An Idea Whose Time Has Come: Two Presidents, Two Parties, and the Battle for the Civil Rights Act of 1964

by Todd S. Purdum

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  WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 28, DAWNED GLORIOUSLY in Washington, with sunrise at 5:33 a.m. The FBI’s crowd forecast, duly passed along to John Douglas and apparently hoping for the worst, suggested a small turnout, while a Gallup poll about a week before the march had shown that close to two-thirds of the public disapproved of the event. George Meany, the president of the powerful AFL-CIO, declined to participate, and ordered the union’s headquarters building closed and barricaded for the day.

  Indeed, in the early morning hours, the streets of the city were eerily empty. But soon the chartered buses began rolling into town like clockwork, more than fifteen hundred in all. One group of marchers had walked 237 miles from Brooklyn; another man had roller-skated all the way from Chicago. Two thousand D.C. police officers, and like numbers of national guardsmen and volunteer marshals, were on patrol—with thousands more troops on standby alert at Bolling Air Force Base and at Fort Myer across the Potomac River in Virginia.

  Eleanor Holmes Norton, a native Washingtonian and Yale law student who had been helping organize the march from Rustin’s headquarters in Harlem, volunteered to keep the New York office open overnight to deal with any last-minute questions, in part because she knew that meant she would get to fly down to Washington, rather than take a bus. As her plane approached her hometown, she could see the gathering throngs below. “When I saw the number of people at various sites, it was clear to me that this was going to be an absolutely big success,” she would recall.

  Robert Kennedy’s intrepid commandos were at their assigned posts: John Douglas at police headquarters from 6:00 a.m. to midnight and John Reilly at Union Station in the early morning and then at the Lincoln Memorial for the day’s program. Bayard Rustin’s elaborate sound system had been sabotaged the day before, but was rebuilt overnight by the Army Signal Corps. (Reilly had solved the problem of what to do if the speeches got too incendiary: he himself would man the loudspeaker switch, and substitute a 78 rpm record of the great gospel diva Mahalia Jackson singing “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.”)

  The Big Six civil rights leaders—with the exception of James Farmer, who was in jail in Louisiana as the result of a protest there—spent the morning in meetings with the bipartisan congressional leadership, first Mike Mansfield and Everett Dirksen in the Senate, then Speaker John McCormack and Minority Leader Charles Halleck in the House, while a biracial contingent of Hollywood and Broadway celebrities recruited at King’s request by Harry Belafonte prepared to muster out. (Belafonte had persuaded Charlton Heston, a Republican who had played Moses in The Ten Commandments, to attend, lending the artists’ delegation a pious, bipartisan air.) The Senate Democratic whip, Hubert Humphrey, joined his legislative assistant John Stewart and his wife, Nancy, in the basement of the First Congregational Church downtown to make a breakfast of pancakes and sausage for the delegation from Minnesota.

  George Stevens Jr., the head of the motion picture division of the United States Information Agency, the government’s Cold War propaganda arm, dispatched the independent filmmaker James Blue and a dozen newsreel cameras around town to make a documentary about the day to be shown in embassies, libraries, and mobile trucks around the world. (Representative John Rooney of Brooklyn, the crusty chairman of the House appropriations subcommittee that controlled the agency’s budget, would later ask Stevens, “Have you thought about getting a security clearance for your leading man?” while Bob Kennedy worried that a shot of a young white woman laughing and smiling in conversation with a black seatmate would not go over well in some quarters.)

  News organizations feared the worst. The Washington Post’s city editor, Ben Gilbert, had leased two huge walkie-talkies and a base unit at great expense and sent a young general assignment reporter named Philip Kopper out “looking for ‘trouble,’” as Kopper would recall. George Lincoln Rockwell and some members of his American Nazi Party showed up at the Mall only to get chased away by whites about 7:00 a.m.; after that, there was “no trouble at all,” Kopper said. “We were reduced to calling in color stuff, all of it rather rosy.” The New York Times went even further, sending its star Washington columnist and resident prose poet Russell Baker aloft in a chartered helicopter. “We had low-altitude clearance,” Baker would recall, “so as the morning passed without so much as a fist fight in progress anywhere I directed the pilot on low-level sightseeing swoops on the houses of friends and colleagues, then took a close look at the roof shingles on my own house and, finding them sturdy and storm-proof, had the pilot drop me at National Airport and moseyed up to the Lincoln Memorial.”

  Shortly before 11:00 a.m. a disembodied voice from a loudspeaker near the Washington Monument rang out. “We are trying to locate Miss Lena Horne,” it said. The performers on the Mall included Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary; and Bob Dylan, who sang a mournful hymn about “the day Medgar Evers was buried from a bullet that he caught.”

  Suddenly, the vast throng—in the end, it would be more than two hundred thousand people, more than twice the hoped-for size—began quietly walking westward toward the Lincoln Memorial, as King and the other leaders scrambled to reach the head of the line. Diahann Carroll, who had just ended her run in No Strings, a groundbreaking Broadway musical about an interracial romance, marched hand-in-hand with James Garner, the popular star of the television western series Maverick. A bearded Paul Newman marched with his wife, Joanne Woodward, while Marlon Brando twirled an authentic cattle prod from Gadsden, Alabama, the kind used to subdue civil rights demonstrators.

