The recalculations were going on in both parties. Once a basic Democratic belief had been that the party could not afford to alienate the South. Now there was a new calculation. The eleven southern states had a total of 128 electoral votes, and that figure included Texas, which Eisenhower had carried twice and whose twenty-four electoral votes could no longer be considered safe for a Democratic presidential candidate. Without Texas, the South’s electoral vote was 104. The nine key northern states had 223 electoral votes. Accustomed though Capitol Hill had become to discounting Hubert Humphrey’s extravagant rhetoric, his remark that the Democrats were “digging their own grave” brought many nods in Democratic offices. “The civil rights dilemma loads down the Democrats in the North, as the Old Man of the Sea sat athwart the shoulders of Sinbad the Sailor,” said Senator Neuberger; unless the party’s stance on that issue was changed, “the result could be banishment for the Democrats for many decades from the executive branch of government.” Long indispensable, the South might, suddenly, now be expendable.
And while Democrats were constrained from taking full advantage of these new calculations by another reality—a change in the party’s stance might alienate the committee chairmen who were so important a source of its strength—no such constraint operated on the GOP. Republicans had little to lose, and a great deal to gain. Give us a civil rights bill, one Republican leader told James Reston, “and by 1960 we will break the Roosevelt coalition of the large cities and the South, even without Eisenhower.” No sooner had the 1956 election results been analyzed than Republican leaders began laying plans to exploit the situation, and among these leaders were the party’s two leading candidates to succeed Eisenhower, both of whom, as it happened, were from California, with its 194,000 Negro voters, which meant that both men had been sensitized to the potentials of black voting power (and both of whom, as it happened, were there in the Senate Chamber with Lyndon Johnson, one of them, William Knowland, seated just across the aisle from him, the other, Richard Nixon, on the low dais just a few feet away, his eyes almost level with those of the tall Majority Leader). Knowland, the Taft acolyte whose passion for civil rights had heretofore been extremely well concealed, now unequivocally promised the NAACP’s Mitchell that he would lead the fight to pass a civil rights bill in 1957. As for Knowland’s rival, as Marquis Childs said, “One thing even Nixon’s bitterest enemies have never denied him. That is a sure understanding of the main chance.” And, Childs wrote, Nixon was “working with all the intensity of a very intense nature, to try to shape … for his party” a strategy to position it on the right side of “the issue that contributed, more than any other, to the Republican landslide of last November.” Nixon’s ally, of course, was Brownell, and the Republican Attorney General had lost none of his enthusiasm for his proposed bill that would give the Justice Department “unprecedented power” to enforce a “broad array” of civil rights—the bill in whose inherent aims, and political possibilities, he deeply believed. Within a few days after the election, it was known that the Brownell Bill would be reintroduced in 1957. In 1956, it had been introduced late in the session, late enough for the Senate to avoid confronting it, but the Senate would not be able to avoid confronting it again.
SINCE THE 1956 ELECTION, there had been a further escalation of white hostility in the South. When the new school year had begun in September, before the election, there had been only minor progress in the seventeen states which, before the Brown decision, had required school segregation. Of the 2,731,750 Negro schoolchildren who were in school that September in the seventeen states, some 115,000–4 percent—were in schools also attended by whites. And even that small figure was misleading, for almost all of those 115,000 were in border states. In the eleven former Confederate states, 3,400 of Texas’ 248,000 Negroes were in integrated schools; a total of 1,200 more were in integrated schools in Arkansas or Tennessee; three years after Brown, that was the extent of southern compliance with the Court’s decree. And as John Bartlow Martin found on his tour through the South that Fall, “in recent months resistance [to school desegregation] has been hardening”; in most of the Deep South, he reported, “there is no prospect of school integration in the foreseeable future.” State legislatures would be convening in January, and scores of bills had been introduced that would have the effect of nullifying the educational integration decree. In Virginia, they were introduced by legislative members of the Byrd Machine. There was no time to lose, Harry Byrd said; a federal judge had issued a ruling designed to force integration in Virginia. “We face the gravest crisis since the War Between the States.” If laws were not passed to circumvent the ruling, he said, six-year-old children of both races would be “assembled in little huts before the bus comes, and the bus will then be packed like sardines…. What our people most fear is that by this close intimate social contact future generations will intermarry.” The chairman of the Senate Finance Committee called for “massive resistance” to all such court rulings; law enforcement, he said, should be “by the white people of this country.”
