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

by Todd S. Purdum

  Mitchell and Rauh had tangled with Johnson over his watering-down of the 1957 and 1960 laws. Now, however, the president offered a pleasant surprise. While he acknowledged that he would oppose any efforts to strengthen H.R. 7152 in the House—honoring the Kennedy administration’s compromise with Bill McCulloch the previous fall—the new president also assured his visitors that he would not brook weakening the bill in the Senate, either.

  “I don’t care how long it takes,” Johnson said. “I don’t care if the Senate doesn’t do one other piece of business this year, you’ve got to keep this bill on the floor … You can tell anybody, the President of the United States doesn’t care if this bill is there forever. We are not going to have anything else hit the Senate floor until this bill is passed.”

  For the moment, the challenge remained to get the bill out of the House Rules Committee, which was currently holding its fifth hearing on H.R. 7152 under Judge Smith’s stubborn, slow-walking command. The chairman had begun his promised review on January 9, around a big table in the committee’s compact hearing room, H-313, on the House side of the Capitol. He pronounced the bill “as full of booby traps as a dog is full of fleas.”

  Manny Celler, testifying that same day in support of the bill, was more accurate in summing up the prevailing feeling about the civil rights movement, and by implication the bill, when he told Smith, “You can no more stop it than you can stop the tide … The die is cast, the movement cannot be stayed.”

  Indeed, the day before Johnson’s meeting with Mitchell and Rauh, the president’s chief congressional nose counter, Larry O’Brien, had told him that there appeared to be 220 House members in support of the bill’s passage, two more than needed for a discharge petition to succeed, and for the bill to pass. So pressure was building on the eighty-year-old Judge Smith, who had begun to renege on his pledge to hold expeditious hearings and was instead dragging them out in a last stand.

  “He was a fox,” Representative John Dingell of Michigan would recall. “His great skill was to make you think he was agreeing with you and that you had a commitment, which you never did. And so everybody would think they had a deal with him, and they didn’t.”

  John Lindsay’s aide Robert Kimball, who had been assigned to shadow Smith’s hearings, got another perspective when he ran into the judge in a hallway one day as the hearings approached. “He thought he was too old to be doing it and others should step up,” Kimball would recall. “The judge knew that they were going to be beaten and he had to go down fighting. He said to me, ‘You’re going to run over us.’”

  Smith’s reaction to his anticipated defeat was to torture his witnesses all the more. When Bill McCulloch testified on January 15 that the bill was “comprehensive in scope but moderate in application,” Smith demanded to know who had written the compromise version. “I assisted in writing this bill,” McCulloch replied, adding that “staff people on the Judiciary Committee participated in redrafting this bill, duly constituted and appointed and confirmed people in the Department of Justice helped write the bill—the same general people who often help in writing difficult and technical bills which are considered by the Judiciary Committee.” With this careful phrasing, McCulloch glossed lightly over the crucial roles played by Burke Marshall and Nick Katzenbach, which was what Smith was driving at in the first place. When Smith asked how it was that the Judiciary Committee had allowed McCulloch a “whole minute” to explain the bill before the lightning-fast vote in October, McCulloch just smiled and said, “Because of my receding red hair.”

  Smith bearded McCulloch about the seeming unfairness of hotel barbershops being covered by the law while independent ones would not be. McCulloch replied by citing the case of a black Ohioan who had recently successfully sued a barber under a seventy-five-year-old state antidiscrimination law, only to have Smith rejoin, “They do strange things in Ohio.” McCulloch then simply quoted from “The Present Crisis,” James Russell Lowell’s nineteenth-century antislavery poem:

  New occasions teach new duties

  Time makes ancient good uncouth

  They must upward still and onward

  Who would keep abreast of truth.

  If Howard Smith was on the ropes, Lyndon Johnson was leaving nothing to chance with the House Republican leadership. Having already worked over Charlie Halleck at their bacon breakfast in December, he quickly turned to the subject of the NASA research center that Halleck wanted to secure for his district at Purdue University—the very subject that Halleck had hoped to broach with Jack Kennedy after his return from Texas. “I’m sitting here with Charlie Halleck and he’s breathing down my neck,” Johnson told NASA administrator James Webb over the telephone on Saturday, January 18, with Halleck by his side. “He wants to know what he can tell his people when he’s running for reelection that he’s done for them lately, and he wants to know what we can do for Purdue.”