  About seventy-five members of Congress attended the rally, and as they took their reserved seats on the steps of the Memorial, the crowd began chanting Pass the bill! Pass the bill! “I remember seeing Ted Kennedy waving and smiling and I thought, ‘Well, he doesn’t get what we’re yelling at him,’” recalled Greg Craig, a young Exeter graduate on his way to Harvard (who would later work on Kennedy’s Senate staff and serve as White House counsel for Barack Obama). The president had advised his youngest brother not to appear, in case of any trouble, and he had debated up to the last minute before deciding to go.

  At the White House, the president himself could not resist trying to get a glimpse of the march. He went to the mansion’s third-floor solarium with Preston Bruce, the doorman, and though they could not see the marchers on the Mall, they could hear the singing and could sense its power.

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  MARIAN ANDERSON WAS TO have begun the formal program with the national anthem. But she was stuck in traffic and did not make it in time, so the lyric soprano Camilla Williams stepped in at the last moment with a soaring version of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Backstage at the Memorial, however, in a small room behind Daniel Chester French’s massive statue of Lincoln, disharmony reigned.

  The night before, an advance copy of John Lewis’s proposed speech had been circulated, and some passages raised alarm bells all over town. Lewis had used words like “revolution” and “masses” and “radical.” He attacked the administration’s civil rights bill as “too little, too late” and said that SNCC would not support it. He vowed to “march through the south, through the heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did.” That was too much for Patrick Cardinal O’Boyle, the Catholic prelate of Washington, who was to deliver the invocation but who now told Bob Kennedy and Burke Marshall that he could not possibly do so unless the speech was changed. When Rustin assured the cardinal that a satisfactory outcome could be reached, he agreed to proceed, but he vowed to get up and leave his seat unless he received a revised text at least ten minutes before Lewis delivered it.

  Lewis and his fellow activists had ample reason to question the Kennedys’ motives and commitment. On August 9, the Justice Department had won federal perjury indictments against nine civil rights activists in Albany, Georgia, charging that they had lied about whether they had picketed a white-owned store there in retaliation for its owner’s vote in a civil suit against the county sheriff, L. W. “Gator” Johnson. A local black man, Charlie Ware, had
sued Johnson for shooting him in the head and neck while arresting him on a charge of public drunkenness, and an all-white jury ruled in favor of the sheriff. The Justice Department contended that the picketers’ actions could be construed as a form of juror intimidation. But its intervention in the case stood in sharp contrast to Bob Kennedy’s repeated insistence that the federal government had no power to protect the Freedom Riders or other demonstrators, and the indictments were now seen as an effort to appease southern sentiment in the wake of H.R. 7152’s introduction.

  But the march’s leaders did not want Lewis’s strong words to cause the Washington establishment to revoke its approval of the event. So they surrounded him and asked for compromise—which he resisted. Roy Wilkins accused Lewis of “double-crossing” the people who had come to support the bill. Finally Philip Randolph himself made a deep, personal appeal. “I have waited twenty-two years for this,” he told Lewis and his SNCC colleagues Courtland Cox and Jim Forman. “I’ve waited all my life for this opportunity. Please don’t ruin it.” Then he turned to Lewis, ready to cry, and implored, “John, we’ve come this far together. Let us stay together.”

  Lewis relented, and soon, even his watered-down version had the crowd roaring its assent. “We will not stop,” he cried. “If we do not get meaningful legislation out of this Congress, the time will come when we will not confine our marching to Washington. We will march through the south … but we will march with the spirit of love and with the spirit of dignity that we have shown here today. By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated south into a thousand pieces and put them back together in the image of God and democracy. We must say, ‘Wake up, America. Wake up!’ For we cannot stop, and we will not be patient.”

  Then it was Mahalia Jackson’s turn to sing—live, not on John Reilly’s trusty record—and she stirred deep feeling in the crowd with a wrenching gospel standard, “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.”

  By prearrangement, King spoke last. Philip Randolph introduced him in grandiloquent tones as “the moral leader of our nation … Dr. Martin Luther King, J-R!!” King’s prepared text, too, had already been issued, and as he began delivering it, he spoke of the pledges of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as a “promissory note” that had been returned to black Americans marked “insufficient funds.” It was a metaphor worked out with the help of Clarence Jones, who had recalled his feeling of awe as he had stood in the bowels of the Chase Manhattan Bank the previous spring, signing a promissory note for $100,000 in bail money for the Birmingham protesters from Nelson Rockefeller.

