Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson

by Robert A. Caro

  And now, in 1956, some of these barriers were, all at once, no longer quite so solid as they had been. Southern Democrats on Capitol Hill had long been able to count confidently on support for their anti-civil rights stands from conservative Republicans (and not a few Democrats) from midwestern or Mountain States with negligible black populations. During the last two or three years, however, the years of Brown and Till and Lucy and Martin Luther King, that support, on the surface as solid as ever, was nonetheless being eroded.

  To some extent, it was being eroded by conscience. Emmett Till’s battered face and Autherine Lucy’s haunted eyes and the weariness of Montgomery’s cleaning ladies had now been brought into millions of American homes, including the homes of elected officials—and, in some cases, into their hearts. It had in the past been easy for congressmen and senators whose constituents included few blacks and for whom southern injustice was only a distant, remote issue, to ignore that injustice. It was less easy now.

  To some extent, it was being eroded by embarrassment. Congressmen and senators who had traditionally been able to vote with the South without their constituents caring no longer enjoyed that luxury; constituents who had read about the Till case and had seen on television the mobs rampaging unchecked through the streets of Tuscaloosa, now began to ask questions of their elected representatives about their pro-southern votes, questions that were not easy to answer.

  And to some extent, it was being eroded by calculation. After the Civil War, African-Americans had remained loyal to the party that had freed them—the Republican Party of Lincoln—for more than half a century, from Reconstruction to Depression. When the Depression struck, however, the heartlessness of Republicans—and of another Republican President, Hoover—changed that, particularly after the arrival in the White House of a Democratic President who demonstrated that government didn’t have to be heartless. Unemployment compensation, Social Security, relief payments, strong unions, the chance, through WPA and PWA, to be back at work again—all these meant so much to the people hardest hit of all Americans by any economic downturn. Wooden-legged William Dawson of Chicago, during the 1940s the only African-American among the 435 members of the House of Representatives, had been raised in Georgia’s Dougherty County, which was not far from Richard Russell’s idyllic Winder, but his view of the area was not quite the same as Russell’s. Dougherty County, Dawson was to say, “was just one step this side of hell. I stood guard with my father all one night to stop a lynching when I was fifteen.” He had, he said, “hated the word Democrat when I came north,” but the New Deal had changed his allegiance. Without FDR, he was to say, “Negroes would have died like flies.” While Negroes didn’t vote in the South, they voted in the North—and in 1956, they had, for more than two decades, been voting solidly Democratic, becoming one of the key elements in the coalition that had made the Democrats America’s majority party.

  And more Negroes were voting now—a lot more.

  In bus depots and train stations throughout the South—in Mobile and Tallahassee and Raleigh and Nashville and New Orleans, and in a thousand small towns scattered across the countryside of the Old Confederacy—the same scene was being enacted day after day: whole families of black people, sometimes two or even three generations, clustered together, clutching their tickets (a ticket to the North usually cost more than a week’s pay), waiting to get out of the South. Most of them were very poor; they carried their possessions in cardboard suitcases or cloth sacks or simply in bundles wrapped in string—and what they carried was often all they owned; “They went north largely without possessions and yet they left behind almost nothing,” David Halberstam has written. And every evening, in the North’s huge railroad terminals—in Chicago, the great railhead, due north of the Delta, but also in New York’s Grand Central Station and Washington’s Union Station and Detroit’s Central Depot—another scene was enacted. The black families would step off the trains and buses to be met by relatives, who took them to their new homes in the fast-spreading northern slums.

  African-Americans’ vast migration from the southern countryside to the northern cities had surged during the two world wars, when jobs were opened up by the cutting off of immigration and the departure of white workers for the armed forces, but even between wars it had never really stopped, because as bad as were conditions in the North—and they were terrible: overcrowded schools; brutalization by police; cramped apartments in fetid slums or in the public housing ghettos they hated—they were nonetheless better than the conditions from which these people had come; as Nicholas Lemann says: “Money and dignity were indisputably in greater supply in Chicago than in the Delta.” Since 1949 that migration had been accelerating dramatically, because the mass production of the mechanical cotton picker and the introduction of chemicals that killed the weeds between cotton plants which formerly had had to be laboriously chopped out made human hands largely unnecessary in the cotton field. During the 1940s, Chicago’s black population, concentrated in its huge South Side ghetto, had increased by more than twenty thousand a year; during the 1950s, it was increasing by more than thirty thousand a year; by 1955, 17 percent of Chicago’s population was African-American—and that inflow was being mirrored in a dozen industrial cities of the North. By 1956, the exodus of the Negro from the South to the North had become the largest American migration since the pioneers drove west in their covered wagons. In 1910, 90 percent of all American Negroes had lived in the Old South. By 1956, almost half—about eight million of the sixteen million African-Americans in the United States—lived in the North.

  Huge as was this mass movement of millions of people, very little was being written about it. There was nothing very dramatic in the daily debarkation of twenty or fifty or eighty black people from a train, and in James Reston’s words, journalists do a better job of covering revolution than evolution. But a public official was ignorant of these implications at his peril. Chicago Mayor Martin Kennelly failed to treat Congressman Dawson with respect despite Dawson’s control of the five wards of the South Side; in 1955, partly at Dawson’s instigation, Kennelly was supplanted by Richard J. Daley, and Daley, supported by Negro votes, was to hold the mayoralty until he died twenty-one years later.