  “Let me talk with him and see if he and I can work out something that he’ll come back to you and tell you he’s pleased with,” Webb replied.

  “If he’s not satisfied when he comes back to me, why, then, I’m going to be talking to you again,” the president warned.

  Now, three days later and just hours after his meeting with Mitchell and Rauh, Johnson was on the phone again with Webb, who told the president he had met that very morning with Halleck and suggested that, with Halleck’s help in the House, NASA might be able to finance a building to the tune of some $750,000—along with a series of research grants (for which he noted Purdue was well suited)—that might amount to an additional $300,000 or $400,000, spread over three years. “The net effect, Mr. President,” Webb added, “is that if you tell him that you’re willing to follow this policy as long as he cooperates, I can implement it on an installment basis. In other words, the minute he kicks over the traces, we stop the installment.”

  “All right,” Johnson replied.

  And it just so happened that two days later, the Republicans on the House Rules Committee, led by the ranking member, Clarence Brown of Ohio, let it be known that they were consulting with their party’s leaders and with their Democratic counterparts about lighting a fire under Judge Smith. Before the day was out, the chairman had capitulated. “I am opposed to the speedup just as I am opposed to the bill,” Smith announced. But he nevertheless added that the hearings would end with an up-or-down vote a week hence, on Thursday, January 30.

  For Clarence Mitchell, the assistance rendered by otherwise conservative pro-civil-rights Republicans like Clarence Brown and Bill McCulloch was heartening proof of a lesson he had learned the hard way—that it was wrong to “cram people into tight molds.” Brown’s decency had helped Mitchell to “see many members of Congress in a new light,” he would recall. As the most prominent black lobbyist before a Congress that still had just five black members, Mitchell was forced to be resourceful and resilient in seeking support, and in taking it where he could find it. His own life’s challenging path had helped him sharpen just such skills.

  * * *

  CLARENCE MITCHELL JR. WAS born into genteel poverty in Baltimore in 1911, in a family that would total ten children. His father, Clarence Maurice Mitchell, was a talented musician (he played guitar, violin, and piano) and in a bigger town or less racist era might have made a career of those skills. But he had to settle for work as a waiter at the elegant Rennert Hotel. Mitchell’s mother, Elsie, took in laundry and table boarders to help make ends meet, and for the rest of his life Clarence despised fish and cabbage, because he associated their smell with the big pots his mother had on the stove next to her laundry water. Young Clarence himself worked virtually full time from his earliest days. He delivered ice and coal, worked in a confectionery store, and served as an overnight elevator operator at the Rennert, finishing his shift at 8:00 a.m., just in time to get to high school.

  In 1928, though he could barely afford it, Mitchell arrived at Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1854 as a refuge for runaway slaves, Lincoln
had produced legions of black doctors, lawyers, legislators, and other professionals, and by the time Mitchell enrolled it was known as “the black Princeton.” Mitchell earned tuition money by working one summer season as a busboy at the all-white Gibson Island Club on Chesapeake Bay—alongside a fellow Baltimorean named Thurgood Marshall, whose father was the club’s headwaiter.

  Graduating in the depths of the Depression, Mitchell decided there was little immediate promise in trying to pursue a profession that might otherwise have interested him—such as the law—since even most lawyers seemed to be struggling. So instead he accepted a $15-a-week job as a reporter for the Baltimore Afro-American. His first big assignment was to cover the aftermath of a notorious lynching in Princess Anne, Maryland, on the Eastern Shore. The case involved a twenty-two-year-old “feeble-minded” black man named George Armwood, who had been accused of attempted assault on an elderly white woman and was seized from jail by a mob of a thousand and beaten and hanged.