  “We have come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now,” King went on, insisting that “this sweltering summer of the Negro’s legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.” He invoked the same words from the Old Testament prophet Amos that he had used in Montgomery nearly eight years earlier: “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

  Then a voice in the crowd—legend holds that it was Mahalia Jackson herself—cried out insistently, “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin, tell ’em about the dream!” And suddenly King pushed his text aside and began ad-libbing—as John Kennedy had in his speech promising the civil rights bill on June 11—launching into a passage he had used before in Detroit and Chicago, a refrain that began, “I still have a dream…”

  “It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream,” he continued, steadily gathering steam. “I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”

  He went on, summoning the words of the Prophet Isaiah, dreaming of a day when “every valley shall be exalted and every hill and mountain shall be made low,” as the crowd roared its assent. And finally, in a shattering crescendo, he invoked the stirring words of Samuel Francis Smith’s “America,” “Let freedom ring!”

  “Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi, from every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’”

  It was a full five minutes before Clarence Jones could make his way through the cheering crush to grab King’s arm. “Martin!” he said. “Today you were smokin’! Just smokin’! Coltrane and Parker rolled into one!”

  At the White House, John Kennedy, who had never heard a complete speech by King, was watching on television, and had a similar view. “He’s damned good,” he told aides, one thoroughbred assessing another. “Damned good!”

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  IN FACT, IT WAS hard to tell who was happier about the day’s outcome, the marchers or the president himself. When Kennedy greeted the march leaders in the Cabinet Room at five o’clock, he reached out to King, a glint in his eye, saying, “I have a dream.” When King, already self-conscious about the praise being heaped upon him, asked if Kennedy had heard Walter Reuther’s fiery speech, in which the union leader declared, “We cannot defend freedom in Berlin so long as we deny freedom in Birmingham,” the president brushed him off with, “Oh, I’ve heard him plenty of times.”

  When it became clear that none of the marchers had eaten since breakfast, Kennedy ordered coffee and sandwiches from the White House mess, and Wilkins embarked on a sober argument that the march had shown massive grassroots support for civil rights, exemplified by the marchers’ willingness to lose two or three days’ pay. He enumerated the shortcomings of Kennedy’s bill—no Fair Employment Practices Commission, inadequate power for the attorney general to bring suits to rectify discrimination—and pressed for a stronger one. Reuther seconded that thought, while Randolph raised the importance of keeping blacks in school. Kennedy picked up that theme, saying blacks would do well to follow the example of Jews, who had overcome discrimination through emphasis on education.

  But, as usual, the president was pessimistic about the bill’s legislative prospects, and he resisted any provisions that might make it even harder to pass. He rattled off a state-by-state review of Democratic votes in the House: “Alabama, of course, none. Alaska, one. Arizona, you’ve got one sure and one doubtful.” At best, the president reckoned, he could count on 160 Democratic votes, meaning that he would need 60 Republicans, and they “are hard to get.”

  At this, Randolph spoke up, saying that if the situation were as grim as Kennedy suggested, “It’s obvious that it’s going to take nothing less than a crusade to win approval for these civil rights measures. Nobody can lead this crusade but you.”

  The meeting broke up just after six, and the leaders scattered to their hotel rooms. At 10:30 that night, in Huntington, West Virginia, a letter was postmarked from H. L. Pemberton, who signed as “Ex-Democrat.” Addressed to “John Kennedy, c/o Luther King White (?) House, Washington, D.C.,” it read, in its unpunctuated entirety, “Grab the nigger vote you just lost mine.”

  And the next day, the deputy FBI director, William Sullivan, composed a memo, endorsed by J. Edgar Hoover, that swiftly circulated throughout official Washington. “In the light of King’s powerful demagogic speech,” it read, “we must mark him now, if we have not done so before, as the most dangerous Negro of the future in this country from the standpoint of communism, the Negro and national security.”

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  FOR THE NEARLY QUARTER million people who came to Washing
ton that day, the march was an indelible experience. “It was clearly, of all the places to be on the face of the planet, that was the place to be at that particular moment in time,” Greg Craig would recall. But John Lewis found himself disappointed that the news coverage emphasized the Sunday school picnic aspect of the day. “Too many commentators and reporters softened and trivialized the hard edges of pain and suffering that brought about this day in the first place,” he would remember, “virtually ignoring the hard issues that needed to be addressed, the issues that had stirred up so much trouble in my own speech.”

  The march’s practical, political impact was harder to judge, at the time, and even a half century later, its influence on events remains a matter of debate. Kenneth Teasdale, legislative counsel to Mike Mansfield, was watching the march from a balcony at the Capitol with “a couple of Southern Senators,” who took note of a spectacle in which “not one single bad thing happened.”

  “And they said, ‘Well, that means there’s going to be a civil rights bill,’” Teasdale would remember.

  A Gallup poll that July showed that public support for a federal law requiring desegregation of public accommodations was clearly divided, with 49 percent of the nation in favor and 42 percent opposed. By September, a narrow majority—54 percent—was in favor of the idea, while opposition had dropped to 38 percent.

  Nick Katzenbach was not so sure about the march’s impact on Capitol Hill. “I would like to think the march was instrumental in the passage of the civil rights bill,” he would write years later, “but as far as I could see, it had no effect on members of Congress who were undecided. But it did, then and later, in the memory, have an important impact on the average American television viewer. It was, I think, the beginning of an American commitment, with respect to which Congress was, as it so often is, just a little bit behind.”