  Rising within the growing northern urban black voting bloc, moreover, was what the black journalist Carl Rowan described as “a new kind of Negro leader.” In the past, all too many African-American black leaders had been complaisant puppets selected by a city’s white power structure because of their willingness to be manipulated by strings held in white hands. The new Negro voters, their eyes opened by war service, by higher education, by the victory in Montgomery, wanted a new type of leader, and, in 1956, while there were still many of the old “Uncle Toms” left, there were more and more leaders of whom Rowan could say, “These men … are not the semi-literate ward heelers who used to sell Negro votes at $5 a dozen; these are articulate Negroes, moved by a passion for justice.” These new leaders, and the new voters in their wards, saw, quite clearly, that the party they and their people had supported so faithfully for two decades was, despite Roosevelt and Truman, also the party that was in power on Capitol Hill—and was therefore the party that was denying their people justice.

  When Democratic strategists sat down to analyze the 1952 election returns, they saw that while in city after city the African-American vote had still been overwhelmingly Democratic, it had not been as overwhelmingly Democratic as in the past. In black wards where once FDR and Truman had polled 80 or even 90 percent, Adlai Stevenson had polled 70 percent, or even less; his percentage of the country’s overall black vote was 68 percent.

  The Democrats’ initial reaction had been to ascribe the slippage to Ike’s popularity, and this was certainly part of the explanation, but when, their attention focused now on the black vote they had previously taken for granted, they began analyzing it more closely, they realized that the decline was also due to deeper, and much more disturbing, factors, for, they realized, it had actually b
egun not in the 1952 presidential election but in 1948, and, in some cities, in the congressional elections of 1946. Quietly but steadily, they realized, their party had been losing the Negro vote.

  That fact had the gravest of implications. The Negro vote was concentrated in the big cities of the big industrial states of the North that cast the highest electoral votes. In fact, it was concentrated in the queen cities (Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Newark, and Los Angeles) of the nine states (Illinois, Pennsylvania, New York, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, New Jersey, and California) which alone had a total of 223 of the 266 electoral votes necessary to elect a President. The bloc Negro vote in these cities had been a key reason that the Democrats had, in five consecutive presidential elections between 1932 and 1948, been able to count on those states—and therefore occupancy of the White House. The magnitude of the Eisenhower landslide had rendered the Negro shift relatively insignificant in 1952, but in a closer election it could be a decisive factor.

  Nor was the significance of the slippage limited to the presidential level. Gerrymandering and other devices instituted by the white power structure made blacks’ leverage in presidential, or statewide or city wide, elections greater than in elections for aldermen or congressmen; the House of Representatives, after all, still contained only three Negroes (Chicago’s Dawson and Detroit’s Diggs, who had sat at the press table in Sumner; and New York City’s Adam Clayton Powell Jr.). In no fewer than thirty-five congressional districts outside the South, however, the number of eligible Negro voters in 1956 was going to be greater than the winning congressional candidate’s margin of victory had been in 1954, so that in these districts Negroes would hold the balance of power. And while every one of these districts had gone Democratic in 1954, as they had been going Democratic since 1932, in many of them the 1954 Democratic plurality had been, disturbingly, much narrower than in the past—uncomfortably narrow, in many cases.

  The possibility of even greater slippage had been increased by the recent civil rights atrocities in the South. After years of unswerving Democratic allegiance, the loyalty of many northern Negroes in 1956 was going to be not to a party but to a purpose: to an insistence on justice for their embattled southern brethren. “We Negroes have got to think this year, because here in the North, we will be speaking for all the Southern Negroes who can’t speak for themselves on Election Day,” said an engineer interviewed by Rowan. “We’ll be voting for Emmett Till and Miss Lucy and that preacher in Mississippi who was murdered because he wanted to vote.”

  The northern black urban vote was therefore a giant political plum ripe for the taking—and Democrats were not alone in seeing this. Republicans knew they had been presented with a great opportunity. Risks were involved. Enthusiasm for Eisenhower among southern white voters had enabled him to carry four southern states (Texas, Florida, Tennessee, and Virginia) in 1952; there had been additional signs of increased Republican strength in the once-solid South since then; Republicans were anxious to widen that beachhead; GOP support for civil rights jeopardized it. The southern stake, however, was dwarfed by the northern. Persuade Negroes that the Republican Party, rather than the Democratic, offered the best chance for justice for their race and the GOP might be able at last to get back the Negro vote. Get it back, and for years to come, even without an Eisenhower at the head of the ticket, it might be a Republican who occupied the White House. Get it back, and it might be Republican representatives and senators who wielded the gavels at the head of the green felt tables on Capitol Hill. In only four of the twenty-four years since 1932 had Republicans controlled Congress, and they hungered to do so again. Get that vote back, and the Republicans might become again what they had once been: possessors of the White House and America’s majority party.