  Mitchell missed the actual murder, but he arrived the next morning in time to see Armwood’s scorched and blackened corpse with one ear missing “and his tongue between his clenched teeth,” in a sign of “his great agony before death,” as Mitchell would write in the Afro-American. He would never forget the sight. “When you see a fellow human being with a rope around his neck, and skin coming off his body,” he said, “you don’t need to add any touches of horror.” Mitchell would later travel to Alabama to cover one of the trials of the Scottsboro Boys, nine black youths accused of raping two white women in 1931. The Jim Crow justice system’s infamous mistreatment of the young defendants helped build support for the modern civil rights movement.

  But Mitchell wanted a job more stable than newspaper reporting, and he applied for an Urban League fellowship for graduate study at the Atlanta School for Social Work. He ultimately became executive director of the League’s office in St. Paul, Minnesota, and in 1941 he returned east, to work in various federal agencies during World War II, including the Fair Employment Practices Commission. In 1946 he joined the Washington bureau of the NAACP and became its director and chief lobbyist in 1950—a job he would hold for the next twenty-eight years.

  Lobbying on behalf of civil rights legislation required sacrifice, persistence, and infinite patience with mundane details and the smallest signs of progress. Mitchell was well suited to the task. “When I began working for the NAACP, we had periods of great financial difficulties,” he would recall. “It was usually after some awful crime that our finances would improve. Someone observed that the persons who believed in civil rights were not moved to fight or work except in times of emotional distress. I think this is true of many humans.”

  Mitchell had been a driving force in the Eisenhower administration’s advocacy of the 1957 and 1960 civil rights bills. With his carefully trimmed mustache, dignified bearing, and scratchy border-state twang, he virtually lived on Capitol Hill, and he had made it a point to cultivate civil relationships with even some of the most implacable southern segregationists.

  Andrew Biemiller, the AFL-CIO’s longtime chief lobbyist, would recall that he hardly ever went to Capitol Hill without running into Mitchell, so constant was his presence there. “He was a very busy guy. I don’t know where he got all that energy,” Biemiller said. Trim and athletic in his youth, by 1964 Mitchell was a bit overweight. “In the summer, I’ve got this picture of Clarence bursting into your office, tie a bit loose, shirt out, mopping his brow, cursing the Southern Democrats,” Hubert Humphrey’s legislative director John Stewart would recall. “He sure kept you honest. You weren’t going to get away with anything with Clarence.”

  Mitchell endured regular indignities in his daily work. Nearly every time he testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, its chairman, James Eastland, would arrange to be absent. On one occasion when Eastland was present and Mitchell had been waiting through testimony by other witnesses, the chairman simply called out, “Anybody else wants to testify?” to avoid having to utter the words “Mr. Mitchell.”

  Mitchell’s method for dealing with such treatment was to make sure his own conduct was above reproach. Joe Rauh would remember one occasion when he and Mitchell were about to cross a street in Washington, and as Rauh began to step into the intersection before the light had turned green, he felt Mitchell’s hand making him wait. “Being Clarence’s fellow traveler down the halls of Congress forty years hasn’t been so damn easy,” Rauh would recall. “First this guy walks so fast and so far I can’t keep up with him. Around noon, I get hungry and he doesn’t eat; at about late afternoon, I want a drink and he doesn’t drink.” But Mitchell could also “get very emotional,” John Stewart would recall. Rauh thought he was “the ideal lobbyist, in the sense that he never boiled over, but he was able to boil over when the situation called for boiling over. He had the patience of Job, but knew when the right moment had come to substitute eloquent anger for patience.”

  When Mitchell encountered Manny Celler in the corridor of a House office building after the Judiciary Committee passed the compromise civil rights bill in October, the chairman asked, “Well, Clarence, is your tail between your legs?”

  “No, Mr. Celler,” Mitchell snapped back. “I wish my teeth were in somebody’s pants. I’m not the kind of dog that keeps its tail between its legs.”

  In a taxi on the way back to the NAACP’s offices that day, Mitchell slumped back in his seat, a colleague would recall, and “with a wry smile” said, “I resent being treated like a fool.”

  * * *

  ON JANUARY 30, AT the Rules Committee’s tenth hearing on H.R. 7152, Howard Smith at last gave up the ghost. He was well aware that the Republicans were eager to get the bill onto the House floor and disposed of in time for them to fan out for the party’s traditional Lincoln’s Birthday round of speeches and fundraisers on February 12. (Lyndon Johnson knew that, too, and had warned Charlie Halleck, “If I were you, Charlie, I wouldn’t dare [go out] and try to make a Lincoln Birthday speech that’ll laugh you out of the goddamned park when Howard Smith’s got his foot on Lincoln’s neck.”)