Other bills dealt with voting, intending to make it more difficult for African-Americans to register—not that such legislation seemed particularly urgent, for while black voting had been rising sharply in the North, in the South voting statistics were little more encouraging than those on schools. Among the more than six million Negroes in the eleven southern states who were twenty-one years of age in 1956, only 1,238,000 had been registered—still only one in five. There were entire counties in these states—counties in which thousands of Negroes lived—in which not a single Negro was registered to vote. In Mississippi, the number of registered Negroes may actually have declined during those four years. Further increases seemed likely to come even more slowly. Five states still had a poll tax, and in all the southern states the use of literacy tests and of outright intimidation, economic and/or physical, was increasing. A new tactic—wholesale “challenges” by Citizens Councils representatives of Negro voters on a county’s registration lists—had been instituted in 1956, and it had proven effective: in one Louisiana parish, more than three thousand of the four thousand registered Negroes had been purged from the registration books shortly before the 1956 election—and its use was expected to increase. The number of Negroes who actually voted in the South may actually have been smaller in 1956 than in 1952.
Nor was it only in schools and voting that the South was strengthening its defenses. “The [legislative] hoppers of the South are spilling over with legislation aimed at keeping the Negro ‘in his place,’” Stan Opotowsky of the New York Post found on a tour of the South in December, 1956. One bill that was about to be introduced—and passed—in Louisiana specifically prohibited the performance of George Gershwin’s musical Porgy and Bess since it raised the possibility of blacks and whites appearing on the same stage; it also prohibited the annual meeting of the state Red Cross, since a previous annual meeting had been attended by Negroes and whites.
Anger was escalating everywhere in the South. In the White Citizens Councils, the South had found, in John Bartlow Martin’s phrase, “a flag to rally round,” and in 1956 as in 1955 tens of thousands of white southerners joined their rolls. One huge rally followed another. The Councils’ vigilance extended into areas previously not thought of: incensed that some of Southern Bell’s party lines were used by both black and white subscribers, Mississippi’s Monroe County Council demanded that the company segregate its telephones.
The Councils’ targets included not only Negroes but white southerners whose racial views, while perhaps not pro-integration, were unacceptably moderate. They, too, Opotowsky found, “are subjected to the same terror if they dare stray from the most rigid segregation line.” “There is a consistent and insistent attempt to force all white southerners into a rigid pattern of defiance of the courts and to a position of rigidity on every aspect of the race question,” said Morris B. Abram, president of the American Jewish Committee. And these “enormous pressures,” Abram said, were su
cceeding. “The field is being preempted by the extremists.” The White Citizens Councils had the South—the white South as well as the black—firmly in its grip. “The domination is total,” Opotowsky wrote. “There is no middle ground, no shade of gray. Only black and white. And woe betide the black.” Reported Martin: “The Deep South is solid once more.”
Even more ominously, a growing number of southern whites were not satisfied with the Councils’ actions. There was, the New York Times reported that December, “an upsurge by the frustrated elements that want more boldness and action.” The Ku Klux Klan, in disrepute for more than a decade because of its violent redneck tactics, was again on the rise: that Fall, Martin reported, it “has burned crosses in the fields and paraded openly through many a small town.” And the Klan, as Opotowsky pointed out, “does not claim the niceties which the Councils wear as their mantle. They’re back to flogging again.” In one incident, in Camden, South Carolina, a white fifty-two-year-old high school music teacher was taken from his car, tied to a tree, and beaten with tree limbs and with a wooden plank by a group of men in white hoods because it was thought that he had advocated school integration. Only later was it learned that the beating had been given to the wrong man; the music teacher had, in fact, opposed integration.