  REPUBLICAN AWARENESS of the opportunity and eagerness to seize it was evident at the first meeting in 1956 between the party’s congressional leaders and President Eisenhower, held at the White House on January 10. The President was sending Congress a legislation to finance construction of new schools. Harlem’s Adam Clayton Powell, a Democrat, was planning to attach to the measure an amendment saying that none of that money could be spent in any state whose schools were still segregated. Similar “Powell Amendments” had failed to attract much Republican support in the past, but the minutes of the January 10 meeting show that key House Republican Charles Halleck, adamant conservative though he was, said that this time “Republicans would have to vote for it.” At the year’s second meeting, on January 24, “It was reaffirmed that there should be no opposition to any anti-segregation amendment that may be offered in connection with this legislation.”

  As for the President himself, he was to say in his memoirs that while he was committed to the cause of civil rights, “I did not agree with those who believed that legislation alone could institute instant morality [or that] coercion could cure all civil rights problems.” His record on the single most pressing civil rights issue—the efforts to implement the Brown decision—is a reminder that since Dwight Eisenhower had left the military before Harry Truman’s 1948 order to desegregate it, he had spent all his adult life in a Jim Crow army; that, as his biographer Stephen Ambrose puts it, “he had many southern friends and he shared most of their prejudices against Negroes,” laughingly repeating their jokes about “darkies”; that he felt education was a local matter, in which the federal government should not intervene—and that before the Court ruled on Brown, he had tried to get Chief Justice Warren to see things his way: once, after a White House stag dinner, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm as the guests were leaving the dining room and said about the southerners, “These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big overgrown Negroes.” Six years of his presidency remained after the Court’s ruling (which he felt had set back racial progress; “I personally believe that if you try to go too fast in laws in this delicate field … you are making a mistake”). Not once during those six years would Eisenhower publicly support the ruling; not once would he say that Brown was morally right, or that segregation was morally wrong.

  “The Supreme Court has spoken, and I am sworn to uphold the constitutional processes in this country; and I will obey,” he said, but, in Ambrose’s words, the President refused “to associate himself and his prestige in any way with Brown,” dodging every attempt to pin him down. “I think it makes no difference whether or not I endorse it,” he said at one press conference. “The Constitution is as the Supreme Court interprets it, and I must conform to that and do my very best to see that it is carried out in this country.”

  Eisenhower’s refusal to publicly support the Court’s decision did make a difference, of course, for the crucial question was whether or not the President would use the military to enforce the decision if there was a showdown—and in his confusing statements white southerners heard sympathy for them and a deep reluctance to use force; as Ambrose says, “The President’s moderation, the Southerners felt, gave them license to defy the Court.” “To stand above this battle,” Richard Kluger has written, “was to side with the legions of resistance, and Dwight Eisenhower, either by design or by obtuseness, comforted and dignified those who were ranged against the Court.” Asked in 1956 by reporters if he would dip into his “tremendous reservoir of good will among young people” and give them some guidance on how they should act at this crucial moment, he replied: “Well, I can say what I have said so often. It is difficult through law and through force to change a man’s heart….” He then attacked “the people … so filled with prejudice that they even resort to violence; and the same way on the other side of the thing, the people who want to have the whole matter settled today”—a comparison that equated violent southern mobs with men and women whose only crime was to be active in the cause of civil rights. There was no explicit criticism from Eisenhower even for Emmett Till’s murderers. The murder occurred a month
after Frederic Morrow became the first Negro on the White House staff, and thereafter he attempted repeatedly to persuade the President to speak out on the incident—with no success whatsoever. When Emmett’s mother, Mrs. Bradley, sent the President a telegram asking him to intervene in Mississippi to halt the violence against blacks, Eisenhower did not even respond. The Autherine Lucy case certainly seemed like a clear-cut instance of defiance, by the University of Alabama trustees, of a federal court order he was sworn to enforce, but he would do nothing about it. As for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, when a reporter at an Eisenhower press conference asked the President for a comment on the jailing and trial of Martin Luther King, he replied: “Well, you are asking me, I think, to be more of a lawyer than I certainly am…. But, as I understand it, there is a state law about boycotts, and it is under this kind of thing that people are being brought to trial.” Even Roy Wilkins, normally so temperate, said that “Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man; but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German today.”

  There were, however, other areas, outside the field of education, in which Dwight Eisenhower felt that the responsibility was his, and the issue more clear-cut (his aide Bryce Harlow had been surprised by how “strong” the President was for voting rights; “he felt very strongly that nothing good would happen until Negroes got the vote”), and in these areas it was “the compulsion of duty” that won, together with what Ambrose calls “one of his core beliefs—that he was President of all the people.” He, not some governor, was Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces, and in the District of Columbia it was not a state that had jurisdiction but the federal government. In his first State of the Union address, Eisenhower had promised to carry out Truman’s edict and end segregation in the military and in the District, and he had kept that promise. By the end of 1953, all public facilities in the capital had been desegregated, and he could boast that in the Navy and the Air Force, segregated units were “a thing of the past”; that would soon be the case in the Army, too.