  As he had promised the week before, on this day, Smith reluctantly called for a vote on Resolution 616, the measure setting the ground rules for House debate of H.R. 7152. “The question is,” he said in his hard-to-hear Virginia drawl, “shall the resolution pass?” The vote was 11 to 4, with only the committee’s diehard southern Democrats in opposition. Now it was the whole House’s turn.

  At noon on Friday, January 31—with the galleries packed with the bill’s supporters, including Katzenbach, Marshall, Rauh, and Mitchell—the House of Representatives convened in its marble-trimmed, wood-paneled chamber, its upper reaches papered in a blue-green shade of silk brocade, with bas-reliefs of famous lawgivers from Moses to Thomas Jefferson staring down from on high. The session began with a prayer from the House chaplain, the Reverend Bernard Braskamp, who quoted from Saint Paul’s letter to the Galatians: “As we have therefore opportunity, let us do good to all men.” The majority leader, Carl Albert of Oklahoma, promptly noted the absence of a quorum (or 218 members, half the body), and the three bells of a quorum call rang out throughout the Capitol and the two adjacent House office buildings as members began streaming into the chamber.

  Ray Madden, Democrat of Indiana, presented Resolution 616, the Rules Committee’s road map for consideration of H.R. 7152, which called for ten hours of floor debate, evenly divided between the two parties, with members eligible to speak for five minutes on any proposed amendment. Madden noted a fact that Clarence Mitchell must have found gratifying, if long overdue: the bill was the first legislation to come before the Congress with provisions “almost identical with the platforms of the two major parties” in the 1960 presidential election.

  Clarence Brown of Ohio appealed to his colleagues to “conduct this debate on so high a plane that we can at least say to our children and grandchildren, we participated in one of the great debates of modern American history, and we did it as statesm
en and not as quarreling individuals.” He pledged that the bipartisan leadership had agreed that every member of the House who might wish to do so would be allowed to offer any amendment he or she wished. But William Colmer of Mississippi was having none of that. “What is the rush?” he demanded. “I ask, Mr. Speaker, is all this done out of fear? Is the Congress of the United States to yield to threats of further demonstrations by minority group leaders—blackmail, if you please?… To what end will this bring us? Is the Congress to comply by legislation with the demands and even riots of every organized minority group in the country?”

  Resolution 616, authorizing the terms for debate, passed overwhelmingly on a voice vote.

  Now it was time for the debate itself. Manny Celler, as the bill’s floor leader, moved that the House resolve itself in a “Committee of the Whole,” to permit general discussion and the offering of amendments. This practice dated back to the early days of the British Parliament, when members wanted to get the speaker of the House of Commons out of the chamber during consideration of bills, as political power shifted from the monarchy to the elected assembly, and the speaker’s role evolved from being the monarch’s spokesman into becoming the spokesman for the House. The House of Representatives had conducted debate on major legislation in the same way since the time of the Founders. Celler’s motion was approved, and the debate began.

  Armed with voluminous notebooks of background material prepared by his Judiciary Committee staff and the Justice Department lawyers, Celler said that H.R. 7152 “bestows no preferences on any one group.”

  “What it does,” he added, “is to place into balance the scales of justice so that the living force of our Constitution shall apply to all people, not only to those who by accident of birth were born with white skins.”

  Bill McCulloch spoke next, answering a charge from Colmer that the bill was being rushed, by insisting, “Not force or fear … but the belief in the inherent quality of man induces me to support this legislation … No one would suggest that the Negro receives equality of treatment and opportunity in many fields of activity today … Hundreds of thousands of citizens are denied the basic right to vote. Thousands of school districts remain segregated. Decent hotel and eating accommodations frequently lie hundreds of miles apart for the Negro traveler … These and many more such conditions point the way toward the need for additional legislation … This bill is comprehensive in scope yet moderate in application. It is hedged about with effective administrative and legal safeguards.”