Everywhere in the South, violence was rising. That November and December, 1956, in the wake of the victory in Montgomery (it had been a week after the November election that the Supreme Court ruled Alabama’s bus segregation ordinances unconstitutional), Negroes had begun bus boycotts in other southern cities, and were trying to integrate schools and parks as well. Martin Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the organization created to launch civil rights protests all across the South, was organizing for its first meeting, which would be held in Atlanta on January 10. Southern whites were reacting to this new black determination with new fury. The bombings of Negro homes and churches increased; more snipers fired on integrated buses; in one incident, in Montgomery, a Negro woman was wounded in the leg, and when more shots were fired at the bus, it headed for a police station with its passengers lying on the floor. There were new attempts on King’s life and family, including a shotgun blast fired into their home while they were sleeping. In Birmingham, Fred Shuttlesworth had announced that he and other Negroes would sit in the front rows of city buses on the day after Christmas. On Christmas night, a bundle of fifteen sticks of dynamite exploded beneath Shuttlesworth’s parsonage. The next day, he and a score of other Negroes were arrested on the buses. Police in other Alabama cities also ignored the Supreme Court ruling, arresting Negroes who sat in front. On the eve of the 1957 session of Congress, southern bombings, beatings, sniper fire, and cross-burnings were not stopping but increasing.
The perpetrators evidently felt they could act with impunity—and again and again they were proven correct. Every time black leaders asked Brownell to take action to stop the violence, the Attorney General had to reply that under existing law, the authority for maintaining intra-state law and order rested with the states, not the federal government. Two white men had actually been arrested for one of the bombings of Martin Luther King’s home, and had given, and signed, confessions. A Montgomery jury, all white naturally, had acquitted them nonetheless. “Deep Southern resistance,” John Bartlow Martin wrote, is “righteous, determined and sure of success. At the outset [it] probably was buying time. Not today. And they believe they have desegregation stopped. This is not a few loudmouth, rabble-rousing politicians…. This is all but unanimous white opposition.” He had taken a tour of the South to determine when the South might integrate its schools, and he gave his conclusion in the title of the book he wrote: The Deep South Says “Never.” The region’s attitude was personified in the Georgian who in 1956 drove gentlemanly old Walter George out of the Senate. Georgia’s new senator was Herman Talmadge—son of Gene Talmadge, hero of the woolhats, the Georgia Governor who during the 1930s and ’40s had been the incarnation of the suspender-snapping, tobacco-chewing, southern race baiter; while he had not actually been a member of the Klan, Gene once said, “I used to do a little whippin’ myself.” Herman was smoother, but just as unabashed a segregationist. As Governor he sponsored a state constitutional amendment allowing Georgia to close her public schools rather than desegregate them, and to send white and Negro children to separate, private, schools. Sitting contentedly in his stately home, filled with echoes of the Civil War (“When we remodeled we dug a few old Minié balls out of the house…. The only reason it was not burned was that Sherman occupied it”), he told Martin, “They couldn’t send enough bayonets down here to compel the people to send their children to school with Nigras.” Talmadge’s election to the United States Senate in November, 1956, was by the biggest majority in Georgia’s history. To Clarence Mitchell, says Mitchell’s biographer, “the supplanting of George by Talmadge” was “a tragedy that reaffirmed the South’s intention to stick to its unconstitutional way of life.”
The South was determined that its position on segregation would in fact be hardened, that this new civil rights agitation would be defeated. And when southern strategists surveyed the situation, they were confident that it would be defeated, for after all, if all else failed, they still had their Senate citadel, where they still held their chairmanships and their subcommittees. When Congress reconvened in January, it would be faced again by the Brownell Bill, but although that bill had been passed by the House in 1956, it had been blocked in the Senate, and, if necessary, it would be blocked there again. And back in the states of the southern senators, the rising Rebel yell was not for compromise but for victory.
