with occasional fights and arrests, but without serious trouble until it reached Alabama. At Anniston a white mob burned up one of the buses. At Birmingham the riders were attacked and beaten. By now SNCC, King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference and other groups had their own riders on the road to Alabama, and there was every prospect of serious violence. The Attorney General and then the President tried to reach Governor John Patterson, who declined their calls. Finally Patterson told John Seigenthaler, whom Robert Kennedy had sent to the scene, that he would protect the riders. But he added in a public statement, “We are not going to escort these agitators. We stand firm on that position.” On May 20, when a delegation of agitators arrived in Montgomery, a mob of a thousand persons greeted them with clubs and pipes. A number of freedom riders and local Negroes were beaten; Seigenthaler was knocked unconscious. Since the state of Alabama, despite gubernatorial assurances, obviously could not maintain order, Robert Kennedy sent more than 600 deputy federal marshals to Montgomery. Patterson protested; the Attorney General was heard to say over the telephone, “John, John, what do you mean you’re being invaded? Who’s invading you, John? You know better than that.”
The height of the crisis was over, though the rides continued; in the end over a thousand people were involved. The President, asked about freedom rides in a press conference, said, “The Attorney General has made it clear that we believe that everyone who travels, for whatever reason they travel, should enjoy the full constitutional protection given to them by the law and the Constitution.” Robert Kennedy had meanwhile petitioned the Interstate Commerce Commission to issue regulations requiring desegregation of all facilities in terminals used in interstate bus travel. On September 22 the ICC put out such orders. When a few cities pleaded local laws as excuse for non-compliance, the Department of Justice brought suits; and at the same time it proceeded against segregation in airports and railroad stations. In time, in a quiet revolution, travel terminals of all sorts through the South were open on equal terms to white and Negro.
4. MINORITY REPORT
The strategy of executive action was thus proving adaptable to new problems. But it was also producing an undercurrent of criticism both within the government and without.
The Civil Rights Commission had been established in 1957 as a propitiatory gesture to hold off pressure for more far-reaching legislation. Eisenhower’s appointment of two southern Democrats and three Republicans as the Commission majority suggested an intention of keeping the body as tame as possible. Its authority was limited to investigation (including the holding of hearings) and recommendation. But facts had a power which no one had foreseen. Among the commissioners were two college presidents, Hesburgh of Notre Dame and John Hannah of Michigan State; and, as they began to understand the dimensions of Negro misery and oppression, they became convinced of the need for strong federal action. The southern members regularly endorsed the findings of fact and went further than anyone expected in supporting the Commission’s proposals. Younger men on the staff, like Wofford and Berl Bernhard, whom Kennedy made director in 1961, organized the work of the Commission with intelligence and drive. Increasingly the Commission construed its obligations as not only techni
cal but moral; it saw itself as, in Bernhard’s phrase, “the duly appointed conscience of the government in regard to civil rights.’’ Father Hesburgh well summed up its mood in his closing statement in the 1961 report: “Americans might well wonder how we can legitimately combat communism when we practice so widely its central folly: utter disregard for the God-given spiritual rights, freedom and dignity of every human person.”
The Commission shared the Department of Justice’s concern for voting rights. In 1959, adopting an idea that the civil rights movement had exhumed from Reconstruction days, it had recommended that Congress authorize the President to appoint federal registrars to enroll Negro voters in districts where local authorities declined to do so—a proposal that led to the ineffective federal referee provisions in the Civil Rights Act of 1960 and eventually to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But the Commission also gave great weight to its inquiries into housing, education, employment and law enforcement. As Bernhard put its view in November 1961, “There can be no single approach which will bring an end to discrimination”; inequalities in political participation, education, employment, housing and the administration of justice all reinforced one another. This meant that, while the Commission applauded Justice’s work in the field of voting rights (apart from the Department’s evident determination to keep the Commission out of that field), its members began to worry whether the government was concentrating on voting to the neglect of other problems equally vital. Indeed, the Commission became so fearful of the conception of voting as the panacea that, in Burke Marshall’s view, it “went out of its way” in its 1961 report to point to twenty-one southern counties where Negroes voted freely with no effect at all on segregation.
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