LYNDON JOHNSON was in residence at the Johnson Ranch over Christmas vacation in December, 1956, so early each morning Mary Rather would walk down to the Pedernales, passing the family cemetery with its big live oak, and then across the river on the low-water bridge to collect the mail from the large, slightly tilted mailbox.
That December, late in the month, among the missives that Ms. Rather found in the mail and left on the dining room table for her boss to open over breakfast were three communications that were definitely not Christmas greetings. They were warnings—warnings, in the form of memoranda, that Lyndon Johnson took very seriously because of the identity of the men who had written them. Each of the three memoranda warned him that he must act on civil rights, and act soon. And each memo told him also what might never happen if he failed to act.
One of the memoranda, mailed from Washington on December 20, was from the man with whom he could not “afford to argue,” and it demonstrated that among people committed to the cause of social justice, not even personal affection could blunt the issue. Philip Graham had discussed the memo with his wife before sending it; in her memoirs, she would describe it as “arguing that the senator needed to counteract the reputation he had as a conservative, sectional … politician.” The memorandum itself said that Johnson’s past response to this “false stereotype … has been largely negative. He complains about ‘phony liberals,’ he criticizes columnists and some other parts of the press, etc.” And, Philip Graham told Johnson bluntly, that reaction hadn’t worked—and it was never going to. The only way for Johnson to change his stereotype, Graham wrote, was for him to announce a legislative program that would make possible a congressional session “marked by a high order of accomplishment.” The program, Graham wrote, would have several “principal themes,” of which an “essential” one (Katharine Graham would call it “perhaps the most important”) was civil rights. “Civil rights to be strengthened, not by phony speechmaking but by consequential action,” Graham wrote. “It is essential for LBJ to create and articulate a realistic philosophy on civil rights … a new Civil Rights program which can be embraced by people” of all persuasions, and which “can bring reality to this general field.”
Bluntly, Philip Graham warned Lyndon Johnson of the consequences of not acting on civil rights. “Fate’s decree may be that LBJ is destined only to be a Jimmy Byrnes or a
more energetic Dick Russell,” he said. “On the other hand, he may be permitted to play a truly consequential role in the mainstream of history.”
“The only way to test the possibilities is to test them,” he said. “At the moment LBJ is not doing so.”
The other two memos were both from the man who Johnson thought was the person who “might make him Pope or God knows what.” Four months earlier, at the Chicago convention, Jim Rowe had warned him, in writing, not to become “another Dick Russell,” had told him that if he presented an image of a “Southern candidate … it will make it almost impossible for Lyndon Johnson” to be nominated “in 1960,” had said that he knew that such an image “is Lyndon Johnson’s private nightmare.” Now, in December, Rowe warned Johnson, in writing—in two memoranda, dated December 13 and 21—that the nightmare was coming true. There is, Rowe said, a “growing public impression that you are the leader of the Southern Conservatives.”
“This has long worried me and I know it worries you, too,” Rowe said. Nonetheless, he said, “it is clear to me that enough has not been done to change or stop or turn this impression. All you and I have done essentially is to point out to each other that this picture is utterly untrue…. We are inclined to dismiss it.” And, he told Johnson, you “cannot afford to” dismiss it if you want to win the presidential nomination. “It is time that we accept the obvious truth that a public impression is just as much a fact as anything else.” That impression must be changed—quickly.
To accomplish this, Rowe had a number of suggestions. Some were social—Harry Truman and Adlai Stevenson will be in Washington immediately after the first of the year, he told Johnson, and you should invite them over for a drink and “conciliate” them; think of what they can do to you if they are hostile!: “If these two men would wish to wrap the [southern candidate] tag … around your neck, you would have a terrible time trying to get rid of it.” And some were strategic, of which the key one was that he immediately put the newly elected Democratic senator from Colorado, former Representative John Carroll, a liberal and ardent civil libertarian, on the Judiciary Committee.
Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson Page 134